What I should be doing:

- Preparing for my next piece of coursework

- Contemplating ways to get rid of the roiling headache that's moved across my temples today, threatening to turn my frontal lobes into scrambled egges, that don't involve trepanning

- Alternatively, trepanning

- Dancing barefoot on the grass to celebrate the recent submission of a large, torturous and downright annoying previous piece of coursework

- Finally plucking up the courage to sign up to some form of online dating website

- Push-ups

- Writing the first Great British Mecha novel

What I am actually doing:

- Using stumbleupon way too much

- Impulse buying t-shirts from Red Hand Media having used stumbleupon way too much

- Also, impulse buying Young Frankenstein - because, well, £4.99!

- Blogging, especially as I maintain my nihilistic stance about how many people who aren't related to me in some way read this

In all seriousness, though, the submission of a piece of work such as the one I sent off to be marked yesterday should yield a time of happiness, involving dancing, increased rainfall, and generalised celebration.

Upon the postman's taking of The Envelope, the heavens should have parted to reveal sunlight with a plangent quality, and there should really have been puppies, or kittens, somewhere. But no, the world goes on. That project took a lot of work, too, godsdamnit, involving liasing with actual people rather than just dusty researching and essay writing. There was interaction. And yet this morning I work up and had a tension headache like never before, after the event.

I was not amused. Today's day at work was spent mostly alternating between not talking very much and starting at the spreadsheet that threatens to consume my very living soul should I have to work on it for much longer. It's like snow-blindness, except that I doubt the Inuit peoples have a lot of different words for 'soulsucking spreadsheet'.

And so, while stumbling upon, I was given to think "sod it", and treated myself to a couple of random t-shirts and a Marty Feldman DVD. Yes, I would truly suck as the manager of a reward scheme for the sheer randomness I bring, but, fortunately, I manage no such thing, and thus consistency is assured.

It's been a long week, in case you were wondering, and it's only Thursday. If I can get through tomorrow without incident I will be beaucoup joyeux.

Sometimes, I wonder why I thought it was a good idea to combine postgraduate study with full time employment. Then I remember; part of me is a masochist. Well, no, that's not the real reason, but it'll do in a pinch. Trust me, I'm an improviser.

I also find myself waiting for the release of the official trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, because the bootleg trailer I've seen was good enough already. It was fun to watch simply for the audience reaction; especially given the whoopin' and a-hollerin' when Gambit was seen on screen. I even think there was a brief shot of Deadpool, which is mainly why I want to see the trailer for reals rather than the oh noes bootleg verson, which has caused my vocabulary to be infected by netspeak.

But enough of this frippery. -

Just briefly; my phonomancy may be weak and rooted in early neo-century dance music, but, still;

Phonogram's coming back! Go here to see the above image in a not-badly-resized format, if their website's working.

I still haven't found the time to see The Dark Knight, which is obviously a failing on my part that requires correction, especially as every single person I've talked to bar one seems to have seen it, loved it and wanted it's slightly gothic emo children.

Other than that, I've been catching up with the most recent Walter Mosley books. These are a little bit of a shot in the dark when it comes to Britain; if you're going to buy them, you have to keep an eye out for the UK release and then either stumble across them in bookshops or do the universal online ordering thing, and I'm not as organised right now as to manage to both track book releases and tag them to online ordering, so in my case, there's a lot of stumbling.

So I was in luck when, on my travels over the weekend, I found a bookshop with both the new Easy Rawlins and the new - to me - Paris Minton books, the latter in paperback and the former in hardback.

However, having finished the latter book, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm increasingly guilty of exoticisation, although not necessarily in it's worst form.

Regular readers - Hi! How's life? Good? Great! - will have picked up on the fact that I'm a bit of a japanophile. Stopping just short of being an otaku, although teetering dangerously across the line, and if I don't start dating again some time soon, probably over the line. Fortunately, I have a long way to go before becoming a hikikomori, especially since I know the signs thanks to Welcome to the NHK. Although...

