Still not quite as news worthy as a girl's chest... But a Londonist mention on Gawker is pretty good going methinks... [Music: Dio - The Last in Line]

Busy busy... In the meantime there's a public health warning here. Jess has plans to force me to watch werewolf movies tonight so it may be a while before I get round to updating stuff on here... [Music: just a big pile of this]

And we're back in 5, 4, 3... 3am... all that cold fresh air up north obviously didn't make me tired. Damn good to be back in London although I did get the opportunity to catch up with Andy and Stuart while I was up there. Highlight of the trip was just relaxing and talking bollocks again with the only two people who understand the true horror of Worm Warfare. I miss those guys. The family stuff was pretty much as I expected, but I scored an unexpected bonus by unearthing a pile of stuff that I hadn't seen in years and then slipping it back here like a modern day Oscar Schindler. Check out my loot: Having all these to reread goes some way to make up for missing the Zarjaz! launch. I thought this was lost and as dead as Laura Palmer. Wow, Bob wow. I'll begin rereading all the old books I brought back first thing tomorrow. All in all it was a much more enjoyable trip than I thought it was going to be... Now I can finally organise the Twin Peaks/2000AD/pulp scifi party that I've been promising everyone for years... [Music: growls and guitars]

This time tomorrow I won't be here... At some point today I'll begin to get my affairs in order. Tidy up the blog roll and all that. Must remember to add Pandagon to the mix. As John puts it:

... it's always nice to see someone so empowered in their sexuality. The only person I can think of who trumps Margaret Cho is Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon. Marcotte is so sexually empowered, I walked out of my office yesterday to find her vagina had stolen my parking space.

Then I need to get ready for my little excursion... supplies will be needed to get me there and back safely. [Music: Sahara Hotnights]

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done... This morning I was invited to the launch of the 2000AD Zarjaz! exhibition in December by the good folks over at Rebellion. The chance to shake the green green hand of Tharg and perhaps meet Judge Dredd... such things as fanboy dreams are made of. Alas I'll be in Sweden. While it would be awesome to chat to the creative people behind the one comic that had such an effect on me as a kid and still influences me a lot, it's not as much fun as hanging out in Scandinavia with Jess so I had to decline. Don't start emailing me - I already passed the invite along to one of the Londonist mob with the assurance that they promise to have no fun whatsoever. Fingers crossed though as I'll hopefully be sorting out a competition for some 2000AD goodies. Watch this space.... [Music: Frank Zappa vs Radio One 1982]

Ack II... Not much point in even trying to sleep once it's gone 4am. I've been sniffing round the edges of an idea and I was wondering if anyone out there can think of any TV shows that instead of jumping the shark reversed their fortunes and had the shark eat Fonzie. I don't mean shows that got off to a shaky start and eventually pulled through into something decent. What I'm after is a show so bad that everyone gave up on it, that no one took it seriously and then suddenly the thing just switched direction and gears and became must-watch-TV. Think Hollyoaks suddenly morphing into a Japanese pink zombie series with the original cast and sets retained only to be eaten through by half-naked zombie cheerleaders. A change in direction is what I'm after - something in which the original concept was just thrown to the wolves and not simply left to die like when the close in Brookside was quarantined by the army. Think an established (but so established it's predictable drivel) show suddenly switching into a genre piece. Like if the Eastenders Christmas Special had the inhabitants of Albert Square struck down with an alien pathogen and a handful of the uninfected struggling to come to terms with their crappy soap lives changing into Quatermass. Think a character with a twenty year lowest common denominated back story suddenly dropped into a David Cronenberg flick... It's no wonder I can't sleep. Watching TV that doesn't exist is not like counting sheep. [Music: off]

Ack... You can tell I'm back on real coffee. 3am. Fuck. It's at this time of morning I remember important things like plugging secret gigs: I would love to go to this but I'm going to be freezing to death in Sweden. For full details make with the clicky on the above photo. [Music: off]

Catching up with the Flickred... Or should that be Flickrd? Swiped from my Flickr friends and created with fd's Flickr Toys. [Music: 'Thrax]

