In which a fellow misanthrope sums up why MySpace gives me the Fear.I like the comment someone made, that MySpace is Geo(sh)cities 7 years on. Because the layout of a typical MySpace page is pretty abysmal: it doesn't work particularly well in Firefox (admittedly this is one of my pet Intarweb peeves: there are only two widely-used browsers and c' ( Read more... )

"This reality-inversion, this contemporary blindness to the obvious institutional cause of Turner's rebellion is almost a verbatim description used by most commentators to describe Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's murder spree at Columbine High School, in which fifteen were killed and twenty-three injured, as well as nearly every rage massacre ( Read more... )

England's been cricket-crazy these past couple o' weeks due to the Ashes thingamyjig. Which, as a Scotsman, has left me rooting for the Ozzies, naturally. I say this because it's expected of me, as an ethnic minority in this fair and sceptred isle, that it is apparently my hereditary duty to root against the English despite the fact I have no sense ( Read more... )

"Back on June 30th, 1908, it appears that a huge meteorite fell down in an evergreen forest near Tunguska, in central Russia. The site has been an area of active interest for scientists, ever since; they go there trying to decide the nature of the object, and to locate what's left of it - if anything. If it was a chunk of ice - probably a comet - ( Read more... )

So far my evening has consisted of drink and knife throwing.

Fuck this, it now seems rail travel is barred to me as well. Is no mode of transport sacred?

One of many amusing passages in Memoirs of the Forties describes how Julian McLaren Ross and his sometime friend Peter Brooke (Anthony Carson) collaborated briefly on a surreal Chestertonian thriller, "The Monastery of Information", which Brooke had sketched out: "The basic elements included an astrally projected Tibetan lamasery, controlled from ( Read more... )

My face seems permanently fixed in this rictus snarl grin which I have to smear at the edges to make it more palatable. My mind is on a permanent vacation at the moment, but it's more a case of the shit that's been annoying me has ceased to matter and letting go is easier when you don't try so hard to well, let go. I'll be back to my little ray of ( Read more... )

I fuck him slowly as he lies with a knife in his back. The handle scrapes against my chest, shiny wood married to Sabatier steel, prodding my muscles painfully as I move in him, and he's still conscious but not really aware of what's happening to him, and that's okay. There's a small well of open flesh clasping like a mouth around the blade as it ( Read more... )

They announced the result of the Turner Prize on telly; Grayson Perry won. I was quite taken with his acceptance speech, complete with apropos Philip Larkin quote which unfortunately couldn't be uttered since it was pre-watershed ( Read more... )

There's a poem by Ruthven Todd, about a dead soldier, and has lines which run:

This sorry, stained and
crumpled rag was lately
A man whose life was
made of little things that mattered.I've been thinking lately of the little things that matter to me, and what their absence would mean. The trouble is sometimes everything seems very momentous, ( Read more... )