Quality Journalism.

Oh, the Daily Mail. How I love you so. Here, the Daily Mail show how our very ever so very very brave (GOD BLESS THE QUEEN) boys in the RAF have destroyed and Afghan drugs nest. Where they were turning cannabis into heroin. Take a look - the quote's just below that picture of a Harrier in flight (designed to pop an erection in middle-aged little Englanders).

If this is true, then the RAF have just destroyed the fucking Philosophers Stone. Even as an abuser of nothing stronger than cheap Mexican lager, I really do find the right-wing "Argh! Drugs!" approach to be a good source of cheap giggles.

Makes Sense.

My output at work has been less than impressive:

'Rithmatic.

From the daily show, on the topic of evangelical Christians voting for Obama:

Jon Stewart: “There’s talk that 40% of evangelicals will go with the Democrat [on Election Day]. When did the evangelicals lose their values?”

Ralph Reed: “I don’t think that’s supported by the polling data. I think if you look at most of the general-election polls, McCain’s getting about 60 to 65 percent of the evangelical vote.”

Engage Hyperrant.

Right. This is should really be three posts, but I'm tired, and frankly you don't deserve it. Item one on the agenda: Barack Obama. Well done, sir. Hilary not giving up at this point: pretty damn funny. She'll still be trying to secure nominations next February.

Item number two: I just rewatched Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, AKA Kenneth Branagh's grotesque egotistical wankfest. It is a preposterous shambles of a movie. As a director, Branagh seemingly considers melodrama to be 'a deft touch', and so wanders past it, down the road marked 'mawkish oblivion'. The result is a soap opera with zombies. Usually I would be in favour of such a thing. This must be an off day.

Item number the third: apparently, atheists have no sense of decency. That goes without saying, really. The thing I really want to know is, what is this ceremony, and how much would it cost to have one performed on my sofa? I have my own matches, and it's despoiler is genuinely far more unholy than a couple of amorous goths.

The Reality Sickens.

Because you asked for it:







If everyone would please be careful what they say in future, this need never happen again.

A Moment.

John Gray is apparently one of the most well-regarded philosophers currently published. Still, I find it hard to read this without stumbling across a few of the old classic right-wing arguments.

• Science as a uniform discipline? Check.


• An absence of doubt as integral to the scientific method? Check.


• Evolution as 'ideology'? Check.


• A deliberate misunderstanding of theory and theorem? Check.


• A 'belief' in evolution as tangential to fascism? Check.

Of course, they're all nonsense, but he continues through the usual well-worn anti-intellectual paths for a while (Morality without religion? Impossible!), and of course, his arguments are inherently Judeo-Christian. Why give to conscience anything else? But that's not the problem here.

This man earns his living as a philosopher. He is both published (regularly, in book form as well as article) and a teacher at LSE. That he should present such appallingly weak arguments should be a cause for concern. An example:

"Promoting Darwinism as an intellectual orthodoxy - a creed rather than a provisional hypothesis - these writers renew the old quarrel between science and religion. Though controversy has been intense, it can hardly be described as having made any large intellectual advance on the debate that raged in Victorian times."

I have never wanted more for the written equivalent of a slide whistle. Let's pretend for a moment that the remark is not vapid nonsense (that is to say, the discovery and understanding of DNA, to name but one small step made in the last hundred years, should be thought of as a trivial thing). What 'intellectual advances' are we supposed to have made? The fact that the majority of scientific discoveries, and here I do mean quantifiably, and of all time, have been made in the last fifty years seems to have escaped this man. That they were meant to be set as some vast scheme to disprove religion is a nonsense, and they were never put forth, initially at least, as part of that debate. That they continue to weaken the hold superstition has over the human race is a blessing, but the idea that that is what they have been working towards is precious little but a right-wing fallacy. In Gray's case, though he has always been demonstrably right-wing, you have to wonder what he imagines scientific endeavour to be. Is the quest for knowledge deliberate counterpoint to his musings? From this evidence, he would certainly seem to think so.

The term 'provisional hypothesis' is something I always appreciate when it comes up in a rant of this nature. To call evolution a 'hypothesis' is to misunderstand the nature of scientific inquiry. As previously stated, Mr. Gray is a philosopher, and so I have to hope that he understands what qualifies as a hypothesis. A hypothesis is either untested, or in the process of being tested. Evolution is a theory. The most tested theory in history, in point of fact. Genuinely remarkable amounts of work go into it each and every day. Have a problem with gravity? Call it a hypothesis - after all, God could be holding you down. But know this - gravity, the theory of gravity - hasn't had one-thousandth of the practical work conducted on it that evolution has. That certainly doesn't make it a hypothesis, much less one one-thousandth of a hypothesis.

Here's another memorable quote:

“Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, not the Vatican.”

Not Gray's own words, but ones he feels suit his arguments quite well. Again, the need for a slide whistle is profound. Poison gas and barbed wire? No - not work of the Vatican. Work of organised athiests? If you want to believe that, then quite frankly you can fuck off right now. Two things that were amongst the many horrors to come out of the trenches of WW1. An atheist invention? No. How does that even merit an argument? It's genuinely pathetic.

High explosives? Again, I'm pretty sure that wasn't the vatican. The first modern high explosive, TNT, or dynamite, was invented by Alfred Nobel, renowned scientist and philanthropist. It was designed to make mining operations safer. What a cunt.

Zyclon B was created under the auspices of Nazi Germany, led by known Catholic, Adolf Hitler. Of course, Hitler held whatever religion served him best at the time, but you could play this game all day. Most of these things were the works of single men or women, working for a company or government, with precious little idea or control of how their inventions would be used.

Let's play another game. Who covered up organised paedophilia amongst priests in the US and the UK? Who endorsed the Nazi government of Germany? Who organised witch hunts from the 14th through 16th centuries? Who denies resources to help prevent the spread of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa? Whose agents have beaten women in Irish communities? Who has systematically persecuted people whose only crime is to have known more than those persecuting them?

Going beyond the Catholic Church, of course Northern Ireland, where I was born, has seen an grotesque amount of bloodshed in the name of religion. It can't have escaped many people's notice that there has been a certain amount of trouble with non-Christian religions of late (not that it would bother Mr. Gray - after all, his discourse is not against religious persecution, but is explicitly pro-Christianity). Then you have the Crusades, anti-Jewish pogroms across Europe from the middle ages to the middle of twentieth century, persecution of Muslims in Palestine and across the world, honour killings (which are socio-religious, but require religion as justification). Stop me if this gets old.

Isn't the blame game fun? Seems to me as though we could play for hours.

