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Today so far has been... ehhh, mostly useless. I couldn't paint this morning as I was waiting for Andy to turn up to pick up the boy's car for its MOT, (you know as soon as you're into the groove and doing something complex and attention-grabbing the doorbell will go and you'll be trapped downstairs for half an hour being polite and come back to a congealed pallette and no idea what you were trying to do) and in between that got whined at by JR for not pumping up the tyres on my car in a prompt enough fashion for his liking.
Then again he's been whining about that for weeks already, and refusing to do it for me because it's 'not his job'. Like I don't make meals for him when mum's not here even though that's 'not my job' either. It's called division of labour, so I thought. He refuses to set foot in the kitchen unless it's to swallow a tub or three of yoghurt and massacre some cheese onto an oatcake, you'd have thought in aid of not-starving when mother's away he'd be willing to pump up a couple of tyres but apparrently not.

Not that it made much difference in the end, he wound up doung half of it anyway cause I couldn't get the valve caps off. If he'd just done it himself in the first place it would have saved a 2-week battle of wills. (Why yes, I can be shockingly petty, how did you guess?)

MOT is due in a couple of weeks on my car too. Haven't even had a chance to take it off the driveway yet. (The tax disk only just came though. Took forever to get it changed from the previous owner's disabled class)
I fear I haven't driven in the better part of six months already, I'm not overly looking forward to starting again in a totally different car. Plus the indicator stalk is on the opposite side to every other car I've ever driven. This means I WILL be turning on the windscreen wipers instead of indicating on an annoyingly regular basis.




Unrelated to any of that, who the hell did I say I was going to send a Cadbury Flake to? It was either kristi510 ormfphila in one of those random discussions about ice cream, Mr Whippy and a 99-with-a-flake.
I know I said I would send one but I can't remember who I was sending it to.

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JR just asked me if there was a way to make the V+ box record a program that was on TV yesterday.

Uh... unless you have a time machine, try 'no'.

(It's on the BBCiplayer though, which will be entertaining to bamboozle him with, having never even quite got the hang of youtube either...)



Semi-relatedly to Tv-land, can someone please explain to me why the sky in 'Quatermass' is such a sickly shade of greenish yellow? I fear finding out the reasoning behind the colour-changing-sky may take more than the 3 minutes I just cruised through on ITV4.

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Mister Huu made my Yahoo front-page headlines.

Hugh Jackman, who plays the mutant Wolverine in the "X-Men" action movies, is pairing with Virgin Comics to create a comic book series called "Nowhere Man," Virgin said on Tuesday.
The series, a futuristic science-fiction odyssey set in an era when men have traded their privacy for safety and security, will be written by Jackman and Marc Guggenheim, who wrote Marvel comics' "Wolverine" series and "Amazing Spider-Man."



I'm... still not sure what I think of this (Other than to comment that that's a really unflattering photo they have attatched, that makes him look over 50 and grizzled). Guggenheim was not among my favourite Wolverine authors and his last contribution to the series was the same point where I bailed out, but that's really no indication of his ability to write an original character or story.
(Hugh's narrative capabilities are, at this time, an unknown quantity.)
I'm also doubly not sure what I think of the idea of writing a comic with the hope in mind that it'll be popular enough to make a movie out of later. It's a little... weird. Why not just make the movie? I don't quite get it. I mean write a comic because comics are cool and you have a good idea that you think will work, don't write a comic because you don't know if the idea is enough to capture the mind of a film audience. I guess it just bothers me a little that it sounds kind of cynical in the way it's being presented, like purpose-building a franchise or something. Which could just be the product of taking a comment clearly out of context and interpreting it in that way, or it could be a unusually calculated marketing ploy. The former would be the preferable option, I don't so much like the cynicism inherent in the latter.


As an aside, in other articles JP has referred to it being a bit like Will Smith's character in 'I Am Legend' which makes no sense to me at all as "an era when men have traded their privacy for safety and security" sounds more like a mash up of every dystopia from 1984 to V for Vendetta and back again.
I assume this lone crusader will be the titular Nowhere Man, of course. Though that's about where the alleged similarity ends given the current information. (And now I have the Beatles stuck in my head again, damnit!)

Other than that, I've never had any interaction with comics published by Virgin. I'm a little scared to note that on their website they publish "Jenna Jameson's Shadow Hunter" the idea of which is enough to make me want to run screaming for the hills all on its ownsome. (They also publish Dan Dare which I didn't even know still existed...)

...More rooting around also reveals they deal with Nichols Cage's Voodoo Child and Dave Stewart's Zombie Broadway. (You know? The one from the Eurythmics who wasn't Annie Lennox?)
It's all kind of... odd.


Reading further, their 'about us' statement makes a LOT more sense out of the maybe-a-movie statement, given as creating comics that could expand to film, TV, games, online content etc etc is part of their core business idea.
I'm still not sure it isn't a bloody weird idea but at least some of their artwork is pretty...

http://www.virgincomics.com/