Horror Express... 10.45am and I'll be on a train north. 8.30pm and I'll be on a train south. Crazy day. Seven or so hours in my home town... most of it spent inside a hospital I expect. At least I won't have to go 'home'. I've seen too many horror movies that start with idiots like me going back to houses like that... Mike is writing to Alkaline Trio

Shinsyu-kawanakajima-kassen... The Kabuki played by boys 2 Originally uploaded by 転�??�?�.

This Kabuki story Kagetora & Naoe need Kansuke(staff officer),make a trick. Naoe wife is Kansuke's sister. Invite Koshizi(kansuke's mother) & Okatu(kansuke's wife). But Koshizi is refuse call Kansuke. Get angry Kagetora ,kill to Koshizi. Okatu defend Kagetora. At the risk of one's life spirit,Kagetora admit leave Kagetora's house. Mike is writing to Frank Zappa

Four more years... From Nicolette in California: Mike, the other night I watched a program on Theodore Roosevelt and ohmygod, you look just like him. It's freaky. "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far". Well that's me alright. Apart from the speaking softly bit... Mike is writing to The Eels

Kindly note... Jess in the FT Originally uploaded by sizemore.

Mike is writing to Nothing Cool

Swallow this... More stuff up on both Londonist and Cinema Minima about the Raindance fest. There's also a few lines about John Mills. After a weekend of watching crap on the laptop we are off to look at BIG TVs... We don't miss the television programming at all, but you need something large if you're going to watch Ash shoot things in the head with his boomstick... Mike is writing to The Kleptones

The dirtiest hold known to man... Warren even pollutes Flickr: judo3 Originally uploaded by warrenellis.

I'm up early (for a Saturday) because we are getting rid of the TV this morning. I reckon we'll manage a couple of weeks surviving on downloaded stuff before we cave in and buy some plasma screened monstrosity... Not sure what else the day holds - tonight we're off to see Palindromes and The Eye 2 at the film fest. Did I mention I'm going 'home' next week. I'll be in the north for exactly eight hours.. I wonder if that hold works on Northernazis... Mike is writing to The White Stripes

F is for Jess... I forgot to mention that as well as writing for The F Word, Jess is now also blogging for them. Mike is writing to something loud

Friday... I was at the launch of the Raindance East Film Fest last night. Reviews are up on both Londonist and Cinema Minima. Cine-Mini is all change since I last posted there - my crap's going straight up on the front page so I guess I should adjust the links accordingly... and I NEED a new photo up there. Speaking of photos - another pile got sent up to Flickr this morning: Jess @ Canada Water Originally uploaded by sizemore.

Tonight Jess and I are off to Lauderdale House where some of Carol's friends have arranged an evening of music and readings in her memory. A really nice thing to do, but it'll probably be a tough couple of hours... Mike is writing to The Kleptones

Algomantra 2005 This a cut & paste job from one of my secret hangouts because I am still half asleep... I tend to get roped into strange things. April 29th is the date for Algomantra 2005. You can read about it here. It's basically a weekend of odd games that include a 58 hour vow of silence and wandering around the city with the wrong or fictional maps. I'll be wandering the streets with a pad and pen like Holly Hunter in THE PIANO and trying to form words from the streets like in Paul Auster's 'City of Glass'. This was all devised by the chap behind the SEAEAT Tsunami blog - the same guy who last year kicked off THE GREAT MAHAKALI WRITE-A-THALON in which we write a novel in a weekend. That will be happening again this year - probably a couple of weekends after the Algomantra crap is out of the way. Just posting it here to let you know I haven't gone mad if you see me wandering around Oxford St with a NYC subway map and my mouth taped up... but if anyone wants to get involved or wants more details on the weekend novel thing then drop me a line. So there you go... As luck would have it, the Friday that this all kicks off I'll be hanging out with vampires. If I wake up dead on Saturday morning the first thing I'll do is go scratching against Rohit's windows... Mike is writing to The Freeze

Now that's customer service... I just got this email from Flickr:

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it's true! And since you're one of those lovely people, here's a little something to say YOU ROCK! 1. Double what you paid for! Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Dec 28, 2006. 2. More capacity! Now you can upload 2 GB per month. 3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends! This won't be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you'll see a note on your home page telling you what to do. Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today. Kind regards, The Flickreenies.

Sweet! Mike is writing to Simon & Garfunkel

More Miike... The first (I think) trailer for the new Takeshi Miike movie is online. No subtitles, but at this point do you really need them? And be sure to watch it to the very end - achoo! Mike is writing to The Donnas

Seven Swords... This looks awesome: and speaking of awesome... Slayer Originally uploaded by sizemore.

