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

Why do I persist in giving each sorry reanimation of the Manics cadaver a try? I suppose this time I have the excuse that JDB's solo album was pretty good (even if that was precisely through its distance from the Manics template), and Nicky's live show amusing in its way. But 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough'...for all that the 'back to what they do best' talk is even more desperately emphatic than usual this time around, this single is clearly Simple Minds covering 'Help'. It is, quite simply, a disgrace. Please, chaps - stop while we can still just about remember that you meant something once.

Full details on the Parkland Walk plans here - I found the URL on a discarded letter beside the Walk, so clearly it's letting me know not to worry. They seem both sensitive and sensible; I'm just a little miffed that I've never been privileged to see any of the slow-worms which apparently live along one stretch.

I know there's been a bit of a retro crime revival recently - witness all those neo-mediaevalist protests about 'blasphemy' last year - but I was still surprised and almost touched to receive a European lottery scam by post. How delightfully old-fashioned!

Right, so Mars is warming up alongside Earth - but for demonstrably Martian reasons, namely dust storms, rather than because the same solar activity is affecting both planets. Doesn't that seem slightly odd? Let's be quite clear, I'm not saying that human-culpable carbon dioxide et al aren't warming the Earth, because I'm not insane and/or in the pay of Big Oil. Nor do I have any reason to suppose that dust storms and consequent colour changes aren't warming Mars - it reminds me of Daisyworld, but that's no objection. It's more that if two adjacent planets are both warming up for totally separate reasons...well, that's the sort of thing which makes me wonder if something Big Picture is going on, like when two totally different characters published by the same comics company start being taken grim'n'gritty in separate ways by their writers.