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

I used to respect Tom Hodgkinson; once the Idler was the best magazine going, and How To Be Idle remains (for the most part) a valuable work of political philosophy mis-filed as humour. Alas, of late he has become one of the tinfoil hat brigade, retailing tired cliches about mobile 'phones as enslavers and the like. And he really doesn't like Facebook. Shockingly, a major company has shareholders who are a bit right-wing! Not homophobes or religious nuts like run half the public transport in Britain, mind - but a utopian who's all in favour of life-extension and the Singularity. Which is a bad thing, apparently. No, don't ask me how. Oh, and apparently it's really, like Big Brother, man! that Facebook's privacy policy says "You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content." Because obviously if Facebook kept a record of anyone who'd ctrlC'd any of your content, and deleted that when you deleted the original, that would be in no way Big Brother-esque, would it?
Tosser.

ITV are really going for the big push, aren't they? OK, so their best show, Entourage, shows no sign of returning from its baffling mid-season hiatus, but that's an import. Their best home-grown, and the best thing they have on terrestrial, is Primeval, which restarted on Saturday. Kingdom is probably the weakest Stephen Fry offering in some time, but it's still Stephen Fry and thus better than almost anything on ITV; that came back Sunday. Royal dramedy The Palace looks like it might be half-decent, but it's scheduled opposite City of Vice (Henry Fielding fights crime - WITH WIGS!), so I shall probably never know. Oh, and there was Moving Wallpaper, wasn't there? That should have been good. I loved the idea of making a new soap, and then having a sitcom set behind the scenes of the soap, even before I knew Ben Miller was starring in it. They've also got a couple of Absolute Power alumni, and therein lies their problem - media in-jokes only appeal to a niche audience, and Absolute Power does them much better, even in the episodes written by Smug Slug*. The show has been infected with that terrible ITVitis (the disease which atrophies human acting and scripting ability even in the gifted). On top of which, they've absolutely blown it by showing Moving Wallpaper right before the soap whose production it shows/undermines, on the same channel. Echo Beach belongs on ITV1, channel of choice for the undiscriminating cudlip. The sly dig at it should not be interfering with their evening of cathode ray grazing - it should be tucked away on ITV2. Same slot, so people who want the pair reflecting on each other can still have the experience - but you should have to work for it, if only in the sense of changing channel.
Not that ITV are the only people launching inept sitcoms, of course. Consider Never Better on C4, with Guy from Green Wing once again playing a less amusing variation on the same character. But for heavens' sake don't consider it for very long, life is short and there is so much better stuff you could be watching. Or indeed, appearing in; his Green Wing brother Martin has been openly retconned into Primeval, which somehow evades ITVitis and continues to kick arse. Motorbike chases with velociraptors in a shopping centre? 'Sound of Thunder' time travel messes used to mess with the lead's head *and* sex up the set-up? Hannah S Club with a gun? I'm sold.

Have been listening to A Cellarful of Motown volume 3 a fair bit lately. It's volume 3 of a label rarities compilation and it doesn't have a single dud on it; how many labels can say that, and how many volumes would it take Motown before they started scraping the barrel? Which is not to say I love them all equally - 'Uptight' aside I never really got Stevie Wonder, and Carolyn Crawford's 'Too Young Too Long' is a bit reminiscent of the song at the end of Brass Eye's Paedogeddon - but not one track sucks. I find myself especially drawn to 'Loving You (Is Hurting Me)' but that may just be because it's credited to the Fantastic Four, so I picture it soundtracking another of those painful Reed/Sue/Namor love triangle scenes.

An interesting if grouchy piece on Marvel and DC notes that both companies, as corporate entities, place a vanishingly small amount of their emphasis on the ongoing publication of comics (against which, part of me is thrilled to see DC describe itself as the home of "such popular characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Sandman". Gaiman's boy in with the Trinity already...). And the scorn directed at the concept of an Ant-Man film is definitely misplaced when you recall that Edgar Wright has been named in connection with the project. But this ties in with something I was thinking about before christmas, except I see it as cause for rejoicing if only the message could be filtered up the line. To wit:
It doesn't matter what happens in the comics.
Corporate superhero properties have, as a rule, been reined in by a fear of hurting the brand. The theory goes that if little Tommy sees the new Batman film, and he then picks up a Batman comic at the drugstore/newsagent, it should to some degree tally with what he saw on screen. So Batman has to be Bruce Wayne (this has already nixed one of Grant Morrison's rumoured plans for the forthcoming Final Crisis).
Except drugstores and newsagents don't carry comics anymore, or if they do it's one of the reprint titles with 'classic' material. So it doesn't matter what's happening in the comics in the comic shops. Because if little Tommy goes in there, the retailer would be a mug to sell him the latest issue of the monthly. Give him one of the trades of the classics. If he says 'goddamn' a lot, give him All-Star Batman. If he's blatantly a goth, Arkham Asylum. I'm hard-pressed to think exactly what sort of little Tommy you'd need to think that giving him the monthly would be a remotely wise idea. So in the monthly, just let Grant Morrison do whatever the Hell the little voices are telling him, and everyone's happy!

Live Free Or Die Hard (fvck the UK title) is basically the same plot as Die Hard With A Vengeance + The Interweb, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining. And Die Harder is a great film overall, but definitely has the least compelling villain.

*He tries to pass for human by the name 'Mark Lawson', but does it really fool anyone?