The idea that this short list of things that are not ostensibly Christian constitutes an argument for Christianity is hilarious. These things are no more Athiest (we're getting a capital letter too, spellcheck be damned) than they are Christian. It's a standard of modern politics - the argument that's there to be read and accepted, never questioned - but it should never be one of philosophy.

These are the piss-poor arguments of a man who's already made up his mind - dangerous territory for any philosopher, particularly one chasing tenure. It's going to take quite a lot more to convince me.

Try harder.

Not Bioshock.

Peoples of the internet, hello. I've been drinking for nine hours. This makes me incredulous. I was wrong about the last Doctor Who. There were not bees, but there may have been wasps.

With that in mind: "I chose the impossible! I chose - The Libwawy!"

Sonic Death Monkey.

By now, you know that cyborg monkeys have dropped us to 2nd place in the food chain.

I'd wanted to write something about this in my usual witty and erudite style. Unfortunately, someone else got there first.

Words Fail Me.

The 28th of May, 2008, and apparently this still qualifies as news.

UPDATE: Sadly, CNN have changed the headline. Originally it was 'Aide accuses Bush of using 'spin' in run up to Iraq war'.

Well Fahkin' Street.

Possibly the best use of 'street speak' to date, discussing the finer points of Nokia 3G compatibility:

Human Tetris.

This cheered me immensely today, though if you can sit to the very end of it you are a better person than me.



When I can squeeze out the words in a sensible order, I'll write something about Indiana jones. Short preview: so angry.

Indiana Jones Rant

So, on Thursday night I watched new Indiana Jones film. This is going to be an angry, spoiler heavy review. If you wish for the experience to be preserved, I suggest you look away now. Those of you in the mood for bile, come back after the poster.



A little context is required for my first concern. One of the trailers was for Kung Fu Panda, a film that is being marketed solely on the fact that it has no discernable merits whatsoever. I was still on a trail of thought that started with 'Surely no-one wants to watch goddamn comedy animal movies any more' and was heading to a way of using a predilection for the things as the basis of a humane euthanasia program, when Indy started.

With comedy CGI animals.

Not so good. I'll get the CGI problem out of the way first of all. There is fucking tons of it, it's very badly done, for the most part, and is incredibly intrusive. I wouldn't have minded so much if the pre-release hype hadn't explained, over and over again, that there was going to be a huge focus on practical effects. This was a lie. A big blatant one. It's a big problem, because it really prevents Crystal Skull
from feeling like an Indy film.

There seems to be a strain of protest online blaming George Lucas for this. Which is preposterous. There are so many people out there claiming to see his grubby, ILM-coated fingerprints all over certain scenes they seem to be forgetting that they have no way of discerning this, and also that Spielberg is not exactly averse to using it himself. The idea that you can single out the bits you don't like, shrug and say 'Well, it's that George Lucas, innit?' strikes me as beyond preposterous.

The next problem is that, just like Temple of Doom, the film suffers for a lack of Nazis. Few things can be described as worse off from the absence of fascism, but right here is the exception that proves the rule. I'd have been happier with a weird jungle-dwelling cabal of aging Nazis (with head-in-a-jar Robo-Hitler) than the muddled communists that serve as the bad guys. Two main flaws. The first is that the America presented is one suffering under the peculiar scrutinies of McCarthy and his ilk, and there's no doubt left as to this being A Very Bad Thing. But then, if the communists have infiltrated the army, then it's kind of justified. It's meant to be pulp adventure - it simply doesn't support such a muddled message.

If the Russians were cackling Red Menace-style caricatures, then it would fit. But they're not, so problem number two rears it's ugly head. They don't have any character whatsoever. Nazis can be boo-hiss bad guys, and it's fine. Modern audiences won't accept that from the (lest we forget, non-combatant) Russians. So they're not inflated stereotypes (which I genuinely believe a film like this needs, or at least something approaching it), but they're not human either. As a result, they're simply fodder (in a couple of occasions this is literally true).

At this point, I feel that I should balance this out. The cast are all pretty good. Harrison Ford still clearly is Indiana Jones, there's no problem there. Shia LeBoeuf is even pretty decent. This surprised me, as I'd only seen him in Constantine and Transformers which didn't give me a whole lot of hope for him. The rest of the cast all fit their purpose in small and underdeveloped roles. They're not great, but they never really get the chance to be. One big character problem for me was Ray Winstone's comedy lag. He's supposed to be ex-secret service and ex-MI6, but he's shit. He's utterly incompetent. I get that he's meant to be a comic foil, but really, if that's the case then it wouldn't have been too much of an ask not to set him up as someone incapable of walking two steps without falling over. That would work. Don't make him superhuman twice over.

Cate Blanchett suffers too. Her character is fine, and she acts well (occasionally wandering accent aside), but really she's a sidekick in want of a moustache-twirling villain to stand behind. There's just not enough there to hang a movie off. She never really feels like a palpable threat. There's also a horrendously underdeveloped character point about her being psychic, but this just drifts in and out of the story as required.

The aliens (told you not to read on) that form the centre of the plot may as well not be there. There are a great many interesting things that could have been done with them. For some reason, 13 alien skeletons, when placed in an aztec centrifuge, become one live alien. One live alien that doesn't really do anything, it just serves to have fire shoot out of the bad guys eyes. Essentially, what's described as an advanced race that provided the entirety of human knowledge before a certain point in history (something that might warrant a certain level of explanation) acts only within the bounds of the film to ensure that the bad guy gets a suitably Indiana Jones-style death.

As always in an Indiana Jones flick, the bad guy must perish because they overreach. There's always been a sense that you shouldn't peek behind the curtain, that it'll always be the downfall of whoever and yaddah yaddah. More than anything here, I was disapointed. It would not take much to develop the aliens here. They are supposed to have crossed the stars and what have you to bring knowledge to the human race. Why do they then kill someone off for wanting to know some poorly-defined something?

This last (I promise) point is probably one that is only a problem to me. These aliens are meant to have provided knowledge of architecture, irrigation and so on to the films pre-mayan culture, and been worshiped for it. In mythology, those gods that provide knowledge to mankind are known as culture heroes, and occur throughout many strands of mythology (Prometheus, Hermes, the Japanese god of agriculture whose name I'm not going to look up just to appear smart on the internet). Typically these figures will be trickster gods, and will have taken this knowledge from other gods for mankind's benefit. Now, the fact that they missed this is something that only I care about, but hey - instant backstory. Better than having this ancient interstellar civilisation serve only as bad guy incinerators.

Basically, when all's said and done, the problem here is that they trampled on my inner child, and I can't really handle that. I wouldn't say that people should avoid it - there are a couple of moments where the old magic is there - but I can't see how anyone could come away from this less than disappointed.

A warning.

If I hear one more person get some fairly basic scientific facts crucially, mind-fuckingly wrong today, I may herniate through sheer rage.

