[comic] Transmetropolitan — website covering the comic of the same name…. ‘Transmetropolitan follows Spider as he harasses people with the ugly, painful truth until they are practically driven insane, fill their pants up with defication wrought of abject terror, or simply kick his ass. Then he writes articles about them.’ [Related Link: Warren Ellis]

[jesus loves you] Good Lord! Christian sandals with Jesus Loves You written on the soles! “As I was thinking of more ways to reinforce goodness, God instructed me to cut out an old inner tube and glue the letters SUSEJ SEVOL UOY backwards onto the bottoms of sandals. When I was finished, it was raining. I walked outside and up onto a dry wooden deck and left JESUS LOVES YOU all over the deck. It was awesome, and I knew this was a wonderful new way to spread the good news.” [via ChrisH]

[big brother] Charlotte Raven on the social debt we owe to Big Brother. ‘The annoying thing about all of this for those of us who stick with popular culture in the lean times as well as the good, is that dilettantish tendency to gather up all the glory without putting in the hours. If you haven’t sat through six months of crap EastEnders, I don’t see what gives you the right to come in for the Christmas episode and talk about Tiffany’s death as if you cared as much as we did.’

[chegwin porn!] My referrer logs tell me that many people come to LMG to look for naked pictures of Keith Chegwin… which always makes me laugh. Apparently he’s refusing all requests to show clips from the gameshow he appeared nude in again and according to BBC News a video of the program is about to be released which he will make a hefty profit from. LMG will link to the video as soon as it’s available. :) [Related Links: Channel 5 criticised in Commons, Original LMG posting, Original notsosoft posting]

[big brother] Guardian Unlimited covers how Nasty Nick’s departure from Big Brother helped converge TV and the internet. ‘But if the convergence between the internet and TV isn’t to become a collision, these media need to work together. Being big on the internet doesn’t necessarily mean that TV viewing figures will decline. Viral marketing? Bollocks. Call it good old-fashioned word of mouth. Internet page impressions went through the roof and boosted, not hindered, the TV audience that night. If the content is compelling enough and production teams plan well, the internet and TV can feed each other. It is the viewer who wins.’

[god is dead] Guardian Passnotes profiles Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Didn’t he love his fellow man? No: “Many too many are born. The state was devised for the superfluous ones.” Didn’t he regard women highly? No: “Goest thou to woman? Forget not thy whip.”‘

[comics] OPi8 interviews Brian Michael Bendis. ‘It’s so funny because you never see people at movie theatres go: Well, I won’t go see a Warner Brothers movie. I won’t be seen in a New Line movie. Only in comics does this happen and I am challenging some of my readers to get over their snobby selves, as far as that goes. Because I am not a genre snob. People are sometimes surprised that I love Spider-Man. I don’t mention it or it doesn’t appear that I would, but I adore him! I love the Spider-Man of yesteryear and that’s what they’ve asked me to write. There is no genre or style of comic that I won’t read. I only want my good comics. If anyone’s kicking ass on a comic, no matter that it is about, I’ll buy it!’

[tech] Danny O’Brien takes a look at the rise and fall of Netscape. ‘At the end of the credits in the original Mozilla was a quote from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: “All human actions are equivalent … and … all are, in principle, doomed to failure.” Well, maybe. But we have to keep on trying, don’t we?’

[movies] The Observer interviews Joe Eszterhas on the movie business, politics, Sharon Stone and Bill Clinton. ”Politics has become entertainment,’ says Eszterhas, ‘and entertainment has become politics. Betty Thomas, who made Private Parts and Dr Dolittle, said that comedy in Hollywood was now “funny moments with liberal inserts”, and that is right, because Sixties liberals and political correctness have taken over the industry. And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives – they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet. Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock’n’roll, politics as a movie.” [Related Link: Eszterhas at IMDB]

[books] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers digested at Books Unlimited. ‘Toph is my laboratory. I can fill his head with my music, my books. He is one lucky, lucky guy. But he’s my problem, too. I mean, looking after your eight-year old brother is all very soulful, but how do you find the time to shag? When I’m not with him I worry someone’s hacking him to death and when I am, I just wish he’d fucking disappear and let me live my life.’

