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

I don't think last night's vile weather can have helped the turn-out for Fosca's last hurrah; as I quited to a couple of the band, "You can spend your whole life trying to be popular but, at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will be largely dictated by the weather." Not that Fosca did ever try that hard to be popular; they only mattered to those to whom they mattered, and it was better that way. I'm not entirely convinced that they're a band that need three guitars - indeed, I'm not entirely convinced that any band does - but it was still good to hear the old favourites one more time, and the two new tracks a first and last time - including an intriguing new 2 Tone direction on one. I'll miss them; I've got too few bands left to go see these days.
A less loving farewell earlier in the day: went to see what was to be seen at Woolworths. A shop I often found very useful in my Cambridge days, but which for years now has always reeked of desperation - and doubly so now. I was expecting to come away with some tat by way of a memento, but no...the reductions weren't all that, and even had they been...Donna Noble and variant Ood toys. Transformers you've never heard of. Films you already own in those ill-conceived boxes with other films which might share a genre but which you genuinely hope never to see. And that was the good stuff. My MP3 player, aptly, was playing We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank.

Bad Santa is one of those films which hasn't learned from the advance I've previously mentioned in American comedies, the one where plot is now pretty much optional. In so far as the film is Billy Bob Thornton in a Santa suit, swearing, cussing, fornicating and so forth - brilliant. But then they have to go and spoil it by bolting on a bloody 'character arc'. Do Not Want.

I had always thought that, while Noam Chomsky is a disgusting joke as a political philosopher, it sounded as though he was a pretty good linguist before he got seduced by the charms of pronouncing beyond his expertise; it's a situation I'd seen plenty of times in literary theory, where someone who's OK on their own turf wanders into literature and starts embarrassing themselves, yet is somehow welcomed because their external authority feels like some kind of validation. Anyway, turns out he's also a rubbish linguist, because an Amazon tribe called the Piraha have a language which violates many of his supposed universals. Of course, he'll probably just claim they're an imperialist plot to discredit him.