Category: Random

Answer me honestly, oh faithful readers, do I (or do I not) look like Jack Nicholson?

Blogger just can’t sit still. Latest launch: blog*spot – a free blogger-blog hosting service. I have to confess though, that even after looking at their products page, I wonder how/if they make any money. And if there aren’t ads on blog*spot, you have to wonder how it keeps body and soul together.

I have this image of Meg and Ev sitting on a doorstep with two extremely powerful laptops, with a cable snaking sneakily out of a nearby warehouse, and “Will Code For Food” written on their T-shirts…

<advertisement> Are you an Anglophile? Obsessed with UK-based webloggers such as me? [Or haddock.org, kitschbitch.com, notsosoft, Lukelog, linkmachinego] If so, then keep up to date with the latest in logging with gb.weblogs.com. </advertisement>

I’ve just discovered that I have built up a backlog of 50 unanswered e-mails over the last two weeks. So if I haven’t replied to you yet, I’m very sorry, and I will get around to it.

It was Saturday afternoon at 5pm, and I wander into Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus. The whole place has been redecorated and looks quite different from how I remember it. The most significant addition is a whole bank of iMacs with net access for sale at £1 for 20 minutes. “Cool”, I think to myself, “I can blog from the middle of Tower. That’s got to be pretty hip”. So I sit down with my little 20 minute card and try to access something.

Time passes. Sites resolutely refuse to load. After twenty minutes, I have managed to glance at two pages: my site and Blogger.com, where I have written a piece slamming the appalling connection speeds. I click on post and publish and nothing happens. For six minutes. My time runs out. I am furious.

At least in the meantime I’d found a way to remove all their sponsors from the browser (why don’t they ever turn off keyboard shortcuts) and replace them with kitschbitch and prolific links. I rule.

A message from the uber-God, Grant Morrison, delivered to us through the BBC: EdFest Live Chat Transcript. Bow in wonder, unworthy scum. Selected awesomeness follows:

Ed›Mathews: JLA was a fun romp. Any chance we’ll see you playing with DC’s heroes again soon? Grant Morrison on Aquaman would be most intriguing, for instance…

Grant›Morrison: I had a really good idea …Aquaman’s mum was a mermaid and laid eggs and there were thousands of them!

Rizla›1977 Am I a sad, deluded fanboy, or are there really deep magical undertones to MarvelBoy?

GrantMorrison Yes there are deep undertones and Yes you are a sad deluded boy for thinking so

Jinx Will Zenith be returning to 2000AD?

Grant›Morrison Yes shortly and in a fairly bizarre story It starts off with Britney Spears being raped by a robot.

I’ve run out of friends, I think. Toby’s away doing god-parent things, Nick’s in Oxford or Cambridge (doing god knows what with god knows who – although I’ll bet it involves women), Rhonda’s in Sussex, Kate and Mella have gone out for breakfast with Tara, Katy is on her way back to Manchester, Evil Nick’s in Harrow, etc etc etc… Meg and Luke aren’t even on AIM. I don’t understand.

Conversations in my head:

• Loyal Reader: Tom? What did you and Katy do last night?
• Tom: We went to see The Sound of Music at the Prince Charles Cinema, Loyal Reader.
• LR: You did what? Why would you do that? I don’t understand!
• Tom: We went to see The Sound of Music. Sheesh – it’s not that hard to understand.
• LR: Let me get this straight. You and Katy went to the cinema to see an absurdly long Julie Andrews musical that you can see on TV every single Bank Holiday, Easter and Christmas. And you went on a Friday night?
• Tom: I can see how you might think that was slightly strange – but really – this was a special screening of the movie. At this screening, they put subtitles on for all the songs and you are supposed to sing along, and people get dressed up in fancy dress (and there’s a competition for the best Nun) and there are props (just like when you go to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show). And there’s an intermission and popcorn and coke and it’s four hours long and there’s Austria and Nazis and “High on a Hill was a…” and “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes…”. It’s COOL, OK?!
• LR: Fuck this, I’m off to kottke.org
• Tom: Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there?

OK. There’s this writer called Grant Morrison, right? And he’s, like, absurdly talented and witty, and has been written about in academic tomes on postmodernity. His work sells in the hundreds of thousands of copies a month, and he may or may not have been the creative force behind The Matrix, depending on who you believe. He mainly writes comic books – pretty fucked-up comic books if the truth be told – about freakish superheroes, the nature of reality, anarchy, evolution, revolution and bald men, who wear leather and fight the establishment.

Way back in the mists of time, he also created this little character called Flex Mentallo, a character who literally leapt off the page. He was a poor skinny little boy, who had sand kicked in his face on the beach. His girlfriend thought he was pathetic and went off with the bully. He studied muscle building arts, and then his girlfriend wanted him back.

Any of this sound familiar? Charles Atlas Ltd. thought so (and rightly, since the comic strip follows almost exactly the Atlas comic strips of the seventies and eighties) and swiftly sued. And why did they sue? [“Sand Kicked in the Face of Charles Atlas”]

Because in Morrison’s version, “Mac” doesn’t just write off for some guides to muscle-building. Instead, he meets a strange man down a dark-alley who has a television instead of a forehead, whose arms trail cans of some kind and who is continually smoking three cigarettes. The man offers Mac the knowledge to make him a master of the arts of Muscle Mystery – and thus to be able to cloud men’s minds, look into other dimensions and generate a “Hero Halo” which hovers above him, saying “Hero of the Beach”. But above and beyond all this, what really pissed off Charles Atlas Ltd, was that when the cooing girlfriend turns around to Mac and says: “Oh Mac! You are a real man after all!”, he replies (while pushing her off him), “That’s right. I am a real man and I don’t need a tramp like you anymore!” (before wandering off into the sunset in his swimming trunks – Hero Halo a-blazing.”

Ceci n’est-ce pas une meme. In fact, if you ask me, it’s a bloody con. If you must, look deeper.