Man's best friend... The machine was a little clogged over the weekend so I reinstalled the operating system - mostly everything was backed up, but a few bits and pieces decided to go awol which kept me busy this morning. The nice people at Alienware are sending me some new stuff to put a spring back in the old girl's step. She used to look like this: But now after a couple of years and being banged around at least seven different countries she's a little more battle scarred. That said she can still kick the living shit out of any Mac with one hand tied behind her back. Best not to take the laptop up North with me on Thursday though - the natives will either worship it as a god or cage it into a giant wicker man once they get wind of it's magical properties... I should be ok with just a pointy stick. Today's problems are more worrying and immediate - the coffee is running low and I am being tempted to listen to the new Darkness album... This would be a good time for someone to rush in and intervene while shouting "The Thirteen!" [Music: Nuclear Assault - Game Over]

You know you have a great girlfriend when... ... she uses phrases like seeping neck wound in her articles. Last night I finally got to meet Catherine Redfern, the person behind The F Word and very nice she was too. Also met another of the site's contributors, Holly, who stayed over and was very polite about my toast making skills this morning and the fact that I started playing music at the crack of dawn. But you want neck wound right? Jess has a piece on Neil Marshall's The Descent that you can read here.

I was interested to find out this film was directed by Neil Marshall, whose previous effort, Dog Soldiers, was a low budget werewolf flick. In that film, an all-male group of soldiers is led to its destruction by a woman who tempts them into the lair of her werewolf family. And it includes a really terrible time of the month joke, setting it miles apart from the much more interesting Ginger Snaps. Crassly, one of the chapter titles on the DVD edition of Dog Soldiers is 'All Women are Bitches'. So perhaps it is not surprising that the women in The Descent get in trouble because they go a step too far - they enter into the male territory of the explorer, and, despite a valiant effort, it beats them.

Awesome. I have quite a different take on The Descent but I've just made so many nice new female friends recently that I don't want to scare them off with one of my own vagina monologues... We also had a bit of bad news when last night we found out that Jess' grandfather, Bill, has been in hospital since Sunday. He's hopefully being released today so we'll be up there this weekend to see what's what. Jess' grandmother decided not to let us know "in case we worried"... nice of her to be concerned about us, but I've said it before and I'll say it again - this family is INSANE. Other odds and ends... Comments are now open on Blottered and there's a kind of open rant thing happening this weekend on Londonist if you fancy it. And guess what. DHL are still sucking Satan's cock instead of delivering MY STUFF. Maybe I'll just stay in Sweden. You don't get stared at for looking like the beardy one from ABBA out there and they know how to make a decent coffee too. [Music: Nuclear Assault - Game Over]

If you only see one film this year... See NIPPLES [Music: Anthrax - The Greater of Two Evils]

Two vegetarian Gothenburgers please... Finally got the flights and hotels to talk to one another and sorted out a pre-Christmas excursion to Sweden. We're off to Gothenburg on the 9th for a long weekend. Fly out on the Friday morning and get back here late Monday night. Looking forward to scraping London off my boot and tackling some more Scandinavian pizza. Last time we were out that way we stayed in Stockholm, but this will be our first time amongst the Gothenburgers. We arrive just in time for the turning on of the Christmas lights so it should get us nice and festive... ho ho ho [Music: A Santa Cause: It's A Punk Rock Christmas]

Been there done it... We went to Highgate the other day... We almost went to Paris but the dead people won us over... Trying to sort out a pre Christmas trip to Sweden, but it's starting to look more like a New Year one. Damn it to hell. Speaking of which I'm heading north for one day and one night next week. Fuck. The rant below was actually written yesterday afternoon in a cafe without internet access while two teenage girls read their bibles aloud at me. I shit you not. It's been an odd couple of days. And today I had my first cup of coffee at 4pm. Still only getting to bed around 2am and up at 7... Now it's time to cook up a storm and catch the Alk3 boys in Brixton. Talk among yourselves... [Music: off]

Dr Who, BSG and fucking footnotes... So here we have Boag:

the cybermen have always looked shit. they dont look any worse than they always have. you know this, deep in your black, black heart of black, black hearts. and camp? did you grow up watching the same doctor who as me? its the campest TeeVee show ever! well, maybe not ever... dont let your RTD hate blind you to the truth, you professor of playa-hation, you. what would you make them look like? the old ones? ya filthy nostalgist curmudgeon.