... Anyway. I grew up, as so many do, in a small town. I've covered my burgeoning liking of comics in a previous post, but my true love, all these years, has been books. I even managed to work in a small book shop for a while as a teenager, which was much like giving sugar to a hyperactive child, and as such I managed to inexplicably - i.e. I can't remember and have no idea - annoy the management structure. But such is life. I've since managed to annoy much worthier people in this life, so why worry?

But in my time as a weekend retail assistant - oh the glamour - I got to see what sold, and what people went for, and how little science fiction sells in a small town. And, in some ways, I got to see the books that didn't quite fit, somehow - they found their way to under a specific section, but somehow had something about them that made them stand out, to me, at least.

And thus began my thus-far lifelong enjoyment of Kinky Friedman and Walter Mosley, beginning, respectively, with Spanking Watson and Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. This was a torrid enjoyment, though, marked by only seeing Friedman and Mosley's books in random places or at bigger bookstores, or, on occasion, in charity book shops.

But now I come to read Blonde Faith, having read a lot of Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels, I'm beginning to wonder if the reason I read them is the setting, rather than the characters, and I wonder if I'm guilty of exoticisation, because, unless time and space take a decidedly weird turn, I'm never going to (a) live in the fifties, (b) in America, or (c) be black, and I'm wondering if my vicarious enjoyment of Mosley's depictions of these concepts is somehow something I should feel, in some way, guilty about.

I get the feeling that this is a remnant of the deservedly righteous guilt that white people still feel for slavery. That someone with my skin colour oppressed someone with a different skin colour for hundreds of years, even if my only relation to them is in my pigmentation, is something that I can't bring myself to discuss in total depth here right now, because it's a charged discussion to be having and I've been typing all day. I hope my thoughts don't come across as loaded language in any way, but Mosley's novels are from the point of view of a black person in America in the fifties, which is a decidedly horrible place, one that I can't even begin to understand - and I hope my attempts at empathising aren't misguided.

Anyway, I love reading Mosley's work. I hope I always will. I just worry that I'm worrying too much, somehow, and that the only person who worries about an issue like this is me.

Finally, relatively recently, the price of the first season of Torchwood dropped to a point wherein it was worth paying for. Of course, 'worth paying for' is a moveable feast, and your mileage may vary.

I was lucky enough to catch most of the episodes on BBC2 when they were first aired, and at the time, it was fresh, new, and interesting. Torchwood seemed to be cleverly done, with good new concepts brought to the already existing Whoniverse.

And, watching them week by week - or back to back on BBC3 - meant that the episodes were necessarily spaced out, meaning that, although they had their own internal continuity, by the time the next episode appeared you'd had enough time to process, file and forget the previous one.

However, having watched most of the episodes over this weekend, I have come to an inescapable conclusion.

Torchwood suck at their jobs.

Seriously. It's not even in a funny way. I have had trouble finding a single situation over the first season where Torchwood have made the situation in any way better by their presence. And so, reader - because, to be fair, there's only likely to be one or two of you - I present the combined Torchwood Fatality Index and Darkness Counter.

Episode 1

Deaths: Stabbing Victim, Hospital Porter, at least two previous stabbing victims, and two members of the Torchwood Team - one suicide, one murder. Very very dark, especially emphasising the corruption of team members through misuse of artifacts. Torchwood help in no way - in fact, it's one of their own who's been on a murder spree.

Episode 2

Deaths: Six or seven - at least - Deaths by Sexing. Seriously. If Joss Whedon advanced the equation in Buffy and Angel that sex = bad, this is the equivalent of that formula squared. None of these deaths would have happened had Gwen been given rudimentary training in Not Throwing Chisels at Colleagues. Torchwood only, in fact, manage to solve the problem because Captain Jack is just so chock full of energy.

Episode 3

A relatively death-lite episode, but, still, Torchwood manage to cause an accidental murder by Gwen - a fully trained Police Officer - not being able to (A)Put a knife out of harm's reach and ( Hold a knife so that someone rushing towards her won't impale themselves on it.

