Linkblogging for 15/03/09
A few quick links here. Our home net access will be fixed tomorrow morning, so normal service will resume then…
Eddie Campbell has his daughter Hayley Campbell’s review of the film of Watchmen, along with a few comments of his own, especially on Dr Manhattan’s circumcision as it relates to Leonardo. Meanwhile Caleb has more on the message from David Hayter I wrote about the other day…
Civil servants can’t even be bothered to read emails from the public. And the same site also asks when we are going to impose regime change on Iraq.
Anton Vowel asks what the Daily Mail really thinks about racism.
I’ve been quite hard on ‘Liberal’ Conspiracy here at times (I think it’s a site with several wonderful writers but with a very strange overall editorial line, to put it mildly) but the briefing report on James Purnell’s DWP and their use of ‘lie detectors’ that has been being posted there and at Ministry of Truth is a great work of investigative journalism of the kind that we all could learn from. Here’s a link to part of it with links to more.
And Tim at the Hurting has a wonderful post on Rorshach.
Why you should not watch the Watchmen
(Warning – some of this may actually be triggering for some of you).
I decided long before the Watchmen film was even made, let alone released, that I wouldn’t be watching it. This was not out of some great moral objection or anything like that – I just didn’t want to see it. But now, I *do* have a moral objection to seeing it…
I already knew this film would be very far from my kind of thing – things like Jog’s review where he says
If, as artist Frank Santoro recently remarked, the original comics were “a Lutheran reformation text knocking on the door of the Catholic establishment by a devout believer,” then the movie kicks down the castle church’s door, leaps onto the altar and pounds all the wine in sight ‘cause it just don’t care and then it flexes its muscles and slips on its shades before saying “the treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men.” Then it pulls out a skateboard and grinds down a pew out a window. Also, this happens after the Enlightenment.
show me that whatever merits it has are not ones I’m interested in. But that’s fine – I’m also not interested in seeing that film about lesbian vampires that’s coming out, or the one with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. I’m not quite egocentric enough to think that every film should be made specifically for me. But having read a post by the hateful little turd David Hayter, I am convinced that there is a very strong case that seeing this film, and thus giving this ‘person’ any more money, is actually an immoral act.
The bulk of the post is basically what you’d expect – he, as writer of the film, believes it’s the greatest thing ever, and that if you don’t go and watch it and earn him more money then you’re sending a message to the studios that you don’t want to see films with ‘brains and balls’. He also manages to demonstrate that he completely, utterly missed the point of the original book with his talk about ‘Rorshach fans’, and compares this Zak Snyder film with works by Kubrick and Coppolla, thus demonstrating his utter lack of qualifications to work in the film industry. But that’s more or less what I’d expect from something like this.
But then we get to something that disgusted even me – his message to those who aren’t planning to see the film:
Because face it. All this time…You there, with the Smiley-face pin. Admit it.
All this time, you’ve been waiting for a director who was going to hit you in the face with this story. To just crack you in the jaw, and then bend you over the pool table with this story. With its utterly raw view of the darkest sides of human nature, expressed through its masks of action and beauty and twisted good intentions. Like a fry-basket full of hot grease in the face. Like the Comedian on the Grassy Knoll. I know, I know…
You say you don’t like it. You say you’ve got issues. I get it.
And yet… You’ll be thinking about this film, down the road. It’ll nag at you. How it was rough and beautiful. How it went where it wanted to go, and you just hung on. How it was thoughtful and hateful and bleak and hilarious. And for Jackie Earle Haley.
Trust me. You’ll come back, eventually. Just like Sally.
For those of you who don’t know, the ‘Sally’ he refers to here is a character in the comic, who was the victim of an assault and attempted rape but who much later had a brief affair with her attacker. This was one of the less savoury parts of the original work – Alan Moore does unfortunately have a tendency to overuse scenes of sexual violence in his work – but Moore and Gibbons definitely present it as a *bad* thing. You don’t come away from the work thinking ‘she wanted it’ (the character herself comes away thinking that maybe she had led him on, but that’s something that rings true) or that the Comedian’s actions are anything other than reprehensible and disgusting.
I don’t know… I know this doesn’t go well with my posts about Dave Sim, but I just have a hard time with the idea that someone who considers a rapist a character it’s a good idea to favourably compare himself to, and who thinks that the general public all secretly want to be metaphorically raped by him and his filmmaking friends, is someone who should be encouraged.
