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

...because there isn't a great deal on, and I have another one pretty much written up with Wot I Dun, and lovely xandratheblue was all retro and got me roped into one of those Five Questions businesses from days of yore.

1/A mad scientists give you to chance to die by super-evolved nuclear owl or nano-kitten-bots. Which do you choose?

Swarm of nanobots has to be quicker and less gory than being snacked on by an owl. Also, they would probably make the remains into something more useful than radioactive pellets.

2/Which velvet jacket?

ALL THE VELVET JACKETS. But I think the midnight blue one without the buttonhole is probably the most versatile.

3/Would you ever have sex with a robot? Would it depend on how much like a 'real' human it was, or you prefer it not to look like a real human?

Well, I wouldn't want to have sex with Robbie the Robot, but on the other hand something that was trying too hard to pass could get a bit uncanny valley (and wouldn't that be the perfect name for an android orifice?). But somewhere between the two could be very attractive. Or, of course, a fully convincing android a la Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner.
(I have previously mentioned the Björkbots in the 'All is Full of Love' video in this context. Turns out it hasn't aged too well, but I definitely wasn't the only person who was rather taken with that clip at the time)

4/If you were a girl for a day, what would you do? Would it make a difference whether you were a beautiful girl or not?

I imagine the main difference would be that, were I not beautiful, my day's activities - while broadly similar in character - would be undertaken solo.

5/Would you really want to rule the world?

Well, obviously there's part of me that would like my face carved on the Moon, but really? I think I'd rather be a shadowy Grand Vizier-type figure, pulling strings from behind the scenes but still able to go out in public, and without having to do the boring everyday stuff. More than that, even, I'd probably prefer someone actually civilised, like Iain M Banks' Culture, to come along and stop the self-destructive brats known as 'humanity' from playing with sockets and hot surfaces. I just want to be able to tootle around reading, and seeing people, and sitting in fields, without having to put up with mediaeval crap like work, and preventable diseases spread by religion, and the environment getting chewed up by fools. But if events fell such that accomplishing that were possible by way of my going all Authority on six billion morons' collective arse in the meantime, then I'd consider it pretty much a moral responsibility.

Back before torrents and LoveFilm and dirt-cheap (or any) DVDs, it was a lot harder to see films that ween't in the local video shop and were stubbornly refusing to show up on TV, meaning that some of them were the exclusive preserve of the cool kids. At junior school it was Freddie and Jason (and I've still never seen any of either's films), shading into the more violent end of action films (I'm well up on my Arnie now, even if I've still yet to see Robocop). Which itself, as we got older, gradually started morphing into the more obviously 'cool' films, and as I was morphing into a slightly cooler child, this was when I started to see some of the status films, like The Hunger and Withnail & I. But one film I was slightly too late to the party to catch was the transitional Hardware - a film with sex and violence and a killer robot, but also featuring cameos by Lemmy (a cabbie), Carl McCoy of the Nephilim (the inspiration for Antony Johnston's Wasteland) and Iggy Pop (DJ Angry Bob, "the man with the industrial dick", who we need on 6Music stat). Because I live in the modern world, on Monday I was finally able to sit down and watch it, but divorced from its context as a badge of having Arrived, it's not very good.
(And then the next day I went to Stationery Club to talk about notebooks, which I think makes an even better point about the collapse of 'cool' as a currency in an increasingly niche social economy)

