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

I see that Lewis' Japanese chums have taken a break and we're now being spammed with thoughts on Snape which, while equally out of context, do at least read like plausible comments and come from Livejournal accounts. They also come with payloads of Russian links on my Gmail notifications, but not on the posts themselves. Seems odd that the links can be filtered out but not the posts.

Largely a weekend of pop; on Saturday I was feeling sufficiently gigged out to skip Guided Missile, albeit with regret, and just hit Don't Stop Moving. A busy and bouncy night filled with booze, tunes and incident, and I even won some Spice Girls hankies, which I think makes up for losing my icecoldinalex birthday hadrosaur. And on Friday, the last Poptimism. Of late it had got into a vicious circle of irregularity and sparse attendance, so I was glad to see it make a good end, concluding with 'Ebenezer Goode' (and then one-more-ing with 'Being Boring', and then again with something I didn't know, and possibly more but I left because I never like sticking around for the very end of the end). Still, one gets the impression that the moment has been prepared for.

Speaking of which, also found time for a bit of a Who day. First up, The Two Doctors. Now, I've seen The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors many, many times and yes, they're fanservice and no, the plots don't make a great deal of sense, but I love them. Here, for all the appeal of putting Patrick Troughton and Colin Baker together, you get the sense that rather than simply accepting that the plot wasn't the main attraction, they lapsed into actual laziness. Hence we get bad nonsense rather than good nonsense, the kind that insults the intelligence instead of just letting it take a break. Also, the evil mastermind looks way too much like Karl Lagerfeld. Whereas The Curse of Peladon is put together well enough that it can easily survive not only a king who's the spit of Heaven 17's Glenn Gregory, but an alien ambassador who looks like a dick. Literally.
(I also saw Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost, based on an American kids' show about which I knew nothing, but which I inferred from this spoof to have been not that far from an American Doctor Who. Except it seems that the same creators made something even closer in The Lost Saucer, where two Earth youngsters are trapped with two aliens as their defective time-and-spaceship ricochets around history)

Anyone else been on the new Overground trains yet? Nice and spacious and all, but what's with the weird handles on the windows? I spent a minute trying various methods of opening them before being told by another passenger that they didn't open - and I remain unsure whether she knew this from another source, or had just been defeated by them herself. If she was right, then why do they look like they open when they don't? Must we be taunted so?
Anyway, I was aboard for my second trip (this year/ever) to Kew Gardens, which has the advantage not only of being so massive that you'll never cover it all in one visit, but of changing with the seasons so that even the bits you did see and love in summer are beautiful in entirely different ways come autumn.

Up is, as everyone has said, heartbreakingly beautiful. The effect of the ascending house works on a primal level, and the first twenty minutes is not only terribly, terribly sad - it explains to children how old people happen, something which always puzzled me at that age. Plus, the moral in so far as there is one is pretty much terrifying - not only that 'life is what happens while you're making other plans' but that, even if you do complete those plans, the result won't satisfy you because humanity doesn't do satisfaction. So it's perhaps appropriate to note that this is not the perfect film I keep seeing it hailed as. In particular, there's an odd moment-by-moment indecision as to whether it operates by cartoon physics or real world (or at least, adventure film) physics, meaning I didn't always know what consequence to expect from an action, how seriously to take any given jeopardy.

Back in the day, Doctor Who had a bit of a tendency to spoiler itself with the episode titles; it's difficult to be excited by the end-of-episode-one reveal of the villain behind events when the story is called Attack of the Cybermen or Revelation of the Daleks. The Sarah Jane Adventures has now managed to get itself into a similar situation more obliquely, in that if the story title includes Sarah Jane Smith's full name, it always seems to indicate the same adversary. Still great to see him facing up to the Doctor last week, though.

