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

Theory: neckties were not an echo of the Roman soldier's neck-rag in the past, but a precursor of earphone leads in the future. Which is why the period of their die-off coincides so closely with the gradual arrival of that for which they played John the Baptist.

Friday: to the Wilmington, where you must not step past the green pillar with your drink because of 'Residents'. No, not in the sense that eyeball-headed monsters will get you. Well, I don't think so. This in spite of the fact that the other side of the same residential block is a square solely occupied by teenage girls getting raucously drunk in a manner which would doubtless provoke an appalled Skins reference if the papers got hold of it. The other risk of being outside is that you get girls at that stage where you genuinely can't tell if they're mixed-race or just really overdid the fake tan trying to get you along to Venus 'nightclub' (and it shouldn't need saying, but that's arguably NSFW). Do they really get much success touting for that outside indie gigs?
The band bringing the drums were late, and aren't quite cute enough to make up for the lack of songs. Because of their lateness, no soundchecks: myfirstkitchen and her Maffickers are having monitor trouble but sound fine in the crowd. However, Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring seem to suffer, their usual magic tragically absent on a day when our hearts were full of spring. I decide that although I ought to check out headliners Cats on Fire, particularly now I've finally got it straight in my head that they aren't middle-class student wankers Cats in Paris (three of the top 10 Google results for that phrase lead you to blogs written by people I know called Steve), this is not the time, and hightail it to the Noble, where the Addlestones is now 10p more expensive, and tastes soapy.
Saturday: fugitivemotel's engagement party. The transition from the glorious, barely-even-evening sun of the walk down to the gentle gloom of the bar leaves me feeling suddenly sleepy, and I initially worry that the rape jokes are not giving his fiancee the best impression of his friends, but by evening's end we're siding with her in an argument, which should count for a lot.
Sunday: join the second half of a genteel Soho pub crawl compered by my_name_is_anna. Well, I think it's genteel, but I'm only half as drunk as the rest of them. Soho really is horrifically gentrified these days though, isn't it? Then up to the Noble again. Pints still priced too high, but no longer soapy. That's something.

Neil Gaiman's 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?' concluded perfectly; in spite of the title, I was reminded less of Alan Moore's 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?' than of the afterlife metaphysics his next novel, Jerusalem will apparently propose. One imperfection, though - you know those 'Got milk?' ads? There's one in here with Chris Brown, talking about how "the protein helps build muscle". Muscle you can use for beating your girlfriend Rihanna black and blue, for instance. Given some of the daft things DC have censored at the last minute (Superman with a beer, for instance) you'd think this could have been pulled.
At the other end of the Gaiman/Batman axis, I finally found in the library the first volume of Mark Waid's The Brave and the Bold, not as Bat-centric as the old title - and like most Waid it's good, undemanding superhero fun. Which makes a mockery of DC editorial's claims that Vertigo and the DC Universe are separate by having a plot turning around the Book of Destiny, and even a scene with Supergirl and Lobo meeting him in his garden. Next time John Constantine gets left out of a big mystical crossover, they're going to need a new excuse.
It's also the first time I've seen more than a couple of panels of the new Blue Beetle, but he seems like a nice kid, and if he was always this entertaining I can understand why people are upset about his title getting cancelled.
Over at Marvel, Apparitions and Ultraviolet writer Joe Ahearne spins off from Mark Millar's Fantastic Four and spoilers the end of his Wolverine in Fantastic Force, whose backmatter has something rather more interesting than the usual set of sketches - a first draft of the script, from comparison of which with the final issue we can see exactly how much a writer new to comics gets smacked around by editorial and told no, you cannot use that character, or have this one doing that. Worth a look even if you have no direct interest in the comic itself, though that's not bad.

My worry reflex keeps trying to creep up on me at the moment, and I have to batter it down with reminders that life is pretty good right now. This weekend, for instance - found a new pub for weekends which I'm not even mentioning online in case Neil Morrissey is watching. Went to Don't Stop Moving where as well as all the pop you could want, These Animal Me's 'Speeed King' got an airing. And then yesterday...well, apparently that was the heaviest snow for 18 years. Certainly it was my best snow day since about then, the only contender being the time at school where it was the rest of us stick the sixth form in all-out snowball war around the whole grounds. We made a snowmonkey! With breasts! Who went to heaven! And then a snow Caesar! And I was totally the most dangerous snowballer, because I have the biggest hands! Happy times. Glorious times.

