"AS OPPOSED TO GOOD?" One tune that has been on heavy rotation for months now is Johnny Cash's cover of Will Oldham's 'I See A Darkness'. It's just stunning and so powerful when sung by Cash. Everyone goes on about his cover of 'Hurt' but this is the real deal: Well you're my friend (It's what you told me) And can you see (What's inside of me) Many times we've been out drinking And many times we've shared our thoughts But did you ever, ever notice The kind of thoughts I got Well you know I have a love A love for everyone I know And you know I have a drive To live I won't let go But can you see it's opposition Comes a-rising up sometimes That it's dreadful and position Comes blacking in my mind And that I see a darkness And that I see a darkness And that I see a darkness And that I see a darkness And did you know how much I love you Is a hope that somehow you Can save me from this darkness Well I hope that someday, buddy We have peace in our lives Together or apart Alone or with our wives That we can stop our whoring And pull the smiles inside And light it up forever And never go to sleep My best unbeaten brother This isn't all I see O no I see a darkness O no I see a darkness O no I see a darkness O no I see a darkness And did you know how much I love you Is a hope that somehow you you Can save me from this darkness If you don't have a copy let me know and I'll burn it or mail you the MP3. Mike is blogging to: duh!

"WITH FRIENDS LIKE YOU, WHO NEEDS FRIENDS?" Well I was having a frankly shitty day until I found this on Doc's blog: Poor Jimmy Corrigan. We found him lost and wandering the street outside our house, his trademark look of worry plastered across his round face. He seemed to be suffering from some kind of amnesia as he was unable to recollect how he had come to find himself in England, let alone on the streets of Leeds. We asked him if he'd like to come in for a chilled drink or perhaps even an alcoholic beverage but he eyed the messy beer can strewn innards of our house through the open door with palpable distaste and mistrust. He turned and quietly stared off into the distance, his mind seeming to wander, perhaps rifling through the dusty pages of his cognitive scrapbook of past recollections. Back to some memory of his mother or father. "Sorry," he muttered, seeming suddenly to snap out of his daze, "I really must be going now, sorry!" And with that Jimmy left. Doc: I owe you a drink for that one, mate. Mike is blogging to: nothing

"FUCK IT DUDE, LET'S GO BOWLING" So in other Mike related news I got a haircut yesterday. I now look like Walter Sobchak. Awesome. Mike is blogging to: nothing

"LOOK, IT'S BEEN SWELL, BUT THE SWELLING'S GONE DOWN" Throwing myself at strangers Part 2: Not a marriage proposal this time but a request to stick up a few pics. About an hour ago I interupted some poor soul's lunch so that I could photograph her arms. Odd I know but what you gonna do - it's not everyday you see such beautiful Tank Girl art sunk into someone's flesh. Anyway I promised her I wouldn't put the pics online until she had asked her friend back in Oz if it was ok - my camera, her arms but his inkwork - fair enough. So if you're reading this I'd love to let all these good people also take a peek - feel free to pass on my address to the artist and I'll try and persuade him. Wonderful work. And thanks again for not telling me to fuck off :) Mike is blogging to: nothing interesting

"HERE WE GO AGAIN..." I just set up a new blog Mike is blogging to: The Byrds

"PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG" Mike is blogging to: Spiderman

�I KNOW HOW TO ROLL BUT IT�S HARD ON THE ELBOWS� Ok � let me get this out of the way first. If the girl who I gave my web address to last night reads this then drop me a line. You were way too cute and I think we should get married and have lots of babies. Or we could just adopt. Or get a couple of dogs and a cat. Do you like werewolf movies? Ok � back to the regular stuff. The Donnas were good last night. Not as good as I�ve seen them before � the new stuff seemed sloppy, one of them was very drunk and The Scala sucks. Still good fun though. I kind of regret smashing that guy�s nose with my elbow. I should have just kicked him in the bollocks when he started to kick off. Press pass my arse. Ahh, fun. Jess and Heather seemed to bond, which was strange, as I thought they had nothing in common � the world of women is still a strange strange place. Maria seemed to have fun too so the evening was a success. Seen a few too many really good gigs lately though so I can�t get too thrilled about this one. Maybe The Donnas will get thrown off their new label and get some of that rawness back that I think they need. Off to see Henry Rollins in about 2 weeks and then Alkaline Trio. Also need to try and get a ticket for the Grant Morrison thing that Boag told me about ages ago. I think tickets went on sale yesterday... I now have two days off work. This should give me plenty of time to catch up with all the stuff I�ve let slip. I foresee a lot of posting, writing and emailing in my near future. Today is still a little up in the air. I may be meeting Charlotte and Daisy. I think I am meeting Esther and Jo after that. I also need to think about a new mini PC and maybe fresh ink for the arm... Super big apology to Jen. Sorry Missy. Can we still discuss baseball? Right � breakfast time. Mike is blogging to: Copper Blue by Sugar

