So I don't suppose I could very well blog about seeing my second favourite band in the universe without doing one for my very favourite - the next night....   (read more)

I couldn't say enough great things about the band we were privileged to see last night, Starset. They're ridiculously smart and creative, wonderfully theatrical live, and frequently hard and heavy enough to support both my running and writing - in fact, they have been indispensable in the creation of more than a few of my books. I love them. You should love them, too....   (read more)

As you will know, there’s almost no ARISEN without the soundtrack. For the first time, I did the entire playlist I wrote these books to as a Spotify playlist, so you can actually listen along as you read....   (read more)

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the theatrical release of the second greatest motion picture of all time (okay, in my canon): HEAT, written and directed by Michael Mann....   (read more)

In my quest for 90-second breaks, and to provide mini-updates on the progress of the work, I seem also to have created a decent little window into the process, or at least the mental contortions, of novel-writing....   (read more)

"Ultranumb", is to my mind one of best, most powerful, and most thrilling rock songs ever recorded. It is also - and I say this after a decade-long career of collecting thousands of tracks to power my workouts and runs - THE SINGLE BEST WORKOUT SONG OF ALL TIME....   (read more)

Awoke to the sound of the surf crashing gently on the cliffs below. Sleeping and waking to this was, frankly, beyond price. We listened to the church bells while we had our coffee on the balcony....   (read more)

So my latest fabulous (weapons-themed) Xmas gift from Alex was a day at a shooting range which will rent you various high-powered fully-automatic firearms to play with. I brought my camera. The rockn', Zombie Apocalypse-themed, heavily annotated, music-video bullet festival results are below....   (read more)

Complete & total asskicking runs on consecutive days this weekend. Six degrees and brilliantly sunny, monstering around the perimeter of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park in a muscle shirt and gloves, all powered by the sublime new Kidneythieves album. Power to burn--which, alas, hasn't quite been universal this past however long....   (read more)

I think this is one of the most stunning albums of all time - smart, tight, powerful, melodic, literate, lushly layered, a total tour de force, completely seminal in electronic rock. I've never stopped listening to it. Weirdly, it's on sale for $1.99 right now....   (read more)

This one goes out to the boys in DEVGRU....   (read more)

That's life, that's what all the people say...   (read more)

Well, since I realised yesterday's post was nothing more than • 34.5% blatant vegetarian agit-prop; and • 65.5% unbridled and horrifying vanity... it's occurred to me to try and atone by posting a couple of personal favourite health and fitness tidbits (which might actually be of use to some of you out there)....   (read more)

Pandora's Sisters Kindle edition, Rockn' music from Damone, running like a maniac out in the snow, and fun-making military videos - all in today's entertainment-packed dispatch. (Warning!: music auto-start.)...   (read more)

Okay, this is pretty damned cringe-making, but here are a huge number of photos of me....   (read more)

It suddenly strikes me that the myth of Sisyphus has such profound resonance - that we have a myth of Sisyphus at all - because life itself is essentially a Sisyphean endeavour....   (read more)

In what might perhaps be a semi-regular feature, here's a song so great that I think we should all be singing it for 100 years....   (read more)

It occurs to me today that perhaps the proper antidote to the Existenial Outlook is to regard life instead as an opportunity....   (read more)

So after my various long-distance walks around the UK, undertaken for no better purpose than to amuse myself, I'm now doing my first sponsored walk for charity: the Help for Heroes Hero Walk - Avebury to Stonehenge....   (read more)

So those of you who have already seen Iron Man 2 will not need me to explain which sequence of Scarlett Johansson's I'm talking about here....   (read more)

I was just outside - and I did not see speck one of volcanic ash. Nonetheless, UK airspace is closed....   (read more)

So what better cutesty animal video to kick off Good Friday with than Christian the Lion! (No, he didn't get the name from eating Christians.)...   (read more)

So this is what is widely known on the Interwebs as The Amazing Predator Rap. Maybe you've already seen it, or perhaps not, but in any case for once the hype is fully justified....   (read more)

This, right here, just a few minutes ago, was - not only the only household in the world - but almost certainly the only household in history in which Democracy in America (unabridged) was being read aloud while Sir Mix-A-Lot played in the background....   (read more)

"So sleep tonight, we'll sleep dreamlessly this time / When we awake we'll know that everything's alright...   (read more)

So today marks the launch of this new thing I've been fiddling with on and off for a couple of months now. It's a music site - tailored totally for runners, cyclists, weightlifters, aerobicizers, gym rats, and all others who rely totally on their workout MP3 playlists to get themselves moving....   (read more)

So allow me just a moment here to plug the new album from Flyleaf. These songs are just about too good for words....   (read more)

So today I ran with the sun on my face. This was my first run in, oh, probably three months. Which is the longest I've gone without running in, oh, probably about 15 years. ...   (read more)

"You will never know how complete you have made me. You saved me from loneliness and taught me how to think beyond myself. You taught me how to live and to love. You opened my eyes to a world I never dreamed existed." - Army Pfc. Jesse A. Givens, in his last letter home...   (read more)

"How small a fraction of all the measureless infinity of time is allotted to each one of us; an instant, and it vanishes into eternity. How puny, too, is your portion of all the world's substance; how insignificant your share of all the world's soul; on how minute a speck of the whole earth do you creep." ...   (read more)

"This is really interesting, Brad. You know, Iraqis don't really seem good at fighting, but then they never really completely surrender either." ...   (read more)