If it happens on the news again, you may hear a rather wet pop. This is an indicator that you should duck and cover.

Setting Myself Up For A Fall.

This is extraordinarily good news. Not only does it relocate an important character in the Marvel pantheon back to a time when America had some sort of idea about when combat was morally justifiable (though a newfound love of it does seem to have come with a dramatic increase in the speed with which it will be engaged), but it's also perfect for the character.

Not to mention the fact that a period piece Superhero flick is something that a lot of people who are me have been clamouring for. Basically, a fleshed-out version of the flashback scenes in The Ultimates would be good enough for me.

Of course, there's no word on director or casting yet. Personally, I think Ridley Scott should be making this. Though there's every chance he doesn't.

Shambling Inadequacy.

Sat at my expansive desk at New Job, I like nothing more than to piss the company's practically limitless bandwidth up the wall streaming music all day. I'd been without a DAB radio for a while, and Old Laptop, whilst a masterpiece of design that stands up to this day, was full of loose change and spiders where complex computer components should be, and so wasn't really up to the task.

Finding myself in possession of Unnecessarily Swish Computer as part of New Job, I started listening to BBC 6 Music again. This was a station I used to love. Lots of exciting new music, good presenters who were both entertaining and knowledgeable, all good stuff. Somehow though, in my absence, the dribbling font of inadequacy that is George Lamb crept in.

If you ever listened to Mark and Lard on Radio 1 about ten years ago, you'll know the sort of show I'm talking about here. Canned sound effects, phone-ins, endless gibbering. At least with Mark and Lard they showed that they had nothing but contempt for the format, and actually tried to get decent music onto Radio 1, something that would be impossible now. Still, it was infuriating.

George Lamb is so much worse. He revels in the vacuous shit that he pumps out. He has cronies (two who gurn and chuckle at his every feculent utterance, and a producer who sounds as though he should be on suicide watch). He shows utter contempt for the music he's meant to playing, because all he really wants to do is educate the masses as to the merits of Jamaican Dancehall. That's fine, but it should be on at two in the morning, because 6 music is the whitenest, middle-classingest radio station you could possibly imagine, and quite frankly it jars next to the Arcade Fire.

Perhaps the worst thing about it is that he knows that he's shit, but he thinks that if, every now and then he claims that it's ironic, his entire career takes on the form of sort of gigantic meta-textual joke the likes of which the world has never seen before. His inadequacy is, to him, the route to true genius.

He's not solely to blame for this. His Handler, Lesley Douglas is the one who brought him in. Amazingly, she also has ties to the talent (never less appropriately used) agency that manages Georgie boy. They also manage Dermot 'Oxygen Thief' O'Leary, who is also getting a slot on a station she manages. But don't worry, it's all above board. As was his recent Sony award for best newcomer. If the reports are to be believed, Lesley was on the judging panel.

Not to worry though. All this quasi-legal nepotism is in a good cause. Apparently, there weren't enough women listening to the station. Now, Lesley says this is because the shows were too smart, and women need some eye candy. On the radio, that most visual of all media. That's it, the justification for fucking up my morning is that this imbecile seems to think that women are dumb. By essentially changing the format to exactly resemble the Chris Moyles show (for those unfamiliar, it's an unfunny man grunting dispassionately for 4 hours - pretty much like a night in the pub with me), purely in order to lure these imaginary cretins to her station.


Lesley in her secret volcano base, yesterday.

I think this is closing in on being the longest post I've ever written here, and it essentially boils down to the fact that these two goons have forced me to switch off the radio for three hours in the morning. I'll leave the final word on the matter to someone with less decorum than I.

Romance.

Something I found in a bored five minutes of tapping 'stumble':

Cartoonish Supervillainy.

Fantastic Four 2. Just like the first one, it was kinda inept, but fun. Actually, that's unfair. It's much better than the first film, it's just that it's wrong in most of the same ways. Most of which can, in turn, be forgiven. There is one slight problem that needs sorting, however:

Doom:



Not Doom:

Italics, You Say? Overused?

One thing tonight's Doctor Who proved beyond a shadow of a doubt is that just because something is entirely (and I do stress this, entirely) predictable, that doesn't mean it's not fun.

Next week: Bees!

Cheap Yucks.

The supermarket was like a jungle today.



Which is why I had the machete.

Unexpected.

Once again, it's movie night. A brief one this time, as all I want to say is: The Punisher should never, under any fucking circumstances whatsoever, ever, ever, ever offer to clear the plates away after dinner. There seems to have been the slightest misunderstanding as to the nature of the character.

Targeted Marketing.

It wasn't me:


But I kinda wish it was.

Yeah.

Guess which headline was my favourite:



Now that's journalism.

Public Service Announcement.

Iron Man is a fairly splendid movie. Possibly the best Marvel adaptation yet. Watch it, make sure you stay to the end of the credits. Good times guaranteed.

A Brief Reprise.

Movie Night.

Today marks the launch of the acclaimed violence and social fabric dissolution simulator, GTA IV. I would dearly love to report that I was sat playing said lawyer-baiting abomination, but I am not. I placed an order for it with a certain well-known online retailer, one I happen to fucking work for, and they have failed to deliver it to me on time. I have been to every shop that might possibly sell it in this drab little town, and they have all run out. I am, in short, fairly savagely put out.

I must find another way to occupy my time. So, as promised, it's movie night. Tonight's film will be The Golden Compass, something that I've studiously avoided thus far. The combination of crippling disappointment, a love for the source material, a genuine hatred of the Americanisation of the title and cheap, cheap booze leaves me singularly unqualified to provide an objective review.

Shall we begin?

0.30s: Staggeringly crude exposition.

This continues for some time.

8.14: They seem to have decided to exaggerate the role of the Church in the story, by bringing in a pantomime villain character.

51.10: This is just toss. Pure, unadulterated shit. The combination of depression and boredom means that I can't derive even an iota of twisted pleasure from it.

104.00: Vomitous pile of inadequacy.

1.13: She can't act.

1.32: Horrible, sanitised, unfinished, poorly-written weasel squeezings.

1.34: Artless, graceless, witless.

1.40: Over.

Genuinely horrible, and not in the least bit funny. Sorry about that. I'll try some Boll next time.

Things It Is Not My Turn To Do.

• Hose down the prisoner.


• Check for poison.


• Regulate the telecoms industry.


• Evacuate the area.


• Quell insurection.


• Defrost the squid.


• Activate the device.

Bothersome.

A warning. Death Proof is a staggeringly dull movie. Quentin Tarantino has lost the plot - his fatal error seems to be in thinking that other people find his eccentricities as inherently charming as he himself does. Net result: 2 1/2 hours of in-jokes and references to his earlier movies. Everything else hangs from those precarious hooks.