"..........." Off to see The Donnas this evening. Looking forward to that. Kind of... Still trying to work out a lot of stuff as regards me and Jess. All a bit of a head fuck really. I'm starting to think that moving out of here is going to happen sooner rather than later. I've moved around an awful lot but It's very hard to walk away from a home. Jess wants me to stay and be the perfect housemate. That works great in theory. She even wants me to stay on for the move to London Bridge and Amsterdam. The more this goes on though the more I just want a chance to be... well, happy I guess. As soon as I figure out that little secret I'll be glad to pass it on. Mike is blogging to: nothing

�I WANT A TRIO AND I WANT ONE NOW!� I had a good day today. I booked tickets for Alkaline Trio and once again I am gig-happy and will be going with a trio of good-looking girlies. Lucky Mike. I just read Duncan�s updated blog which is always a joy: �Anu buys the cassingle (still a valid vehicle for chart success here) of some song that is getting huge rotation here and haunts every coffeeshop, bar and bus. The guy says �yeaheaheay� with real heartache before a fantastic Yamaha bagpipe sound wails in. Deshu frighteningly and inexplicably has a passion for Michael Bolton who he compares it to.� If you are reading this mate, drop me a line and let me know if you got my last email. Reading through the pages of my other friend�s lives I find this photograph of Doc: He�s the King of the World. Well, Leeds anyway. (Notice the AT-AT in the window? Awesome). He also had the following to say: �Mike ate 46 of those Wrigley's Thin Ice breath fresheners in one go and threw up sticky Thin-Ice goo (although he'll probably never have to brush his teeth again); we rode people in the shopping trolley and smashed them into bins; we called some wierd black magic medicine guy we found an advert for in the paper and James (not our James, a different one) left answer phone messages saying that his legs had been cursed and were now the size of rabbits' legs...� I love this guy. Read more here. I have been getting to know Jen better which has been a blast. She just did an interview with another of my friends for the next issue of Punk Planet which she let me take a peek at. Again I�m in the happy position of being surrounded by creative and talented people. I finally spoke to Lawrence about getting his comic book into Foyles and dropped a bunch of emails to other comic book artists and writers and asked them to get their stuff to me. If anyone reading this has a comic book that needs a home drop me a line. I had a bunch of cool emails from all sorts of people from all over the world. So a big firm handshake to David (rabid Twin Peaks fan) and Steve (from Tokyo Pop). And a peck on the cheek for the ladies: Kathryn (and all four of her blogs), Charlotte (just back from Oz), S�nje (on her way to Germany), Mandy (who asked me to write for her magazine) and Ju (the French comic book goddess). Also a big �Hey-do� to Sandra who I know is lurking around here somewhere... Yesterday I wandered around town with Jess and took a pile of pics which I�ll try and get up somewhere here later. I also stole a brick from a church. Met up with Daisy, which was cool and had fun laughing at a mad barber but our search for mummified priests ended in failure... I also managed to kill the beloved PSION revo PLUS. Fuck. Now all my portable writing bits and bobs are in a state of death. I did fix a laptop which is handy but like other items of my equipment it's not the kind of thing you want to pull out on the tube. I may have to go shopping for a new gadget... Also debating new tattoos... As I write this I have another window open which is streaming me a live feed from one of the BBC�s cameras in Baghdad. It�s quiet now. Every now and again I see a car slowly move down the road and hang a left off the screen. The lights flicker every now and again. Damn, this war is dumb. Jess has a nice link on her blog which runs a tally of dead people so far... ahh the delights of the interweb. Mike is blogging to: The Donnas

"WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE" Guess who wishes he had got a 'regular' job? Ahh well - at least every time time they punch him in the face he'll know deep down that he's helping to prevent another 9-11. Mike is blogging to: nothing

"YA BIG GALAH!" I only crawled into bed at 6am. The nice thing about being single is that there is no one around to call you an idiot. Or get you up. 2 hours sleep, the usual Shindler's List style tube journey and 3 cups of coffee later and I'm back at work. While I was out last night Frank from Oz rang. Bollocks. I miss his little Home & Away accent and strange cooking skills. One thing i did do last night was this: The Punk Planet Posters Gallery. People on the forum have never had a safe & secure home for thier pics and its always nice to put a face to someone you are calling a wanker. Most of em are like little punk angels though. Started a great book last night - Jeff Noon's Falling out of Cars. Beautiful and very strange. That's it for now. The Donnas in five days. Excellent. Mike is blogging to: nothing