He’s asking people to send a message to the studios… well, I know what message *I* want to send, and it isn’t ‘make more films with David Hayter scripts’…
(Internet connection still essentially non-existent. TalkTalk still not bothering to do anything about this. We’re moving in a couple of weeks, so hopefully a new phone line and a new phone company will mean I’ll be able to update this on a more frequent basis again).
Filming The Watchmen
Before my enforced absence from any form of communication, thanks to the inaptly named TalkTalk (I now have a phone line that crackles so badly I can’t hear the other end of the conversation, I can’t receive incoming calls, and I only have internet access while actually on the ‘phone) I was going to write about why I wasn’t going to watch the Watchmen film. But plenty of people have been doing that, in quite exhaustive detail, and I don’t have much to add to that. Anyone remotely interested will have seen the arguments, and if you’ve read both the book itself and the reviews that have appeared on the net (including phrases like “it’s full of ass-kicking and explosions, and who doesn’t like that?”) you’ll be able to draw your own conclusions about the film, and I genuinely don’t want to spoil the fun of anyone who does go to see it.
Nor do I think Watchmen is inherently unadaptable. I doubt there’s such a thing as an unadaptable work, though sometimes the only way to do the work justice would be to create an entirely different work with only the faintest connection to the original – see for example the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufmann film Adaptation (and for those who’ve never done this, try watching that film back to back with Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, the Kaufmann-scripted adaptation of Chuck Barris’ ‘autobiography’).
The crucial thing to remember though when making a film adaptation is not to prize fidelity to the source material too highly. Fairly few films that are just straight adaptations of the source material have ever worked (the only one I can think of is One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). To make an adaptation that actually works you must be ruthless with the source material. You can take a good novel and trim it right down, completely rewriting the plot, as in LA Confidential, or you can take a terrible novel, slice out the few bits that work and build an entirely new film around it, as in The Prestige. You can make a film about the unfilmability of the source material, as in Adaptation or A Cock And Bull Story, or you can transpose the events of the book into a different setting, as in Apocalypse Now. You can even take a terrible Harold Robbins novel and just stick in a load of scenes of Elvis singing Lieber/Stoller songs, as in King Creole, and get something watchable out.
But no matter what you do, the process of adaptation is one of selection and creation – no matter how faithful or otherwise you are to the source, you’re taking the elements that you think will work in the new medium and adding in elements of your own that you think will complement those.
With that in mind, here’s my idea of how you film Watchmen. The first thing to remember is it’s a comic, and it’s a collaboration, and that collaboration made it a success – this is something Snyder actually gets right, to an extent – he looked at the pictures. While you shouldn’t slavishly use the comic as a storyboard, you should at least look at Dave Gibbons’ art, and at the choices he’s made, and figure out why he made those particular choices – because everything’s there for a reason – and know why you’re making changes if you do.
My choice of director, were he alive, would be Robert Altman. Failing him, the Coen brothers would do a good job (as would Kubrick, though his films are probably too misogynist for what I have in mind). The film would be about 90 minutes long – I tend to agree with Hitchcock’s dictum that the length of a film should be proportionate to the size of the average bladder – and would be an ensemble piece. There are several threads going through the film, which never properly connect, but the characters bump into each other.
Our viewpoint character is Dr Malcolm Long, a middle-aged, overweight, friendly psychiatrist, a respectable black man of the kind usually played in films by Morgan Freeman. The film focuses on his relationship with his wife Gloria, and with one of his patients. While his relationship with his wife appears fine on the surface, he grows increasingly distant as he gets more involved in his work.
His patient, Walter Kovacs, is a serial killer who used to dress up in a mask and beat up – and eventually kill – criminals. In a series of conversations between him and Dr Long, we see in flashback the events that led him to be this way – his abusive mother, the Kitty Genovese murder (which in this film is the pivotal moment of the story) and the kidnap and murder of a small child. We also hear Kovacs talking about various other masked adventurers he knew in his past, but it’s never made clear whether these are real or people in his imagination. Kovacs has a nihilistic view of humanity, believing that nobody is truly good and that everyone is immoral – he thinks the Kitty Genovese story proves that humanity cannot be saved.