I've given a lot of thought as to exactly why the new Doctor Who annoyed me so much. I went back and rewatched some of the better episodes from 1963 onwards to try and work out what was missing. The answer annoyed me. There was nothing missing really. As Boag points out the TV show that he and I fondly remember (despite him being a mere pup) was camp as hell so surely my worries over the new Cybermen being tripped up by double entendres are foundless. And his question as to what I'd like the new monsters to look like is an interesting one that also required a little thought. I watched a couple more Cybermen episodes (Troughton's Tomb of and Davison's Earthshock being my favourites) and then I sat back down and watched the entire run of new Who episodes and it was still like pulling teeth. But I did finally figure out what was wrong with the Doctor's 27th* season. It was his 27th season. Over the last couple of years I've been lucky enough to be treated to some of the most intelligent and thrilling scifi television to come along in a couple of decades in the form of the new Battlestar Galactica. It took the bare bones of the original along with a large portion of its heart and revamped the fuck out the concept. A risk that paid off big time. For years Richard Hatch, the original Apollo, tried to get a continuation of the series off the ground. His plan was to pick up with the original characters some twenty years later and much like the novels he penned, push the story forward. He got as far as shooting a trailer, but then Ronald D Moore came along and delivered the death blow to Hatch's idea with the new series. Hatch later cremated his dead baby by agreeing to guest star in the new version and to be honest not many people mourn that concept. I'd have liked to have seen it but I'm very aware that it would have been all too easy to tap too deeply into the cheese that ran through the original series. I rewatched Lorne Greene and company running from the Cylon menace last year for the first time in more years than I care to remember and I was shocked to discover how lame (and short) the show was. A few things still stood out as awesome - the Colonial vipers, the Battlestar itself and yes even the clunky 'we shoot worse than Stormtroopers' toasters. The vipers were literally dusted off for BSG 2003 and the Galactica itself is just familiar enough to give you a little buzz every time it swings into view - names and plotlines also survived (dodgy monikers were changed to callsigns while a spaceflu that knocked out the boys and finally let the girls have a go at playing space soldier was replaced with an explosion that simply wiped out the Galactica's already chewed up pilots - male and female). Galactica suddenly became the hippest show on TV. That the shiny one eyed silver clumsybots had been replaced partly by naked blonde chicks who snap babies necks also helped a lot. The great thing about the new Cylons is that now not an episode goes by when I don't think to myself well maybe this is the episode when we'll get a glimpse of an old-school toaster. I still have enough fond memories of the original show to get a buzz at that prospect and I think I may have done a little dance when I twigged that the Pegasus was about to come into play... Now let me get back to what I was saying about Doctor Who and it's doddering season twenty-whatever. Yes, RTD revolutionised an old show BUT it's still the same old dead thing underneath with just a few cosmetic sleight-of-hands to distract you from the stench - you know, like Joan Rivers. The FX are crap, the new monsters are laughable unless when they are supposed to be funny** - it's just Sylvester McCoy sexed up the point of being easy to swallow*** (One of the problems is taking that old format cliffhanger show and trying to trick it into a nice new slot - a lot of the bolder ideas in the new season would have benefited from having more time to play with). This is exactly why the new show's 'Christmas Invasion' fits so well, so comfortably between the festive episodes of deadly dull soap opera Eastenders next month. There's plenty here to send the tweenies scurrying behind the sofa (the 'Are You My Mummy?' episodes were fantastic - but let's be honest in admitting they had more to do with Sapphire & Steel than anything else), but NOTHING to upset the lowest common denominator soap fan. I hate the new Who because I want a NEW one. I want a Year One. Imagine a Doctor who doesn't know one end of a Dalek from the other , a Time Lord without the assurance of whipping cyber-ass a million times before over a handful of lifetimes. So to get back to Boag's original question - what do I want a Cyberman to look like at the arse-end of 2005? Well it's easier to tell you what I don't want. I don't want a 1960s Cyberman with the 70s, 80s and 90s overlay and respray topped off with 21st century helmet handles - in short I don't want Windows XP... I want Linux Cyberbastards. With huge metal codpieces. I want a new show that's been built from the drawing board up. I want new writers with a track record in pleasing ME to be given the job and let them give me MY Cybermen. Same with the Master. Same with the TARDIS. Same with the split-tails that get used up in there and spat out like half chewed porn eels. That's what I pay my fucking license fee for... * 28th if you want to add the Paul McGann TV movie. ** then you just want to hit RTD over the head repeatedly with his Bumper Big Book of Fart Jokes. *** The only thing that really changed was the Doctor himself - into a mugging gurning twat with a fetish for running around with big guns and an overly unhealthy attachment to Cardiff. Don't even try and tell me that when you peeled all that crap off there was even a smattering of William Hartnell left. [Music: off]