It's also maddeningly slow. Three-quarters of an hour pass before anything happens. Then another set of protagonists are introduced, and the whole process repeats itself. It was boring the first time. Second time around, it just feels maddeningly self-indulgent.

I don't mind Tarantino's quest to prove himself the biggest film nerd out there. I will even defend the 'Superman' monologue in Kill Bill. I don't mind the patchwork of styles in his movies, I don't mind that every character will inevitably speak in the same fucking style. I can even let the foot thing slide. In short, what bothers most people about him doesn't really bother me. Death Proof is just really, really tedious.

It's Up To You.

Given what some of you folk have said, my savaging of shitty movies brings some light to your drab lives. So. Then. Suggestions.

For the full-on Wicker Man experience on another movie, make your suggestions below. I will give consideration to them all.

Reasons To Be Cheerful.

Things that are currently leading to a bouyant mood:

• William The Fucking Bull will be directing the Hobbit.


• This song. It's the happiest miserable song ever.


• The song 'Voodoo' by Spiral Beach. There's no good version online, as apparently some people still cling to such outmoded concepts as 'copyright'. Trust me though, it's brilliant. There's a crappy live recording on Youtube if you absolutely must.


• This song.

Oh, and this image:



Yes. Geeking the fuck out now. I apologise for the tone, I know it'll have come as a shock to most. I promise the next post will be a particularly bilious spillage.

The Devil Valley Celt.

It would be remiss of me not to, at the very least, provide a link to this wonderful story. I do hate to be remiss.

The worst thing about this story is that it's about a guy attacking a bunch of Welshmen with a length of metal tubing. I can't help but feel that this is my subconcious, made flesh.

Like The Nuremburg Trials, But For Shit Movies.

Brett Ratner. Eddie Murphy. Same place, same time.

Fetch my grenades!

In Any Colour You Want.

There has been precious little zombie-orientated news here of late, and I can only apologise. Profusely.

I watched Black Sheep, and it's essentially everything you could expect from a movie about zombie sheep (and were-sheep), even if it's perhaps not everything you might want. It's funny, but not Braindead funny. It's clever, but not Braindead clever. It's gory, and I'm sure you get the idea, bright buttons that you are.

It was always set up as a spriritual succesor to Peter Jackson's gore epics, not necessarily the brightest move. Because, while it is a pretty good film all told, they seem to have been shooting for a 15 (or whatever the backwater equivalent is) and are just not prepared to invest in the sheer volume of high-velocity innards required to satisfy the sort of people that are the habitual audience of such films. Add to this some fairly unlikable characters, and a fundamental failure to grasp the fact that, just for two minutes of act three, your everyman / underdog hero must morph into Arnie circa The Running Man, and you have inevitable dissapointment.

Perhaps I just need to learn to switch off. Or start drinking like I used to.

A Quadradactyl in a Pentadactyl World.

I have royally fucked up the middle finger of my left hand. It is swollen and gross. If I look like I'm swearing at you, I assure you that this is not the case, merely a crude byproduct of swollen joints.

Unless I'm kissing said digit and screaming 'This is all for you!'.

Then you can assume I'm swearing.

Whale Oil Beef Hooked.

Seriously, fuck off.

Bravo.

I fucking told you. I am victorious, and full of tremendous powers.

The coronation must be due any day now.

Speaking of Half-Finished Tripe...

You might remember that a while ago I asked for the help of my loyal readership in navigating the choppy waters of the internet. And you might also remember not lifting a fucking finger to help me. So, I hope you're happy that I decided to use my newfound technologies to watch Torchwood.

BBC iPlayer is a hilarious thing. It's basically what everyone expected digital TV to be when it was first mooted, albeit in a viewable window the size of a small postcard. I do think that it's a genuinely brilliant thing, and so I feel a little disappointed in myself for only having used it for Torchwood. But then, as previously discussed, the blame lies squarely with you.

I originally abandoned watching the show a couple of episodes into the first series, and assumed that it would have maintained the same trajectory it had set out on. I fully expected, a full series on, that the folks of Torchwood 3 would be fighting (sexy) space crime using nothing but their genitalia. That was not the case, so chalk one up for pleasant surprise.

The episode I saw was called 'Out Of Gas' 'Fragments', and those of you that are vaguely culturally literate will already have gathered that it takes place as a series of flashbacks. In the midst of horrendous accident (and explosion set off by the malicious little cube things from Terrahawks), the history of how they all got together as the happy all-singing pansexual brigade of alien-fighting misanthropes. It is exactly the same structure as the aforementioned Firefly episode, but is written with less than a fraction of the elan.

At this point you might be thinking: "Torchwood? I've some puppies for you to kick if you need an easy target." But hold on. It (as is rapidly becoming standard in these rants) wasn't all that bad. Given that I genuinely was prepared for a show in which the most glamorous people in all Cardiff lined up to felate John Barrowman while disinterestedly waving a Luger with whichever hand they weren't using to cup, it was pretty good for the first twenty minutes. Cap'n Bigcoat's drunken ride through time with steely Victorian lesbians was genuinely entertaining. It all trailed off a bit after that though, until James Marsters appeared, playing a character called Peter Fanservice. He looked a bit like a pirate. But a holographic one. Which, by pirate standards, is pretty lame. Long story short - Torchwood is worse than most shows, but better than botulism. It has picked up somewhat.

As if to balance this unceasing generosity, we now come to The Simpsons Movie. I avoided this in cinemas, because I don't take disappointment in the cinema with anything resembling grace. My cries of anguish during Transformers gave birth to a new universe.

I finally picked it up, as it is now very cheap on DVD. This is because it is shit. It's shit of the highest order. There are no jokes per se, just a frantic rush to get a succesion of minor characters shoehorned in so they can have a tiny, unfunny character moment before they vanish again.

If anyone would like a copy, let me know. Otherwise I'm going to grind it up and sprinkle it on my cereal.

I'll be taking those puppies now.

A Spark of the Divine (Intervention).

This is obviously tragic news. It's certainly not the sort of thing that would wrench uncontrollable laughter from somewhere dry and deep in my decrepit frame. And definitely not the sort of thing to ellicit wild jackal howls of delight.

But you've got to admit, it's pretty funny.

The Onion is Funny Again.

Very probably true.

Pre-emptive retributions.

Have any of you wronged me recently? Like stolen all my cattle, for example, or burned my township to the ground?

If so, click here and we'll consider ourselves even, okay?

Sound Advice.

Mutineers Need Not Apply.

