Bowerman And The Men Of Oregon

I'm reading Bowerman And The Men Of Oregon, a biography of one of the founders of Nike and a highly influential athletics coach, who I'd only heard of before as the man who invented waffle soles for training shoes. Oh, and has some shoes named after him.

Comedy And Error

Simon Day was in the Fast Show, portraying Competitive Dad, Monkfish and a slew of other catchphrase-driven characters. After the Fast Show, he spent some time writing his autobiography, which is quite a grind. The things I wanted to read about were his time working up the comedy circuit; not the constant grousing about how the youth of today has it easy, drugs aren't as potent as they once were (that's right, the grass really was greener back then) and backhanded compliments about most of the people he worked with.

The Devil's Road to Kathmandu

In Beijing in 2008, a few months after the Olympics, I wandered lost in a backstreet with a friend, looking for a vegetarian restaurant. We bumped into an odd looking chap in a hat who was looking for the same place, and teamed up. Thus I made a new friend, an academic sometimes trapped in Canada, who'd send me emails from strange places, like a North Korean-themed restaurant in Vientiane.

And that led to me looking for reviews of Pyongyang - there's a branch in Laos and another in Bangkok, and it was the second one that inspired Tom Vater to write about it. A strange tale of karaoke and Coca-Cola, and that was enough for me to order a copy of Beyond The Pancake Trench, his bittersweet collection of travel writing where everyone seems to end up dead.