Entertainment

Here’s something that makes no sense to me, my aunt won’t let her 14 year old son watch the Simpsons but she’s taking him to see Christina Aguilera? Surely you get more good quality, humorous, entertainment from the Simpsons instead of watching Madame Aguilera writhing around while miming?

What’s with this cruel and unusual punishment?

Warren Ellis is in a very expansive mood this week and has written a piece reminiscent of a line from The Outlaw Josey Wales; ‘Well he ain’t a hard man to follow. Leaves dead men wherever he goes.’:

I remember you all.

Nicola Jane in Hyde Park summer, all in white, long blonde mane and pale blue eyes, every inch reflecting light, laughing at me dressed all in black. We didn’t look right together, but we were. Waiting for you at night outside the stage door. I think that’s when I started living at night. You got brighter and I got darker.

The world got darker.

Guitars clanging like fire alarms inside the club as Tara B and I clung to each other in the back doorway, the night no bigger than me and she. My hand on her dancer’s thigh in the dark, all wrapped in nylon. Her eyes on me as she sang in working-men’s clubs. Bending her over the dressing-room table while they were still applauding in the bar. Running my fingertips over the scars on her wrists at five in the morning.

Alice the taxi driver gasping as I licked her tattoo, the first time anyone had done that. The menagerie of rats in her tiny room watching from their cages as she arched and spasmed against my lips.

Darker and darker. Time passing in a million little breaths.

I remember you all, I really do. I remember Ann-Marie’s dirtily infectious giggle as I went down on my knees in front of her and told her it was her turn to be sucked off. I remember Jenny’s wild pealing laughter as I got down on my knees at the taxi rank and asked her to marry me, to mad cheering from the bar full of people behind us.

The same taxi rank I met Alice at. Love makes you stupid. Love kills us all.

They found Alice in the back of her taxi not long after. I had a friend in the police service who said the look on her face was one of total surprise.

After a while, it was like I never saw the sun at all.

Tara B, floating in the canal like a junkyard Ophelia, burger boxes and used condoms drifting around her. Nicola Jane, slumped outside the stage door, hands over her crimson heart like she was trying to stop it breaking.

I went west, chased by permanent night. Porcelain Larissa in New York hotel rooms. Sex was a psychedelic for her. It took her places no-one else ever saw. Convulsing like an electroshock patient as I held her throat with one hand and spanked her with the other. She’d say “thank you” after each apocalyptic sequence of orgasms, looking up at me with complete devotion. Hotels would complain about the screaming.

I think perhaps they were relieved when the screaming stopped, and I sat there alone again, with night coming hard.

I ran from it. For a while, there was sun on my skin in San Francisco. And at night there was Augusta, still in her leather corset and black Victorian cape, taking control of me, telling me it would be like this forever.

But it wasn’t. The one thing I have learned in all this time is that nothing is forever. Everybody leaves.

Larissa left me in a ghetto park. From a little distance, it looked like she was wearing a red choker, and that her hands were tied by red ribbons.

People called me vain because the first thing I always bought for every new home was a mirror. But it was only so I could see another face when the night got too dark for everyone else to stand.

And here I lay now, in a country whose name I don’t even know, and night is falling, my darlings. Night is falling and I can’t run away this time.

I remember you all. And I lay here dying now. I can see it coming, feel the shape of it. All my strength is falling from me like October leaves. I have in me just enough to be able to hold your hands.

But none of you are here.

Well, maybe not the best ever, but it’s pretty funny.

Tom Baker, the fourth Dr Who, told BBC Radio Five Live that comedian Eddie Izzard had landed the part. But BBC says no final decision has been made on who will star in the TV show when it returns in 2005. I’d like Richard Grant for the role, but am quite taken by the suggestion of Jonathan Pryce

More disturbing imagery from Warren Ellis:

She used to have eyes I could lose myself in, and then she had them replaced with laser pointers. Little red dots jumping up and down on the bedroom wall as I took her from behind. I could live with that until she had the animal voice import. The cheetah purring was okay, but the dingo noises just killed the mood. The combination of the red eyes and the gorilla sounds when she jerked off was horrible. A few weeks later, things were moving down there that shouldn’t have. Don’t be scared, she said, as stuff pumped like organ stops under her skin. Something extended itself and waved at me.

I threw up between her legs and she didn’t talk to me for a week. Which I suppose you can’t really blame her for, but still.

I knew it was over when she cut her legs off.

Had them hacked off at the knee and came home with a suitcase full of modular replacements. The stumps had little Firewire ports that plugged into the new lower leg units. She fitted what she called her Sex Legs and flexed artificial toes, feet fixed in a perfect arch to accomodate the welded-on six-inch heels. Apparently there were Segway gyroscopes in the calves to keep her upright when she walked.