"IT'S SIMPLE REALLY..." Good: Bad: Mike is blogging to: Transvision Vamp

"THANK YOU" It's been years since I saw Throwing Muses. Kristin's voice wasn't quite as strong as I remember but maybe I'm now more accustomed to her CD voice than live warble. Then again if she's aged so have I. Maybe it's just my hearing not being what it used to be. Then there's the fact that I was upstairs rather than down in the pit where I spent most of my teenage years. Old man. The Astoria's sound was as bad as its ever been and the lighting average. And yet. Maybe it was the fact that they made me forget for a couple of hours that there was a war going on outside. That we were killing people. Maybe it was just hearing the old songs again or the fact that they can still kick out cool new tunes after all this time. Maybe it's simply because I used to fuck like a rabbit listening to Red Heaven. Whatever. Throwing Muses were beautiful tonight. Exactly what I needed to see and hear. I'm just sad the rest of you guys couldn't be there too. Mike is blogging to: BBC News

"IT'S STARTED" Warren Ellis: "I remember when Gulf War One kicked off. We'd all been waiting for it for days. That night, I was down at the local all-night burger place, writing LAZARUS CHURCHYARD; working longhand in a notebook in those days, sketching out the pages so I didn't ask for anything impossible to draw in the scripts. Sammy, the owner, would tell my friends that I'd been in their until 4am, "making his little drawings and taking tablets with his Coke." The little TV was on in there, but he wasn't turning down the radio or the bloody fruit machines. I looked up, and the balloon went up and the cruise missiles banged off and we'd gotten our war on. I stood at the counter, watching a war start on TV, with a fruit-machine background of bingbingbingbing bloopbloop chakkachakkachakka you're a winner! After about forty-five minutes, the initial bombardment paused, and I ran home. My housemate was waiting at the stairs. We both yelled at each other, "It's started!" Stayed up til dawn watching the first war to be fully televised. Last night, I had the BBC News 24 videostream open on the right hand side of my screen while I wrote in the left, AOL open in the bottom quarter of the screen so I could trade email with Fraction and Peter Rose, both channel-surfing in the States. And we thought watching the first one on TV was creepy. There's a webcam in Baghdad, but it's down. The crump of bombing distorted out of my speakers, as I looked down on Baghdad at dawn through the BBC camera. They had a reporter on the phone in central Baghdad, and he couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice: I'm in the centre of the city and they're not bombing me. Anti-aircraft fire cracked over his voice. Imagine being in one of those houses. With your family. You never got to dissent. This war's got nothing to do with you. You can hear the sound of the world's big dog scratching and booming outside your door, and you never did anything wrong but to be born there. Regime change could have been effected twelve years ago and very few people would have argued the toss, the tangle of America's fickle affections aside. In a different phase of American geopolitical manipulation, Saddam Hussein was the lesser of two evils, and no-one wanted to see crazy Iran win a Middle East war. That Saddam is a little bastard is almost irrelevant now. The real needs of this war have little to do with Saddam being a basket case who shouldn't be allowed to run a bath, let alone a country. The instances where there were actual justification for going in, taking him and putting him in front of a court are long gone. There were other ways. There were always other ways. And now we, able to dissent, made complicit by democracy, will wear the stink of a para-legal war of oil and Robespierrean guillotine politics for a long time." Mike is blogging to: dumb fucks on Question Time

Fuck

"THE THRESHOLD FOR WAR SHOULD ALWAYS BE HIGH" The full text of Robin Cook's resignation speech: "This is the first time for 20 years that I have addressed the House from the back benches. I must confess that I had forgotten how much better the view is from here. None of those 20 years were more enjoyable or more rewarding than the past two, in which I have had the immense privilege of serving this House as Leader of the House, which were made all the more enjoyable, Mr Speaker, by the opportunity of working closely with you. It was frequently the necessity for me as Leader of the House to talk my way out of accusations that a statement had been preceded by a press interview. On this occasion I can say with complete confidence that no press interview has been given before this statement. I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support. The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour party in my lifetime. I hope that he will continue to be the leader of our party, and I hope that he will continue to be successful. I have no sympathy with, and I will give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace him. I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution. I do not think that anybody could have done better than the foreign secretary in working to get support for a second resolution within the Security Council. But the very intensity of those attempts underlines how important it was to succeed. Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance. France has been at the receiving end of bucket loads of commentary in recent days. It is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution. We delude ourselves if we think that the degree of international hostility is all the result of President Chirac. The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council. To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse. Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition. The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower. Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules. Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: the European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate. Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired. I have heard some parallels between military action in these circumstances and the military action that we took in Kosovo. There was no doubt about the multilateral support that we had for the action that we took in Kosovo. It was supported by NATO; it was supported by the European Union; it was supported by every single one of the seven neighbours in the region. France and Germany were our active allies. It is precisely because we have none of that support in this case that it was all the more important to get agreement in the Security Council as the last hope of demonstrating international agreement. The legal basis for our action in Kosovo was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis. Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq. The threshold for war should always be high. None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will "shock and awe" makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands. I am confident that British servicemen and women will acquit themselves with professionalism and with courage. I hope that they all come back. I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops. It is entirely legitimate to support our troops while seeking an alternative to the conflict that will put those troops at risk. Nor is it fair to accuse those of us who want longer for inspections of not having an alternative strategy. For four years as foreign secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes. Iraq's military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors? Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months. I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted. Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply. I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest. Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq. That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war. What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops. The longer that I have served in this place, the greater the respect I have for the good sense and collective wisdom of the British people. On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain. They want inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect that they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own. Above all, they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb on a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies. From the start of the present crisis, I have insisted, as Leader of the House, on the right of this place to vote on whether Britain should go to war. It has been a favourite theme of commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics. Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support. I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government." Mike is blogging to: nothing

