[intersection] Adrian Mole and Big Brother 2 … ‘I lay awake pondering yet again on the true nature of my sexuality. Did I vote for Brian out of gay solidarity or because he is a semi-erudite Irish eccentric? I garnered the evidence: a) I like Kylie Minogue; b) I sleep with a lavender pillow; c) I am no good at sex with women; d) I am very fussy about my sheets, pillowcases and towels.’

[comics] Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics … A collection of pointers to world’s weirdest comics. Some classic comics including Jack Kirby at his nuttiest… 2001: A Space Odyssey ‘”White Zero” is the fictional identity given to mild Harvey Norton in simulated superhero “sequences” artificially created in the high-tech chambers of “Comicsville, Inc.” But during one of his synthetic “adventures”, Norton unexpectedly encounters a floating monolith similar to “the one they found on the MOON in 2001 A,D.” When his manufactured exploit goes awry, Norton’s enthusiasm for superheroics dwindles: Another Comicsville Inc. patron observes: “Man, if you can’t make it in COMICSVILLE, you may as well try KNITTING sweaters!”‘ [Related: Oddball Comics Archive, Gone and Forgotten]

[mp3] Top 10 Bootleg Napster MP3’s. Eminenya is well worth downloading … ‘The lush celtic strings of Sail Away clash with the vocal from the Real Slim Shady, speeded up by a factor of about three. A nightmare within a dream.’ [via Popbitch]

[tv] The inside story on Elizabeth from Big Brother … ‘On Friday morning, after Elizabeth’s eviction , Druitt’s mobile phone is almost constantly engaged. The horror on her face at her exit interview, when nude pictures from the Star flashed on the screen, was, says Druitt, a big sham. “She loved those pictures.”‘ [via Popbitch]

[comics] Long, fascinating interview with Grant Morrison over at Disinformation … ‘What I want to see is people doing their own experience and their own life without trying to be clever or trying to be hip or fashionable. If you do what’s in your own head it’ll always be cool because no one else will have thought of it.’ [via Plasticbag]

[movies] Interesting review of Apocalypse Now Redux … ‘Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), the surfing-obsessed, napalm-crazy Air Cav honcho, the additional minutes are more than a madness bonus. They excavate contradictions in his character that were glimpsed only briefly in the ’79 cut, and make him seem both more monstrous and more human–more monstrous because he is more human. His interest in acid-tripping California surf god Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms) now seems less like a middle-aged man’s power-juiced nostalgia trip than a prepubescent’s obsessive male crush. Kilgore dotes on this fair-haired visitor, monitoring his needs the way an old-school movie producer might pamper a star, and Lance–like Kilgore, a fancy cipher in ’79–responds with a stoner’s sense of privilege. (Refusing to surf in artillery-pounded waters, he says: "I’m an artist.")’ [via Robot Wisdom]

[medicine] ickle tackles painkillers … and allows me to dispose of this link I’ve had sitting in my “Must Blog” Folder for ages… the history of aspirin — Rise of the 1p wonder. ‘The trouble for the drug firms is that so many of them make aspirin, and it is so cheap to produce, they make no profit from it. Instead, they are intensively trying to develop so-called ‘super-aspirins’ which are more powerful and can be patented to ensure that they make money. ‘If something is found as a successor to aspirin, it is likely to be expensive. The market is huge – a goldmine,’ said Elwood. But the reason the drug companies don’t like the common aspirin is why patients and doctors do. It’s almost as cheap as chalk – about 1p a pill – and tackles all the big killers: heart disease, stroke and cancer.’

[pop] Make your mind up, M’lud — Amusing article about the the court battle between Bobby G from Bucks Fizz and David Van Day from Dollar over who has rights to the name Bucks Fizz. ‘If all this sounds like a particularly bitter lover’s tiff, it is because the two men are former friends and colleagues. Van Day was one of the best-known bubblegum pop stars of the early 80s in his own right as one half of Dollar, an equally peroxide-heavy act which had 14 hits including Oh L’Amour and Mirror Mirror between 1978 and 1983. “We were fifth in a recent TV programme on the world’s top 10 duos,” he says. “Underneath us were people like Ike and Tina Turner.” ‘

[comics] Borderline the new PDF format magazine about comics launches… Two versions are available: High Resolution / Low Resolution … It contains news, reviews, articles and an interview with Bryan Talbot… ‘Borderline is the result of a renaissance in British fan circles during the last two years but with the use of the internet for delivery we hope to offer something with points of interest to readers of comics anywhere in the world.’