Crushed King Darius again... Finally got around to checking out the British Museum's Forgotten Empire: the world of Ancient Persia exhibition: Awesome stuff. Runs until the first week of January. [Music: Old Boy soundtrack]

Behind the scenes at Londonist... This is pretty typical of the kinds of conversations we have.

Mike: New Cyberman revealed. And it's a piece of shit. I am trying to stay clear of things that make the little vein in my forehead stick out so no Doctor Who stories for me thankyou. Mark: But it's beautiful Mike... Mike: It has cheek bones. And the BBC called them "giant robots". Captain Jack has his own spin off show. 'Mickey' is now an official companion. There's another stupid 'Bad Wolf' arc that will probably involve Giles from Buffy turning out to be K9 or some such shit. Wales is full of inbred hill people and yet not one of them could kill Russell T Davies? Life isn't fair. Alex: Hmmmm...they look more like Marvel's 'Iron Man' now don't they? Rob: I'm thinking Metropolis Mike: I think Rob got it spot on. A fiver that the Cybermen's new plan involves making lame inuendo about Captain Jack's arse. Although Iron Man did have a great moustache under his helmet... I should have sent them my King of the Rocket Men costume. Alex: You look like a cheese grater. Mike: Just what I'd expect from a sporty type. I look like a DEFENDER OF FREEDOM goddamnit. Mark: I was thinking more Mick Jagger in Ned Kelly. Mike: Ned Kelly did not have a high tech state of the art chest plate with complicated UP, DOWN, FAST and SLOW controls. Nor did he save Australia from ZOMBIES OF THE STRATOSPHERE. Matt: Office poll of old-school Dr Who fans gave the new cyberman a unanimous thumbs up. Sample size = 2. Mike: Bah - to hell with the fans. They are also excited about the fact that there's a Children in Need sketch on the way... Most old school fans were serioulsy damaged by the Sylvester McCoy years and their judgement is not to be trusted. Only MIKE can be trusted on this. Only MIKE recogonises the abomination.

You see now the work that goes into the stuff that we don't even post about... If you want to add faces to names then Ken recently threw up some more official party photos: Here I am doing my best Gimli to Alex's Aragorn: See if you can spot the boss. He's wearing a certain something...

Mike: I liked your Freddy Kruger jumper by the way. Rob: Everyone took the piss out of that jumper... my fiance has a lot to answer for. Mike: Well tell her I LIKED it. It made you look like an undead sexual predator - a hard look to pull off. Rob: I'll be sure to pass that on.

