'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Spent Friday night in the Queens, which I don't recall visiting since its brief stint as the local, a stint ended when missfrost ceased to be its most local local and the centre of social gravity shifted. It hasn't changed, except that it now employs a pirate, something I mentioned just as he picked up my glass from behind. Ooops.
On Saturday, I got the train to Oxford rather than the coach, which also meant using Paddington rail station for I think the first time ever. It has a disappointing lack of bears. I was amongst the dreaming spires for a wedding attended by many people from university who were already married, draped in children or otherwise giving me the fear. What I had thought a rather over-ambitious scheme for the day in fact worked very smoothly, and the river journey in particular was perfectly English - motoring gently along the Thames, gentle meadows to the side and gentler cumulus above, plenty of cava. And, inevitably, the goth boating party coming the other way. One friend of the groom refused to believe that my flatmate could be among them - "How can they have flatmates? They're river gypsies!" West Londoners can be so entertaining. Later, I attempt to scramble up some creepers. This is not a great plan - you can trust trees, but creepers are deceptive. I fall on my arse, and am in a not inconsiderable amount of pain for the rest of proceedings, and onwards. Between this and my cowboy boots (long story, but they really were the only sensible footwear given the itinerary), on Sunday in particular I am reduced to walking at the speed most people walk at. I honestly don't know how they cope - it takes so long to get anywhere! Suddenly I understand why so many people get public transport everywhere or are simply reluctant to leave the house.
On Sunday, fugitivemotel gets his send-off. All associated parties are late to the pub in various degrees, but some other people I know have been there since mid-afternoon, so I hang with them for a bit, then manage to disperse most of them with the assertion (I can offer no sources, but still recall hearing it somewhere credible) that one major omission from Gorillas in the Mist was quite how friendly Dian Fossey got with the gorillas. This means we can get their big table. Result. And have a nice USA, fugitivemotel.

One can point to plenty of templates for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's stitching together of different fictions into one grand tapesty - Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton series is often mentioned, or there are Kim Newman's Dracula books. In one sense it's a foolish endeavour, because back before copyright started messing intertextuality up, myths would always mingle - look at the way the Matter of Britain incorporated other chivalrous myths, previously self-sufficient characters like Lancelot being brought into Arthur's orbit. Nonetheless, I've found another work on the same theme which I'm rather enjoying, David Thomson's Suspects. Thomson is probably best known for his gleefully partial Biographical Dictionary of Film, though I only know it through the entries the Guardian sometimes runs; I was turned on to him by his experimental Orson Welles biography Rosebud, and then confirmed as a fan by The Whole Equation which explains all those bits and pieces you never quite knew you didn't know about how Hollywood works. Suspects started as an outgrowth of the Biographical Dictionary, except instead of actors and directors it addresses the characters, telling you what happened before the film starts and after the credits roll. In the interests of a coherent world, it limits itself to film noir - but Thomson defines this term pretty widely, taking it out to borders like It's A Wonderful Life and Taxi Driver which, if not canonical, become inarguable the way Thomson tells it. So in the style of a reference book, we learn how Noah Cross from Chinatown and Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond were lovers, say - and the identity of her child - and yet as it goes on it becomes clear that, non-objective as Thomson has always been, the narrator here is not Thomson, but someone involved in this noir-verse. I'm hampered by only knowing about a quarter of the films referenced, and none of them all that well, but still love it; if you're a film noir obsessive I imagine it's even better.