[[comics] Fandom reports that there is no sign of any detente between Alan Moore and DC Comics in the light of a 15th Anniversary edition of Watchmen. ‘”Regarding the Watchmen products, any renewed relationship with DC is not anything that people should be placing any hope in at all,” Moore told Newsarama. “I can tell you that right now, I’m having nothing to do with the Watchmen project – I completely disown it. I’m not at all interested if there are any more toys or anything at all comes out, and I shall not be cooperating with the project in any way.’

[big brother] Guardian Unlimited asks: Where were you when Nick was kicked out of Big Brother? ‘The playwright Dennis Potter once explained that he had decided to write for TV rather than the theatre because only television offered the possibility of a “common culture”: one in which people of all classes and generations experienced the same event simultaneously and talked about it the next morning.’ [Related Links: Nick Bateman Appreciation Society]

[photo] Image of Cary Grant taking LSD. ‘Patient Cary Grant. From a vision, a tough inner core.’

[comics] Excellent interview with Authority writer Mark Millar. ‘…I thought Grant was a bit mad. He was going through his ‘Bizarro persona’ at the time. Did you ever hear about that? As a shamanic exercise, he purposely said the precise opposite of everything he meant for six entire months and broke his vocabulary down into “Me am not want drink of Vodka”, etc. It was very, very fucking scary, and his girlfriend of some years had a breakdown during the course of the exercise. He was a good sort, though, and we hit it off almost immediately thanks to my sterling knowledge of Silver Age DCs.‘

[Mailer] Norman Mailer on the sexual revolution. ‘The six times married Mailer, who stabbed his second wife Adele in 1960 after an all-night party, said the women’s movement has been “sold down the river for a mess of corporate pottage” and sympathised with President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. “Mon frere, I thought. I’d have done it myself.”‘

[big brother] Update: Nick has been disqualified from Big Brother. Earlier: BBC News reports: Big Brother’s ‘Nasty Nick’ rumbled. ‘A Big Brother spokesman said: “The online producer panicked and hit a panic button which brought the [live video and sound internet] feed down between 0400 and 0600. “It was a mistake, it shouldn’t have happened and it won’t happen again.” However, he denied widespread rumours that the situation had turned into a fist-fight.’ [Related Link: Big Brother UK]

[TV] Guardian Unlimited profiles The Prisoner and Patrick McGoohan. ‘The last episode, written and directed by McGoohan, completely overdosed on weirdness pills. “Fall Out” had Number 6 gunning down guards to “All You Need is Love”, with no obvious answers to all the questions posed throughout the 17 episodes. On the night of transmission, thousands jammed the ITV switchboard, complaining about the incomprehensible finale.’ [Related Link: McGoohan at IMDB]

[comics] Dylan Horrocks the creator of Hicksville sent an email to the Comix Mailing list recently detailing what he’s currently working on. ‘[..] the monthly should be pretty unmistakably me: I’ve been bamboozling mainstream comics press interviewers by describing it (pretty flippantly) as a cross between Tolkien, William Gibson and Jean Baudrillard. ;-) Anyway, enough about that – lest you fear I’m ‘lost to the dark side’ (as Heidi likes to wryly put it), I’m also hard at work on the first issue of ATLAS, my new series from Drawn & Quarterly.’ [Related Links: Drawn & Quarterly, Comix Mailing List, Review of Hicksville]

[protestors] Bloglet makes an interesting point about the portrayal of paedophiles protestors in the media and reminds me of an article I read earlier last week in the Evening Standard — In defense of the women of Paulsgrove ‘ […] David Aaronovitch, writing in The Independent, mocked the Portsmouth protesters for their “peroxided hair” and their “pale faces”, brought on (he sneered) by “a diet of hamburgers, cigarettes and pesticides”. Horrors! Why do they spend their few quid on cut-price fags rather than putting it into their private pensions? Yet these women – so disgracefully patronised by commentator after commentator – were legitimately frightened about what was happening on their estate. This was an outcry by the powerless.’ [Related link: David Aaronovitch — Why I am so scared of Paulsgrove Woman]

[simpsons] Guardian Unlimited covers the Simpsons in Edinburgh. ‘At the beginning of the evening, by way of introduction, the man from Sky 1 noted: “Unlike Friends, the cast don’t get older and the scripts just get better.” Nor do they get $750,000 an episode. But then, the cast of The Simpsons are only really famous for what they actually do, and not for having nice hair or great pecs.’