I've never been a die-hard Nirvana fan, nor really much of a grunge-head. But I do remember exactly where I was standing when I first laid ears on "Smells Like Teen Spirit."...   (read more)

So it seems an awful lot like this song makes me cry. It certainly did on my run today....   (read more)

If you're just dragging yourself back from the May bank holiday - or if, perhaps, you're celebrating Cinco de Mayo - you may need these....   (read more)

Special for Easter Sunday: hilariously rude t-shirts. This might seem like kind of a strange thing to anthologize. But, back when I was working for the Civil Service, I did find the T-Shirt Humour site to be one of those things I checked in on when I was bored and depressed and needed a laugh. (And sent around when they were particularly good.) And what are rude t-shirts without a good soundtrack?...   (read more)

And but there's this whole Christian Bale blowing up on the set of Terminator: Salvation in this stunning, infantile, megalomaniacal, wildly profane, seemingly unending rant/temper tantrum... And now here's the absolute king of mashups: it's called "Bale Out", by a guy called RevoLucian - and it's a gem, and completely danceable. ...   (read more)

Well, my notes from the last day of the walk are pretty damned scanty. Suffice it to say we got up at a leisurely hour, showered - at the beginning of the day! - packed our bags one final time, and moseyed on down that last stretch of road....   (read more)

We enjoyed a lovely breakfast in the well-appointed, if slim, West Highland Way Sleeper dining room. The morning train went by outside....   (read more)

Well, the Large Hadron Collider had gone online. And we were still there. That was a nice start to the day - not having been sucked into a small black hole, nor woken up to find that stranglets had devoured the entire planet, leaving only an inert hyperdense sphere 100 meters across....   (read more)

At 3295 feet, glowering over the eastern shore of Loch Lomond, Ben Lomond is Scotland's southern-most Munro. Today was the day we would pause our northerly march to climb it. ...   (read more)

During our breakfast at the big table in the big kitchen of the bunkhouse-y B&B, we were joined by a man leading a tour... So then it pretty much a matter of getting ourselves down off of Conic Hill, and onto the shores of Loch Lomond - the bonny banks of which we'd be walking along for the next two days....   (read more)

Morning, breakfast in an amazing upstairs room with, reassuringly (to, you know, me) several guns on the wall. Rather less reassuringly, there was this countour map of the West Highlands, which our hosts thought they were being helpful in pointing out to us....   (read more)

Morning, breakfast in an amazing upstairs room with, reassuringly (to, you know, me) several guns on the wall. Rather less reassuringly, there was this countour map of the West Highlands, which our hosts thought they were being helpful in pointing out to us....   (read more)

"Bon voyage, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys." - Homer Simpson ... I'm going to hell for opening with that quotation. The French, even (in particular) the Parisians, have hardly ever been anything but nice to me. But, hey - who can resist?...   (read more)

Regular Dispatch readers may recall previously reading about me getting handed my ass. Well, lately I've switched to getting my block knocked off. That is to say, I've taken up "the Noble Art" - of boxing....   (read more)

Today it's February, and the sun is shining bright. We made it....   (read more)

I've come to realise that, aside from all the other things - and there are a lot of other things, most of them more qualifiable and quantifiable - I seem to have lost my senses of beauty and wonder....   (read more)

I'm pretty sure I'm going to be listening to this song over and over for the rest of my life. The rest of my life. In any moments when I can't actually be listening to it, it will be playing in my head. Forever. And ever....   (read more)

Q: Just how much Graham Greene do you intend to read, anyway? A: Every word he wrote....   (read more)

My hipster Ben Sherman shirt and extravagantly ripped Versace jeans are soaked through - and by "soaked through" I mean soaked through - with fragrant sweat. The outsides of my little toes are raw and, conceivably, bleeding. I don't know. I'm shaking too much to get my boots off....   (read more)

Morning now, and I am standing on the stairs to the slide of the camp site playground, soaking up the first sunlight. I am not sitting here, nor anywhere, due to the dew, which is just a monster. The surface of the world couldn't be any more drenched if a thunderstorm had stopped five seconds ago....   (read more)

I went and saw Public Enemy at the Forum last night. That might be 'nuff said....   (read more)

So, nothing like the best single night's sleep ever (as mentioned yesterday), before the last day of the longest walk of your life. We awoke in the clean, pretty, quiet, sunny room together, and rolled over and stretched and yawned languorously and finally roused ourselves to go downstairs for, oh yes, another ass-kicking breakfast....   (read more)

"The effortful shepherding of one's confusion and faint nausea, which I assumed was the basic existential package, turns out to have been a temporary condition." - Martin Amis...   (read more)

I left the office shortly after 6pm - an hour after the last civil servant had melted away - and walked the streets of Soho. I headed north then west, bouncing pinball-like through the brilliant rectangle of Soho...   (read more)

...   (read more)

The hop from Amboseli to Nairobi was painless, and our quick drive-by of downtown Nairobi tended to underscore why we weren't being dropped off in the city proper. Lamentably, these days, Nairobi is literally one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden cities on the planet. ...   (read more)

Lake Malawi is the 3rd largest in Africa (behind Tanganyika (Burton's discovery) and Victoria), and the 9th largest in the world. It is 580km long, and believed to be 750m at its deepest point. Moreover, due to it's waves, winds, tides, and unpredictable weather, it is officially classified as "the sea."...   (read more)