Due to an unfortunate volcano-related accident, the position of chief minion is once again open. To be in with a chance of attaining this desirable position within The Organisation, simply answer this question:

Now that I have a computer that works, what's good on the internet? Assume for a moment that I've been living a backwards existence with a 500MHz processor and a schizophrenic wireless card for five years. What's good in the world of Not Text?

Oh, and I've already heard of YouTube. No smartarses, thangyewverymuch.

Oi, Grendel! 'Ave some!

Continuing in the tradition of being impressed by movies of which I have previously been pretty damn unsure, I recently watched Beowulf. Now, before I go too far, I wasn't that impressed. But it wasn't a clusterfuck, and that's something.

The main reason I found myself watching it was I was interested in the adaptation of legend into contemporary storytelling. Modern audiences, though pretty fucking shallow for the most part, will not accept the 'that's just how it happened' nature of storytelling in myth. Mythological characters rarely have a compelling or even vaguely believable psychology. They're often not even really archetypes, tending more towards amalgamations of human experience. This is where Beowulf fits, as a morality tale about those who strive for glory.

In the film Beowulf, while he is still the skilled warrior of the poem, is an unreconstructed braggart. Great, fine. In a society where word-of-mouth is the only way for information to travel, this would be a great way to have a legend form. But, and this is a big but, even his own men think he's full of shit. And here we come to the main problem with the film. In trying to turn mythological characters into actual characters, the writers have left the story wholly unbelievable. Why would his men follow him on a lunatic quest for glory when they think he's a lying toerag? There are plenty of these gaps of logic, and they generally occur around the points in the story where the writers have failed to ally the story they're compelled to at least vaguely try to tell with their interpretation of Beowulf's character. It doesn't entirely break the movie, but it's distracting, because if you have made fundamental assumptions about how someone behaves, it is not acceptable to go entirely against those assumptions because you are constricted by the original story.

It's quite a pretty film, though has the usual glassy-eyed staring that CG characters tend to suffer from. This might just be rose-tinted amnesia, but I'm sure some of the characters in The Spirits Within looked better. There's also some really obtrusive and annoying (virtual) camera work. The director is clearly too enamoured with his toybox to actually use it properly. It's as though Orson Welles climbed into his crane with a bucket full of Pixie Sticks. It zooms, swoops and dives all over the place for no reason that I can discern, and it is desperately annoying.

With all that said, it wasn't a bad film. There is some genuinely great design work in it, which counts a lot more for a CG movie than it would otherwise. It's well-paced, and plenty of the vocal performances are strong, though I can't help but think it would have been better for a cast of unknowns, especially with all the actors providing faces and performances. Suffice it to say, the idea that all that's keeping you from seeing Ray Winston's digi-bollocks being a shader setting is quite disconcerting.

I seem to be having trouble summing this up. A lot of small petty things annoyed me. I couldn't believe the motivations of many of the characters. There was a lot of unnecessary reference to Christianity replacing the old Norse religions. Grendel, for some fucking reason, spoke 11th-century Anglo-Saxon in 5th-century Denmark. And yet, I enjoyed it.

Sorry.

Yeah, It's a Picture of a Hairy Guy.

Firstly, the remake of The Wolfman looks damn cool. This cool, in fact:



Secondly, 30 Days of Night would seem to be quite good. Pallette and general tone remind me of John Carpenter back when he was good. Characters seem slightly more than 2-dimensional, which is not bad for a horror movie in which everyone is almost certain to die. It even has Dracula references (there's a Renfield character) that do not suck. The vampire designs are original and compelling. So far, so good.

Imagine the noise of a comedy slide whistle. I can't believe anyone can listen to this shit and lap it up. The worst thing about this pretty damn shitty administration is that they have categorically proved that you can simply tell a great many people what you want them to believe, and they will believe it.

Unsplendid.

So, um, yeah.

Not much more I can say about that.

Back.

Hello there, internets, I am returned.

So, it's been a little while. Not to worry, I know for a fact that both of the people that read this got by in my absence. Still, the usual cursory update is yours for the taking.

I have left Old Job (Goliath Books) and started at New Job (amusing nickname to follow.) New Job basically involves mining for internet. Which means, given the gibberish I tend to put up here, that I am now Signal/Noise neutral.

Various other things have happened, but as per usual, if you're reading this you probably already know about them.

Coming soon: videogame euphemisms!

Just the Ticket.

These will go spledidly with my new pants:



I will be the most dapper semi-dressed man at the ball. Until they throw me out for wearing nothing but boxer shorts and an oversized bath towel festooned around my shoulders as a cape.

+2 Pants of Fucking Awesome.

Because I like to share:



I must possess these delightful artefacts.

Thought for the Day.

I have a strong urge to buy a pet and call it Hitler.

Informations (Addendum).

I have more in common with Madonna than previously thought. We have both made very bad films.

Son of Spam.

Fresh from my inbox: Largish Penis Garland.

You Probably Didn't Hear It Here First.

After many years of grotesque, cowlike servitude, I am free. This is good news for me, as I was less than fond of both my job and abject poverty. It is good news for my employers, who were not fond of me.

So yes. Freedom...

No.

Aaaargh! Aaaargh! Aaaaargh!



All better now.

Powerful Informations.

Things I have in common with Madonna:

• I used to have a large gap in my front teeth.


• I didn't used to have an English accent.

That will be all.

The Staggeringly Obvious.

I've sat and watched the entire series of Nathan Barley this evening.

It has done me no good at all. But it is very funny.

Intimacy.

I work with a man called Michael. Through a series of excercises designed to foster a sense of mutual trust and respect, I have come to learn that Michael views me like this:


Michael knows and appreciates the fact that I view him like this:



It's a beautiful thing.

The Claw.

Work is getting to me a little bit.

Big in Japan.

Just click the link. You won't thank me, but hey, I don't care.

And whilst we're on the output of that peculiar country, I grabbed Rez from Xbox live arcade today. One of the notable things about it's release on PS2 (I nearly said 'original release, but my inner Dreamcast fanboy punched me in the duodenum) was that, in Japan at least, you could acquire something called a 'trance vibrator'. Yeah.

This was a small piece of black plastic that you were to put in the small of your back. It pulsed in time with certain beats in the game, and the pad would vibrate in time with others. Since Rez is sort of, kind of, a music game (amongst many other possible descriptions, many of which would require me to invent adjectives on the fly) this apparently did add something to the game, though not always as the manufacturer intended. I would say that the article linked is not safe for work, but frankly, no-one reading this really has a job. If there is any chance you might be reading at work, don't click. Just repeat the words 'logical conclusion' over a few times. It's essentially the same effect.

