alexsarll | It's always summer in the songs

If you'd told me two months ago that I'd be in Kilburn, watching Scritti Politti (with a line-up featuring

rhodri) covering Jeru the Damaja, I'd have been surprised. I probably wouldn't have disbelieved you, because I'll believe most anything these days. But I would have been surprised. Though likely not half so surprised as

rhodri would have been if you'd told him, of course.
I'd expected the Luminaire to be a back-room-of-pub job, but it's surprisingly lush - all red drapes and leather sofas, like nightclubs look in TV shows. Shortfly after I've mentioned this to

oneofthose, and said that it makes me half-expect a bad Marc Bolan impersonator to show up, T Rex starts playing - which is especially spooky given the rest of the between-bands music is ska. The first act on is initially amusing - she's Bonnie Tyler on a bad day covering Tori Amos with more daddy issues. After the fourth song, though, it stops being funny.

cappuccino_kid suggests that she's not 4 Real but a genius of character comedy - but then if memory serves he liked Tony Ferrino too. Wet Dog are up next, and while they're very 1979, they do gradually grow on me - not necessarily something I'd listen to at home, but at least a little unusual. It's during their set that I realise quite how full the venue is with people I know, and indeed quite how full generally, to the extent that I'm sure I see Nicholas Passant but don't actually get chance to make contact, and don't even spot the allegedly present

dafinki.
Scritti are...strange. Green no longer looks like kin to Dr Robert and The Good Paul Weller, but then nor do they anymore. Now he looks and talks like the first guy to get killed in a heist movie. But when he starts singing, it's still the exact same voice. And though he suggests we treat it all as an open rehearsal, and it is rather stop-start, and these are new songs I don't know, I think they're a lot more instant than Anomie and Bonhomie was, so he's clearly still got the same ear for a tune, or at least an ear that's different but as good.
Stay Beautiful was even more fun, but that was very much in spite of the band. Really, what was the point of them?

Most impressed with The IT Crowd - and unlike my regrettably positive initial reaction to Hyperdrive, I'm sure I was sober this time. It's not reinventing the sitcom, it's not even quite as funny as Black Books, but that still leaves it far funnier than 99% of sitcoms, especially when the infallible Chris Morris is on screen. Similarly, Belle de Jour is not the best book ever written, nor even particularly shocking, but it's a pleasant enough light read, and I really needes something to cleanse the palate, a short book in which nobody dies.

"They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers,". Well, it's certainly an answer, isn't it? Still, good to see some of our politicians finally taking a sane stand, with both Labour and Conservative MPs calling for arrests of some protesters over those despicable placards, and the police seemingly in accord. Even the Guardian managed a fairly sensible leader, though their news pages rather let them down: "They wanted the paper prosecuted. The PM gave them the brush-off, arguing that his government could not interfere with the right to free speech." Well, no, what you've done there is confuse 'polite expression of the only legitimate response' with 'the brush-off'. Though Jyllands-Posten also seem a little confused - "We apologised for hurting the feelings of a lot of Muslims in this. But we don't apologise for printing the cartoons." As well say "We apologise for hurting that man. But we don't apologise for pointing a gun at him and then pulling the trigger." Particularly amusing was the reaction of some Saudi minister/princeling or other, who called on the Vatican to halt publication of the cartoons. Yeah, like we needed any more evidence that you're about six centuries behind. Though of course the Vatican has condemned the cartoons - who can blame them? Bet they'd love to claw back the power that Saudi thought they had.
Tariq Ramadan says "In Islam, representations of all prophets are strictly forbidden. It is both a matter of the fundamental respect due to them and a principle of faith requiring that, in order to avoid any idolatrous temptations, God and the prophets never be represented. Hence, to represent a prophet is a grave transgression." Those other prophets including, of course, the ones Christians and Jews worship and depict. So if we're going to be 'respectful' and all play by Islam's rules, like some people craving 'compromise' would like, that means another spate of iconoclasm in the churches too, and burning all those religious epics on celluloid too. Over to al Qaida's number two: "We are in a battle," Zawahiri counselled, "and more than half of it is taking place in the battlefield of the media." Which is why we must never cede that battlefield, ever.
Anyway, trust an old Pembroke alumnus to come up with the first actually funny cartoon in all this.

That Maxim ad, where the two men pretend to gay up to get rid of their girlfriends? Somebody's grasp of female psychology is deeply outdated. But then, I suppose we are talking about Maxim.

Let's say you're walking along a beach, and you happen across a message in a bottle - you'd be excited, wouldn't you? That something like that still happens, and that you've just found one! Unless you're this joyless sod, who instead decided to write and tell the sender off for littering.