Atomic cheesecake

On Thursday I realised I hadn't had a Cool, Crisp Pint for a full week - a situation soon remedied with the aid of the V. Used some of my day off on Friday to do the ironing while listening to a Doctor Who audio* - too right I'm rock'n'fvcking roll. Also bought things I needed (jeans, a slightly less gay bag) and things I arguably did not (two James Branch Cabell books) before noticing that the Holloway Road Virgin is closing down - 40% off everything! Among my purchases were the DVD singles of 'Guns Don't Kill People' and Rammstein's 'Amerika'. Repeated doses of these have bred in my head to leave me with 'Guns Don't Kill People, Amerika Do'. I HAVE BEEN TURNED INTO A HIPPY BY DVDS. Gah! And the evening was fugitivemotel's party, at which I ate a travelcard (they taste exactly like Pringles) but did not bite Jodie's oyster.
Saturday afternoon I was in town and called in for a pi(n)t stop at apiphile's birthday boozes. The Ben Crouch was as dressed up for the season as one would expect, but the scariest detail was the witch-hats they were handing out, because they were clearly designed for the victims of headshrinkers. queenairhead and claireybiscuit were also in, randomly, the former doing a particularly fine shriek when menaced by a masked barman.
And then Samhain itself. A big deal for me, as you may have gathered. I was quite peeved that we were robbed of a Saturday Samhain by the leap year, but I hadn't expected such a total washout. First off - the weather. Out of nowhere, Summer returned for the weekend - look outside your window, can you see a trace of it now? On TV only C4 had any horror, and their efforts were pretty lousy. Perhaps in revenge for Jack Skellington's prior misdemeanours, someone stole Hallowe'en. And then, the lack of suitable festivities. We settled on a night at the Legion which promised spookiness, but even had it been in June this DJ set would have been remarkably un-Hallowe'en-ish. The closest it came to spooky was the poppier bits of the Cure! And as for pubs which have more than one lager (all of which taste the same, as the Kronenbourg/Fosters taste test proved) but no cider on draught - human rights violation. The Legion, you are Not Wanted On Voyage. The Reliance was more like it, even if they had got a bit overenthusiastic with the cobwebs. But walking the last leg of the journey home (after a kind lift from fugitivemotel and trying to feel any glimmer of the energy there should have been in the air - nothing. I don't know where Samhain went but yesterday wasn't it.

*Written by Mark Gatiss, and featuring David Walliams as an 18th century fop with the same voice as Emily Howard.

After earlier meditations on titles for entries, I have stage fright.

Some top stuff from Saturday's Guardian:
The Weapon Plus programme is real - Jon Ronson on US military efforts to create the supersoldier.
Sufism is the one form of Islam I like. Here's a deeply depressing article by William Dalrymple on how other Muslims loathe it.
The education officer of the anti-religious British Humanist Association is called Marilyn Mason. Is this a Lost Consonants crossover?

Anyone with the slightest interest in comics: you need to be reading We3 - Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely/cyborg animals. It's not Watchmen in terms of depth, but in terms of new storytelling techniques it's really pretty close. And heartbreaking with it. Poor cyborg animals, they only want to go home.
(Morrison's recent Seaguy was also fairly magical. He finally seems to have stopped retreading his alien abduction/download experience and moved on)

Fans of doomed romantic balladeers Jack: Anthony Reynolds has a solo album named neu york available here. Much of it shares the louche majesty of his former band. But then there's also the inexplicable and awful song about Melvyn Bragg...

[Poll #376313]