Every day Dr Long buys his newspaper from Bernard the newsvendor, who provides a sort of Greek chorus to the story, talking to the other Bernard who sits by the hydrant near his newsstand reading a comic. From him we learn that the world is facing nuclear holocaust any day, and that nothing appears able to stop it. Another customer of the newsvendor is Josephine the cabbie, who is having relationship troubles with her girlfriend (who I’ll call Geraldine because she’s unnamed in the source material) (ETA Actually she *is* named, once, in the comic, she’s called Aline), mostly because Geraldine is a very political gay woman while Josephine desperately wants to be ‘normal’.
As the story goes on Dr Long’s relationship with his wife weakens, as we see Kovacs’ history and his own mental deterioration, and this is paralleled by the news from the newsvendor telling us the world is close to an end. The climax of the film brings all these characters, except Kovacs, together – as Dr and Mrs Long are trying to reconcile their differences, Josephine and Geraldine Aline start fighting, very physically, and Malcolm has to choose between saving his marriage (his wife thinks he cares too much about people in general and not enough about her in particular) or helping someone who’s obviously getting hurt. He chooses the latter, thus proving that Kovacs was wrong and humanity *is* worth saving, just before a white light fills the screen and the sound of an explosion’s heard. We, like the characters, never know what killed them or why.
*THAT* would be a Watchmen film I would go to see. It would keep about as much of the material from the comic as Snyder’s version, be a hell of a lot cheaper to make, and almost certainly be a much better film.
What would *your* Watchmen film be?
Linkblogging for 01/03/09
A few links for you:
At Lib Dem Voice they’re wondering if the Fuhrerprinzip is now the basis for governing Britain. For all the fuss being made about the obscene amount of money that Fred Goodwin is getting in his pension, the fact is that it’s his money paid into his pension scheme, and that this is how our current economic system works. If you don’t like the fact that a retired usurer gets more in a year than my wife would get in sixty years working full-time in her job as a nursing assistant (and, as you can imagine, I don’t like that fact one bit) then try to change the system rather than singling out scapegoats.
As some of you may know, scans_daily, a livejournal community based around posting scans of comics, was recently closed for copyright violation after the comic writer Peter David complained. Chris Bird has the best take on this. Speaking of comics, I’ve recently got a sense of ennui about comics – there’s plenty I’m reading that’s pretty good, but nothing that’s grabbing me and insisting I write about it. I’m sure that’ll change when Seaguy 2 comes along, or Morrison’s return to Batman but in the meantime do any of you (Mindless Ones? ) have any suggestions for exciting four-colour adventure with enough in it for me to sink my teeth into writing about? In the meantime, I’ll post some more on Cerebus and some other old ‘art comics’, but the genre stuff is more my forte…
Bloggingthemail here eviscerates a column from Amanda Platell in the Mail saying fat people shouldn’t be treated on the NHS. As a fat person, I think Mail columnists shouldn’t be treated by public *or* private doctors, for the good of the species, but thankfully I do not have a column with several million readers from which to propound this view. Ms Platell, alas, does…
Bryan Hibbs has seen the Watchmen film, and from the review it’s clear that this was *exactly* the film I expected them to make, except that the new ending is even stupider than I thought it would be. Seriously, if you go to see this film, you’re an idiot. It couldn’t possibly be good.
The Mindless Ones present… Teal Kryptonite!
And continuing the theme from last post, the best roundup of the Convention On Modern Liberty I’ve seen is Alix’s liveblog.
Linkblogging for 19/01/09
A number of people have been posting tributes to Patrick McGoohan – all talking, of course, about The Prisoner. Here’s a selection ofthem…
(Fewer people have been paying tribute to Tony Hart, but Richard Herring sums it up quite well – “Everyone’s reaction was the same, a vocalised and instinctive “oh” of disappointment”)
Via Chris Bird, a wonderful collection of Polish posters that in most cases are much more interesting than the films they’re for.
Don Paskini talks about William Hague’s promotion.