[distractions] Feed The Tango Inside … ‘Oh no! You’re not still seeing her, are you? You’ve been wanting to get out of this relationship for years, and now the mother speaks of marriage? You must do something drastic my friend. Make a pass at her father! Go on… just give his knee a little squeeze…’

[comics] A couple of articles about Neil Gaiman …. From the Telegraph — Bitten By The Fantasy Bug and from CNN — Gaiman: ‘I enjoy not being famous’ … ‘The Sandman stands as a key text of the Nineties. In it, Gaiman drew together many of the currents that bubbled below the surface of the times: a millennial preoccupation with alternative spiritualities, a New Age interest in dreams and archetypes, a postmodern fascination with mythologies and storytelling. A decade later, these currents are no longer below the surface. Indeed, it looks very much as though The Sandman presaged our present pop cultural landscape, for today’s biggest stories – from Harry Potter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer – exist in spaces it charted first.’ [Related: Gaiman’s Web Journal]

[politics] Extreme? I’ll tell you what’s extreme… — Profile of Iain Duncan Smith in the Independent … ‘The latest polls reflect Mr Duncan Smith’s strong appeal to the Tory core. But Mr Clarke is still more highly rated by non-activist Tories, and still more so by the electorate at large. Taunted as “William Hague’s dad”, Iain Duncan Smith comes across as a tribute to the ordered, proscriptive world of 1950s Britain.’

[comics] Pulp fiction — Guardian review of Comic Book Nation … ‘According to the New York Times , one in four magazines shipped to US troops during the second world war was a comic book. The superheroes fought the war, too, but they had to find excuses for not winning it immediately. Fortunately Clark Kent failed his eye test, so Superman could credibly remain on the home front.’ [thanks to John at LinkWorthy]

[must read] Salon reviews James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand … ‘Ellroy once called himself “the greatest crime novelist who ever lived,” and then wrote books like “The Black Dahlia,” “The Big Nowhere” and “L.A. Confidential” to prove it. Now he wants to sit with the grown-ups, and if they don’t make room at the table he’s going to tip it over. One way or another, he means to make it, and on his own terms. “Fuck being a crime novelist when you can be a flat-out great novelist,” he once told me — there never being a doubt in his mind that being either one was merely a matter of choice, of will. Ellroy took risks.’ [Related: Cold Six Thousand at Amazon]

[profile] Mum, this is my porn empire… The Independent profiles Benjamin Cohen — a young “dot.com whizz”. ‘He shows me his bedroom, where it all began. It is lime and turquoise, with a sweet little single bed and, still, Winnie the Pooh books in the bookcase. Have you had sex, Benjamin? “I’m not telling you that.” “Why not?” “Because I’m just not.” Benjamin, by the way, is a Tory, an admirer of William Hague who, yes, would one day like to get into politics himself. “Do you think the porn thing will be a hurdle?” he asks.’

[profile] Prophet of the new child order — Sunday Times profile of Michael Lewis… ‘It seems a curious moment to introduce his theory that technological advance is rocketing ahead too fast for most of us. Virtual reality is mostly stuck in amusement arcades, e-mail use is declining, dotcom companies are still on the ropes and silicon chips report falling profits. All this is irrelevant to the changes that are taking place under our noses, he claims. “The profit-making potential of the internet has been overrated and the social effects of the internet were presumed to be overrated. But they weren’t.”‘ Thank God for the Internet — Another article on Lewis at Salon. On Bill Joy’s view of technological change: ‘…what bothered me was that he had a political interest in reining in this process. Stopping it. Stopping change. This just seemed the height of hypocrisy to me. This is a man whose status in the society derives entirely from the society’s willingness to be very liberal in its attitudes toward technology and change and development and now that he’s on top he wants to control it. It just reeked to me of status anxiety.’