Wednesday: I do the Bloomsbury museums, for the first time including the Cartoon Museum, currently hosting a Ronald Searle exhibition. The guy is 90 and in spite of having suffered terribly as a POW of the Japanese, he really doesn't look it; the only hint of weakness comes when he misquotes Molesworth but if there's one man alive who can be forgiven that, it's Searle. He seems to subsist pretty much entirely on champagne, which I suppose could explain it.
In the evening, one of my very favourite bands, not just brilliant but generationally important, are playing in aid of an unimpeachable cause. By which I am of course referring to the Indelicates' anti-Digital Economy Bill show at the Monarch, charging a princely fiver. The support, alas, are not good - even Lily Rae is for some reason not on form, and when I say that Akira the Don had a tiny child on keyboards, I'm not making the usual joke about how young bands are looking nowadays - it was an actual tiny child. But when the Indelicates come on, who cares what has gone before? Simon explains how this atrocious piece of lawmaking has nothing to do with helping starving artists and he should know what with being a starving artist. And they play 'Savages', which I have previously said will be the greatest song of the new decade unless something better than humans starts making music, and even then it will be a dazzlingly apt note for the species to bow out on - "The brave new futures we have seen, filled with beautiful machines. The greener pastures, clearer skies and none such as you and I". kgillen was there too, and while I was writing the above I saw a link he posted regarding the music of one Emily Howell - who is a computer, and confirms me in that belief.

Nonetheless, out to another gig last night - Brontosaurus Chorus at the Wilmington, whose new songs 'Sandman' and 'Scissormen' confirm that someone has been at the Vertigo comics, which is always to be encouraged. There have been concerns that the show might sell out, as the headliners have been supporting Editors. I join in the chorus of mockery - what kind of world do we live in where supporting a bad Joy Division tribute means you can sell out your own gigs? Then I realise that the band in question are The Strange Death Of Liberal England, whose 2008 mini-album I rather liked. Watching them, however, they don't add much to the music's strangeness and yearning and British Sea Power echoes (the clue to that bit is in the name, isn't it?) and in one sense actively subtract from it: the singer has a ginger Afro. I decide to stick with the sounds in future, and head out.

Didn't think much of last night's Life on Mars - it annoys me that after gradually building a tense but respectful working relationship between Sam and Gene in the first series, we now seem to be going by sitcom logic where they're back to being stuck in an unchanging loop of exasperation with each other. I also found it deeply distracting that two key characters were called Patrick O'Brian and Frank Miller.

As powerful a mind as Milan Kundera's is still prepared to go along with the lazy consensus that Tristram Shandy is "inadaptable", a theory happily disproved by A Cock And Bull Story. This was one where I waited for the DVD because I knew I'd want to explore the extra layers the format does so well (I'm expecting the commentary to be a gem); so far I've only seen the film itself, but it's perfect. All you need to do to adapt Tristram Shandy is make a film as chaotic, sprawling, human, self-indulgent and apparently undisciplined (but magnificently nuanced) as the book itself, one which wanders off and loses the book just as the book loses Tristram. And it helps that the cast is packed past the point of sense with top talent. I don't just mean the marquee names like Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran and Stephen Fry (magnificent though they all are); even minor roles are played by the Tory MP from The Thick Of It, Errol from 15 Storeys High, Ian Hart, James Fleet and the like.

"A man accused of a stealing underwear from a shop in a knifepoint raid believed he was a female elf at the time, Belfast Crown Court has heard." Fair enough, but of all the games to take over your life and corrode your reason - Shadowrun? Meanwhile, South Korea moves towards the real world implementation of Laws of Robotics, though since they seem to be proposing the pre-emptive prohibition of sexual human/robot relationships, it's a terrible start.

Listening to the new Arcade Fire album (streamed on nme.com for those of us unsure about buying it), I think I'm one of the moderates. Some of the early mutterings that they'd totally lost it are unfair, but it's certainly lacking in the electric 'What is this? It's awesome!' that I instantly got from Funeral. I suppose it's always hard to keep going at such an exalted level after you've hit with a debut that good - and even if you manage it on the second album, that'll only make the crash with the third that much worse; just ask Mike Skinner.
edit: Damn, I think I'm coming to the same conclusion about the second LCD Soundsystem, and I've heard nothing but good things about that one so was really looking forward to it. Still, hurrah for the brave new world where we can discover these things, legally, without paying a penny.

Would have very much liked to catch myfirstkitchen and Nemo at Tesco Disco tonight, or maybe Jason Webley again, but realistically I was never going anywhere except my bed.