Jenni Ajderian

     Of nearly 3,000 shows at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, nearly a third are comedy, and for any one publication to review them all is a pretty impossible task. This will be my fifth year at the Fringe, and my first at reviewer publication Broadway Baby, where I'll be humbly taking up the post of Comedy Editor, so it's my job to pick and choose which shows are worth sending a reviewer to. Of course this is what anyone does when they arrive at the Fringe, filtering the 3,000 shows down to probably five or six to spend an average of £8 a ticket and hoping beyond hope that it's worth the ticket price. Personally, I'll be attempting to get to all of these, regardless of price and regardless of whether or not I'm reviewing them- Reginald D Hunter: In the Midst of Crackers Starting with the big names in comedy, Reginald D Hunter is an essential for lovers of wildly intelligent satire and unstoppable wit. Hailing from Albany, Georgia, Hunter has lived in the UK f...

Image from IMDB.com      First things first, if you like magic you will probably like this film. If you don't, you know that whenever the words Michael Caine and Bank Robbery are in the same film blurb, whenever Mark Ruffalo is looking grumpy and unshaven, whenever Morgan Freeman is, er, there, you know you'll like what happens next. But the like-love line rests on the reason why you like magic.      If you like it for the spectacle, the visual factor, the lights and the colours, you will love this film. Stunning cinematography and elegant graphics bring us from the spotless shine of a Las Vegas stage to the packed streets of New Orleans and the grimiest parts of New York, as a troupe of four magicians play out their unstoppable three-act bank-robbing cop-befuddling show.      If you like it for the performance, the audience banter, the misdirection, you will probably love this film. With a solid cast and a story full of enough twists a...

Photo by Dan Hems, gnarley waves by Mother Nature      My dad went to hospital last week. He's okay, he just learned some valuable lessons about launching a kitesurfer in 30 kilometre-per-hour wind too close to a car. An ambulance ride and an x-ray later he possibly has a broken rib, definitely has a sprained ankle, and certainly won't be running the Fairford 10k tomorrow, only ten days after he got too friendly with someone's brake-light.            So, tired from travelling and sitting in the hospital, and frankly overjoyed my father was still breathing, I suggested I take up dear old Nick's place at Fairford.      Looking back, we both did something stupid that day.      What followed was ten days of training, on and off, to get me up to speed with my mother, who has been doing this for the last 3 months. As an experience, it ranged from 'interesting' to 'whatthehellwasithinking', right through...

     One of the most interesting sidebar ads I've ever seen on Facebook popped up just the other day for NurtureDonors.com , a recent arrival to the UK which recruits egg donors and pairs them up with couples in need of fertility treatments. After a lot of reading (it's exam season- I have a lot of procrastination to do) I'm seriously considering egg donation, and my conviction that this is a good idea is emphasised by the fact that the website annoys me so very much.      It's clear Nurture Donors want young hip fertile gals just like myself both by their advertising strategy via social media and the fact that they insist on referring to their donors as 'gals'. A couple of times, they even call me 'girlfriend'. They over-use exclamation marks and they misuse apostrophes and hyphens and when sentences like this pop up my pedantic grammarian nerves are really close to breaking point- "A gals BF is often her Mom - if you are going to disclose ...

Images from the Cité du Livre website Festival de Bande Dessinée, Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence For some reason I've never been here before. For some reason it's taken this bibliophile seven months to figure out that there is a place in Aix-en-Provence devoted to literature, a place whose name in Google Translate produces variations on the theme of Book City, Book Estate and Book Ghetto. The books, they are huge. We have discussed before how I feel about books. Books which I recently blabbered about in a vlog are here reproduced in thirty-foot-high concrete form and act as a simple external wall to the Book Ghetto. They are huge. I felt a few tears when I first saw them. Hidden unjustly away behind the gare routière , the Cité du Livre played host this month to a graphic novel festival whose speakers ranged from authors to graffiti artists, and whose slightly shabby walls were transformed into booths full of first drafts, coloured panels and authors' not...

(album review originally published by The Student )      As if the total absence of the 2012 apocalypse was not surprise enough, David Bowie’s decided to augment the world’s collective blood pressure even more by finally coming out of hiding. Bowie’s ten-year séjour in the US saw critics and observers worrying for his health and wellbeing, but it is astonishingly clear that he is more than alright. Bowie is having fun.      What arrived back in the new year was the best-kept secret in music, the least-anticipated but most welcomed come-back single in years. The recording of  The Next Day  was shared not with the press, not with the record label, not even with the artists’ families, until the night before its release.      “Where Are We Now”, that delicious gift given to the world on Bowie’s 66th birthday, was chosen as the first single, with the details of its release in mind. This, the mellowest song on the album, still explod...

Dear Hallmark : We're all very impressed by what you've done with St Valentine's day. No, really- the appropriation of the death-date of a Roman heretic who went ahead and practiced illegal marriage ceremonies and its transformation into one of the biggest gift-giving events of the year ? Seriously, bravo. Aside from the chocolates, the cards, the squishy teddy bears and the extortionate romantic holidays, you've also spawned an entirely new way to feel bad about oneself, a season around which Hollywood can organise its mushiest films, and an anti-movement just as strong as its lovey-dovey counterpart. So why did you stop there ? No sir I ain't fakin' / When I say I don't eat bacon There are plenty of other Saints in the Roman Catholic calendar just begging to be used for money-making ends, and a lot of them are better documented than St Valentine. These lesser-known saints come prepared with their own celebration day, traditions and a pre-defi...