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The immortal Grant Morrison, the creator of the memes that have hollowed out my head and set up a house party there, is interviewed about New X meN over at Marvel.com. I’ve not been particularly impressed by the series yet, but I always trust Grant to impress in the long-run – he’s never let me down yet.

Particularly important parts of the article for me were 1) realising finally that the new White Queen’s outfit is a full body suit with an X cut out of it (can’t believe I hadn’t noticed that) and 2) Grant saying: “Part of the new setup involves Professor X drafting a Mutant Rights Charter and sees the X-Men realigned not as super heroes, but as a kind of mutant equivalent to the Red Cross or UN Peacekeeping Force. They’re the people trained to deal with mutant-rights violations. They are educators, activists and warriors. They don’t need to be super heroes anymore, and I think the stories will be able to expand in some new directions because of that shift in perspective.” Suddenly, the X-men get interesting again.

Just because I designed it and because I think it’s nice – I hereby present the invitation to my 29th birthday party – to be held one week from tonight.

Today has been a tremendously pleasant day. I’ve written two reviews for the BBC’s Film Site representing the very best and worst of genre moviews: The Empire Strikes Back and The Man With The Golden Gun. There’s something wonderful about “Empire” which never ceases to amaze me – it’s the way that freed from having to have a happy ending, every single character comes into focus and every relationship is heightened. And it’s all played out amid such an amazing spectacle. Truly an incredible film.

Very brief aside: the prodigal daughter returns, and yet again she has too much bloody energy.

Via Haddock: The official drink of the Barbelith Underground.

As I was walking home about a year ago, a little girl was riding her bike in the middle of the street. She still had the training wheels on as she wobbled and struggled to peddle. It reminded me of when I was little and how badly I wanted a bicycle but couldn’t get one. My parents wouldn’t let me have a bike until I was 12; my mom was too afraid I’d hurt myself. I’d pass the bike section in the store and just look, having given up asking my parents about it long ago. I eventually did get one after much pleading and begging. Amazingly, getting my driver’s license at 16 and the subsequent borrowing of the family car passed without incident.

I don’t think you can fail to be impressed by a news service that writes important stories like this: “While NASA variously refers to the air lock as a “door” or “porch” for the station, it really defies such homey analogies, since earthbound people do not have to worry about stepping outside into a near vacuum that can boil their blood and burst their internal organs.”

Does Red Bull kill? And more to the point, exactly what is sudden adult death syndrome except for a name for something that they have no idea what it is but results in sudden death?

I’m trying to work out whether I want to go out on the piss tomorrow night or whether it would be better to have all my gay friends around for a piss up at my place instead. I could get some snacks in and some booze and we could listen to shite music and chat. Might be cool. Less about staring at people in bars and more about hanging out. Don’t hang out enough…

Via Prol comes this incredibly useful little site on Common Errors in English. Of course the first thing to do is run it through an online spell-checker and look through it desperately to try and find grammatical errors and clumsy linguistic usage. Well it would be if I had the time. I’ll leave that up to you guys.