Still recovering slightly from a nightlife-heavy weekend. Poptimism was down to core personnel, on top of which strangers came - and not ones who wanted to dance which would have been grand, but ones who just sat there looking like disgruntled darts players. Nonetheless, an enjoyable night. Prom Night, on the other hand, was swarming with people who were very much on the right wavelength - Jareth from Labyrinth and the disembowelled nerd were particularly impressive, but at ever turn there was another great costume. I felt almost underdressed, particularly since a year without practice meant it was midnight before I really remembered how to wear my cloak to best effect, but I still danced until my feet hurt, and then some.
Out on the streets, though, Hallowe'en falling on a Saturday seemed to mean amateur hour - I saw a few zombie/vampire/witch hybrids who seemed to have been taking tips from Alan Partridge, and some inexplicable blackface (but orc black not black person black, so far as one could tell. Are chimney sweeps spooky?). Also, a puzzling preponderance of Beetlejuices.
And on Sunday, the PopArt Bowie special. Nightbeast aka The Sex Tourists aka White Witches and Jonny Cola both did fine Bowie covers, Mr Solo didn't bother but hey, he's Mr Solo, he can do what the Hell he likes, even bring along an alter-Devant band with aliases of the Detective, the Czar and the Inquisition. The night ended with the PopArt Allstars doing a whole set of Bowie covers for which, on balance, you had to be there.

Possibly I'm just biased against Logan's Run because I'm 31 and was watching it with a 22-year old. But it really is very silly, isn't it? I mean, even if one takes as given the whole futuristic-utopia-maintained-by-killing-everyone-at-30 bit...why are all of the Sandmen who enforce this situation such abysmal shots? How can a robot which is following its programming but with unforeseen consequences end up cackling maniacally when this results in threats to people, when surely it should be going about its business calmly because it believes it is doing its normal routine? And once again, one feels comparatively mild about the Blue Screen of Death and its compatriots when one sees once more how people in the future thought computers would crash, ie, give it one 'does not compute' and the entire city explodes.
Lovely design work, though. And Jenny Agutter was very pretty. Michael York less so, but I think that was mainly the haircut.
In other age-related news, circa 5pm today I mark my gigasecond. Being alive for a billion seconds probably only feels like a landmark if you read a certain school of science fiction (I first encountered it in the works of Charles Stross), but still...a billion anythings is a lot, isn't it?

SB aside, I haven't mentioned my weekend. Well, by way of a handy reminder that London still has other clubs which feel like home, Friday was Poptimism, at which I was particularly glad to hear Pet Shop Boys' much-underplayed 'Flamboyant'. On the way down, I passed the Fourth Plinth for the first time since they started putting people on it; there was a woman in a safari shirt with two cuddly toys and a sign reading DAKTARI. I hoped she might be reenacting episodes but turns out just to be the name of some sanctuary for which she was raising awareness. That net around the plinth really spoils the effect, doesn't it? Good old 'health and safety'. See also the decision that the ground floor of the Fullback's Ewok Village is 'substantially enclosed', ie not rainy and windy enough to be a legitimate smoking area.
Sunday was understandabaly less active, spent mostly reading crime comics and listening to jangly indie

Why are there so many T-shirts around for the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, which has been pretty much universally panned? If this is viral marketing, is it paid, or are some people just really desperate for free Ts? I mean, they don't look like derelicts.

The best thing about a Moffat two parter is that after a first part which was brilliant, you get a second part that's even better. ( Spoilers! )
I'm sure by now we all know about Lawrence Miles' interesting if infuriating blog, and Paul Cornell's has been about for a while (as if getting mainstream coverage for Gordon Brown vs the Skrull Empire weren't enough, turns out he's adapted Iain M Banks' The State of the Art for radio. With Anthony Sher as the Ship and Nina Sosanya as Sma, no less). But I was happy to discover this week that the other big beast of the Who books* finally has one too - Lance Parkin. In part because he's writing a Tenth Doctor book. As in, just the Doctor. There's not a lot up yet, but he does link to an interview in which I made the sad discovery that one of my favourite Who writers wanted to kill off one of my favourite companions.