[Music: Mr Bungle]

Dawn is just a month away... Seems that Nightwatch vibe is going a long way. Swedish vampires are on the way. Sweet. [Music: off]

Old notebook... "Todd boards our train at Baltimore and I immediately catch sight of him striding through the carriages like a Russian Cossack. It's been only two months since we saw him last but he immediately seems more at home here in America. He's sporting a beard large enough to mesmerise small children and has a Clark Gable flick to his hair. Funny to think of the random way we met and all the people between here and London that we will never ever speak to..." Thinking about another trip to the States... [Music: You wouldn't believe me if I said Blast Furnace]

Tokyo Zombie... I just watched the trailer for this and I'm already giddy:

Near-future Tokyo. In one corner of the city, at a fire-extinguisher plant, two men, Fujio and Mitsuo do nothing every morning but practice Jujutsu. Fujio, acting as teacher loves Mitsuo as a brother, and Mitsuo returns that affection. These two grown best friends of brotherly love, are about to be connect in a way even beyond that bond. From a mountain of industrial waste dubbed 'Black Fuji' is born a plague zombies that multiply at an ungodly rate. Before they can make their dreams of travelling to Russia to become the strongest men on the planet, they are forced to fight zombies and stand against the possible extintion of the human race. Can they possibly save the Earth!?

Check out the website. The film is directed by the chap who wrote the script for Ichi The Killer... I found it over on The Pulp Movies Trailer Park Etc: There's a new splash page up after people moaned about the old one being taken down. It's only temporary while I think of a better use of the space. I was surprised so many of you bookmark it rather than the actual blog... More archiving: Malefique review / One and a half please / "We'd all had quite a bit to drink," / Lord Buckingham not inbred shock! / Pirates! / Films, Films, Films and a dash of Horror [Music: something complicated]

The Mars Volta - Scab Dates: Live (Island) We initially backed the wrong horse when At The Drive In went belly up, but as much as we enjoyed the punky Sparta's 'Wiretap Scars' it was obvious from early on that The Mars Volta were going to be a lot more interesting and time consuming. Plus we've got a soft spot for blokes with girly singing voices so the combination of complicated musical weirdness with some Rush like vocals was always going to be a bit of a winner. So we were very excited when we got hold of Scab Dates a little while ago and held it up next to our deteriorating vinyl copies of It's Alive by The Ramones and Maiden's Live After Death - the high-water marks of live releases by which everything else is judged. We're happy to report that Scab Dates more than holds its own although for entirely different reasons. Partly this is due to just how damn obtuse the Volta can be - there's no 'Gabba Gabba Hey Hey' or "Scream for me, Longbeach!" here - in fact the crowd noise is peculiarly absent either buried in the mix or perhaps it's just that the fans were atomised during the opening of Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt and the band just carried on regardless of the fact that sections of the audience were imploding under the weight of so many free jazz musical changes and simply bonkers sci fi/suicide influenced lyrics. Actually that's the only downside to the release in that we like a little 'You Can�t Do That On Stage Anymore' inspired banter when listening to something this musically charged. At times it's hard to recognise this as a live album at all although it is quite different from the earlier releases in terms of rawness. There's also a fair amount of intricate twiddling that you'll either dismiss as navel gazing or constantly loop in an attempt to stimulate your pineal gland. If you haven't come across The Mars Volta before then this isn't the best album to start with, there's only really eight tracks here and the last one clocks in at just over 40 minutes - you may want to try snorting a little before you start looking for a nice fat vein in your genitalia to play with. If you're already a fan then you're not reading this anyway - too busy trying to build the interocitor from the instructions hidden in the lyrics that will open your path to Metaluna no doubt. The biggest draw for fans is of course the fact that apart from the aforementioned Cerpin Taxt and Concertina from the Tremulant EP the only place to hear any of this up until now was live. The Volta don't feel it necessary to ape their studio releases live or record all their music in the studio... just another reason that they don't just stand out from the crowd, but rather hang in the air above them exactly the same way that bricks don't. Our recommendation is to just buy it - even if you secretly hate it at least people will think you're smart. Or you can show how little you trust us by going over to www dot themarsvolta dot com to stream the album via realplayer Don't forget that they're also curating 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' All Tomorrow's Parties and will be messing around with the likes of The Fucking Champs and Acid Mothers Temple. Brains will melt. Just something I wrote for Londonist under the music group login that I'm archiving here. [Music: Stabbing Westward - Wither Blister Burn & Peel]