Way too cute... Mike is writing to Bombay the Hard Way

Erm... Jess: Do you remember telling all my friends how you cradle-snatched me? I'm never drinking again... Until next time. Now we have a whole Saturday to kill... What would Johnny do? When the ink starts to itch, then the black will turn to red Maybe it's time I got a new tattoo... Mike is writing to Johnny Cash

To be like other girls... Rough night. The Londonist meet-up, drink, no sleep, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and then out again last night with Jess' work pals, too much drink, arguments, pizza and then up at 7 to watch Buffy... I hope the neighbours appreciate Sarah Michelle Gellar's singing voice this early in the morning. Jess watches that shit with the volume turned up to 11. "Give me something to sing about..." How about coffee and leftover pizza for breakfast...

celebration?
Originally uploaded by ponyintheair.

The meet... Tonight (it's still Thursday until the sun comes up) I finally met up with my fellow Londonistas. It was a good night - nice people, good conversation and plenty of drink. I posted a couple of photos up to the Londonist Flickr group - probably more to follow as I wasn't the only one with a camera to hand. Now Jess and I have a couple more people to discuss Lost trivia with... There's a new free paper just launched - an attempt at a London based Village Voice/SF Guardian style weekly indie. It's still in beta (according to the masthead), but it does boast a Londonist column. They've given it the tagline London's best blog... that should kick off some hate mail. Oh, and if anyone has the uncut version of The Hustler in which Paul Newman picks up an ashtray with his cock please drop me a line. Mike is writing to H�sker D�

Ever shaved a keyboard? A few of you have been here and have met the cat. You probably left with a lot of his fur stuck to your clothes. Keeping the flat fur free is an ongoing battle - wooden floors ack! This afternoon I decided to clean the keyboard on the laptop and this is what I found inside: What should have been a five minute job turned into a couple of hours. Damn that was gross. Now the keyboard feels too springy... I'll give it a week before it starts getting clogged again. Hey look - it's 5am! Mike is writing to H�sker D�

Hello weirdos... So I killed the statcounter on the left. It's been acting weird since my posting on Londonist began - too many new visitors for it's feeble code to keep track of. It's been a year since I even looked at my webspace provider's stat tools as they used to be pretty basic too - now they're full of bells and whistles so I can keep a close eye on the habits of the weirdos that drop by here. As of yesterday that was around an extra 4000 page views/2000 unique visits per day than my old stat counter was telling me about. Piece of shit. Still small potatoes compared to real interwebsites, but it's nice to know that I've got a few of you in my grip. And I never would have noticed (because I suck) that my old friend Tod Goldberg now has a blog (duly added to the roll) and is pimping me like a Deadwood whore:

"Ever realize you've totally neglected what was once one of your favorite blogs, only to return and find out that it still makes you happy? It's sort of the reverse of seeing an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend in line in front of you at Rite-Aid, when you have to decide what the proper decorum is: Do you begin screaming "I hate you, I hate you, you ruined my life, you fucking skank!" or do you play the catch up game of "So you're fat now, that's too bad, I wouldn't have predicted a plague of goiters hitting you," or do you simply stare fondly and remember the good times? I opt to stare fondly in this case, because Mike Atherton at Visible Monsters is still as fucked up as ever...and this is just wrong."

All it takes is a little zombie pope to bring people back to the fold. Seriously though - read this and then go buy his fucking books. Tod is a great writer. Mike is writing to Throwing Muses