Episode 4

But don't worry, they're back on form for this; two deaths, both of which were caused by Ianto's inability to mention to everyone that he has a potentially planet-threatening machine in the basement wired up to his cyberwoman girlfriend, who loves him, and killing, in apparently equal measure. Along with impromptu brain surgery. Ianto also swears to let Jack die if he has the opportunity to save him, which is odd considering not three episodes later he and Jack are having Stopwatch Sex Shenanigans.

Episode 5

Deaths: a mixed grab-bag involving a paedophile, a fairy expert, and a stepfather, culminating in a mother losing both her fiancée and her only child on the same day to fairies from the dawn of time. Torchwood don't, in any way, help, and Jack spends most of the episode being cryptic and having flashbacks to another time in his life where everybody around him ends up inexplicably dead. Viewers may begin to see a pattern emerging.

Episode 6

Don't even start on this one; before the episode begins, Torchwood note that 17 people have gone missing in the same area, which tells us that Torchwood will only turn up after at least 16 people have disappeared, not before. Death abounds; in the opening section, a woman is killed for forgetting to take her car keys with her when she investigates what looks like a body in the road. This is contagious; Owen forgets to remove the keys from the SUV filled chock-full with expensive equipment, but not before the team discover a skinned corpse. Which was only, apparently, a diversion to steal the car. Quite an extreme diversion, really, but hey, who are we to judge?

Gwen gets shot but - crucially - can still operate; there's another skinned corpse in the row of houses in the middle of nowhere that they investigate; Toshiko and Ianto discover a fridge full of body parts, and are then led to a room with human corpses hanging, ready to be butchered; Gwen manages to screw up a Mexican Standoff, previously thought an impossibility; And Jack saves them all by shooting randomly in the most Darkplace-esque moment I think I've seen, before he and Gwen settle down to interrogate the main cannibal, who looks disturbingly like Frank Kelly, leading to the moment when, as he leans forward to tell Gwen why he does the whole Eating People thing, I was half-expecting him to say "DRINK! FECK! ARSE! GIRLS!"

Which might have been an improvement. Torchwood don't actually help at any point, they simply serve to get the horrible cannibals who've been doing what they do every ten years for god knows how long into police custody. Because that'll work.

Episode 7

A tricky one, this; the death at the beginning is not, strictly speaking, anything to do with Torchwood. However, Tosh discovers her inner lesbian, much to the delight of fanboys everywhere, and Jack, lacking any particular inspiration, then sends Toshiko's new girlfriend to the middle of the sun, as she turns out to be an exiled alien criminal. For once, none of this is actually Torchwood's fault, but at the same time, most of the team are too busy flirting to be of any use whatsoever.

Episode 8

Another slight anomaly; a serial killer is killing victims - three, to be precise, so far - because of Torchwood, but they don't know why. So, naturally, they decide to bring back the team member who killed herself in episode 1, because this is the logical course of action. Except that Gwen manages to develop the ability to use something she's never used before to such a degree that she begins to die so that Suzie can live. In the end, Suzie dies again, which certainly has novelty value, and the serial killer locked in the cell in the basement is never. mentioned. again. Also, the team are saved by Emily Dickinson.

An otherwise impressive, sinister, dark episode is derailed in the last few minutes by Ianto apparently having forgiven Jack over the course of the past four episodes for killing the only woman he loved to the degree that he now wants to have The Sex with Jack, to the beat of a stopwatch.

Episode 9

One death, largely because nobody in Torchwood would pay attention to Eugene, and wacky hi-jinks ensue. However, Eugene, who has been invisible and incorporeal throughout the episode, overcomes these difficulties for around two minutes to save Gwen; just long enough so that every single person at his wake can see him standing, seemingly alive, before he disappears in a flash of light. Yet, not surprisingly, this isn't commented on.

Episode 10

Three time-tossed refugees end up in 2007. The trauma of this causes one to kill himself, one goes to London and is never heard of again, and one is so in love with Owen that she decides to leave him forever by flying back into the rift. So, one death - technically two, though, as Captain Jack has a fetish for dying and coming back. It's his thing.