[internet] Taming the Wild, Wild Web — interesting article on Big Corporations growing discontent with the “unreliable, uncontrollable, unruly” Internet… ‘The business world’s discontent has increased as the Internet economy has unraveled over the last year. That’s not surprising, given that the network was first mapped out more than 30 years ago, when it was devised as a coast-to-coast system connecting universities working on projects financed by government grants. “The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn’t excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws,” said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. “The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn’t have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network.”‘ [via Digital Trickery]

[profile] The Independent profiles Heather Mills and wonders what exactly is it about her that people find unsettling? ‘What is it then, that causes us to hang back, to pause a little? The answer is Mills herself. There is something about her that is almost frightening. She seems too perfect, her story too colourful, too dramatic. Few people, say her critics, are as driven, as single-minded, as strong-willed as she. And we find that unsettling, hard to cope with. When her father comes out to say his daughter is not a gold-digger who hunts down rich men, there are some who wonder if he protests too much.’

[mindfucking] Taming the multiverse — New Scientist on Parallel Universes… ‘In classical physics, [Deutsch] says, there is no such thing as “if”; the future is determined absolutely by the past. So there can be no free will. In the multiverse, however, there are alternatives; the quantum possibilities really happen. Free will might have a sensible definition, Deutsch thinks, because the alternatives don’t have to occur within equally large slices of the multiverse. “By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives,” he says. “When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen.”‘ [NOT Related: Crisis On Infinite Earths]

[politics] Time to reveal my “other” website: Darius Von Daniken Shrubsole says “I’m proud to be a Tory!” ‘If you are a conservative and you like my page, maybe we can be friends! Why not email me with your personal details. We can correspond about anything – I’m interested in more than politics. I like listening to Music (particularly Radio 2) and shopping for fashionable clothes at the Lakeside Shopping Center, which also has some marvellous architectural features. Of course I’ll only respond if you are voting for William on June 7th!.’ [via Clog]

[comics] Salon has A Conversation With Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes… ‘Collectors like us are usually all really troubled people who find solace in their dank apartments filled with decaying old stuff, and they’re often a trial to deal with. Of course, I live in my own little sanctum/sanatorium with all my books covered with Mylar. I collected a lot of sleazy ’50s and ’60s sex paperbacks and recently found one from 1968 called “Ding-a-Ling Broad.” It has the dumbest-looking woman that I’ve ever seen on the cover. It’s something that is an endless source of joy for me.’ [Related: Ghost World Movie Site, Salon Review, GW at IMDB, link via Seething Hatred]

[recession] Economics? It’s a piece of cake — are we heading for a recession? The Guardian does a number of totally unscientific tests to find out… ‘…Budd’s scientific method for testing the economic climate was to stand in the Lakeside shopping centre in Essex counting shoppers – fatally, he was fooled by their numbers into believing recovery was on the way, not noticing their sad noses pressed up against the glass gazing forlornly at the things they couldn’t afford.’

[comics] The Disappearing Comic Book — Why are comic books in trouble when comic book characters are strong in other mediums? ‘During the last 30 years, comics have become ghettoized, Munson says, turned into specialty items sold in persnickety little shops, located one per town, if that, and sold only to those who know the secret word. (Los Angeles, with dozens of shops and some of the best, is an exception.) A few popular titles are available at chain bookstores, but I had to squat and look beneath the bottom shelf on a Barnes & Noble magazine rack to find a copy of “Wolverine’.

[intersection] I Am Jack’s Younger Self — the unmistakable connection between Fight Club and Calvin and Hobbes… ‘Within the safety of the panel, Calvin is perpetually eight years old, terrible things can never happen, and no matter how crazy a stunt he pulls, everything always returns to status quo. Because of this, our hero is free to do as he wishes, free to chase his dreams as wildly as he desires, never having to worry about tomorrow because there essentially will never BE one — unless it’s part of a continuing storyline. This makes the reality of Fight Club all the bleaker, because it depicts what happens when you take someone weaned on dreams and limitless possibilities and jam him into a cramped cage confined by rules and regulations’ [via Metafilter]