Talking to the Feds... We were in New York when the terror alert was raised from an almost dull yellow to the pumpkin coloured terror of orange. Yellow means Elevated - "An Elevated Condition is declared when there is a significant risk of terrorist attacks". Orange means High - "A High Condition is declared when there is a high risk of terrorist attacks". There's a full rainbow of terror that can ensure you never sleep easy again. Best to ignore the whole thing. Easier for us than the locals though. This was December and I was watching talking heads discuss the need for the National Guard to protect Times Square against a terror attack, but I couldn't help thinking of the oncoming threat as a group of camp 60's Batman villains dressed in day-glo outfits and intent on wrecking the most precious of holidays armed with candy cane machine guns. I mean what the hell do Christmas terrorists look like? I was still still pondering this a week later sat in the passenger seat of DC Mike's car as we crept down Route 66 towards Baltimore and a date with Edgar Alan Poe. I keep seeing these huge (and by huge I mean American) signs hanging over the freeway reminding me that the current terror alert is ORANGE and that I should call the number if I see anything suspicious. Bull. Red Flag. I ask Jess on the back seat for her mobile phone. "Who are you calling?" she asks as she passes the handset to me. "FBI," I say. The car wobbles slightly as DC Mike laughs. I punch in the number from memory and get nothing. My memory sucks like a chest wound. It's why I write. I write everything down so I don't forget it. That's a lie. For some reason I don't need to write down pop-culture references like the fact that in The Blues Brothers in the diner scene Jake orders 4 fried chickens and a coke while Elwood asks for dry white toast. This I can remember because I took my grandmother with me to see that movie - it was the first AA movie I ever saw at the cinema and it left a lasting impression on me. As well as a healthy fear of nuns. But phone numbers I can never remember. Good job that those signs were flashing away every few hundred yards or so. It was like the illuminations at Blackpool. I kept looking to the side of the road expecting to see John Ashcroft giving chase to flashing terrorists animated in light bulbs. Soon enough I was connected to some bright young spark eager to hear my suspicions. Before I could get a word in he asked for my name and location. Maybe I imagined the excitement in his voice when he repeated "Washington DC" back to me. Then again maybe these guys are working on commission. For every monument saved an extra ten bucks and one of those cool jackets that say FBI on the back. If only we could force the bad guys to wear jackets with the word TERRORIST on the back then things would be much simpler. Then again, angst ridden teenagers would just adopt them the way they do 'parental guidance' stickers. I blame the TV. "Please state the nature of the suspicious activity sir." Oh yeah. The FBI guy. "Well that's just it, I have no idea what you mean by suspicious." "Sir?" "I'm British." I find that stating my nationality in the USA is like sprinkling myself with dead cow parts while at an Atkins Dieteers convention. It makes me popular. I'm British and I need direction. "Well, sir may I ask which part of the UK you're from?" I wondered if he had a form to fill in. The Terrorist hotline was called 15 times this week by the English but only once by the Welsh. He brightened when I said London and asked me if I was familiar with Piccadilly Square. Now in London we have a whole bunch of squares but not one of them is called Piccadilly. I surmised he was probably asking me to think of a magical place that had all the wonder of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square combined. "Funnily enough," I answered, "I just happen to live in an apartment that overlooks Piccadilly Square". I was being kind by using the word apartment but also showing off that I was fluent in the American tongue. "I wake up to it every morning and know every inch of its four corners inside out," I continued. This was going swimmingly, but DC Mike couldn't keep a hold of his laughter. I moved the phone to my other ear. "Well sir, anything you would consider out of the ordinary in Piccadilly Square that you see here you should call in immediately." I nodded. More for my benefit than his. I explained that back home in dear old Blighty things were very different and that culture shock was confusing the hell out of my terrorist sniffing instincts. Back home our policemen don't carry guns so now every time I saw a cop here I was instantly unnerved because of the firearm at his or her side. In reality this doesn't bother me as much as when I am in Israel and riding on buses with machine gun wielding adolescents but I wanted to lay my 'bright eyed tourist fish out of water' spiel on him and as heavily as possible. Of course I didn't want to openly say I was a tourist in case he misheard me and we were forced off the road by a swooping black hawk helicopter with Dick Cheney hanging out the side hunched over a rail gun. I asked very nicely if he could please help me along with the spotting of suspicious suspects by telling me exactly what I should consider out of the ordinary in this super size playground of the gods. Now pay attention to this next part. Wherever you are reading this is, in all likelihood, as valid a target as anywhere else. Look around you. Would an explosion in the immediate vicinity cause terror? Then here's what to look out for. "If you see people pointing binoculars at government buildings". "If I see people pointing binoculars at government buildings", I repeated for the benefit of the car. "Or cameras". "Or cameras". I looked out of the window and saw that we were passing a large coach filled with Japanese people. They were all pointing camcorders at me menacingly. I like the Japanese and I didn't want to be responsible for their searched cavities so I didn't mention them to the guy on the phone. My first conversation with the FBI and there I was - withholding information. Instead I explained that already I had seen several people with cameras hanging around the White House and some of the larger monuments. This was a bold faced lie. I had been nowhere near any of those tourist traps. DC Mike had kindly taken us up The Exorcist steps and later pointed out some old school punk rock graffiti, but that had been the extent of our sightseeing so far. We had seen a homeless guy taking a dump near an underpass but he looked very patriotic doing it so again I resisted the urge to snitch. The man on the phone happily explained to me that the people I had seen with cameras were probably just tourists and as long as they were similar to the kind of tourists we get back in Piccadilly Square then there was nothing to worry about. I asked if there was anything else that I should be afraid of or report straight away. "Be on the look out for men in trucks. Especially if the trucks have writing on the sides with radioactive or explosive warning signs. Be especially cautious if you see these men unloading barrels from these trucks. Ring us immediately if you see anything like that. Or anyone pointing anything at aeroplanes." Now some of the stuff I am writing here is fiction. Some of the stuff is just out and out lies and some of it really happened. But that conversation on the road from Washington to Baltimore did indeed take place and those were the actual instructions that I was given. God save America indeed. Extracted from Thrillpitcher May 2004 Mike Atherton Mike is writing to Mission of Burma