Episode 11

One man dies because he commits Suicide by Weevil, and his body is dumped in a warehouse; Owen poses as a Jellied Eels salesman and meets an estate agent who's also, co-incidentally, Tyler Durden; and Gwen trys to get her boyfriend to forgive her having an affair, before using an amnesia pill to make him forget she had said anything. Owen then attempts to also commit Suicide by Weevil, but is saved, before Tyler manages to do so because Captain Jack seems to think it's easier to let him kill himself than for Torchwood to arrest him. Morality's great, huh, kids?
Owen is now so brutal and manly that he can make Weevils back down by hissing at them and baring his teeth, which may come in handy at parties.

Episode 12

Torchwood are separated across 67 years, and a very dapper time-traveller manages to trick them into doing exactly what he wants just by being very dapper. If it seems like nobody's dying this episode, it's because they're saving it up for the next episode,

Episode 13

People start to realise that Owen opening the rift in the previous episode may have caused lots of problems, largely because it has. Lots of people succumb to the Black Death, but are saved, fortunately. The dapper man from the previous episodes stabs Gwen's boyfriend because he can, killing him; Owen later shoots Captain Jack dead because of an inferiority complex; their actions release Abaddon, who kills lots of people just because they're in his deadly shadow. Jack then - having risen again from the dead - kills Abaddon because, as in episode 2, he's just chock-full of life. Except he's not, any more. Oh wait! He is. Lucky, that. And instead of waiting and explaining, Jack hears the Tardis, and runs off like a giddy schoolgirl.

*

Don't get me wrong. I like Torchwood. It's just very very dark, grim television, and almost every single episode involves deaths caused by, or indirectly involved with, Torchwood. They're just, in the end, not very good at their jobs, because, in the end, who can be trained to do what they do? But, at the same time, when an agency's nominal tagline ends up as "Torchwood: If you're lucky, they won't make it worse", what more can you expect?

Today is a bit of a weird news day. Occasionally, there's a strange fallow period between the aggregated scares that the world has become party to, whether it be terror, petrol prices, global disease, house prices falling, blah, blah, blah, fishcakes, there's always supposed to be one thing at a time to let us concentrate on being afraid, annoyed, or indifferent about.

But today seems to have an accretion of strange little news stories that build up to a whole bunch of weirdness.

For instance, this. Very strange. Imagine you're the poor victim; you're traveling along, waiting for the journey to end, and suddenly you have no fucking head.

I mean, what?

"He calmly walks up to the front [of the bus] with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," Mr Caton said.

"There was no rage in him ... It was just like he was a robot or something," he added.

And, yes, the Terminator jokes have already started over on B3ta. But then, it never takes them particularly long to angle these things.

Once you reach a certain age, the creeping realisation hits that no, you're not immortal, and that life is random and difficult, and if you don't like it, tough. But news stories like this - involving, for example, extremem violence apparently coming out of nowhere, without a motive or a reason, are the oddest things when they break every now and then.

Yes, psychopaths exist. People are, or become, damaged, and there's not a hell of a lot that can be done about it. But brutal, random acts of savagery are - or at least should be - what distinguish us from animals, or at least our self-enforced moral codes should be what keep people from... I don't know where I'm going with this. At the end of it all, civilisation is only ever around two to three layers deep.

It's been a long week, and this relatively minor news story has caught my wandering attention span.

Then you have this; eight years in prison for a wrongful conviction. Granted, it's somewhat better than the death penalty, but still; Viz were making jokes about this when it first happened, and now it turns out that they were right. Strange times indeed, when Viz turn out to be the correct party.

And, seriously, what is it with the decapitations? And the shootings?

Some days the news just makes you want to curl up under the duvet and give up until, through your inaction, the world becomes a better place. But I've tried that, and it's not worked.

Yet.

No harm in trying, though.

I find deep joy in odd combinations. For instance, I have voiced my love of a certain Space Western here, and elsewhere, at length. (I've bought the box set for three different people so far, which is a good thing.

But, recently, I've been getting into music. Now, music doesn't tend to do genre crossover much, or at least it doesn't tend to do it well. So, having heard of J-Pop before, I was cheered to find out the existence of J-Ska. This concept intrigues me, and thus the eponymous CD by the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra is now merrily winging itself to me, all the way from, well, yes, Japan. I may be disappointed, in the end, but the anticipation's so worthwhile that I refuse to check them out online, lest I hear some of their work before receiving the CD itself.