[tv] Boom Box — Michael Lewis on TiVo and ReplayTV. ‘They’re seizing control of a $50 billion industry from its creators; there’s more than enough booty to go around. “The one question our investors did ask us,” Ramsay says, “is ‘How long will it take for the TV networks to hate you so much that they shut you down?””

[fear and loathing] Hunter S. Thompson can’t get interested in the US Presidential Election. ‘[..] he can’t even come up with a description for the junkies who’re mainlining it. “Anyone with half a fucking brain would be apathetic,” Hunter spits, before trailing off. “If you’re excited about this thing you’d be, um, I don’t know.” Even though Hunter’s not writing about it, he still follows, muting and unmuting CNN, which plays constantly on a 27-inch television not 12 feet from his ashtray and keyboard. He’s still biting with the same force, but the teeth are different – not as sharp.’ [via Metafilter]

[big brother] GuardianUnlimited asks: Is Big Brother just like working in an office? “‘Dishonest gossip, lack of co-operation, unkind looks and sneers, the intolerance of dissent – all are now regarded by many American workplace psychologists as classic symptoms of ‘mobbing’. And they are also, of course, all leitmotivs of the Big Brother household. ‘Big Brother appears to be a microcosm of work, just as work is a microcosm of society,’ said Ishmael.”

[counter] File this under pointless but intriguing: The Counter Man. My number was 741 by the way…

[interview] The New York Times profiles/interviews Stephen King. ‘If there is a single trait common to most of King’s writing, it is the reader’s feeling that the author is playing God. He can and will make really bad things happen to his beloved creations. He will then watch them confront this evil, occasionally offering aid. Finally, after they’ve been scared witless and have proved themselves worthy, they are welcomed back into His warm embrace, humble and grateful.’

[big brother] The Observer finds somebody to praise Nasty Nick… ‘Even his name bears testament to his mission. Nicholas is clearly a reference to Niccolo Machiavelli, the founding philosopher of group intrigue. And Bateman is of course a nod to Patrick Bateman, the homicidal stockbroker who ruthlessly eliminates his rivals in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.’

[profile] The Observer profiles Guy Ritchie. ‘He is irritated, for a start, by the way the press have attacked him for having an affluent background and a cockney, or ‘mockney’, accent. Too many jokes about his ‘manor’ having a gravel drive and a swimming pool have made him cross. ‘I never said I lived in the East End for 30 years,’ he complains.’

[comics] Interesting usenet interview with Dave Sim the creator of Cerebus from 1992. ‘Nothing frustrates me more than the twentieth century adherence to the notion that you can find out what ‘actually happened’ and that it is necessary for fiction to set out a linear, quantitative and absolute reality for the readers consumption and assurance. I think EVERYTHING is like the Kennedy assassination(s); riddled with inconsistencies, false trails, overlapping stories and considerations; distortions wrapped inside fabrications and coated with lies. The sooner we get over the idea that reality isn’t like this, the sooner we’ll be able to put together a world that fits our circumstances as they are; not as they never were and will never be. I’m not holding my breath.’

[big brother] Hours of fun with DIY Big Brother. ‘Big Brother is worried that things are getting dull, so he summons the housemates to have a mass debate about sex. After far too many cans of cider, Sarah admits that she likes to be spanked on the arse with a Bowl. Chris says he never wears condoms because they make his willy sore and Neil agrees. Joanne goes into a rant about how none of the other housemates have ever enjoyed a true orgasm because they’re all boring heterosexual bastards. Nicky sits in the corner, quietly eyeing up Neil.’

[adrian mole] Adrian Mole is the best thing about the Guardian on a Saturday… ‘Ivan went on saying to my mother, “This is an authentic working-class experience, isn’t it, Pauline?” His eyes were shining with excitement. He is turned on by vulgarity. It is why he fell in love and married my mother. My mother drew heavily on her St Moritz menthol fag with the gold-rimmed filter and said, “Ivan, I’m no longer working class. I read the Guardian and buy coffee beans now, or hadn’t you noticed?”‘