The filthy monkey lives... This is my thought process from around 1 until 5am: Earlier... Mike: I can't believe I live in a world where I'd get into trouble for pushing a pitchfork through that woman's face. That's why I find zombie movies so comforting Jess: It is? Mike: Sure. You know where you are with the undead. They just want to eat you. Apart from that they're not annoying. They don't walk behind you blathering into a mobile phone, or sit near you talking loudly about their "ten year plan"... Jess: Well, that's true... Mike: Tell me in what way that woman's life wouldn't be improved if she suddenly found her head pinned to the wall by a pitchfork. Jess: Tell me you didn't buy a pitchfork today. Mike: Well, I was looking... Mike is writing to The Ramones

Comments... I tidied up the comments code so that you now get a neat little comments box popping up instead of that crappy reloaded post with extra scrawl underneath. I also noticed that this site looks a tad weird in Internet Explorer. Not unreadable, but not the neat layout you get in Firefox. I know everyone who comes here regularly is not stupid enough to still be using IE, but for anyone who just unpacked their PC and wants rid of the feeding tube that is the browser of choice for those in a persistent vegetative state (Ohio, for example) here's Firefox. I have no idea how this looks on a Mac. If any Mac users can tear themselves away from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy long enough to send me a screenshot I'd be grateful. Mike is writing to Minor Threat

Flickr... Loads of new photos up on Flickr. A bunch of graveyard shots and some random crap. All the older shots are neatly arranged into sets. Mike is writing to low flying helicopters

The Doctor has gasssss... What is still unfolding on BBC1 may well be the worst slice of Doctor Who ever - even worse than the Bonnie Langford/Nicholas Parsons years. I say may well be because I stopped watching it. This is ok because I think maybe Mark Gattis stopped writing it halfway through and then remembered some old Star Trek TNG scenes that he could patch it up with... I just leaned back in my chair and heard the line "The angels need me" delivered in that syrupy Welsh accent that I hope will never be heard again for the rest of the run. Isn't enough they've dragged people out of the pits to film the damn thing? Mike is writing to drivel

Bah... The Quatermass Experiment remake... Mike is writing to The Breeders

Dull soup... I just finished In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami and it was a real disappointment. He seems to have lost his edge somewhere, Almost Transparent Blue is one of my favourite books but his latest is just drab. Much better was Speed Tribes by Karl Taro Greenfeld, non-fiction written as narrative, great technique and with a much clearer insight into Tokyo than Murakami's trudge through the sex district. I'm just re-reading Quatermass by Nigel Kneale - great stuff. I missed the recent new live production on BBC4 because I was out at the Polysics gig. The thing is repeated tonight though so I'm sorted... Jess is home for a couple of days before she starts in her new promotion so things on here may be a little more erratic than usual. Other stuff - The Warren Ellis feature is now with the editor in LA - should go into print sometime early next month just before the first issue of Desolation Jones hits the stores. I'm not sure yet if it will go online anywhere, but six weeks after publication I get to place it somewhere else so I'll more than likely put an extended version of the interview up on the (almost ready) DogTower site. Still transcribing the Mike Watt interview - I am slow with stuff like that, but it'll be online in the next week or so I guess. Well before he plays the ICA anyway... Should be some new zombie stuff going up too... you can never have enough of the undead. Mike is writing to Iggy Pop

Blame Corran... He makes me do things... I have room for one more Cardinal and a couple of Bishops. Then we ride on The Vatican. Mike is writing to Sabbath

Maybe it's because I'm a Londonist... All my Londonist posts are now collected in one handy place. And the rest of the Londonist staff finally have faces. Mike is writing to nothing - time for Deadwood

URGE ON!! The Polysics review is up over on Londonist. Almost thirty pics of the show up on Flickr. Mike is writing to Godspeed You Black Emperor

Fuck Doctor Who... This is my Saturday night: Mike is writing to Alkaline Trio

Only the good die young... part 766565 The Vatican's Medical Spokesperson, Dr Logan, has surprising news for the world's media on an otherwise slow news day: "It wants me! It wants food! But it has no stomach, can take no nourishment from what it ingests. It's acting on instinct!" Our thoughts at this time are of course with the Pontiff's long line of illegitimate children and his crack team of milking nuns. PS The Blogger spell checker wants to replace Vatican's with beauticians. Highly appropriate considering the pic. Mike is writing to Nuclear Assault - guess the song and win a cookie.

Fuck... Guitar Wolf bassist Hideaki 'Billy' Sekiguchi has died. No prizes for guessing what tonight's movie will be... Mike is writing to Jet Generation