I'm not making a moral stand, I'm just a bit tired.

In Victoria HMV, there's a box set of all eight Alien and Predator films, including the two crossovers, for £15. It's shelved next to an earlier box set of what were at the time all seven Alien and Predator films, including the crossover. This costs £30. I know Alien vs Predator: Requiem is meant to be bad, but -£15 bad? And how much would a box with neither crossover cost?
(While musing on this, I caught an ad from the corner of my eye at Pimlico station, advertising Doctor Who - the Sylvester McCoy box set. Ooooh, how did I miss that? Turns out it's a Mock the Week ad with a list of 'Presents We Don't Want' or similar. Gits.

A bad week for icons; I have seen plenty of (richly deserved) tributes to Bettie Page and Oliver Postgate, but less about Forrest J Ackerman, superfan, inventor of the term 'sci-fi', honorary lesbian (this one was news to me) and inspiration to everyone from Ray Bradbury through Joe Dante to...well, pick someone cool, they were probably in his thrall. Rest in peace, all three of you.

Bands advertising tours on TV: is this normal? Genuine question, I don't watch much commercial TV these days, but it felt very odd when one of the breaks during the final Devil's Whore* incorporated a plug for Coldplay tickets. So odd, in fact, that it even bypassed the normal outrage I feel whenever reminded of this tour's existence - I am grudgingly prepared to forgive Coldplay's existence, but that they should reduce Girls Aloud and Jay-Z to support acts? Not acceptable.

"Gordon Brown has been called "Superman" in Parliament as the fallout from the prime minister's inadvertent claim to have "saved the world" continues. The Tories have been mocking Mr Brown after his slip of the tongue over the economy at Prime Minister's Questions...But Commons leader Harriet Harman told Tory MPs that she would "rather have Superman as our leader than their leader who is The Joker"."
1) Even by the standards of Parliamentary name-calling, isn't accusing the other side's leader of being a mass-murdering psychopath rather strong? I suppose there's always the remote chance that she appreciates the Grant Morrison perspective on the Joker's personality, whereby he has no essential 'self' and reinvents himself in line with each new circumstance; this would be a pretty good charge to level at Cameron, who has never really managed to articulate a stance or principle beyond 'I'm not the other guy'. Somehow, though, I doubt there's a copy of Arkham Asylum or 'The Clown at Midnight' on Harman's shelves.
2) Equally, I can only conclude that Harman has never read Kingdom Come, in which Superman's failure to confront the Joker with sufficient conviction leads to the death of Lois Lane, Superman's retirement, and the collapse of the superheroic age into carnage and anarchy.
3) At a simpler level, I think most of us would rather have Superman as party leader than The Joker. What her riposte signally fails to grasp is the difference between Superman, and an all-too-human leader who has made a slip of the tongue which looks very like it was as Freudian as it was hubristic.
(That third point is really banal, isn't it? And yet without it, the whole item looked that little bit too abstract/Comic Book Guy. Speaking of comics - I was a little worried about Phonogram series 2 starting with a Pipettes issue, but Seth Bingo's anti-Pipettes rant assuaged all my fears. Great comic, and the launch party wasn't too bad either. Yeah, get me with the schmoozing)

*Which was still a bit of a mess, wasn't it? Moments of genuine power eclipsed by the overall sensation of a story whose truncation made it didactic and rushed. Not to mention repetitive, in the way that over four episodes Angelica Fanshawe managed four deaths for four shagpieces. Has anyone yet written a crossover in which she turns out somehow to be an ancestor of Torchwood's Tosh and her Fanny Of Doom? If not - please don't.