‘Cerebus is unique among other comics for its length of story, depth of character, breadth of detail, and evolution over time. It exists in 4 dimensions. The series focuses on Cerebus, a 3-foot tall aardvark man, who lives in a pre-industrial medieval fantasy world. As the story progresses, Cerebus finds himself involved with people and events that change history. He becomes a politician, pope, houseguest, bartender, and prophet, in that order. He finds and loses love. He speaks with beings of great power and knowledge, including his creator, Dave Sim. And yet, he still cannot find happiness in day-to-day life. Cerebus has done it all, been everywhere, and seen everybody. And he still fucks up.’

• XFM Breakfast Show Blog… ‘We’re in trouble with the Muppets, apparently. After the interview yesterday, when Christian, erm, questioned Fozzie Bear closely about his sexuality, the Henson people have apprently gone tits. I hope they don’t set Animal on us. The bear doth protest too much, methinks.’
  
  
• Belle de Jour — Diary of a London Call Girl …‘The client was in law enforcement, and the first time out he’d taken me to a semiformal work event. From the ratio of nubile cuties to paunchy detectives, I may not have been the only paid girl there. Or perhaps the Met’s PR efforts are paying off in unexpected ways.’
  
  
• Memex 1.1 — John Naughton’s online diary … ‘I’ve discovered that I appear in Colin Jarman’s The Nasty Quote Book! [I described Radovan Karadzic, the infamous Serbian politician as “a rambling, inconsistent, sentimental, bouffanted crook”. Nasty, perhaps; but also true.]’

‘To see the really cool stuff, you have to sneak into the room above the garage, which Mr. Ross calls “my fortress of solitude of collectibles.” Two lifelike figures — a 6-foot-3 Superman and a 6-foot-2 Batman sculptured in wax, resin and fiberglass by a British artist, Mike Hill — dominate the room. Action figures including one-of-a-kind pieces bought on eBay and cheap mass-produced fast-food favors are arranged museum-style in vitrines on every wall. A small jointed wooden Superman from 1939, bought for a song at a toy show, has its own shelf.’

‘Mr. Ross went to his own party as the Phantom, an often overlooked superhero also known as “the ghost who walks.” At 6 feet 3, Mr. Ross can actually be rather unghostlike — especially in a hooded Danskin bodysuit the color of grape Kool-Aid.’

‘It is a genuinely frightening movie which makes splatterfests like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre look juvenile. With style and intelligence, Scott absorbs the influences of Kubrick and Spielberg, together with movies like Westworld and The Stepford Wives, but makes a movie quite distinct from any of these. He puts together a white-knuckle intergalactic ride of tension and fear, which is also an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare-parody of the Apollo 11 moon-landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, with all its earnest optimism about human endeavour. And perhaps most stunningly of all, this new version of the movie reveals how it works as a conspiracy satire about state-corporate complicity in manufacturing biological weapons of mass destruction.’

‘Howard sacked Prison Service Director Derek Lewis and then (famously) failed to answer a direct question about it from Jeremy Paxman 14 times on Newsnight.

Howard’s former deputy Anne Widdecombe said there was “something of the night” about him.

Howard was the Minister in Charge of bringing in the Poll Tax in 1988. Even after Thatcher had gone, and after the poll tax riots, he insisted he still believed in the policy. (July 1991)

Howard was the Minister who brought in Clause 28 of the Local Government Act banning the “promotion” of homosexuality. (March 1988)

Howard voted in favour of anti-abortion campaigner David Alton’s Bill to reduce access to abortion. (January 1988)

Howard criticised Jack Straw’s decision to detain General Pinochet and actively campaigned for his release: “We think this has gone on far too long. We think he should be sent back to Chile.” (BBC Interview, 26 November 1998)’

I like my girlfriend, but I’m dying to go date other girls. I know I could do a lot better than her.

I have three testicles.

i pissed on my neighbors cat… i feel really bad about it

‘Maus does have a profound and unfailing “strangeness”, to use Bloom’s term. Part of this is due to the depiction of Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and so forth. This is what jolts most people who come to it for the first time, and still jolts me after several readings. It is such a risky artistic strategy, because it implies a form of essentialism that many readers will find suspect. Cats kill mice because they are cats, and that’s what cats do. But is it in the nature of Germans, as Germans, to kill Jews?

The question hangs over the whole work, and is never answered directly. Instead we are reminded by the plot itself that this classification into different species was precisely how the human race was then regarded by those who had the power to order things; and the question is finally dispelled by the gradual gentle insistence that these characters might look like mice, or cats, or pigs, but what they are is people. They have the complexity and the surprisingness of human beings, and human beings are capable of anything.’

‘Al Jean: We have a show coming up where Marge writes a novel and gets endorsements from writers playing themselves, including Tom Clancy, Thomas Pynchon-

IGN DVD: How did you get him?

Al Jean: We got him. (laughs) He was really nice.

IGN DVD: Oh well of course, he’s not seen, right?

Al Jean: He’s wearing a paper bag over his head, but it is his voice.’

1. The Flash
2. Superman
3. Paradax (Strange Days)
4. Diabolik
5. New Gods (by Jack Kirby)
6. Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery
7. Emma Frost, The White Queen (X-Men)
8. Cyclops (X-Men)
9. Billy the Cat (and Katie) (DC Thompson)
10. Marvelman (by Alan Moore)

‘It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1, the world’s great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo. By the time international affairs returned to their normal cold-war level, some wits were calling it the most tasteless April Fool’s joke in history. I happen to know all the details about what happened, but I have no idea how to recount them in a manner that will make sense to most readers. For instance, I am not even sure who I am, and my embarrassment on that matter mates me wonder if you will believe anything I reveal. Worse yet, I am at the moment very conscious of a squirrel – in Central Park, just off Sixty-eighth Street, in New York City – that is leaping from one tree to another, and I think that happens on the night of April 23 (or is it the morning of April 24?), but fitting the squirrel together with Fernando Poo is, for the present, beyond my powers. I beg your tolerance.’

‘At almost one o’clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top. The escalators rose toward the mezzanine, where my office was. They were the free-standing kind: a pair of integral signs swooping upward between the two floors they served without struts or piers to bear any intermediate weight. On sunny days like this one, a temporary, steeper escalator of daylight, formed by intersections of the lobby’s towering volumes of marble and glass, met the real escalators just above their middle point, spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails which wavered slightly as the handrails slid on their tracks, like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge of an LP.’

‘In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.’

‘I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just plain nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out towards me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.’