Category: Random

“There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.” Anthony Trollope was on drugs.

I cannot emphasise enough how much you have to go and see Hedwig and the Angry Inch if you haven’t done so already. It was phenomenal. My trip to see it last night with Katy was followed by a brief interlude with Mo and November Juliet at Morgan Towers complete with (different) Katy, excess Kravitz, some of Nick’s vocal stylings (that reminded me of Dead Can Dance) and the opportunity to bore everyone stupid by playing Ghostbusters and Fur Elise over and over again on the keyboard.

Wil Weaton peed in the ocean.

There seems to be a trend at the moment for webloggers presenting galleries of themselves through time, and I think it’s a trend that I like and might have to participate in. The latest casualty of the desire to present one’s gradual slump into senility is ‘er at NotSoSoft. It’s astonishing how different one can look and still be recognisably the same. I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that weblogs act as a chronicler – as a way of cementing memory and narrative, as a way of making sense of one’s own life to date.

Today on Barbelith: Fantastic Beasts – “Just as traditional bogeymen have been replaced to some extent by paedophiles and other, more human terrors, so the fantastic beasts of mythology and the mediaeval bestiary have been exchanged for the less improbable subjects of cryptozoology. Catherine Wright investigates. “

Now this is good: Cornell University have put together a well designed, immersive, atmospheric site on The Fantastic in Art and Fiction including woodcuts and lithographs of the most bizarre and freakish images you’ve seen.

Katy‘s better half now has his own weblog. Blog Family Robinson rules demand that they produce tiny bloglets immediately.

I don’t live in America so I’m in no position to judge. I don’t have that much access to the feeling of the nation – I can’t gauge the effects of policy on the ground, but it’s beginning to seem clear to me that no one really likes GW Bush.

I read the Watchmen for the first time when I was about eighteen, and I have to say that I didn’t like it very much. I found it unsettling, confusing, too grim and dense. I was in an escapist mode at the time. Later, of course, I came to love it, even though it feels so very much of its time. But I think my eighteen year old self would have liked the script for the Watchmen Movie That Was Never Made. Even though now I think it’s fairly lame.

Happy birthday to my father, David Harmer, who turns sixty-one today.