Hurrah, it is Friday again and it’s been a busy week. My first London Book Fair where my feet were ruined by grown-up shoes but I experienced the joy of lumberjack chips in the pub, tons of Christmas Highlights kits for head office buyers to look at, a whole load of printing and a fair amount of doing stuff on Amazon meant it was busy busy busy but it had a great soundtrack: new Patrick Wolf album leaked (an essential purchase for June, lots of mad beats, funny instruments, good storng melodies and peculiar voice bits), the Noisettes album was released (I bought it as it is so much better than their first one and quite disco-y in a good way), some new Jarvis Cocker tracks landed on the internet (that 8/1 blog is rather smashing) plus the pants song from The Apprentice of course.

Oh no, I fogrot to eat my Wake Up Call this morning. This might explain the pants problem. Brilliant cereal box design though. Honest.

I have become slightly obsessed with prematurely cancelled (by Fox of course) early 00′s comedy Undeclared.

Maybe because, like The Inbetweeners, some of it reminds me of awful people I have known. The terrible music fight in the linked clip especially so as I once shared a house with a couple of not-at-all-from-the-hood white blokes who only played hip hop and only played it very loudly. Very Westwood (Tim not Vivienne).

Obligatory comics recommendations (mutants spesh):

I still love X-Factor even if the art team changes every other issue. No it is not the talent show off the telly. It is quite camp sometimes though with the fabulous bitchy one.

Meanwhile, in Uncanny X-Men where artist Greg Land is still copying images from catalogues and porn:

Uh-oh! Obligatory continuity-messing sort-of-resurrection alert!

Also: gays and stuff… at least good old Northstar is a stroppy one. Who could blame him after he was killed by a brainwashed Wolverine then resurrected as a zombie by evil ninjas only to be somehow restored to normality in an ending I must have forgotten about?

So… what’s going on with Dollhouse? Well it improved bloody loads after a few episodes which wasn’t hard as it started very badly. But now it might be dead or might be alive. Well it is on Fox. Damn rumours…

What’s that? The Daily Express reckon Gillian Anderson from The X-Files is going to be playing The Rani in Doctor Who? Hmmm…

In other news, the new Big Finish play (story 1 of 3 of the McCoy mini season) was damn fine, I wore shorts outside today (which is not right), bought a part for my oven in a shop for men (an electrical shop) successfully and made my first vegeburger mix burgers. They were yummy.

Facebook currently flits between shite and bloody peculiar these days:

Tomorrow: Asians.

Or lesbians.

I’m so used to Tweeting that doing a whole paragraph seems like hard work… so here are my recent CD purchaseing reviews:

Bat For Lashes: Two Suns
Description: Spooky, Kate Bushish, night time countryside, a bit 80s, a tad electronica.

Recommended tracks: Glass, Daniel, Siren Song, Pearl’s Dream, Travelling Woman.

Plushgun: Pins & Panzers
Description: Electronic Indie, elderly students, unrequited love, drum machines.

Recommended tracks: Dancing In A Minefield, Let Me Kiss You Now (And I’ll Fade Away), How We Roll.

Also on the iPod this week: Patrick Wolf’s Hard times is much better than the previous single, IAMX’s new album isn’t the horrible trendy drugs-n-glitter-n-top hats mess I thought it would be, Marina & The Diamonds should have a really great album when it gets finished, Del Marquis from Scissor Sisters went solo and is quite good.

Meanwhile, in the real world I got sick of Christmas 2009, had a friend round for pizza and padlockigami, bought the Freaks & Geeks DVD box set because I had forgotten how much I loved it, bought the Dead Like Me TV Movie DVD and wished it had remained dead, got pleased that I was enjoying Heroes again, thought about doing some exercise, stressed about rising damp (not the sitcom), read some more of a real book, and finally caught up on my sleep.

So this is what it’s like to be my parents…

• Oliver Twist in the real world scummy London!
• Unmarried mothers and guess who’s paying for them?
• Stalking actor with cancer, don’t he look thin?
• Fat is bad, thin is win!
• Little Britain, BBC bad, Nu-Liebore, slags, rubbish schools, aaaarrgggh!

If I had to read the Daily Mail every day I would lose my mind. Not that my parents are mental, I must add.

I’ve been a bit lazy writing about The Apprentice but everyone else has taken up that role so well. This week I have mostly been not using my Wii Fit but wondering if the home gym machine contraption the Apprentices had to invent would be more fun….

Hmmm… that’ll be a “no” then. I could be all obvious and talk about Ben with his wanker braces, twat socks and horrible smug ‘I would go fuck myself if I actually could’ face but instead it’s gotta be Maj. Or Madge as I want to type his name… “Me and my friends from school have set up a theatre company called One Life. We go around schools doing plays on knife crime and workshops. We all came from the rough area of Coventry, we didn’t go to the best schools and we came up with idea of educating youngsters on how we succeeded. We wanted to let them know that there is another way out. Knife crime is so rife in the UK right now it’s unreal. We are hopefully doing something that gets youngsters off the street and change their lives. We want them to realise there’s so much they can do if they put their minds to it.”

Maj is in the real Legz Akimbo?

