Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In 1967 Philip Norman interviewed JRR Tolkein for the New York Times. Here’s the scoop. It turns out that the author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings was born in South Africa, worked as an altar boy in Birmingham (England) and ended up pals with C.S. Lewis.

D’Angelo was in Brixton, London last weekend, on the last leg of his European tour. Aside from being a supremely talented pianist & guitarist, he is blessed with a voice that had every female in the audience swooning, alongside some equally captivated gentlemen. On his acclaimed album Voodoo from 2000; he supposedly wrote, produced, sung […]

Courtesy of The Verge. LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions […]

One of my regular jobs in espionage is what I call ‘the deathbed duties.’ Spies like to fact-check the passing of illustrious figures. It’s an eerie duty that puts the spookiness in spook. It all started because we once royally embarrassed ourselves. In fact it was one of our biggest boobs to date: Mr Alfred Nobel woke up one […]

Most concert films are tedious. Sorry (I’m not sorry) but it seems as though every act and their roadie thinks that their fans will somehow feel more emotionally connected to them if they release a show video inter-cut with some black and white handheld footage of “the real them” arriving at the venue, preparing backstage and offering homogenised pearls of wisdom. I’ve been grabbed by very few concert films since Cocksucker Blues, Robert Frank’s cinéma vérité expose of The Rolling Stones ‘72 American tour. However staged parts of it may have been (I doubt even Keith and Ronnie would have bothered chucking that telly off the balcony if the camera wasn’t rolling) it gave an insight into the men behind the myth. Perhaps too much of an insight as when they saw it, the ever image-conscious Stones legally barred it’s public screening. The internet allows one to circumvent that sort of daftness these days but I wish I’d seen CS Blues before pretty much every concert film except Stop Making Sense and Gimme Shelter (notable exceptions as they don’t just feel like early rehearsals for Spinal Tap).

When I saw a Guardian headline warning the world that Gordon Brown was set to unveil his predictions for 2025, I thought I was reading The Onion. Oddly, yet predictably, it turns out I wasn’t. After all, Gordon’s exactly the kind of guy who thinks that everyone will benefit (if not exactly be entertained by) from his dour yet […]

In this three-part series, Orchard Times scribe Oscar Rickett investigates the history of Dunwich: Britain’s wannabe Atlantis. This is the third and final instalment. Here’s Part One and here’s Part Two. Jumping Ship In Dunwich they used to hold a “Service of the Waves” on the cliffs in the memory of Saint Felix and Sigeberht, […]

Here’s plenty of boom-barking beats and rip-roaring instrumentals; from tingly, toe-tapping electronica to bestial, boom-bapping trip-hop. All these tunes are 100% wild productions.