I'll never fit in at WalMart... Jess has been on at me for a while to do 'something' with the fiction I write. It doesn't really have a home unlike a lot of the non-fiction stuff I do and as fiction in general is hard to place I tend to write it and then forget about it. Stuff I throw up on here tends to get a decent enough response and I know a few people who get paid LOTS of money for writing fiction that have said a nice word or two as well, but I never tried to get picked up by a magazine or anything like that. Jess reminded me of an article she saw via Boing Boing a while back about an attempt to pay short story writers a decent 'wage' again through a new online magazine launching in the new year and suggested I drop them a submission. Reading through the other submissions online I knew I'd have a hard time writing that kind of thing, but to please Jess I dug out something I wrote a while back and posted it up this morning. I was half expecting the readers to take me to task, but the first response I got was from one of the magazine 'minions'. It's a doozy of a reply :)

I knew from the first line I wasn't going to like this. I was right. There _was_ one good line. "The red stickers were saved for anyone who looked French." That was funny. Anything else, -- ick. Followed by --Ick Spit. I get dystopias. I even get "if this goes on" stories. I do. Really. But. Mike, this magazine is attempting to focus on marketing to "other than the people currently buying small market sf." It's trying to market to the people who generally buy their reading material at walmart. We don't need to shock them. We don't need to be so weird, or so shocking, or have such surprize twist endings that no one can see them coming. We don't need that stuff. We _do_ need "thumping good stories." Look at the list of LEAD AUTHORS who have already committed to writing, or have already sold stories to BAS. Mike, try again, but please try with a story that could show up in an anthology in an end-cap at the grocery store. You might want to shop THIS story around to some of those small market sf mags. The ones that pay $5 a story or less. Rick Boatright

People buy stuff to read at grocery stores? I obviously need to get out more. And forget about my story for a minute, but people want to read something whose ending they see signposted along the way? You learn something new every day. I'm not knocking Rick, the magazine or the readership they're aiming at as we obviously just move in very different circles and have dissimilar ideas about what fiction is supposed to do. I only mention it here as it's the first thing that made me laugh out loud - especially that last line - since I heard that China died. [Music: The Mars Volta - A Missing Chromosome]

Fuck it all to hell and back...

It is with a lot of grief and weariness that I announce that Friday�s DMBQ and friends show @ Club Exit was cancelled following a tragic car accident involving the members of DMBQ. We will continue with Saturday�s show, which DMBQ was scheduled to play, in memoriam and as a benefit to cover DMBQ�s travel and medical expenses. DMBQ�s van rolled from I-95 in Delaware en route from Baltimore to Brooklyn this afternoon. All members of the band have been hospitalized, as well as Michelle Cable from Panache Magazine and booking, who has been managing their tour. Mana �China� Nishiura did not survive the accident. China was DMBQ�s drummer, as well as a former drummer in Shonen Knife. China will be missed. Michelle Cable is conscious following surgery for a head injury. She also sufferred an injury to her back which will keep her in the hospital for a few weeks and put her in a brace for awhile, but she is expected to recovery completely. Shinji Masuko is still in the hospital but is expected to be released soon. Toru Matsui and Ryuichi Watanabe have been released from the hospital. That�s all the information I have.

2005-03-26R2F07-BWDMBQChinaStarBar04Crop Originally uploaded by proteusguy.

