Clumsy Westerners Need Not Apply

"Nintendo surprised many by unveiling a new version of its best- selling GameBoy, called the GameBoy Micro, due to go on sale in the autumn.
The tiny game player is just slightly bigger than an iPod Mini, but two-thirds the weight."

Good to see that Nintendo are going for the hitherto-ignored market of video games for really tiny people...

The new X-Brick is even uglier than its predecessor, and has the wrong name (wouldn't "Next-Box" have been much better than the surreal "X-Box360"?), and I'm undecided about the look of Sony's new machine, but it promises to be backwards compatible with both previous incarnations of the hardware, and that's enough to sell me on it.

To Badly Go...

Enterprise got an absolutely wonderful series finale tonight, a poignant episode that really got to the heart of what the show was about. Excellent stuff.

Except it wasn't the real season finale, because that was the episode they tacked on afterwards, which sidelined the regular cast in favour of guest appearances by some of the Next Generation cast members. It says volumes that the best bit of the entire episode was the Picard voiceover clipped from the Next Generation opening titles. Tsk.

I think that one of the reasons why Star Trek has the reputation it does is because for every absolutely stonking episode, you get three or four terrible stinkers. Conceptually, it's never been a bad idea (even the abysmal Voyager had a great premise), but the execution is so embarrassingly erratic.

So it's farewell to Enterprise, a programme that didn't start off too well, but delivered two quite strong final seasons that were among the best the franchise has ever produced.

Jan Ken Pon!

So you've got eleven million quid in paintings you want to offload, and both Christie's and Sotheby's want the job of selling them. How do you decide which prestigious auction house to choose?

Keeping Clean Since 1935

DC Comics, the home of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, has acquired a new logo, for the first time in thirty years.

Sadly, rather than saying "exciting superhero stories within", it really says something more like "24-hour cavity protection" or "keeps clothes clean and colours bright":



Expect an ad campaign involving Danny Baker going door-to-door threatening housewives with copies of Superman in Action Comics...

Do not attempt. Again.

So there's this advert for some generic car in which it's being driven along some country road somewhere. It's not being driven particularly fast, and there are no obstacles in the way or flashy stunts being attempted.

And yet, there it is, at the bottom of the screen:

"Professional driver. Do not attempt."

Do not attempt what? To drive your car along a road? What would be the point of buying the sodding thing then?

Cretins.

Speaking of which, the election went pretty much as I'd expected, with Labour taking a pretty big hit over Iraq. I hope that this warning shot will wake Labour's leadership up a bit to just how much they're letting people down. Brown and Blair do seem to at least acknowledge the fact that some of their recent policies haven't been too popular, which is progress of a sort from Blair's creepy and arrogant attitude of the past year or so. Great fun was had following the events on US telly, too, especially the many and varied attempts made by the news programmes to explain some of the alien (to Americans) concepts involved. Three parties? How does that work then?

That's The Spirit!

Gah! For the past couple of weeks, I've been struggling with drawing a strip for Sunny For Girls #2. It's been a right pain in the arse, but I got there in the end, and it doesn't look too bad either. I've also learned a few new tricks that I can apply to other work, such as the still-unfinished O Men Anthology piece, so all in all, while it's been a hassle, it's been worth it.

I can't rest though, as there's an ever-increasing list of projects to deal with!

Wasn't she in Leprechaun?

New game: pick any non scifi/fantasy/horror film and spot all the cast members who have appeared in scifi/fantasy/horror films. For example, bland smugfest Bridget Jones' Diary features the evil scientist from the new Battlestar Galactica, the lead from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4, Pussy Galore (you may want to appeal to an impartial observer regarding the validity of Bond movies-I'd count them), the Eleventh Doctor (one of many scifi appearances from this actor), a landowner seduced by a snake cult, and the bloke who looked after the Rancor in Return Of The Jedi.

The more embarrassing and/or obscure the scifi/fantasy/horror appearance, the better.

Wanted: Mr Tibbles - Dead Or Alive

Since they discovered that killing Hmong immigrants tends to lead to thorny civil rights issues, Wisconsin hunters have decided to set their sights (literally) on another target, and are applying for permission to allow hunting of stray cats. That permission has already been granted in Minnesota.

I'm not a cat person, but really, are these people so obsessed with killing stuff that they have to go after household pets?

Do Not Attempt.

America has no legal system. Instead of actual laws and punishments, everything seems to be about money. You don't prosecute, you sue. As such, adverts are full of disclaimers, especially ones for cars (and there are a lot of car adverts on telly here). I even saw one which featured someone daydreaming about his car being able to fly, with the not-a-hint-of-irony disclaimer:

Car does not actually fly.

So I'm quite surprised at a recent Jeep advert. Normally, these things show the vehicle of choice sliding about through gravel and mud, pulling handbrake turns and the like. Risky manoeuvres, certainly, but nothing over the top. Nonetheless, there's the ever-present disclaimer:

Closed course. Trained driver. Do not attempt.

Now, in order to tie in with the new Sahara movie, there's one of those half-advert-half-trailer thingies out. It features a Jeep sliding about in gravel and sand, and launching off of the top of sand dunes. It also features the occupants firing heavy automatic weapons at pursuing helicopters and lobbing hand grenades at other vehicles.

Not a peep.

So, apparently it's a big no-no to be driving a four-wheel drive off road vehicle through some deep mud, but using it in dangerous paramilitary operations is fine and dandy.

Still, I suppose the kind of person who'd be using their Jeep as a mobile weapons platform wouldn't be suing the manufacturers because the cupholders snap off at high speeds.

Cacophony

I know that iTunes does it, but I'm not sure I want to get involved with all that business unless I have a Mac and/or iPod, so is there any other way to standardise the volume of all the mp3s on my hard drive? I'm getting a tad miffed with having to interrupt what I'm doing to adjust the volume every other song.

In completely unrelated news, I notice that the Darth Sidious action figure also gives away the twist in Revenge Of The Sith. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given that the soundtrack album to The Phantom Menace, which came out over a month before the film, had "The Funeral Of Qui-Gon Jinn" on the tracklisting...