So now it's out on the 360, with a rather neat addition. Any spare pads you have lying around can take on the function of the trance vibrator. It's intended function, that is. It's unwieldy enough having one of those things wedged in the small of your back, I can assure you. So that's how I spent the first couple of hours of this morning. One pad jammed in my back (not completely unpleasant, but definitely not working the knots out of my aching muscles), one balanced on my feet. About an hour of wierd, trancy, shooty, fly-y, schlorpy (told you) gaming, with pulsing Xbox pads strapped to me.

It can only get less odd from here.

Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!

Wicker Man remake. More for my sake than anyone's, I need a chronicle of this.

2.48. Rural. Cage seems pensive. His wig is not the best.

4.18. A huge truck hits a car full of creepy people. The overall effect is comical. Cage is coming to the rescue, but I sense failure is on the cards. I see it written on his stupid face.

9.45. A joke is made about a lack of plot. It sucks.

13.34. Cage charms an old man into flying him out to Summersisle. Edward Woodward could fly his own plane, and he didn't need no stinking thirteen minutes of exposition.

16.44. Bags can be mysterious and funny.

17.50. Modern-day Willow appears. She's annoying too. She appears smitten with Cage, usually a symptom of being struck about the head and neck with a large rock.

19.28. Bees!

24.08. The Wicker Man is mentioned. The Wicker Man is never mentioned in the original. Cage loses his self-help tapes.

28.43. Cage falls through some rotten wood. Overly-dramatic music fails to fuck off.

35.00. This film is profoundly boring. I think one of my kidneys just shut down.

37.15. Big fucking crows! Just. Big. Fucking. Crows.

47.56. There's a dead kid in the water! But it's just a dream! Or is it? Yes! Cage has more forehead than before. Also: The Radio is dead!

54.00. I have never felt the absence of folk music so keenly.

56.35. Bees! Anaphylaxis! Epinephrine!

1.02.35. Misuse of the word 'Celtic'. It is correctly pronounced though. This is the highest praise I can muster so far.

1.05.39. I'm starting to hallucinate. Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee are micturating upon Cage. An endless stream, yet he never quite drowns.

1.10.19. Bees. Cage is also hallucinating. Mine's funnier.

1.11.37. "How'd it get burned!? Howdiditgeburned!? HOWDAGABUAHRRNED!"

1.13.03 Bearded lady. But the beard is all made of bees! Whatever will happen next?

1.16.15. Cage is just attacking children now. I knew this day would come. Also, somebody killed the pilot. Cage's wig is giving up. He's more forehead now than man. Fuck this.

1.20.02. Really, fuck this.

1.22.04. Cage is in a bear suit. He's abducting a child. He's knocked out three women so far. Fuck this.

1.28.20. The worst acting I have ever seen from Nicolas Cage. Con Air and Face/Off included.

1.33.00. They burnt him. The film is dedicated to Johnny Ramone. I can't imagine he'd have been pleased.

The Bull.

OK, so this at the rumour stage at the moment, but Guillermo Del Toro directing The Hobbit is about the only good thing that could come out of Peter Jackson not directing The Hobbit.

In no particular order, some reasons why Guillermo Del Toro is fucking great:

• He can work with Wesley Snipes and still come out smelling of roses.


• He's made two of the least sucky superhero movies to date.


• He fills his movies with gigantic clockwork howdads - for no particular reason I can discern.


• He's obsessed with using the same pallette Goya used in his 'crazed and yelling' days.


• His name translates as 'William The Bull'. William the fucking Bull! It's the best name ever!

Novelty Stationery Items

Clearing away the straggly remains of Christmas from my place of employ today, I found myself at the mercy of a small but insistent voice at the back of my head.

"Now you can really get a good run-up.", it said, apropos of nothing.

"I wonder what that means?" Said one of the more actively-conscious chunks of my psyche. "It couldn't be... oh. Oh, God."

It turns out my subconscious wants me to play Assassins Creed with the customers. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this novel form of digital violence (I can think of one person likely to read this who hasn't at some point sat and watched me play this, so this is for you) it essentially involves you running around, and climbing over, various ancient and allegedly holy places in an effort to find Bad Men and stab them in the throat with the pointy end of the stabby thing.

Now, whilst I couldn't do all the climbing, I can run pretty damn fast. I don't do this very often, because of various complex and intertwined factors (my size, a lack of any desire to). One of the ways in which you introduce Bad Men to Mr. Stabby is by running at them, jumping, placing a knee on their spine or stomach (dependant on angle of approach), and driving Mr. Stabby into their neck. I (on the suggestion of my apparently deeply impressionable subconscious) feel that this is an area in which I can truly excel.

They never should have given me a pen.

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Usually I can't really stand this webcomic, but today I demand that you pay attention.

Obvious Fact of the Day.

No shit.

My morning espresso, on the other hand, has made me the adonis you see today.

Oliaginous Transportation.

On my way home from work, I saw the morbidly obese man who sits in the window of Clowns cafe cycling. It was like The Third Policeman as filmed by David Cronenberg.

In case that's not clear, I could only see about a third of the bike. Try to guess where the rest was. How it was still functioning as a mode of transport, I haven't the first idea.

Shiny.

I don't know what this is yet, but it's from Team Ico, so I know that whenever it's on the shelves I'll be buying it and a PS3.

Dear America...

Please do at least try to elect Barack Obama. Your only other option is to walk, collectively, over to that writhing burlap sack marked 'Other Candidates'. I can assure you, though you probably will not listen, that it is chock fucking full of rabid wolverines. Stick your hands in, grip on firmly, and pull out whatever takes your pick.

Just don't come crying to me over your wolverine injuries.

Red in Tooth and Claw.

What a rich and productive day it's been. I put the finishing touches to the Weather Machine, made vague, supercilious threats to the leaders of several developed nations, and got some washing done.

What else was there? Oh yes, - I went feral.

Nah, na-na, nah-na, na-nah...

If this doesn't make you smile, you are dead inside.

Better Than Ghost Rider, That's For Sure.

Having just finished Mass Effect (hereafter referred to as 'That Sex Game'), a few thoughts are in order.

Thought number one: Mass Effect is fucking great.

Thought number two: 2007 was a very, very good year for storytelling in games. Despite the best attempts of the scriptwriter on Assassins Creed, there has been a definite shift forward in what can be done, and what the effective minimum standards are for scripting, digital 'acting', and voiceover.

On Pornography.

So, I just played through the 'highly controversial' scenes in Mass Effect. I guess it's news to precisely no-one reading this, but the hysteria surrounding this from certain quarters is entirely bogus. Any kid who wants to sit through the seventeen hours of sci-fi tropes with the hope of seeing a pixelated nipple is going to be sorely dissapointed.

That kid is probably entirely imaginary. Still, he must be protected from all the dreaful things that are out there.

Espresso count: 10. I will soon find a religion, or found one. Whatever suits. Either way, know this: you are all fucking heathens.