Or, yes, this could be laziness.

Worryingly, my creative side has re-emerged, and convinced me to work on some old clothes to make them useful again. And so, taking a denim jacket that originally cost me £5, I am now attempting to make it look less ratty, and old, and refurbishing it. However, so far, the refurbishments have cost £15 (dye, velcro, patches); and so I will have spent 150% on the improvements compared to the original outlay.

So, yes, it had better look good once I'm done with it.

This re-emergence of a creative impulse intrigues me, though, simply because it's normally blocked by something I've never been able to shift. My personal best is writing 3/4 of a book before the gates came tumbling down, leaving me in the non-creative tundra. And nobody, let's face it, wants to be in the tundra if they can avoid it...

I love Dr. Who. Not in that way, no, and not in a particularly geeky way; it's just fun, something that doesn't get much of a look-in on television these days. Plus, it's cross-genre, cross-audience television.

However, I'd like to take a few minutes to get cynical about Saturday's episode. I'll try and reign in the cynicism, but still, you may wish to find your anti-sillyness goggles.

*

Last Week: Shit got real, yo! Dr. 10, he got zapped!
And then there was regeneration, followed by a great deal of speculation on the part of the fan community.

This week:

Doctor: Oh no! I'm regenerating! This is a catastrophe which can only be averted by the usage of a slightly strange plot device forshadowed in previous episodes by an odd bubbling sound! Right now, I could use a hand - lucky I didn't leave that in the Torchwood Hub, or I'd have been pretty boned...

The Doctor directs his regeneration energy into his severed hand. Thousands of fans across Britain - nay, the World - experience mild shock at this strange twist, then simultaneously get over it.

The Tardis is captured by the Daleks. It's shields gone, it is now merely a wooden box - but a wooden box with Catherine Tate stuck inside it. Hell hath no fury like unto this, especially when it gets dumped in the Dalek equivalent of the garbage disposal. Suddenly, Catherine Tate can't get the chorus of " Reach Out" out of her head. She does, and there is a new Doctor, all shiny, and, as she points out, naked. He finds one of his brother's hand-me-down suits, and they contemplate their problems.

Meanwhile, in the Torchwood Hub

Gwen: Wait a minute. What's this barrier?
Ianto: Oh, it's a hasty plot device designed to keep us alive until the new series of Torchwood.
Gwen: Fair enough. Fancy a hand of canasta?

London:

Sarah Jane Smith: Oh noes! I'm about to die! And I forgot to let K-9 out for his walk!
Mickey Smith: Remember me? [kills dalek]
Jackie Tyler: Why am I here again?
Sarah Jane Smith: Never mind. If we surrender to the killing machines, they'll let us in their command ship. I know scary; I've hung around Tom Baker.

Germany
Martha Jones: Good, I'm in Germany. Oh look! An overbearing old German woman! I'll have an impenetrable conversation and be threatened by her.

Dalek Crucible
Doctor 1: Oh look! It's Davros. Long time, D-to-the-ross.

Davros: Silence your prattling, and fear my spiky metal hand. Oh, and my bomb that will destroy everything in reality except the daleks. Powered by planets that will then, somehow, have to destroy themselves, because if our own weapon destroys it's own power source then that'd be a bit silly, wouldn't it?

Doctor 1: Yes. Yes it would. Oh no! We're trapped. Again.

Transmission
Martha Jones: Listen, Daleks! You know that ominous maguffin we teased mercilessly in the last episode? Well, it's a giant bomb. Or, at least, lots of bombs that will fuck the earth right up and proper. What do you say to that?

Transmission also
Captain Jack: Hi there! You see this bling? This can blow up your entire ship. Possibly even this entire galaxy.

Martha Jones: I thought upstaging someone with the ability to blow up the entire earth was difficult, but trust Captain Jack to find a bloody way.

[All of them are teleported to the main room.]