[comics] Comics From The Underground — The New Yorker profiles Dan Clowes… ‘Clowes scowled. “I really hate this shit,” he said. Then he noticed a 1951 “Space Squadron”: on the cover was a squat red rocket and spacemen floating in bulbous suits. “That’s so great,” he said, and his huge gray eyes seemed to glow. “That unthreatening quaintness, that X factor of weird old men trying to draw for children. It’ll be panel after panel of inexplicably strange Freudian dogma.” Gesturing at the “Black Widow” and “Hellblazer” graphic novels below, he said, “This crap looks like it was airbrushed on the side of a van in 1973 by some surly young creep.”‘ [via Robot Wisdom]

[intersection] Journey’s End — was Michael Portillo’s political career ruined by Big Brother? ‘”Michael was very struck by Big Brother,” reveals a Tory frontbencher who supported his bid for the party leadership. “We discussed it at length. His whole speech to last year’s Tory party conference was inspired by it. “The thing about that programme was the people. Young people, easy-going in their attitudes. They seemed to be the face of apolitical modern Britain. Michael knew immediately that we had to reach out to people like that. Britain isn’t reactionary any more.” Maybe. But large sections of the Tory party are.’

[linkage] I’ve just noticed that the Sunday Times has finally put articles from it’s glossy magazine on the website… Bullitt over Broadway [Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3] Brief study of Steve McQueen… ‘He grew more insecure with each film. “He wasn”t sure of what he was doing – and he wanted to do a really good job. He wanted order. If a director showed weakness, he would be replaced. And he was very possessive,” remembers Claxton. “He was like a child – at lunch he would order way over what he needed: two cheeseburgers, three chocolate milkshakes, two bags of fries. His attitude was, “Get it while you can, before they take it away from you.” He purposely didn’t carry any money around; he was very tight. He wouldn’t even tip baggage handlers at airports. He’d say, “No – they need to learn that life is tough.” ‘ The Hot Ticket [Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3] Article about Tony Blair just before the last election… ‘Flying back from the Labour party spring conference in Glasgow, I am seated next to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, almost entirely deaf. He holds his nose and blows hard, instructing me to follow his step-by-step example. ‘No, no, no, not like that, like this.’I fear bursting an eardrum. He shrugs; his view is that unless you push on with a project it’s hardly worth bothering.’ The Talented Mr Ridley [Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3] Interview with Ridley Scott… ‘He had not won the Oscar for best director. That had gone to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic. Ridley had been there before, with Thelma & Louise, losing on that occasion to Jonathan Demme, the director of The Silence of the Lambs. This time, he said, he had two flash moments, the first being relief that he would not have to do his acceptance speech, the second disappointment at having come so close again. Then he thought, oh bugger, he’d have a vodka instead.’

[tv] The Life of Chris — the Guardian profiles Chris Morris’ career.. ‘The animal rights campaigner Carla Lane is still disgusted, four years after her encounter with Morris (“Prison’s not good enough” for animal abusers, she told him. Morris replied: “Prison’s too good. So what about jail?”) “These trendy people seem to think what they do is very funny,” Lane says today, “but most of it is beyond the 40-year-olds who are looking for Only Fools And Horses or Are You Being Served.”‘ [Related: Cook’d and Bomb’d]

[politics] And Mother Makes Two — Old, slightly revealing interview of Ann Widdecombe by Gyles Brandreth… ‘Let’s face it, we are not a happier society as a result of the liberalisation of the Seventies. We have record rates of divorce, record rates of suicide, record rates of teenage pregnancy, record rates of youth crime, record rates of underage sex. We should invite people to recognise that the Great Experiment has failed. You cannot have happiness without restraint.’ [via Blogadoon]

[comics] Daddy, I Hardly Knew You — review of Chris Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth…. ‘This is a finely crafted, complex book that gets better with every chapter: Ware seems to have matured both as an artist and a person in the years it took to complete. While so many similar projects are little more than strings of striking images, Jimmy Corrigan forces you to pause, flick back a few pages and read again, rewarding you with another insight, another overdue connection. It is a rare and uplifting example of an artistic vision pushed to the limits.’ [via Bugpowder]