�TREAD SOFTLY BECAUSE YOU TREAD ON MY DREAMS� Duncan updated his blog again. He did a double-post but when his stuff is this entertaining who cares? As well as eating coal and making me smile at the thought of his trying to bandage up someone�s broken foot after the first aid course we went on together, he also adds: Buying bread I see a Fanta calendar that has hung on the wall at a rakish angle since 1995. Then I remember that it is 1995 here by the Ethiopian calendar. Everyone should come to visit us here purely for the fact it is the cheapest form of time travel currently on the market Very fucking cool. So last night sucked for a little while but things as usual look rosier this morning (probably something to do with �Rosy fingered Dawn� which has never ceased to make me smirk). This is what I had to say last night but I never got around to posting it as I was too annoyed after listening to Bush and his �You have 48 hours to get out of Dodge� speech: �Fuck. Today was going so well too. I had a great conversation with an old friend that helped put some stuff into perspective and handed me some advice that I�ve been putting off hearing. Thanks Kerry. Then I had a blast at work. Busy but fun. Spoke to a lot of cool people. I forgot to mention the guy I spoke to yesterday about Iron Maiden after overhearing him talk about Samson with a friend. He was American and a big collector of all the stuff I used to listen to years ago � very intense but I always get a kick out of people who have a passion for something. So many people just seem to sleepwalk through life� anyway I�m getting off track. Suffice to say it was a good day. The evening was going well too but then BAM one little sentence and I�m completely fucking floored. It may even have been my fault, fuck knows I never know when to shut up but I�m not used to having an Achilles heel and its even more surprising when it gets cut away. All very cryptic huh? I�m having the same problem as another friend of mine who keeps a blog. Once the people who read it regularly get involved in your �real life� it becomes difficult to pour stuff out online without either making things worse or just betraying a trust. Anyway it fucking sucks. Tomorrow I�ve decided I won�t be going into work � I want to meet up with Daisy, go see Equilibrium again and just have a good day. Tomorrow evening I have the first of a series of meetings over a proposed film project. Pretty exciting if we can get the fucker off the ground. I will of course spill more beans on that one in due course. My day off is Wednesday so I guess I�ll just turn up for work then and make up the missing shift. I actually love the job enough that I don�t want to fuck them around. This is a nice twist on my usual attitude to employers. I�ve written off tonight. I�ll try and get some writing done (but I work for shit when my mood is like this) and post this blog when I get back to the main PC. At the moment I am holed up in what I guess is now �my� room, listening to loud noisy guitars and trying not to focus on how unhealthy it is for a 30-year-old to be in this dumb teenage funk. I need to pay a lot more attention to the good advice I�ve been getting lately.� So I never got to post that because I stumbled into an on-line discussion about Bush and talking fish. Gotta love the Internet. I rang in 'sick' this morning and will make the hours up tomorrow. Not something I do lightly but my head is screwed and I need to unwind - mental crap seems just as legitimate to me as taking the day off because you have a bad cold. One more thing... Mid January I wrote on here By the end of the month I'll have had well over 10,000 hits. Not too shabby... I just noticed that in the last two months that figure rose by another 5,000. Who are you people? Not that I�m complaining, fuck forbid that I should moan that people read this stuff. I�m just curious. Maybe I need to upgrade my stat software � at the moment at any given time I can only really get a look at the last fifty visitors. I only actually check the stats about once a month so there are major gaps in what I know about visitors here. Oh well... I�ll keep spewing and you guys keep reading... More later... Oh and kudos to Robin Cook for having some backbone and the balls to tell Blair to go get fucked... Mike is blogging to: We Have Come For You All by Anthrax