Collectively: Oh no! Why didn't we assume that an enemy with the power to shift entire planets into a new galaxy and arrange them as parts of an engine wouldn't be able to teleport five people, four of whom were on their own ship? For now, we are undone!

Davros: Doctor, I mock your pacifism, but applaud your work ethic in getting other people to do your killing for you. Kudos on your time management. And now, I'm going to destroy everything, because I can.

[Tardis appears]

Doctor 2: Oh no you're not! I have an antenna on a stick! [runs] [is shot]

Donna: No! Now I alone bear the burden of saving the universe! [is shot]

[In the background, Donna has a Flowers for Algernon Moment.
She disables the Daleks, and her and Doctor 1 and 2 return the planets to their previous positions in space, and, hopefully, time.]

Davros: Dalek Caan! You've forseen everything - why didn't you forsee this?

Dalek Caan: Well, y'know. I was busy being mad, really. I went to the trouble of rescuing you and allowing you to clone hundreds of thousands of daleks from your own cells just so that we could all be destroyed, because we're too destructive. Why I didn't just leave you behind, I'll never know. But then we might not have had a plot, so let's just walk away from that point.

Supreme Dalek: It's my party, and I'll destroy the console allowing you to replace the earth in the right position if I want to.

[Doctor 2 get his genocide going on an epic level.]

Davros: Oh no! Fire! And falling girders, the natural enemy of the dalek race!

Doctor 1: Let me save you from the falling girders!

Davros: No! I curse you and name you Robert Oppenheimer! You haven't seen the last of meeeeeeeeee... Unless you have, in which case, I leave you my collection of Dalek Porn.

Doctor 1: Fair enough. Right. We need to tow the earth back manually, conveniently ignoring gravity, rotational shift and, frankly, all the laws of physics - and we can, because we've got a giant lassoo made out of Welsh Pixie Dust and held together by a recalcitrant schoolteacher of a supercomputer. Has anyone got any Enya? If we're going to tow the earth back, with all of us except Jackie getting to do something, we really need some Enya. No? Bollocks.

[Earth is saved. Yay!]

Doctor 1: Goodbye companions!
Captain Jack: I'm going to Wales, and I'm taking Martha with me.
Mickey: I'm coming too!
Captain Jack: Oh great, perma-sidekick.

[Ping! Alternate Universe Time]
Doctor 1: Rose, I'm leaving you with my confused, human, genocidal clone, but on the bright side he's able to say he loves you when I can't bring myself to.

Doctor 2: It's true, I can. Watch! [he whispers in her ear. They passionately kiss.]

Doctor 1: Where's Captain Jack to make three-way jokes when we need him? Oh, right, he already did that earlier. When even he didn't want to hug Catherine Tate, until she made him.

[Doctor 1 leaves.]

[Back in the Tardis, Donna starts to have a 'moment'. For some reason, a Human Time Lord makes perfect sense - a human body with all the knowledge of a time lord, that's fine - but a half-human, half-time lord isn't allowed. In much the same way as the Doctor had to remove excess Tardis energy from Rose, he removes Time Lord energy from Donna, meaning she now no longer remembers All The Amazing Adventures, rendering the majority of the series slightly pointless.

Although, given Who and Torchwood's tendency of - let's be charitable here - re-imagining Buffy and Angel storylines, I'm a little confused as to why the Doctor didn't just find a way of altering her biology to make Donna Half-Demon - sorry, I meant Half-Time-Lord, Half Human, rather than retconning her completely.]

Suddenly, there is a Cribbins Moment.

Cribbins: Let's be honest, my five minutes owns this entire episode.

THE END.

CHRISTMAS TIME SPECIAL! The Cybermen Return! Again! Just this time, with David Morrissey, rather than Neil Morrissey - although "Cybermen Behaving Badly" might have been fun...

I am beginning to learn to love driving. For instance, on Saturday night, late, it was beautiful driving home with the sun still apparently in the sky somewhere; the gear changes were perfect, the traffic was negligible, and the fact that the radio wasn't working left me with some blesséd silence.