I came home one night to find her in a red latex minidress and sixteen legs. Spider things were sprouted from her knees, eight legs each. She paraded on the plastic kitchen floor for me, swinging her hips. Clackclackclackclack on the floor. Clackclackclackclack.

She stuck her tongue out at me when I started retching. There was what looked like a DC power inlet on the tip.

After that, it just got ugly. I had to go. I saw her again a couple of weeks ago. She introduced her new boyfriend as Spin. His skin was cold and shiny, like white plastic coating over steel. He had a revolving drum in his stomach. She leant against him and grinned.

I’m living in my car now. My car loves me. I mean, it wouldn’t have grown a real vagina for me otherwise, would it?

A literary gem from Warren Ellis:

I had to kill the pig.

It was a GM Vietnamese potbellied pig that some freak had meatfitted with a voicebox and the frontal lobe of a grown-up crack baby.

It scuttled across the carpet on fat little legs, firing hideous acidic turds out of its fortified arse like it was Satan’s vending machine. I loaded the harpoon gun I’d borrowed from Sunil. There are a few parts of the world where you can legally hunt humans who have gone aquatic, and Sunil owed sexual favours to all of them. The pig turned, rasping “Fuckpig! Fuckpig! Fuckpig!” I’d not yet worked out whether he was talking to me or telling me his name, but it seemed to be the only word he knew. I’d been listening to it for two weeks. Two. Weeks.

The harpoon locked down into the receiver chamber, and the air compressor hissed, charging the gun.

I hefted the gun and took aim as the bastard dropped another shit on the carpet, burning another hole in it. “This is it, you disgusting fucking object. Melissa left me with a disease so unusual and horrible it does not have a name, a weird Japanese doll that sucks out its own urine, and you. I’ve had my urethra irradiated, I listened to the doll scream as I shoved it into a wood chipper, and now there’s only you left. The pet pig.”

“Fuckpig!”

The compressor stopped hissing. The gun’s chip crooned to me, for no good reason, in the synthesised voice of Peter O’Toole: “You may kill things now, young man.” I threw the receiver lock to open the barrel and fired at the pig’s smoking anus.

Of course I bloody missed.

The pig hurled itself to one side like it was an action movie hero, rolling and coming up poised and ready on its foul black trotters. The harpoon thudded into one of my speakers. I fumbled another one into the chamber and slammed down the receiver lock, hoping there was enough push left in the compressor for another shot at the little crapmachine. I waved the harpoon gun at it. You couldn’t see its eyes; they were dark wet slits surrounded by great folds and swells of warty pigflab. But you knew it was scheming. I edged between it and the clear run through my long thin apartment to the front door. I had it pinned here in the back bedroom. Nowhere to run.

It feinted to my left like Ali, with a rasped “Fuckpig!” I pretended to follow the feint, and then snapped the gun back as it launched itself for the opening it expected between my right and the doorjamb.

It realised I had it and pissed itself in mid-air, an evil green sprinkler. Twisted its immense gut around to carom off the wall. I kept a bead on it as it bounced off my bed — realised too late that it was aimed for the window.

Fuckpig! and it hurled itself through the window. I ran to the sill, trying to keep my hands away from all the broken glass. The pig had launched itself with some force, I gave it that. There was a chance it could reach the shopfront awning on the other side of my narrow market street. The odds were better that it’d miss and splatter. But I don’t like gambling, really, and this was a personal thing.

I put a harpoon through the bastard pig from arsehole to breakfast-time, skewering it in mid-air.

It dropped down into the market, landing on a fruit stand. Its guts let go and the awful flow dissolved all the apples. There was a storm of swearing in Croatian, and then the retching started.

And, you know, this is as good as the next month or so got.

After aeons drifting hopelessly lost in the space/time continuum, Doctor Who is finally coming back to Earth. In a move that heralds the most eagerly anticipated comeback in television history, BBC1 said that it is developing a new series of the sci-fi classic

Hasbro has released high-resolution, printable PDFs of Monopoly money. Great stuff, especially if you keep losing the stuff or are playing a Cheapass Game that needs currency tokens

For those who are interested, I have a drum n bass DJ gig on soon. It’s at Utopia EMF (my slot is Saturday 2pm in the Throwdown arena). Watch me ruin the mood of a lazy Saturday arvo with some fast rollers.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Jamie Zawinski has written a perl script to convert blocks of normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are scrambled, to prove the point that legibility is only marginally affected by altering spelling of words, provided that first and last letters are left intact.

VOA Special English is a simplified English language used by Voice of America in propaganda broadcasts into foreign territory. The news is read slowly and using a limited wordlist of about 1500 words. Charles Kay Ogden recommended radio news be given in Basic English with the appropriate Basic special radio vocabulary add-on. VOA Special English, although intended for telling news around the world, has the additional benefit of allowing English to be learned and for pronunciation to be polished.