".................." Damn, I just wrote all this out and then pressed the wrong key on the stupid work PC and it wiped the entry. Bollocks. As I was writing it some girl did notice I was blogging and asked for my website address which was nice. Yesterday I went up to the London Bookfair. Hooked up with some of my comic distributors and came away not with the handfull of crappy proofs I was expecting but free Manga DVDs. Awesome. The order I placed finally made it onto the shopfloor here so I am now knee deep in Japanese weirdness, armoured robots and cute Japanese schoolgirls. Plus I had a visit from the too-cool guys at Tokyo Pop and I now have a very special For screening purposes only DVD to watch tonight along with GT Onizuka. I also sparked up a conversation with the guys from Seven Stories Press who I have a lot of time for and while I was chatting to them a girl who overheard my name came over and said hello. Turns out she knows me from this website. She emailed me a few months back regarding the Donna Tartt novel I reviewed. Small fucking world. I mentioned that I reviewed 9-11 on here and so they are gonna send me a hot off the press copy of something I got to flick through that pulls apart this whole sorry 'War on Terror' bollocks. In the evening I got to hang out with Daisy who showed me a lot of London I hadn't seen before. I don't walk enough in this city and I should. I'll be doing a lot more of that from now on and intend to start carrying my camera around with me again. Today has been hectic and I'm starting to feel a little run down - too many late nights coupled with all the news Todd keeps giving me about new Judge Dredd movies... I need some rest. I'm getting old. Today I am wearing a Farscape watch... Way too geeky, even for me. More to tell but I need to get home first... Mike is blogging to: nothing

�I AM THE LAW� How cool was last night? What the fuck has happened to British Film over the last year or so? When did it grow such huge fucking balls? I�m still reeling from the double-whammy of Dog Soldiers and 28 Days Later when along comes Equilibrium to give my frontal lobes a damn good kicking. Where the flying fuck did this bastard come from and more importantly why did I never realise before that exploding crash helmets were so much fun? This is by far the best thing I�ve seen this year. It�s a genre slice of sci-fi of the best kind. Think The Matrix, 1984, Minority Report and Fahrenheit 451 all wrapped up in Logan�s Run. Its very British credentials are stamped in place from a great cameo from Sean Bean and a thankless role for Sean Pertwee but Christian Bale owns this movie. He was great in American Psycho and just managed to save Reign of Fire but in this he�s just incredible. Let�s get the plot out of the way. What�s left of humanity has turned its back on war by embracing an Orwellian society fuelled by fear and a Super-Prosac drugged population. Keeping law and order and burning all remnants of culture and quite a few people are The Cleric � a pseudo religious order trained in the art of breaking your fucking face while dodging bullets. Bale is at the top of his game but then doubts about what he is doing start to surface and we are treated to the old �one man bringing the system down� chestnut. This all sounds contrived but you have got to see this film. It�s beautiful. Criminals try to hang onto culture by collecting 20th century bric-a-brac and holding out in rooms that look like the stalls on �Bargain Hunt� and then in walk The Cleric and destroy everything. They do this by using a style of fighting I wittily dubbed gun-fu but I have since learned is called Gun-Kata � simple idea really � martial arts with the gun used as an extension of the hand. Stunning to watch. Every time Bale turns on his ex colleagues I found myself shouting �fuck yeah� as he flipped shotguns around into their owner�s faces and broke bones aplenty. Best bit is when he learns why people used to keep dogs as pets and then kills a truckload of soldiers who try to take away his puppy! You can see why I love this movie... With Dog Soldiers it was thumbs in eye sockets, with 28 Days Later it was zombies spitting blood and in this you get face slicing... go see it. And from the cinema to the Astoria. Anthrax was a nostalgia trip. Scott Ian still holds the whole thing together and seeing him throw out those riffs was like seeing an old friend again. Again I had forgotten how awesome a front man John Bush is. I have all these memories of seeing gangly spider monkey Joey belting out the songs but they soon get filed away when you see Bush rip the fuck out of something like �Madhouse�. He�s like a hobbit with attitude. Frank Bello still looks like Frankenstein�s monster and still whips up the crowd by mouthing �whathefuck� every time he thinks the pit is flagging. They ended the encore with �I Am The Law�, destroying the Astoria while I ripped my own throat apart. Beautiful. The real nostalgic part of the evening was having Jess drape her arms around my shoulders from behind. It just seemed so fucking right. Outside the crowd mixed with some nu-metal-punk gig that had just finished up at the Mean Fiddler. Funny. All these 14 year olds tripping over their baggy trousers and trying to keep their chests in their tops as they fall into the road away from all the ugly hairy old men. Be interesting to see if the band they saw is around even a year from now. Anthrax just chalked up twenty years doing this. Christ. Growing old gracefully is just not an option... thank fuck. Mike is blogging to: American III by Johnny Cash