However, driving today was not so fun. I have a morbid fear of hill starts; this is because (A) I don't have that much practice (yet), ( I learnt in a forgiving diesel car and now drive an unforgiving petrol car (and, trust me, there's a whole whack of difference there) and (C) I'm, just, so, lucky.

For instance, there's nothing better for feeling like a cretin than being stuck in a dip underneath a railway bridge, having a mild panic because hill starts aren't working like I'd want them, with, for some reason, Loco in Acapulco blaring out the stereo, as someone at work kindly 'donated' some of their unused tape collection to me (and my first choice, "Me and my CB", wasn't working). Really, there isn't.

Still...

I saw The Incredible Hulk last night, and I have to say, it taught me a lot of new things that I previously wouldn't have realised;

(I) Don't give cockneys drugs, or, at least, don't give cockneys the super-soldier serum. It won't go well.

(II) You can get from Guatemala to Virginia in seventeen days, especially if you have no money whatsoever.

(III) Giving Stan Lee gamma-irradiated soda is not a setup for a sequel, unfortunately.

(IV) When all else fails, use REALLY BIG SPEAKERS if you need to fight something.

And, lastly but not least,

(V) You can solve all your problems using auto-erotic asphyxiation.

I don't think I'll apply the last lesson to real life, but it appears to be true; Banner's Hulk versus Roth's Abomination is a one-sided fight, in that it's a scientist who fears his inner Hulk versus a trained soldier who embraces it. Up until the point the Hulk puts out a fire by clapping, then chokes the Abomination with a length of chain with an extremely dodgy look of joy on his face. It's because he's winning, I know, but it just looked bizarrely sexual.

Oh, and also;

(VI) If you're a general that's just had a massive problem with two monsters beating the hell out of each other in Manhattan, and everything's gone wrong, drown your sorrows with, apparently, Galliano.

The Tony Stark cameo was pretty brilliant, however.

Still, why worry?

I was lucky enough to be bought a Soviet man-bag as a birthday present this year. Granted, I've been pioneering the man-bag trend for a long time now, mainly because I didn't realise they were in some way looked down on - but previously, they've been strictly messenger bags, so if anyone tried to accuse me of having a handbag - and therefore, in some way, being less of a man for it - I could claim I was a messenger and carrying important missives. A human carrier pigeon, if you will.

But this man-bag is deceptively bloody huge; it looks small on the outside, but it holds more than you could possibly conceive on the inside, and thus it has my respect. What it may not be able to contend with, however, is the sheer randomness of what's going to end up in there. For instance, let's take an inventory of what's in there today; perhaps this will open up a window into my psyche so that the ten or so people who read this regularly may understand me somewhat better, or, to be honest, probably not.

Today's inventory;

- A paperback copy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yiddish_Policemen%27s_Union>The Yiddish Policeman's Union, with a price label on the back for Season 1 Part 2 of Bleach on R2 DVD, peeled from a train window when on the way home one day proving at once both that other people in the world who take the same trains as me watch Bleach and that HMV heinously overprice their anime DVDs;

- A Centenary program for a theatre I've never been to;

- A payslip

- A role of grey duct tape

- A pair of scissors, used to cut the duct tape in an earlier repair job, to be returned to work tomorrow;

- A bank statement

- A Black and grey beanie hat

- A 1 3/4'' model of Frank Castle

- 9 analog cassete tapes; "Parklife" and "Modern Life is Rubbish" by Blur, "Birdhouse in your soul" (Single) by They Might be Giants, a head cleaning cassette, "One Day at a time: Tues 2nd Feb" by Father Francis, of the Franciscan Friary; "Scratch and Sniff" by Smith and Jones; "The Good Son" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds; "Love" by Aztec Camera; and The Best Of John Williams; all purchased for a legitimate reason, I'll have you know, and all for 50p a go.

- An Ipod connection cable.

- A Blue and White "Frangi" silk tie;

- Keys, Wallet and department-issue Shoyfer;

- Two ID cards, one for an office soon to be closed;

- and a bottle of "Motrin IB" pills from, of all places, New York

The question becomes, obviously; what does this say about me; or, more accurately, why worry?