This week’s Apprehensive video is not up yet so here’s last week’s:

Comics highlight:

Doctor Who Big Finish ‘coming soon’ highlights:


Irony highlight:

Danny Dyer (multi-ranged star of The Football Factory, Doghouse, Dead Man Running, Outlaw, Severance, The Business, Mean Machine…) told some tabloid “Mathew Horne is one of the worst actors I’ve ever seen in my life. Corden’s obviously OK but Mathew was terrible in The Catherine Tate Show. He’s just got nothing about him, the geezer. No substance and no depth. It annoys me a bit that no one’s clocked that. I’m not trying to do anyone out of a pound note, I just think they’re s**t. Mat is absolute rubbish.”

Hmmm… while I am no fan of Horne’s work (I would have chosen the word “tedious” if I was Danny “hard man” Dyer) I was amused to see that Dyer is secure in his own highly versatile talent to criticise a fellow thespian for having no substance and depth… but at least he is not trying to take hard-earned money that has been out of circulation for 25 years away from his fellow actors. Phew. Don’t send a hard man round to my house please Mister Dyer.

It’s not quite cancer but…

Shocking news from the Daily Mail! Pupils who spend time doing other things when they should be doing that studying they should be doing will do worse in exams… says an expert.
Experts have confirmed what parents and teachers already feared – youngsters who use Facebook do worse in exams… The American research found that Facebook rituals, including building an empire of friends, adding applications, joining groups and ‘poking’ other users, can swallow up hours of study time. Some users were spending as little as an hour a week on academic work. ‘Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,’ said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University.

Eating cakes instead of studying means less studying, picking your nose instead of studying means less studying, having a wank instead of studying means less time studying, reading stupid Daily Mail stories instead of studying means less time studying…

University student D**** Jones, 21, said: ‘I was in the library trying to write a 2,000-word essay when I realised my Facebook habit had got out of hand. I couldn’t resist going online. You do that, then someone’s photo catches your eye. Before you know it, a couple of minutes has turned into a couple of hours and you haven’t written a thing.’

There’s always gotta be a stupid person to use as an example. Thanks, Miss Jones.

Another Easter, another Doctor Who series. Whoops, no, it’s only a one-off. We visited Adam and Wendy who had rubble in their front garden, a bath and towel rail in their lounge, flirty cats and Doctor Who-inspired cocktails that were both delicious and amusing:

Jo: Giggly, quirky and fruity – Pineapple, rum and cherry with a bit of fizz.
Sarah Jane: Confident, bold & inquisitive but inclined to dress up as minty sweets – Cream, chocolate and peppermint.
Adric: Bland and wooden – A glass of tap water with a stick in it.

The episode was basically fine, a nice silly romp with some scenes of mild peril. I particularly enjoyed having a planet that wasn’t a quarry in Gerards Cross (ah, happy memories), the Giant Robot reference for hardcore geeks, the saluting, the oooh spooky psychic woman and her husband who were both in the marvellous Moses Jones (buy the DVD, go on) and Lee Evans with a gun pointed at him. Take that, sweaty gurning annoying stand-up man! Bonus point for no “I’m so sorry” from Tennant.

As per usual in these specials, nothing really heavy/gritty happened but we have all that to look forward to at Christmas, maybe too much so if what has been confirmed so far is all happening…

Yes, it looks like we have some returning characters (again), just in time for the regeneration. Well what did you expect? I’m still holding out for a return visit from the Monoids, with their Beatles hair and Zippy voices.

The next special looks like it will appeal to me a bit more…

More guns!

Achey breaky necks!

Water!

I had left a blog post half-written on my Notepad document thing, about Tori Amos and Plushgun but then I forgot I hadn’t wrote it and only remembered after deleting all the words. So instead here are some mostly poor (the out takes are either blurry non-flash or whiteout flash shots) pictures of Cheryl’s 13th birthday at Ben Crouch’s Tavern*



* Ben Crouch not actually pictured, same as the Crayola Pony Makeover Kit, Flight of the Conchords DVD, Barmaid Who Couldn’t Make Coffee From A Machine But Was Nice Anyway, the lovely food, the funny toilets, some shots in test tubes and various oddities including a blond man with dyed black hair that didn’t match his face.
* She was 24 actually.

Another week, another sales conference. My glamorous job in the world of publishing means I get lovely yummy cnapaes and wine from rather good caterers, unlike the ones those feckin’ Apprentices made this week on the telly:

Mmmmmm lettis!

I am so glad the return of The Inbetweeners lived up to my expectations:

There’ll be complaints from fish people, mark my words.

It’s Comic Catch-Up Weekend. Unless I get horribly addicted to Wii Fit Hula Hoop again, but my muscles (yes I have some) have only just recovered from my last session. I may have a great BMI but my Wii Fit age is sometimes ‘pensioner.’ Anyway, comics:

Peter took his mask off (again but for the first time. Oh don’t ask) and Jessica remembered him from the retcon in Alias. Which was nice, if rather geeky.

Buffy issue 23 was a return to form…

Did I imagine this? No, it is here for all to see:

Fuck me, that makes K9 & Company look good!

Tools of the week are the residents of an ‘affluent’ village formed a human chain to stop the Google car taking pictures of their lovely big houses for Street View as they were concerned about burglaries and then talked to the Daily Mail who published loads of photos of their lovely houses:

“I ran outside to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime. This is an affluent area. If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for burglars to strike. I don’t mind estate agents taking pictures but this shows people how to get in and how to get out. I was determined to make a stand so I called the police.”

Surely somebody should have pointed out their fail at missing the point?