I found the above pic of China in Proteusguy's Flickr stream. Over on his blog he talks about her sitting on top of him at a gig only a week or so ago. Fucking stupid world. [Music: just loud]

Lee Van Cleef's favourite restaurant... So after I wrote this post about pirates, Jackson sent me this... Damn. Gotta beat the kebab place around the corner... [Music: Bikini Kill]

Firecracker etc... Problems with MT meant that Londonist has only just updated itself - I had similar problems with Blogger and Blottered. Odd. No problems with Firecracker though. Still one of the best looking websites around and now you get more of ME in it: Japanese Films at Raindance (Late Bloomer, Yumeno and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai) Azumi 2: Death or Love The Castle of Cagliostro The Cat Returns Kung Fu Hustle Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind Sky Blue Whispering Corridors Nick and Erika just got back from the Pusan International Film Festival so there's plenty of other good stuff to get your teeth into. You're all still reading The F Word right? Jess has a view of the Eastenders 'thick lip' story that you won't find in the crappy tabloids... [Music: off]

All the MosNews that's fit to print... Russian news is slowly pushing aside the Japanese stuff in the search for great headlines... Russian Police Hunt Syringe Stalker is one I found for Blottered, but MosNews is full of cool stuff today:

Lenin Street Signs Reappear in Russia�s Baltic Enclave 2 Russian Sailors Die Near Japan Shore After Drinking Industrial Use Alcohol Russian discovers Dead Bat in Loaf of Bread Antonio Banderas Helping to Sell Jewelry in Central Russia Russian War Veteran Proves He Was Not Killed in 1943 Russian Man Faces Jail for Sex on Neighbor�s Phone Russian Woman Jailed for 6 Years for Selling Daughter for Body Parts Russian Inventors Suggest New Funeral Solution � Launch Your Dead Woman, 87, Spends Fortnight Without Food After Daughter�s Death Russian MP Calls Bird Flu "American Provocation" F1, F2 Stolen From Monument to Computer Keyboard in Urals Monument to Radiator Unveiled in Russia Drug Dealing Suspect Eats Money to Avoid Arrest Trophy Penis Gives Away Tramp Murderer New-Born Baby Survives Stabbing, 8 Hours in Grave Marriage Hostage Drama Kills 2 in Central Russia Putin, Bush and Blair to Appear on Ukrainian Toilet Paper Russian Villager Turns Milking Machine into Drug Factory Moscow Gallery Removes Icon Caviar Exhibit as Churchgoers Protest Asteroid Impact May Wipe out Life on Earth in 2035 � Russian Scientists Man Spends 15 Years in a Fridge Parcel Bomb Kills Russian Birthday Boy Old Alarm Clock Causes Sleepless Night in Russian Apartment Block

Must check that out on a regular basis... [Music: Blondie]

My eyes hurt... Must have been all the pretty girls... That was quite a turn out. I wasn't sure how that was going to go at all... Londoners are normally hard to motivate, but tonight the place was packed. Good to catch up with some people I haven't seen in a while and meet a few bloggers I haven't crossed paths with before... now if I could only get some sleep I'd be a happy Mike. [Music: off - but CSI NY is at hand to keep me entertained until my brain shuts down]

Party... Londonist bash is tonight. The more the merrier. Full details here. Don't worry - if you win an iPod I won't make you keep it. [Music: off]

Everything is Illuminated... Mnah. Funny, very funny for about twenty minutes and then falls into Jewish suffering 101. Frodo with even larger eyes I could do without and the Reservoir puppy look got old really quickly. Also if you want to remember something then go buy a fucking digital camera. Flickr is more of a friend than an endless supply of sandwich bags. That said, the heartless joy hating critics I watched it with were moved to actual applause at the film's end and the girl next to me was in tears. I liked the dog. [Music: The Song Ramones the Same]

Freefall... So Night of the Lepus it was. Must be twenty years since I last saw it, maybe twenty-five. I think it's nuances were a little lost on the youngsters - at least two of them fell asleep... I hope they could remain that calm in the face of a real giant bunny threat. I have a little stockpile of horror flicks I wanted to watch over October but I guess they'll have to wait until things calm down a little. Maybe have a little frightfest later in the month. Five cups of coffee meant I could at least get Nanowrimo kicked off Candyfloss Papercut starts here I think that'll be it for today as I have a LOT of writing to get done before midnight and Lucinda let me know yesterday that there's a preview of Everything is Illuminated this morning that I should try and see. That's a couple of hours that I'll miss later on tonight... Best get to it. [Music: Tomahawk - Mit Gas]