A Spotters Guide.

A brief, and by no means complete, list of the types of people who shop in bookstores after the hours of darkness.

• Public Masturbators. The proud sort, not the furtive sort. The sort that believe a lifestyle magazine for public masturbators is just around the corner.


• The Mentally Unsound. It's as if someone drives a care in the community ambulance up to the front door, tips out the shrieking, urine-soaked contents, and drives off.


• The Savagely Foreign. Like the charming lady who tried to watch a DVD in one of our computers this evening.


• The Genuinely Lonely. For some reason, there are always two people who come in every evening, who are completely unconnected to one another. They sit, doing very little, until the time comes to leave. They do so, quietly and without a fuss. But I'm sure the thought must be nagging at the back of their minds: "Maybe I should just say hi. We could get a coffee."


• Thieves. Obvious really, but can't be ignored.


• Cottagers. One became a regular for a while, to the extent that he would always say hello if he saw one of our staff, even though we had to throw him out because he was going to be violently sodomised by a middle-aged man in our toilets.


• Normal People. Simply shopping for quality, intelligent books.

So, have I missed any really obvious ones?

Practical Advice.

When typing a URL, endeavour to use all of the required letters, and do so in the correct order. This will save you from a quarter of an hour as fruitless as the one I just spent.

And again, and again, and again...

I'm getting a bit of a theme today.

Just for the record, this is not what Mass Effect is about. This is a spectacularly idiotic right-wing knee-jerk response to the very idea that a form of legitimate media has (whisper it) sex in it.

Sadly, people will listen to this sort of nonsense. Oh sure, they'll forget the specifics, but they'll be left with some vague notion that games are bad, an' stuff.

My Knee Is Twitching.

Apparently the way we are to deal with violent crime in our society is to stop characters in games carrying knives.

I'm about old enough to remember the banning of the word 'ninja' from any media. This strikes me as just as well thought-out and practical.

Japan? This is Dave...

...and I'd like a word. specifically, I'd like to know why you did this:



As if the pun wasn't bad enough, here are the contents:



It contains, apart from the obvious, something called a 'Rotor'. I can only assume that this is a small outboard motor, and not... Oh no, wait, I got it.

Must Try Harder.

It has been a long day. You might even call it challenging, if you were prone to melodrama. The last few days have seen the customers in the store give off such an unnerving and constant buzz of inadequacy that this sort of thing comes as little surprise.

Shocking (with all apologies).

Synergy, taken to its logical extreme.

Evil...

Watching The Omega Man. It's a pretty dreadful film, and I would like you to know this:

Big Chuck Heston's bingo wings will destroy us all.

The Future of Warfare.

I need a lot of money, quickly, in order to set up a restaurant. After much deliberation, I've decided the best way to set about this is to establish a Privatised Military Company (PMC) with the others who may be in this deal.

As with malicious blogging, I assume anonymity is crucial in this sort of venture. Therefore, my name will not be involved at all with the proceedings. Instead, the company will be known as Shitheel McGee and His Travelling Banditos (PLC).

In order to deliniate ourselves from other PMCs, other than in the fact that we do not know how to fight, and have never, in fact, held guns, we will offer ourselves as the environmentally friendly mercenary corporation you can trust. We will be the 'green' solution for all your 'black ops' needs.

This basically shakes out as us only ever travelling by ferry. We can actually only afford to travel by ferry.

Basically, if you've got a foreign government to overthrow, and you don't need it done with any particular haste or competence, look us up. We will be very cheap indeed.

Back.

Back now. Exceptionally tired, having been in and out of airports all day on three hours sleep.

Give me a moment or two to snooze, and I will once again be available on the usual channels - phone, email, cryptic trail on facebook, and a good, old-fashioned smack in the chops.

Saints and Scholars (I am Neither).

I'm off to Ireland, and so will be incommunicado for a few days.

I Don't Learn.

A big part of Christmas for me, at least in recent years, is discovering just how horrible the Doctor Who Christmas special is. Every time I assume that this will be the year that they don't royally fuck up their most expensive episode, and every year I'm disappointed.

This year's was particularly vile. Amongst the offences:

• Every other line was an in-joke.


• A seemingly endless shot of The Doctor walking towards camera.


• Twee 'Magic of Christmas' bullshit.


• A huge, melodramatic "I'm the Doctor" speech.


• A need to come up with at least 8 deus ex machinas for when a sonic screwdriver just will not cut it.


• The whole script.

It's been pretty bad for the last two years , but this one was pretty much a crime. There. It's out of my system now.

False Advertising.

I've recently succumbed to some vague notions of modern male grooming. This is not to say that I am not some sort of grunting, hairy ape-boy, because I am. I just happen to be one that owns moisturiser. What I will say to those following my pioneering trail is this: dermatising microgranules is just a fancy term for very small grit. Do not be fooled.

In other news, I am occasionally stroking my signed His Dark Materials boxset (number 999 out of 1000, I'm sure that means something), and making little purring noises. My family are beginning to get used to the idea.

Work Haiku.

I have had enough
Boy, activate the device
They will soon know fear

Ghost Rider - Update 2.

Ghost Rider is not as bad as X-Men 3.

Ghost Rider - Update.

Do not watch Ghost Rider.

When Stunts Go Bad.

I'm watching Ghost Rider. I think it might be one of the worst films ever made. It barely makes sense, which is an achievement, given that it's a dumb action movie about a flaming skeleton chasing down the kid from American Beauty and his three emo friends.

It makes Daredevil look like a masterpiece. More when it's over.

I'm Doing Science.

Hello there, internets. I am not dead. In other news...

The War on Dumb.

Worst. Terrorist. Ever.



Wanted man. Caught at a checkpoint. In a wedding dress. How did anyone think that was a disguise?

The Welsh are Coming.

Jeff Minter is upset. This doesn't happen often, as he's a happy-go-lucky scamp. He spends his days frolicking in the Welsh hills, popping home every now and then to tend to his llamas, ingest mind-fucking quantities of mind-fucking psychotropic drugs, and program unplayable videogames.

Says Jeff:

"OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, ***** arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. We'll shut up trying to do anything new then. Sorry for even trying."

Jeff's upset because an old, ***** arcade game, Frogger outsold his latest game, Space Giraffe by 10 to 1 last week. Jeff thinks it's unreasonable that no-one wanted his nice 'new' game. Jeff's new game is essentially another remake of Tempest, an old, ***** arcade game, but with different enemies and a more complicated scoring system.

It seems churlish to point out that people may have bought Frogger because they weighed up their options, and went for a game that doesn't make your brain slough away and trickle through your nose in fleshy chunks. But I did it anyway.