"THIS IS A LOCAL SHOP. THE STRANGERS YOU WOULD BRING WOULD NOT UNDERSTAND US, OUR CUSTOMS, OUR LOCAL WAYS" My fingers are cramping. I just sent out 46 emails. Fuck. Yesterday the Korean girl came back into the store and presented me with a small plastic version of Mashi Maro complete with plunger and small pillow. I didn't really know what to say. I will photograph the little guy later and post him up. Odd day to say the least. Some of my best friends are strangers... Just before I left work two American girls came in and asked me the quickest and cheapest way to get to Manchester. When I explained that that was tricky apart from the horrors of National Express they looked ready to burst into tears. Seems they came into town yesterday with a bunch of friends to see 'Dirty Vegas', lost their ride home and had their bags stolen. No money, no credit cards, no mobile phones, no way home. One of them lived and studided in Manchester but the other was here on holiday. I rang National Express and got the details of the next coach for them. �17 each leaving at 11.30 pm and getting into Manchester at 5.30 am. Like I said, National Express is fucking awful. They had a �20 note between them. They decided to ring one of their mothers in the States who could buy a coach ticket over the phone with her credit card leaving them enough cash to grab something to eat. I found this unacceptable and suggested they come back home with me, grab something to eat, make some calls, come up with a better plan and not just rush off to spend part of the night in Victoria Coach Station and the rest of the night crawling along the motorway - of course they declined even after I promised not to cut them up into little pieces (nervous laugh). Can't blame them at all but it sucks to think that even the most genuine of offers has to be looked on as some kind of veiled threat. I gave them my phone numbers and wished them well. I guess they are already home and cursing London by now... Jo remarked that she has worked here for three years and never really 'spoken' to a customer and here am I, a month in and already asking them home. Then there are the free rabbits... A few nights ago I sparked up a conversation with a girl on the tube simply because she was reading Ghostwritten. Once she realised I wasn't hitting on her we had a cool discussion but she was very wary of me at the start... I must have serial killer written all over me. Anyway, I gotta run back into town to grab drinks and stuff before seeing Anthrax this evening. I already have 22 unread emails waiting for me... fuckaduck. Mike is blogging to: nothing

"THE INTERNET IS A COMMUNICATION TOOL USED THE WORLD OVER WHERE PEOPLE CAN COME TOGETHER TO BITCH ABOUT MOVIES AND SHARE PORNOGRAPHY WITH ONE ANOTHER" Warren Ellis again: "At Bruce Sterling's house in Austin,Texas, Howard Waldrop beams Cory Doctorow an mp3 of some swampy old rock'n'roll from the dawn of time. The next day, across town, his powerbook scorching the flesh off his legs, he beams it over to me in England. I put it up on a private server for Fraction in Kansas City and Laurenn in San Francisco, while reading the first few chapters of Cory's new book, which he sent to me from an airport a few days before, squatting by the power outlet next to the public toilets. I put down Charlie Stross' next book for this, shot down the phone from Scotland, presumably before he had to go out with his spear to hunt dinner. Make a note to send the mp3 to Deon Maas in South Africa. B�ra sends photos from her balcony in Reykjavik while Andy Cosby threatens my screenplay with substance-challenged 80s TV stars from LA. Jean-Pierre Dionnet says hello from somewhere in Asia, which reminds me I need to speak to Olivier Dahan, who by now is probably in the depths of France, shooting a film with Jean Reno. M Shakti, somewhere between 2003 America and 1920 Paris, lets me know she has audio-blogs up at anaiscam.com. Cory's document goes in the file with the short story Kenji Siratori sent me from Tokyo. In 1988, I was living in a room that was six feet long and six feet wide, with no phone, nothing but a record player with tape deck and a portable manual typewriter. I remember waking up one afternoon and reaching for my last cigarette, that a girl had written "Good Morning" on with a biro before leaving, and thinking: Christ, the world's got to be bigger than this. I also remember thinking she was trying to poison me with biro ink." Fantastic. I just read what Garth Ennis did to Ellis' Authority creations and laughed out loud. Then I read what Ellis is currently doing with Hellblazer and almost puked at the thought of a Keanu Reeves version. I'll gouge my eyes out before I see that... Mike is blogging to: nothing

"HONOR'S KILLED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. HASN'T SAVED A SINGLE ONE" Since getting the tattoo I must have had twenty conversations a day about 'honour' with Japanese and Chinese people. This morning I spoke to two guys from Japan who told me about a famous Japanese gangster who had the exact same tattoo on the same arm. He died sometime in the eighties in a shoot out. I also have several post-it notes with variations on the character written down for me and have been taught how to pronounce it. I have been given several email addresses too - icluding one from a very excitable Korean girl who kind of yawned at the tattoo but then went apeshit when she saw I was wearing a Mashi Maro badge: This led to a very jumbled conversation about Resident Evil, Final Fantasy and Chow Yun Fat. Excellent! Mike is blogging to: The Beach Boys

