another thing I meant to tell you

I keep meaning to link to (and strongly recommend) Benjamin Birdie's Genre City, but I always think I should wait until I have something intelligent to say about it. It's just very good. I mean: very, very good. In fact it's brilliant. Go read it. And say "yes" to online comics, kids.

I just love my...

As the junkmail is always telling me: it could be bigger, for her pleasure.



Actually, it'd be pretty scary if it was any bigger. It's not so much my brain that looks big, more my head...

my texture is the best fur

After a stressful week, building up to a minor panic attack last night, suddenly everything's looking sunny again. It's payday, and a quiet day in the office to boot. I have slightly more money than I thought to last me the month, and the bills are suddenly looking a tiny bit more manageable. I now own the Beyoncé album, and I'll be seeing Red tonight, who as ever will light up my life, be the wind beneath my wings, blah blah vomitcakes. Plus tomorrow evening I'll be heading down to Right-On where I should find waiting for me the first print version of the Jenny Everywhere stories Nelson and I have done to date. And then I may have to talk it up / explain myself to some hipsters - which is enough to make me wish I'd left out a Smallville gag or two, but what the hell.

I'm really interested in hearing the new Liz Phair album, because it seems as though the debate that's going on around this record encompasses several of my current chief obsessions... Thing is, I already know which side of the argument I think I'm on, which makes me predisposed to like the album even if I, er, don't. Although actually, even if I don't end up liking most of the album myself, I'd still argue that a lot of the criticisms of it and Phair that I've seen and foreseen are nonsense. But let's wait and see/hear...

Check out the latest morsels of genius from Nelson Evergreen: the new adventures of Mark E. Moon & The Gazelle Street Mob. In particular, make sure you click on the top 'Sequence' link for 'Situation / Solution', in which the man like Evergreen displays a quite frankly worrying talent for words and narrative. It's enough to make a humble scribbler feel obsolete. The N. Evergreen Partial Lobotomy Fund is now open: a painless operation would leave him able to draw and paint pretty colourful shapes, but unable to grasp language unless conveyed in the form of instructions beginning "Page 1, panel 1...", and so on.

I think I have the financial equivalent of a binge-based eating disorder: in comes all the money, yum yum yum. Then out it goes again, in a horrible splurge. Gah.

The kingdom of heaven promised us certain things: it promised us happiness and a sense of purpose and a sense of having a place in the universe, of having a role and a destiny that were noble and splendid; and so we were connected to things. We were not alienated. But now that, for me anyway, the King is dead, I find that I still need these things that heaven promised, and I’m not willing to live without them.

Excellent interview with Philip Pullman, author and apostate. Worth reading in full, because the interviewer actually tussles with his subject in an intellectually rewarding way: in the course of this, Pullman says lots of things I agree with, and a fair few things I don't. I would comment more, but it's a Monday and my brain isn't working. Via Jack.