You're not going to out-hippy me, you fvcking hippy

Outside Victoria station they're handing out postcards for the DVD Girls on Trampolines. At first I assumed some level of distancing was at work here - perhaps this is the film within some forthcoming film?
Sometimes, I think too hard.

Michael Bracewell is a very good culture writer. Michael Bracewell's The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth is not a very good book. I've no objection to collections of journalism, and own several (Angela Carter's, Richard Smith's, Jon Savage's), but this book attempts to stitch them together into some form of whole with tenuous connective passages. Given this dishonesty, the repetitions, contradictions (did Karen Carpenter die of anorexia or bulimia) and anachronisms become far more glaring. He should have either let the pieces stand alone, or revised them properly, because this mish-mash does neither him nor his readers any favours.

Last night I went to a bookshop with free wine and managed not to buy anything, not even the Man and Superman mug, and especially not the 400 page book about pencils. Then I went to a pub where I used to be semi-regular, but whose threshhold I haven't crossed in at least a year, and managed not to be bludgeoned by nostalgia. Nostalgia is one of my greatest weaknesses (my favourite Suede lyric is the "English disease" verse from 'The Power'), which may seem peculiar when I live in my favourite area of my favourite city and have more wonderful friends than I can manage to see anything like as often as I'd wish. But just as my dream home is somewhere that is at once totally isolated and instantly accessible from anywhere, so I want to have the choice of anywhen, all the time. I want something like the Time Tower from Supreme, where I can walk out of the door into my Cambridge years, or a long lunchbreak at junior school. And bear in mind - I mostly hated junior school. But every now and then I'll be transfixed by nostalgia for particular moments of it. Impossible as it is, unmanageable as it would be, I never seem to want anything less than everything.

For the moment, though, I'd almost settle for an explanation of what possessed 2000AD to commission another series of Synnamon.

That's my job now. That's what I do. I'm a sechser.

The English Collective of Prostitutes just mailed half the people here the details for their International Conference on prostitution. Apparently various hos will be speaking on the topic "No Bad Women, No Bad Children, Just Bad Laws".
So Countess Bathory was not actually a bad woman, then? Even though she effectively *was* the law in her area when she was murdering local peasant girls and bathing in their blood. Note also that they make no mention of "No Bad Men".
Clearly, the current laws on prostitution are an archaic mess. But a mixture of naivete and misandry is not the answer.

The X-43A very nearly made Mach 10. That's almost pointlessly fast, given the size of the Earth. But still cool.

Imagine being the chicken which lived for 18 months after it was decapitated, only to choke to death on a corn kernel. This just goes to show that attempting to live a healthy life in a world with a macabre sense of humour can often be a doomed endeavour. Decapitation? Take it in your stride. Fresh vegetables? Fatal. Not that the forthcoming White Paper on banning fun will take that into account, of course.