"KILLED BY DEATH" Reason I love my job # 48675: I just met Lemmy from Motorhead! He was of course buying books on WWII fighter planes... Mike is blogging to: nothing (but is quite awe-struck)

"KINDRED SPIRITS" I love Warren Ellis: "I want a button on my computer that, when depressed, has the target on the screen held down and fucked in the gall bladder by nymphomaniac suicide lepers who are quite prepared to leave their green suppurating cocks broken off in the wound. I DON'T THINK THAT'S TOO MUCH TO ASK IN THE 21ST CENTURY. LEPERS. SORES. WOUND-COCKS. NOW." Mike is blogging to: nothing

"YOU'RE PLAYING CATCH-UP" Cute Japanese girls keep touching my arm. Weird. Still behind with the emails. Sorry. I'm thinking of getting one of those helper monkies that Homer keeps going on about. It's great being able to write email from here at work but I obviously don't have access to all the email that keeps piling up at home... Tonight I intend to blitz through what's left and that includes writing to Duncan, Bruce, Shannon (I have Ripper walk details!), Mags, Doc G, RJohn, Laura, Crazy Alison, Brendon and a bunch of others... Busy week ahead but there's a bunch of people I need to catch up with face to face. Mark - if you're reading this give me a call and also ask Lawrence if he'd like me to stock his comic book here. Let me know the next night you guys are going out for a drink and I'll tag along. I'm off to see Anthrax on Friday, meeting Heather on Saturday, bookfair on Sunday (where I get to annoy the guys from Tokyo Pop) and then meeting Dave Sunday night if he can't get tickets for the Prince Buster gig... Still lots of gaps though so drop me a line if you want to grab a coffee. Also I may be off to Madrid next month so tell me if it sucks or not - haven't been to Spain since I was about eight. All I remember are a bunch of Arnie action movies and arcade games... More later when I get a spare five minutes... Mike is blogging to: Johnny Cash

"I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT'D BE BETTER TO BE A FAKE SOMEBODY THAN A REAL NOBODY" Mike is blogging to: Ryan Adams apparently

"RALPH, JESUS DIDN'T HAVE WHEELS" I'm not sure I like working on Sundays. Sure the day is shorter but I just fine them too frustrating. People's stupidity levels seem to rise too. I blame God. Have any of you been to Oslo? Are any of you in Oslo? I find it staggering for some reason that Duncan has been reading my blog in Ethiopia. I'm used to getting people browsing in from the States, Europe, Canada, wherever but for some reason the idea of Duncan swatting away giant bees while looking at pics of my tattoo just tickles the hell out of me. He just updated his blog again so go and read it. Fucking amazing. Last night I rewatched Mad Max II so all in all life could be worse... Mike is blogging to: tourists and Johnny Cash

"WORST EPISODE EVER" Ineresting times ahead. Yesterday was excellent. I finally got my hands on the comics section and began the fun job of recreating it. I found out yesterday that the section used to be organised not by title or author but by size. The mind boggles. We also have exactly eight Japanese comic books in stock. Eight. I'm gonna put in two extra shelves just for Lone Wolf & Cub... Loads of good stuff coming out from Fantagraphics as usual too. Like I said, geek heaven. I also got a heap of free stuff yesterday and hooked up with a literary agent from Colorado. Oh and if you're going to the London Book Fair I think I'll be there on the Sunday so drop me a line if you want to grab a coffee. At some point over the weekend I will tackle my email. I've allowed it to build up to quite daunting proportions... I'll get back to you all before Monday - including the self confessed weirdo from California who offered to run off to Africa with me if I built her a tyre swing. You people get weirder and weirder. I also just started a new blog but for the moment that's got to stay secret. Interesting times indeed. Mike is blogging to: We've Come For You All by Anthrax

"THE FINAL CURSE UPON THE LAND. TO END FOREVER THE SLEEP OF MAN." Somehow my imagination has been overflowing like crazy and been resulting in night time emissions rather like a build up of semen. Last night I had not so much a dream or nightmare but rather a full technicolour installment from one of those late seventies British anthology horror movies. It even had a young Michael Caine in it. The plot's a little hazy now but had something to do with a guy (played by Caine) who by some freak medical occurence had lost the ability to cry. He arranges to have the tear ducts of a hapless victim removed and reinstalled in his own face. Not being able to cry coupled with the horrific scarring of the operation sends the victim insane (I think he may have been played by Ian Ogilvy) and he sets off on a eye gouging rampage around the London underground. The whole thing ended with Caine and Ogilvy fighting over a vial of tears on Teddington train station. Ogilvy gets messily crushed beneath a train but not before he rams the broken vial into Caine's eyesockets. As the ploice arrive (and I swear the inspector was played by Arthur Lowe) they find Michael Caine crawling around in his own blood King Lear style. Excellent. I am a little unnerved by the fact that the last thing I read before falling asleep was Neil Gaiman's Sandman which I just started re-reading. Mike is blogging to: Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys

