It's going to be great fun. Or carnage - I use the two terms pretty interchangeably.

[alexsarll]

A Pretty In Pink invaded by Normals, a leaving do, many cups of healing elixir - I've not been up to anything it'd be too edifying to report in depth. Except that I've read the first Phonogram, and it's even better than I expected. For most of you, as for me, I'm sure the basic premise - music is magic - is pretty much stating the obvious. But what Kieron Gillen has done so well is to actually think that through. As he explains in the afterword/sleevenotes, there are three one-level stories this could have been - the autobiography, the modern fantasy, the slightly silly bouncy comic - and they'd all have been OK. But by letting the three tense against each other, you've got something which actually captures how many levels music affects on, how many directions it can spin your life in at once. You've got something true - and still very funny with it. Look at page six of the preview on that link up there, for instance; I have never, in any medium, encountered a better account of how soul-destroyingly awful sitting through bad support acts can be. It does help, of course, that the key musical touchstones this issue are Kenickie and the Afghan Whigs, two of my very favourite bands - but I'm sure even those whose lives have not been enriched by their music could follow this issue and get something from it at one level's remove. Though frankly, if you don't like at least one of the two already, why exactly are you here?

Film with black writer, director and stars described by campaign group as "flagship programme for racism" and "a return to the "care-free" days of the Black And White Minstrel Show" - ban sought. Even aside from the self-evident idiocy of this, it reminds me that I increasingly feel that I've hit on the formulation for what should be the central law of all human societies. It's an old phrase - 'live and let live'. But what we need to change is, making clear just how indivisible they are, how solid that 'and' is. Live *and* let live - or neither. The minute you start calling for bans on films or books or sexual behaviours or intoxicants or anything else which doesn't directly impinge on the freedom of others, you've ceased to let live - so you no longer get to live.
Extremist liberalism. I'm liking it.

"I'd rather Batman embodied the best that secular humanism has to offer - a sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim'n'gritty Batman would be more likely to join the Taliban, surely?" Wise words from Grant Morrison - though unlike him, I am massively looking forward to Frank Miller's Batman vs al Qaida project, if it ever actually arrives. In other comics news, I knew that Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, was a psychologist whose interest in bondage manifested itself in the early strips. What I didn't know was the sheer unsubtle extent of it, his belief that female domination was the route to world peace, or that he was himself nonmonogamous.

The Web Planet is one of my favourite First Doctor stories, but I'm nonetheless obliged to concede that it doesn't half go on a bit. And no wonder - if it's not the Menoptera doing their Attack of the Mimes movement (genuinely alien, but still intermittently annoying), talking melodically about "the fun goose" and "the animoose" or generally prancing about, it's Bill Hartnell pottering around the set, desperately trying not to let on that he's forgotten his lines, his blocking and quite possibly what programme he's on. You can see how it ended up six episodes long, and a spot of Top Trumps definitely helps with some of the longeurs.

Revolt or no revolt, for at least a time, Pluto is no planet. Why does this leave me feeling so upset, as though it had been blown up, as though the solar system now comprising eight planets were more than a semantic matter? I mean, even by my understanding of the world, I very much doubt that Pluto knew it was a planet in the first place, so I can't see what it has lost - or even what we have. Still, something's gone, somehow.

Comments

[missfrost.livejournal.com]

Yes than you to Asimov - Mother Very Thoughtfully Made Me A Jelly Sandwich, Under No Protest - and now she's just "under no..."

(For the uninitiated/unbothered, Thoughtfully = Terra = Earth, A = Asteroid belt.)

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

My very easy method just speeds up naming.

Erm.

:(

mickey mouse's dog is gay?

[missfrost.livejournal.com]

Oh I think that works better. Apart rtom poor Pluto.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Hang about, what's the second M before the asteroid belt?

TBH I never really got the hang of the mnemnonics for that one, I just learned the order the planets were in. Much simpler. Whereas I still use Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain for rainbows - under protest, of course, as regards acknowledging that figment of Newton's numerological lunacy that is 'indigo'.

[missfrost.livejournal.com]

Hush now, the second m was my typing running faster than my thinking.

[(Anonymous)]

Cheers for the PG mention. :)

[kenix.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I like to post without logging in, like a prick.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't worry; it's your art we love, not your l33t tech skillz!

[bremxjones.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it, sir. In many ways, you're the absolute model of the sort of person I was thinking about when writing the bastard thing, in terms of who may Get It.

KG

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

Alex in understand efil magic people and good music shocker... ;)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I've always hoped that one day my life would start resembling a comic, and while I continue to wait for the powers to kick in, a comic resembling my life is a very welcome stopgap.

[euphoricstimuli.livejournal.com]

I have a theory that the reason they are downgrading it is because the alternative would be adding 3 more planets, & they don't reckon kids these days could deal with the extra learning by heart at school, so theyve made it easier for them.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Do children even learn all the planets anymore, anyway? I think the extra three would have been fine, but the worry is that we're going to keep finding objects of about Pluto size, and end up with 30-odd planets, which would just be silly - especially when most of them would be cold, lifeless and thoroughly boring.

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

Richard Blackwood appears in that film. Isn't that reason enough to ban it?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Even the most inherently appalling ingredients can sometimes be redeemed by context - cf the use of 'All You Need Is Love' in The Prisoner.

[gregjames.livejournal.com]

Still not tempted by Hartnell epics after sitting through the Keys of Marinus. "I think she's under a deep form of deep hypnosis."
Whoa, man! Deeeeeeep!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

My favourite Hartnellism in that one is "And if you'd have had your shoes on, m'boy, you could have given her hers! Hmph!"

Doddering old hack.