***** means shite, by the way.

That's Good Newsing! We Done News!

For some reason, I feel myself compelled to read pretty much any time I possibly can. This means that if I'm left alone for more than two minutes, I fire up the web browser on my phone and start reading the news. Unfortunately, there are only certain sites you can access for free on my tarriff, so I'm pretty much restricted to reading the ITN news portal for mobile browsers.

As you might expect, this is some pretty lousy news. I'll use the first story I read today as an illustration (apologies for lack of linkage, but I've no idea where to find it in a standard browser, and can't be bothered looking). The headline is 'Beowulf Premiere Hits London', and these are the edited highlights, with translation:

Quote: "Beowulf battles three enemies, Grandel (Newcomer Crispin Glover)..."

Translation: Despite having 45 screen credits, including the Back to the Future trilogy, The Doors, Wild at Heart, and the Charlies Goddamn Angels movies, as well as 2 directing credits, none of our staff have heard of Crispin Glover, who started his acting career in 1981.

Quote: "The image has been digitally enhanced using the latest animation techninques, giving Jolie's natural curves a bit of a boost."

Translation: The film is entirely CGI.

This is where I get most of my information about the world from. Explains a lot.

Speaking of Duality...

New competition. I now want song titles that are really fucking good song titles, but genuinely appalling names for porn films. And when I say appalling, I mean that they will, like medication bought from unsolicited emails, induce vomiting. I'll get the ball rolling, with the first track from The Wombats album:

Tales of Girls, Boys and Marsupials.

The gauntlet is down, folks. It is down.

Stealth Atheists - Secular Ninjas.

So, this December the His dark Materials trilogy is getting a movie. From what I've seen of the trailers, I'm not optimistic. But then, I'm never optimistic. I'm a grumpy old man. But that is beside the point.

The books have been perceived as anti-religious, and that's certainly one way of reading them. I take that with a pinch of salt, as I say worse things about religion before my first cup of coffee, then faster and more perceptively after. What they are is humanist - they promote a shared humanity that is far more important than any text. The 'villains' of the piece are those who lose sight of that - those who would harm people for their own ends. Sometimes those ends are religious, but the forces seeking to end religion (which has a palpable presence in the world of the books) also do terrible things to acheive their ends.

What the movie has done is reignited the supposed controversy over the books. From the IMDB, on the Catholic League:

League president William Donohue tells America's Entertainment Weekly magazine, "Parents might be inclined to say, 'Hey, our kid really enjoyed the movie, why don't we buy him His Dark Materials for Christmas?' (It) introduces the kid to atheism. (It's) a stealth campaign."

Excuse me, but how in the name of living fuck do you introduce a child to atheism? I'm sorry, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a child is born an atheist. The water you sprinkle on it's head doesn't change that for a moment. A child is basically programmed to believe whatever it's parents say. A child also has an inherently dualist mentality - it's very hard for a child to realise that the voice it hears when it thinks is generated by a couple of pounds of electrically charged tissue. So religious notions fit very straightfordly into a child's worldview. I think if you raised someone to 18, with a normal education but no word of God, then presented them a bible, you'd still have an atheist.

Apologies for the stunningly obvious nature of this argument (to most), but the idea that there's a stealth atheist agenda makes me very, very angry, quite amused, and with a peculiar itch to start one.

Vital Information.

For those of you who have an interest in the American political process, or more specifically just how painful it is to watch it from within, then may I direct you to the mighty Gin and Tacos. Funny and savage, it's well worth a read. Observe:

"... I would like to recommend one of my favorite pieces of public opinion research, one that goes a long way toward understanding why our national political discourse is one step above a throng of retards slap-fighting in a mud puddle."

I've learnt some important things today, myself. One is that the new Wombats album is pretty fucking good. It has all the handclaps, la la la's and closed harmonies I expect from pop-leaning indie, along with some spiky guitars and amusing lyrics about doing stupid things and getting dumped for it. I proclaim it to be delightful.

The other thing I've learnt, and will pass on in case it's any use to anyone is this: if you've split your middle finger in two with a blunt knife, it can't hurt to lower your typing speed. It doesn't make you any less of a man. Knocking bloody chunks out of your hand though, quite literally, does.

Movie Time.

Despite a late entry from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang with:

Shot In The Shoulder / Narration / Black Comedy / Corpse / Breasts

the great 'dumbass keywords' debate was never going to be won by such half-arsed attempts. So, ladies, gentlemen, may I present:

Toupee / Group Vomit / One Night / Lifting Person In Air / Blender

Goonies = for teh win!

The Right to Bear Arms.

This man is a true American hero.

No, Really. Horribly Wrong

It's like joy, wrapped in more joy, dipped in chocolate, and given a dusting of yet more joy. No, actually, it's extremely fucking daft.

If the scriptures are turning out to be too hard to understand, I'm willing to lend elements of my own, admittedly controversial, philosophy to these needy pastors. It goes something like this:

Don't be a cunt.

You'll probably find it works better than sermons on ancient Middle-Eastern tax law.

How Much Cretin does $11 Million Buy?

You've got to feel sorry for Fred Phelps. Just because he and his followers gatecrash hundreds of funerals every year to spread their vile, idiotic, hate-filled message, they've left themselves open to a little spot of litigation.

No, hang on a second, you don't have to feel sorry for him at all. He's one of the worst human beings on the face of the planet, and every second he's not on fire is a second we're not correctly using all this oxygen we have knocking about the place.

Glad that's cleared up.

The Correct Use of Astrophysics.

This is totally unfair. I've killed several large ruminants this year, and no-one thinks I'm that valuable. Some people seem to actively disapprove.

Hallelujah!

I have always said that if I was presented with convincing evidence for some sort of higher power, I would recant my naughty atheism.

That day is here.

Web 2.Ohforfuckssakepeoplearecretins

The IMDB is a tremendous resource. For the nerd who simply must know every little tiny bit of movie trivia, it is indispensable. It recently added a new user-generated feature, however, that is hurting me in the soul and a few other places.

You can now nominate plot keywords for movies, so that people can browse for things they like to see in movies. Here's an example:

1990s / Vomit Scene / Civil War / Border Crossing / Jeep.

Wow. Because I'm betting the guy who searched for '1990's' and 'Vomit Scene' was of course looking for Three Kings, a fairly harrowing black comedy about the first Gulf War, and definitely not looking for really weird porn.

Let's try another:

Mustache / Corpse / Limousine / Split Personality / Fashion

Give up? It is, of course, Batman Begins. Those are the five words that most adequately sum up that film.

So here it is folks. Audience participation time again. I want you to look the single most preposterous set of keywords for any movie on the IMDB. A pat on the back for the winner. Not an actual one, but an internet one. Which is better.