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

Autumn's here, isn't it? The leaves have been falling tentatively for a while, but the chill came on Thursday night (after Glam Racket, which had played a song that would also appear at Poptimism, but because it's an instrumental and nobody else was at both, I have no way of knowing what it was), and then yesterday the barbeque had to move inside earlier than you'd think, and not just because the incompetent cat was too distracting, and then in the Open Air Theatre (and what a magical little grotto that is after dark, I've only previously been for a daytime Romeo & Juliet where if the weather wasn't wet, the leads certainly were) Daniel Kitson told a story about a story about Upper Thwackley, a lovely little village with an unusually high population of assassins, and in Upper Thwackley it was snowing and we could feel that winter on its way. A beautiful story, about a funny story - not something many people could carry off with a largely half-cut audience at midnight on Saturday.

Last time I tried to watch Stalin-son-com Children of the Revolution, my tape cut out halfway through because some asinine sport or other had over-run in the usual rude fashion which should see the whole pack of them exiled to specialist channels. Last Saturday it was shown again, and this time when it was promised. I love those weird low-key Australian comedies, which interchange the same set of actors (Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill and Brenda Griffiths are all in this one) and have the same...deadpan's not quite the word, but there's a sensibility there which really works for me. The latter half was maybe not quite so good; well, it was for a while, but towards the end the serious fact that a lot of Western communists genuinely did believe the USSR was a good thing starts to overwhelm the comedy a little. Which may be correct, but is also inartistic; I don't let Wilde's rules on these things slide just because I agree with a given agenda.

"My local Oxfam throws out hundreds of books every month. Before they are binned, the front covers are ripped off, or the first few pages torn out, so no one else can benefit. There are three other charity shops within a radius of 100 yards – any one would welcome these books and probably arrange to collect."
Anyone who purposely renders a book unreadable is scum. Godwin be damned, this makes comparing Oxfam to the Nazis entirely fair game as far as I'm concerned.

In other news, my Tyranid army had their first outing this week and the lead monster punched a tank's face off. Geek relapsing is awesome.

Went to the New Royal Family's comeback show last night at the ever-baffling Lark In The Park - absolutely top hole. Lots of people out to see 'em, rewarded with icecoldinalex going back to blond. a new drummer in a very fetching sailor suit, and heteroerotic Bowie/Ronson guitar antics from charleston and thedavidx. Oh, and chocolate digestives, of course. New single 'I.W.I.S.H.I.W.A.S.GAY' made its live debut, except that live it's not a minute of electropop madness, it's 'Another One Bites The Dust' meets the Sugarhill Gang, especially once moleintheground got in there with the gay guest rap. That's gay meaning homosexual, obv.

Stardust is of all Neil Gaiman's works the one to show the most evidence of Lord Dunsany' influence - and that's saying something. Nonetheless, even the success of the lovely film version did not prepare me for news of a Dunsany film. I confess that Dean Spanley is not a work I know, but if Peter O'Toole, Sam Neill and Jeremy Northam are all in the film, then I have reason to be optimistic. Though I note they have all also worked together on the dismal Tudors, so maybe I should be expecting an announcement of Joss Stone joining the project as the King of Elfland's daughter.

I've noticed the whole Georgia farrago has been mostly absent from my friendslist, and I don't blame people, because there's not much to say; Russia's throwing its weight around again, there's sod all we can realistically do about it, and certain sections of the Left are creaming themselves with glee and blaming the US, just like the old days. But this one I cannot let past without comment: "It is rare that all the blame is on one side. In fact, both sides are probably to blame. That is very important to understand," Germany's Chancellor, there, talking about a war. Perhaps she should acquaint herself with the biographies of some of her own predecessors, she might find a rather startling counter-example. That sort of moral equivalence and equivocation gets my back up whoever's spitting it, but coming from someone in that particular job, is simply chilling.
(And while I'm back off the current affairs wagon:
Paul Duffy, 35, from Castlemilk, was part of a four-strong gang who smashed their way into a car dealer's home...The High Court in Edinburgh heard that Duffy was freed on bail nine days before the raid in February. He had 52 previous convictions for crimes including robbery and carrying a knife. And this man has been sentenced to...50 months. It being deeply unlikely that he will even serve the whole of that. Seriously, what are the odds that this man's continued existence will ever do other than taint the lives of other, better people? What possible purpose is served by allowing the continued existence of a human being so fundamentally rotten?)

I realise there are few lower forms of blogging than 'point and laugh at the interweb mentalist' but what the Hell - go here, skim the article (which is filler, frankly), and then check the comments from a prize pillock I may have mentioned before, 'anytimefrances'. ATF's feeble brain is entirely consumed by a knot of obsessions - chiefly, the notion that rock and rap music (they're interchangeable) are synonymous with drugs and noise pollution, and that they're leading to the demise of Real Literature and Proper Music. In and of itself this would be of strictly historical interest - in an age where even the Mail covers Glastonbury without much hysteria, seeing such retrograde opinions in the wild is a bit like finding a living coelacanth, except uglier. What raises the experience to the level of comedy is that while ATF grandly proclaims its own cultural and intellectual superiority to the foolish rock fans, its incoherent arguments are unfailingly delivered with worse spelling and grammar (never mind sanity) than anyone else on there: "wake up to reality. don't pretend, we can turn it up 'real loud' because everyone loves it. it's sick humiliation detritus." Though I admit that's an atypical quote - for starters, the apostrophes are in the right place.