Shaun Tan's The Arrival is not a comic per se; it's a wordless picture book. The wordlessness perfectly suited to the story of an immigrant's experience in a New World whose language he does not know, a city of wonders as strangely familiar as the lurking horrors from which he fled in the old country. It has some of the most haunting artwork I have seen in a long time, and some of the most heart-rending. I imagine it would be a particularly good purchase for any child which parents fear may have been exposed to Mail headlines about immigrants eating house prices, but it deserves an audience far beyond that.

I love White Mischief, so I'm glad it's popular, but dear heavens it gets hot in there with those crowds, especially if one is making an effort to dress up (which the vast majority did, splendidly so - at one point I thought "What the Hell is that girl wearing?" before processing that she was in jeans and a teen top, ie what would outside be considered normal). Some fine acts, though - I particularly liked the Brel-singing acrobat and the sword-swallowing, and if Tough Love and Ebony Bones had just played shorter sets, they would have absolutely killed.
And for all my irritation at last night's multi-clash, I at least got to say hello and cheerio to some of the Poptimism lot on my way home.

*Kate Orman I would have counted for her Virgin work, but once she went to BBC books and started co-writing with that guy, they no longer grabbed me in the same way. And Daniel O'Mahony was excellent, but he only wrote two.

Does anyone else have a Zen Stone MP3 player? Mine is misbehaving slightly, and advice would be welcome.

Never would have expected to attend two clubs on two consecutive nights in 2008 which both played 'Dub Be Good To Me', but it's nice to see Norman Cook's finest hour getting some limelight again after all that Fatboy Slim unpleasantness. Lower The Tone on Friday was, I think, the first time I've ever been to a predominantly lesbian night except for some of the better Stay Beautifuls as against gender-mixed gay nights like Popstarz, Pink Glove &c. Not wishing to stereotype or anything, but I'm not sure I've ever been to such a couply club - however, this was friendly coupledom, not insular coupledom, so it still worked as a club in a way I'm not sure such a couply straight club ever could. Good venue, too, and I'm not just saying that 'cos it's walking distance for me. Though that does help.
And then Poptimism last night, at which katstevens' History of Bosh set caused me to bosh myself half to death and thus remind me why I never go to proper dance music clubs. Ow.

Foolishly, I had hoped that one bulwark against the neo-puritan attack on alohol might be supermarket competition; they'd never be able to impose the sort of rationing they clearly want if they're relying on Tesco and Sainsbury's to share consumer information. Insufficiently devious of me, of course; what do retailers like more than an excuse to set up a cartel? And while the government normally fights (ineffectually) against such behaviour, it's about to hand them a morally sanctioned cartel on a plate when it comes to alcohol. Apparently "the price of alcohol in shops has halved in real terms in 20 years" - by which they mean that it has remained stable. So in our apparently prosperous society, where everything else from bread to fuel bills has been rising at enough of a rate to wipe out any real increase in purchasing power, one thing has failed to keep pace - and it's something which helps people numb the pain of the world our proud masters have made. Clearly that can't be allowed to continue.

Even before they start in with Mad Men tonight, BBC4 continues to come up with odd little gems; Caledonia Dreaming, for instance, a history of Scottish music from Postcard to Franz Ferdinand. They did their best to re-examine some of the less fashionable stuff, but while I was already coming round to The Proclaimers and Deacon Blue, and can now see some merit in Hue & Cry, two of the bands they looked at will always remain beyond the pale: Wet Wet Wet and Teenage Fanclub. Had no idea how involved people like Deacon Blue had been in independence campaigning, either.
Also, the first World of Fantasy (still up on Iplayer, but I'm not linking 'cos it's been misbehaving for me today), on fantasy with child heroes, which gets points for going outside the usual suspects and doing some very good stuff on Alan Garner. Puzzled by the Susan Cooper omission, but maybe the Dark Is Rising film put them off. Which by all accounts would be fair enough.