And pillock has two pieces which say things I want to say. One, on how TV stations can’t even make proper crap any more, actually sums up a lot of my thoughts about Doctor Who old and new, while the other is just a short piece pointing out that Richard Dawkins is a prick, but any excuse to slag off Dawkins some more is all right with me…
Albums You Should Own – I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
This week’s Albums You Should Own is hamstrung a little by my presence in the US. I haven’t brought the vast majority of my record collection with me, for obvious reasons, and I don’t like writing these things without re-listening to the album in question. So this one is going to be about a less obscure album than the last few, but a good one – Brian Wilson’s I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.
In 1995 Brian Wilson was considered even by his most ardent fans to be a washed-up failure. Since the Beach Boys’ eponymous album of ten years earlier, his musical output had consisted of one pretty-good solo album in 1988, an unreleased and not-very-good follow-up, a couple of terrible singles and a single track on the Beach Boys’ Still Cruisin’ album, all of these more than six years earlier.
But rather astonishingly 1995 was to be the biggest turning point in Wilson’s career since 1966. To start with, MOJO magazine voted Pet Sounds the greatest album of all time, causing one of those occasional resurgences in the album’s profile that happens every few years. There was also a general wave of popularity for id-60s pop music at the time, caused partly by the Britpop boom in the UK and partly by the release of the Beatles’ Anthology series. So the time was ripe for a comeback. But rather startlingly, unlike the earlier ‘Brian is back’ campaigns, this time Brian actually did come back.
The end of 1995 saw two new albums from Brian Wilson. While neither contained any new Wilson songs, that was still more than the previous decade had seen. One of these albums, Orange Crate Art, his collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, I’ve dealt with in an earlier post. The other, however, while breaking no new artistic ground, is a rather lovely introduction to Wilson’s work.
In the mid-90s Don Was was busy trying to work with every legend of rock music he could. He produced the Rolling Stones’ Stripped, a Jerry Lee Lewis comeback attempt, and while he couldn’t do the Beatles, he did the next best thing and produced the Backbeat soundtrack. So it was probably inevitable that he would try to work with Brian Wilson. The result was a black & white documentary, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, designed to show non-fans why musicians so often refer to Wilson as a genius.
Unfortunately, the soundtrack album for some reason misses the three best musical moments from the film, all intimate round-the-piano performances. One is Wilson and Parks sat at the piano together performing Orange Crate Art, but the really special performances are Brian at the piano with his brother Carl (also of the Beach Boys) and mother Audree, singing God Only Knows and In My Room (heartbreakingly, both brother and mother would be dead in a little over two years from the film’s release).
What is released, however, is essentially that most 90s of artifacts the Unplugged album. While these aren’t actual live performances, they’re ‘as live’ – Brian overdubbed his lead vocals onto otherwise straight live cuts. The arrangements are subtly different from the originals – more ‘commercial’. The interesting edges have been smoothed off, and a glossy AOR sheen applied, that makes the music much less compelling for those like myself who are as interested in Wilson’s unique arranging skills as they are in his songwriting. While there’s nothing as actively distasteful as the arrangements on Wilson’s 1998 Imagination album, there’s nothing at all striking about them either – everything’s acoustic guitar, piano, drums, and not much else.
But there’s still the songwriting, and the vocals. Wilson’s vocals here are strained – he’s not been a ‘good singer’ since the late 60s – but that’s not really the point. What he is, is someone who believes in the song he’s singing like no-one else. He can communicate the feeling in a song better than any other vocalist I can think of.
And the songs are impeccably chosen. Almost hit-free, they’re instead chosen from the very best songs he’s ever written, and this short album does manage to do what Was wanted, to explain why Brian Wilson is a genius.
The album opens with Meant For You, originally from 1968′s Friends, a little 51-second piece of beauty, before going into This Whole World. This Whole World is the greatest pop single that was never a hit. In under two minutes the song sums up everything positive about pop music, with a dazzling, extraordinary race through almost every key and harmonic ambiguity imaginable, never settling on one tonal centre for more than a bar or two. Just gorgeous.
The rest of the album continues like this, going through obscure Beach Boys classics like Let The Wind Blow (from 1967′s Wild Honey album) and Wonderful (a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks from the Smile album which may well be the most perfect song ever written), as well as remakes of the two best songs from his first solo album. But the best thing on it is a song that wasn’t recorded for this album, but 19 years earlier.
Still I Dream Of It was from a bunch of songs written during the time of the Beach Boys Love You album, and originally intended for the unreleased album Adult Child. A full studio version from 1977 had been released on the Good Vibrations box set a few years earlier, but the version on here was Brian’s solo piano demo.