"I TRY TO SCRAPE HIS BABYFACE OFF WITH A KNIFE..." Duncan has updated his blog. If you know him you'll want to read it. If you have no idea who the fuck he is you should read it anyway. I never knew he could write so well - he takes you from Finland to Ethiopia in amazing detail and with a wonderful turn of phrase. Stick it on top of your stuff to read pile. I'm in total fucking awe. I apply four coats of �Broken White� to the gate in the sticky heat. 35*C today. As I am painting I become aware of someone standing behind me. I glance over my shoulder. It is a skinny little kid, maybe 10, holding a giant empty green plastic washtub. I go through the �how are you?� routine which I have now mastered in Amharic. A small silence. I keep painting. In English, he says, �My mother and brother are dead.� I stare at a fly struggling, stuck in the drying paint. Mike is blogging to: Maybe I'll Catch Fire by The Alkaline Trio

"IT'S A LONG WAY DOWN" I'm down there somewhere: Mike is blogging to: nothing

"I CAME BACK FOR YOU..." Awesome. Mike is blogging to: wet and windy tourists

�I HATE THESE RESURRECTIONS� Sizemore.co.uk is one year old today. Maybe having the fucking thing written on my arm will remind me to keep running it. I almost brought the whole thing down last week but have finally decided to keep it up for the duration no matter what. So it�s been an interesting year... a bit of a ramshackle one actually. Lots of travelling, lots of new friends, ups, downs and the loopy bits that make things so interesting. Here are a few lines from that first blog entry: �I'm sick of treading water here in London... I never wanted a career selling books... We are moving into a smaller place closer to the city centre in a few months and are still planning to move to San Francisco some time in the near future plus I want to get my PhD started...� Ha. So here I am still treading water. Still in London. Still in the same house. Still waiting to move. Some plans have changed � no move to San Francisco until Bush is out of office and I have no desire to lumber myself with a PhD. Not sure i ever did. So should I be pissed at the lack of progress here? I would be if I were still in Borders or any of other crappy �filler� jobs I�ve done in the last 12 months but I�ve happily landed at Foyles. The people I work with are very cool very laid back and good fun so I�m already having fun but a couple of days ago I was given the Graphic Novels section to look after too... Nerd heaven. In that post I mention most of the people I used to work with at Ottakar�s. Duncan is now married and living in Ethiopia. I�m typing it, I�m reading it but I�m not believing it. Awesome. Others I�ve lost touch with but Mark is still very much part of my circle and dragging me into chicken restaurants the first chance he gets. Everyone else I see from time to time and seem to be doing well. So about that new tattoo... The last couple of weeks as some of you know and as others have guessed from the lack of posting on here have been pretty fucking rough. Foyles aside a lot of stuff seemed to be simply fucked. I�ve finally got my head around a lot of that stuff but only after losing sight of a lot of the things I�ve always held dear. For a time there I didn�t like myself very much at all, fuck, I didn�t recognise myself. The tattoo was a way of reminding me to stick to my own moral code regardless of what was happening around me. Luckily working in central London I�ve already had a bunch of people who can read Kenji commenting on how it looks. I can honestly say that I have never had a bunch of girls come up to me and say �You have a beautiful arm!� before... I added the �sizemore� line today after a friend pointed out how easy it would be to build up the rest of the arm Memento style. Maybe my next one will simply read �Find him and kill him�. And onto the relationship stuff... Jess and I are no longer together. Well, we are trying to be �no longer together� but that seems just as fucking hard as breaking up was. Maybe things will be different in a few weeks or months or maybe we�ll just carry on with this strange limbo relationship for a while yet. No matter what it doesn�t change the short term plans � sell the fucking house, move to London Bridge and fuck off out of London. Jess is going to go to Mexico � if we are still hanging onto some kind of relationship or friendship by then then I�ll still be heading for Amsterdam. If the whole thing goes terribly wrong then I�ll stay in London for an extra year and then head off on my own. Now the heartache stuff has all been played out its good to be able to look at all the options as exciting. Later today/tomorrow I�ll recap on some of the other stuff I�ve been up to and fill in some of the blanks from the last week or so. Big thanks to all the people who kept coming to the site regardless of content and for all the email. Extra special thanks to DC Mike and Doria for helping me keep my head where it belonged. You guys rock � especially you missy :) So this is my first blog of Year Two - lets see if I can keep it going... Mike is blogging to: Maybe I�ll Catch Fire by The Alkaline Trio