‘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.’