Written during a time when Wilson’s mental illness was at its worst, but his compositional ability was still as good as ever, Still I Dream Of It is the howl of pain of a scared little boy crying for his mother, and for a world that makes sense, but filtered through the sensibilities of a man with an absolute command of music. The lyrics are almost incoherent – Wilson never being the most verbally articulate of men at the best of times – but heartbreaking in their implications:
Time for supper now, day’s been hard and I’m so tired I feel like eating now
Smell the kitchen now, hear the maid whistle a tune my thoughts are fleeting now
Still I dream of it, of the happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars aboveYoung and beautiful, like a tree that’s just been planted I’ve found life today
I’ve made mistakes today, will I ever learn the lessons that all come my way?
Still I dream of it, of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars aboveA little while ago, my mother told me Jesus loved the world
And if that’s true then why hasn’t he helped me to find a girl, and find my world?
Til then I’m just a dreamerI’m convinced of it, the hypnosis of our minds can take us far away
It’s so easy now, to see someone up there high in heaven’s here to stay
Still I dream of it, of the happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.
Hearing these lyrics, both childlike and childish, sung by a man who was at the time in his early thirties but sounded more like someone in his late 60s, with a voice prematurely ravaged by alcohol and cigarettes, recorded on a crackly old cassette, is one of the most emotionally intense musical experiences I’ve ever had. And getting just a couple of minutes of the pure, unfiltered power of this music makes you grateful for the gloss and sheen and emotional distance that comes from the more ‘professional’ sounding tracks surrounding it.
Brian Wilson’s music communicates to me like no-one else’s does, and if you’ve yet to understand why the man who’s best known for I Get Around and Surfin’ USA commands any respect at all, you could do a lot worse than tracking down this album or the film for which it is a soundtrack.
Linkblogging for 18/11/08
Sorry I’ve not posted much for a couple of weeks. I’ve had various bits of life-related bits to attend to, and some work stress (can’t talk about that publicly, but I will say “Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!” as a very subtle hint…)
Anyway, got a comics post mostly written which will be up in the morning, and BFAW tomorrow night, but for now, here’s some links. And if I go a day without posting on here in future, please feel free to leave abusive comments calling me an idle tosser…
Alix at the People’s Republic Of Mortimer has a great post about the Tories’ cargo cult tax policies.
Over at The Independent, they seem to think that… women don’t have ideas… or something? Apparently if Richard Dawkins, Malcolm Gladwell and Christopher Hitchens write ‘big idea books’ (though what the big idea is for at least two of those I don’t know, frankly – Dawkins is a third-rate thinker at best and Hitchens has let alcohol and a forty-year-old grudge against Bill Clinton ruin a once-sharp mind) they’re being typically male, whereas if Naomi Klein or Lisa Jardine or whoever do, then they’re ‘outliers’. Piffle, inspired by the increasingly-reactionary Germaine Greer, and dangerous piffle at that – though the article is so badly written one can’t tell if the writer is arguing for or against the proposition; or if she is merely, in the American ‘journalism’ style, laying out a bunch of quotes from random people with no coherent thought as to a larger context or argument behind those quotes.
Is it me or is the Independent getting really, really sloppy in recent weeks? I only read it online, but the writing’s getting almost as bad as the Guardian, and they appear to have sacked all their sub-editing staff…
Pillock has a really good post on post-Crisis DC Comics, one of many things I want to write about myself, soon…
The Mindless Ones have a great post up on Edward Gorey
Fred Clark, having finished his several-year-long dissection of the first Left Behind book, now turns his eyes to the film version.
And another post from the People’s Republic of Mortimer to finish off, to remind everyone that the so-called ‘tax cut for the lowest paid’ that Brown was touting last week was actually the fudge he introduced to try to fix the problem he caused by *raising* taxes for the poor to cut them for the rich – and this ‘fix’ makes the poorest of the poor still worse off. Don’t let him get away with it.