More handy reminders that the BBC isn't *just* for winding up tabloids and the scum who read them in the shape of The Old Guys and Moses Jones. The former I watched because it was conceived by Peep Show's Bain & Armstrong, and I was put off when the credits revealed that it wasn't actually written by them - was the writer their Chibnall equivalent? Nor did the laugh track augur well. But while it's undoubtedly a broader style of comedy than Peep Show - cf the lead roles going to Trigger and the guy from Keeping Up Appearances, with Jane Asher as the neighbour and Jen from The IT Crowd as the daughter - it's still a recognisable relative, wallowing in toxic male companionship and hilariously awkward moments. Moses Jones is a cop show which, let's be honest, I'm mainly watching because the Eleventh Doctor is the sidekick. Worryingly, so far he really hasn't done much. But Shaun Parkes is excellent as ever in the lead role, while the supporting cast for their journey into crime and ritual sacrifice in London's Ugandan community includes Kareem Said from Oz, Suzie Torchwood and a bunch of very good African actors I don't recognise. I'm finding it all distinctly reminiscent of The Vinyl Underground but a) it's still pretty good and b) frankly, not many people will experience this problem.

Recent dreams:
- In a manner reminiscent of Movember, loads of my friends were growing Hitler 'taches to mark his birthday. This was intended ironically, or as reclamation, or something, but it still felt like poor taste to me. Everyone else just thought I was being a spoilsport.
- Superman was our mate, and I went for a drink with him at the Salisbury because he was feeling a bit listless after the events of Final Crisis.

Fireworks and Remembrance both seem to have been a little overshadowed for me this year by the election - like we have something even better to celebrate than the takedown of a theocratic terrorist, like we might finally be getting around to making the better world so many sacrificed themselves for. On the Fifth of November itself, I was just sat outside the Noble as per, though London being London still obliged us with a fox, a unicyclist and a flaming balloon.

A biomechanical race devoted to the destruction of all life, whose adversaries supposed weaknesses often turn out to be their salvation (but then, the stories are being written by humans, so they would say that, wouldn't they?). First appeared in a 1963 story. The Daleks, right? But this could all equally be applied to Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers. For all that I'm usually ready to diss Terry Nation at the first opportunity, I'm not accusing him of ripping off Saberhagen - just observing that as with the two Dennis the Menaces, or Swamp Thing and Man Thing, it was clearly biomechanical exterminator time.
(This correspondence perhaps struck me so forcefully just because it was while watching the current Sarah Jane Adventures, Mark of the Berserker (otherwise completely unrelated), that it suddenly occurred to me to pause iPlayer and check out Saberhagen's stories, of which I knew only blurbs in the back of other SF books of that era. Within moments I had a free, legitimate online text of one of the novels. Which begins with a prequel short story, if you want to try, and see how like a Dalek story it feels. I love modern technology, at least up until the point where it decides to eliminate the puny fleshy ones)

My favourite bit of the Quietus interview with John Foxx is his thoughts on our city:
"London is the centre of The Quiet Man's universe. Also of mine. It has a new emergent form of nature - Grey Nature - this is Nature unconfined by the world outside cities. We will begin to see the emergence of startling and subtle forms of highly specialised life forms from now on. Alligators in the sewers are just a daft beginning. The next generation are swift and subtle and almost undetectable. They live on momentary intersections and coincidence, and have learnt to take sufficient advantage of these to predicate entire new ecologies. The tabloids will have a field day. So will any agile biologists. Just watch. The next generation of Attenboroughs will investigate The Cities - The Grey Planet Series."
Reminds me somewhat of those fantasy Above Ground graphics on the Piccadilly Line. The problem is, if John Foxx were involved in urban planning at all, even in such a fantastic capacity, then everyone would start asking leading questions about how to get across certain features, because a bridge would ruin the aesthetic, so maybe we'd need to get under it via some kind of...[pregnant pause]. And he'd finally give in and say 'Underpass?' and then everyone would shout 'UNDERPANTS!' and then he'd be obliged to press the red button on his synth and cause the sonic destruction of the Earth.