‘How Bruce Lee died’ discourse was very much a thing when I was about 11 years old. The prevailing gossip among my peer group was (no word of a lie ) that ‘he got a headache for the first time ever and he took an aspirin for it, but he was so healthy that it made his brain explode’.

I don’t think what we get in the two big character beats this week is ‘new information’ in terms of the sort of plottiness we’ve come to expect from Star Wars, but it’s apparent this show is aiming a bit higher than that. From the different ways Vel and Mon talk about ‘the old ways’ we learn that Vel is to some extent…

I had the same thought! There’s this one line in the first episode which I thought was just a neat bit of worldbuilding where Cassian asks B2EMO to lie to Maarwa for him and mentions that he knows it will be a drain on the droid’s power. Now I’m wondering if the little guy’s apparent grief, while heartbreaking, is a…

I’ve loved Hugo Blick since The Shadow Line, and it always amazes me that he finds a niche to do what he does.

Alan Moore thinks it is, and he is entitled to think so since it is a piece of subjective rhetoric, not a statement of fact.

Who is telling, or even asking, you to feel bad about that or anything else?

I don’t think anybody said you ‘had to be a part of it’. I’m not even clear what ‘being a part of it’ means in relation to something someone said in an interview. What exactly is it you imagine people are feeling they have to do in relation to Alan Moore’s opinions that you are helpfully telling them that they do not,…

In the minds of the people at whom this channel is aimed, it’s absolutely 1998.

I think the main source of Idle’s reputation is that he’s the one who has been the most obviously venal about exploiting the Python legacy for cash. But he was the one who had the closest thing to a working class background out of all of them, so it’s entirely exusable.

Generally coming out of the mouths of their ‘comedy working class’ characters, thus adding another layer of ‘ehhhh...’ to the process.

Pretty sure I ended up watching a couple of his management training videos.

So just to desensationalize this a bit - I’m sure (now that Andrew Neill is no longer their respectability cover) GB News would like to imagine that it’s a ‘British Fox News’, and everyone can see that this is what it’s trying to be, but it was an absolute joke of a station from its shambolic launch to its current…

I don’t really expect this to be anything other than the incoherent mess that the other two were, but at least the people coming back are playing their original roles, rather than completely different people who look exactly like them for reasons that nobody feels particularly motivated to try and explain.

This is a wierdly under-researched and thought through list.

Well technically there is neither East nor West because (and this is the most bizarre bit of lore), the Earth is supposed to be flat until the end of the second age when the Valar make it round as some sort of punishment.

As hindsight intensifies, the idea that ‘Blur vs. Oasis’ was, or could ever have been, a meaningful thing becomes ever more ridiculous. I hold no torch for Britpop, which coarsened pop culture (and culture in general) in the UK immeasurably, but the fact that it provided a pupa for Gorillaz redeems it somewhat.

Conan and Total Recall seem to suggest that there’s a background project explicitly dedicated to ensuring that whenever Arnold Schwarzenegger is used in the service of some gonzo pop-auteur’s lunatic vision, there’s a weak, focus-tested two hours of extruded blockbuster product with the same title which strips out all…

Man, those last two books are just...I tried to revisit them a bit ago to see if the reason I couldn’t get any kind of meaningful handle on what was supposed to be happening, let alone why is because I was younger and a less sophisticated reader but...no, no they’re just complete gibberish, aren’t they?

There’s a couple of wierd moments in the script where it definitely feels like it was written for someone other than Danny Glover in that respect. At various points (particularly during his first entrance) you get reaction shots and a certain kind of swell in the music which suggests that this reasonably healthy…

Well, having sort of leafed through the comics in no particular order at various points in life (so I’ve got a rough map of what it’s all about, a notion of the general vibe and a memory of some of the incidents but no particularly intense expectations of what happens when or how it’s going to look when it does), I…