Linkblogging for 17/10/08
For those who are interested, I’ve received part two of the Mindless Ones interview, which I’ll be posting here tomorrow (it’ll take a little formatting and I’m exhausted tonight). A part three may follow…
In the meantime, a few links. I’ll try not to make this too dominated by the US election, but that’s pretty much all I’ve been thinking about recently. The fact that nearly 50% of people in the US are actually considering voting for McCain (and the polls being close enough that stealing the election is a likelihood) depresses me enormously. However, I’ve been reading tons of stuff at Sadly, No and Firedoglake in particular…
Chris Bird wrote the review of Terry Pratchett’s Nation that I’ve been meaning to write.
Tim at The Hurting has a very interesting new idea for what term we should use for sequential art/graphic novels/bd/…
Language Log have links to some interesting papers on why published research is usually wrong. The remedies advocated by the authors are completely wrong, but the explanation for the problems in most papers is nearer the mark…
Scipio looks at this week’s news in the DCU…
Vdash.org intends to be a wiki for mathematics that will formally verify the theorems added. Could be interesting.
And pillock reappraises Ang Lee’s Hulk.
Linkblogging for 23/09/08
Just a quick one today, but hopefully I’ll have something longer for tomorrow:
Chris Bird continues “Exploring Hollywood” with a look at how “My Best Friend’s Girl” must have been created.
Fred Clark points out that giving someone $700 billion without any restrictions on how he spends it is not strictly advisable.
Bobsy at the Mindless Ones wants to hunt down Jason Todd’s killer
Leonard Pierce is also not entirely happy about the US government giving seven hundred billion dollars to the greedy rich usurers who caused the economic crisis without so much as asking what they’ll do to stop it happening again. I can’t say I disagree…
And someone on Liberal Conspiracy finally questions the ‘we must save Labour from itself’ thing they’ve got going over there and asks what Labour has got to offer us
.
Linkblogging for 02/09/08
I was hoping to write a review of That Lucky Old Sun today, but my pre-ordered CD/DVD hasn’t arrived yet (other internet orders made in the last two weeks that haven’t arrived – Leonard Cohen tickets, a Doctor Who box set, and a bottle of melatonin tablets, all from different online shops. I’m beginning to think the people in one of the upstairs flats may have something to do with this…)
Bots’wana Beast over at the Mindless Ones has reviewed Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D, in a review he was nice enough to compare with mine, but his is better. I’m hoping to touch more on the themes from that comic later this week, as there’s a lot to say there…
A very different comic link – yesterday Dial B For Blog held a day of celebration for Gaspar Saladino, a legendary comic letterer. That link takes you to a list of participating sites (especially check out Todd Klein’s always insightful posts) while this is the start of Dial B’s own 24-hour, one-post-every-two-hours, celebration of Saladino’s work.
Stephen Fry has (oddly, for a Mac person) done a video wishing happy birthday to GNU. While I’m not an absolutist in my support of free software (I do, after all, work for a proprietary software company, and I also use a very small number of non-free apps at home – Gnome Inform7 because it’s a wonderful piece of free-as-in-beer software and maybe the nicest programming language (albeit specialised) I’ve ever come across , Scilab because it’s a standard program I need for my research, and unrar for opening cbr files (all of those are ‘open source’ and freely available, but not free software by the FSF’s definition) ) I do think the GNU project and Richard Stallman aren’t given nearly enough credit for their achievements.
In particular, I’ve made certain to always refer to GNU/Linux in writing, since I discovered that several computing students I work with, all of whom run ‘Linux’ , had no idea who’d written the compilers and other software they used every day.
(I’d disagree with the video in its recommendation of gNewSense as a distro to use if you’re interested in Free Software though. It won’t work on many new systems because some video card makers and similar keep their designs secret, making it nearly impossible to write a totally free OS for new hardware. If you’re new to Free Software, I’d go for Debian GNU/Linux, which has the tiny minimal programs you’ll need to run your hardware but is otherwise totally free, or Ubuntu, which is easier to install but in my limited experience slightly less stable.)
Andrew Rilstone reviews the last two episodes of the most recent series of nuWho. I’m very glad he did so, because Grant Morrison’s comments on how the story with Davros has parallels with his own Final Crisis even though they were conceived independently almost persuaded me to watch it.
Brad Hicks has two fascinating posts about McCain picking Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nomination.
And RIP Don LaFontaine (for those of you who don’t know the name, you do know his voice. He’s the man who did the voiceover for pretty much every film trailer of the last 30 years).
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