^^ is that season 1? I saw the first episode and it sucked. So it gets better in the later episodes?

Well Season 2 is a LOT better as is season 3 till the last three episodes when they realise their time is up and get a little too self referential. But still pretty damn good.

Finished Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale, the first book I read end to end on my MP3 player. This was a surprisingly painless experience and one that I adjusted to a lot better than I thought I would. The book is vintage Lansdale and not a good thing. It's for all intents and purposes a Hap Collins and Leonard Pine book except Hap is called something else and Leonard is replaced by a heterosexual mix breed black guy who is even more of a violent nutjob. The plots fairly engrossing and even if it relies rather too heavily on serendipity, moves at a reasonably good clip. Apart from the great feeling of deja vu, a good read.

Black Cherry - Doug Tennapel A down on his luck soldier for the LA mafia is hired by a rival gang to steal a body from his boss. The body turns out to be an alien that everyone from the catholic church to the gangsters to satan's own army wants and our poor hero is stuck in the middle. This is one of the most politically incorrect graphic novels I've read in a while and the characters are crude, rude and all shades of gray. Dark and twisted but also quite hilarious and the art is just as crude as the dialogue. Overall, well worth reading. Also read Carter Brown's The Streaked Blond Slave about a top hollywood star who's sister goes missing from an asylum and it's left to private eye Rick Hollman to find her and bring her in. Usual Carter Brown themes follow with big breasted sexual addicts chasing the private dick while his misogyny is only thinly disguised under a veil of cool. The usual random sex, drug use and colorful characters pervade the book and overall a fun read. Also currently reading The Cardiff Trilogy by John Williams which is a collection of his novels and short stories set around the Cardiff area and focussing on the lives of the small time cons, gangsters, hookers, drug dealers and even some regular people. Very nicely written and the stories have a gentle melancholy to them that I'm totally loving.

Saw this Brit horror movie called Heartless after it was mentioned here by someone. A young man with a splotchy red birthmark on his face has issues with it in a future city somewhere. There are these weird reptilian people around who terrorize the city in gangs and who the hero runs into. Shit happens, trades his birthmark for a random act of chaos with some evil dude and falls in love with a pretty girl before mayhem and murder take centre stage. Was mostly boring except for the colours. very pretty movie to watch but almost zero suspense, horror or entertainment. Would have been a good short film if the whiny ass hero had been eaten by the reptiles in the first 15 minutes.

Saw Hellboy 2 on DVD and it turned out better on second watch. DVD also had a kickass making of docu, which shows that a surprising amount of visual FX in the film were practical rather than digital.

Stephen Fry in America Very cool 6 part documentary with Fry traveling through the 50 states of the USA. I guess you have to be a Stephen Fry fan at some level to appreciate this because it's basically just him traveling in his British taxi cab through the length and breadth of a vast country meeting a whole lot of assorted people who range from the completely normal to the totally eccentric and occasionally being incredibly sarcastic about things. Fry is awesome in this series and has a sort of boy like wonder and what looks like very genuine enjoyment of things. Very good watch.

Wizard's Convention - Boris, Church of Misery, Eternal Elysium, Greenmachine A concert dvd of 4 Japanese stoner/ sludge bands with about 30 minutes time each. The sound isn't great but it's loud and noisy as fuck and the bands mostly sound great. Pretty good watch overall although it gets a bit boring to sit through the entire thing in one sitting.

Started watching House MD and is this a boring show or what! I do see where Kvlteswaran was coming from when he described House as a kind of medical Sherlock Holmes but due to my absolute lack of interest in knowing whether it is a lymphasarcoma of the intestine or a nymphasaconma of the dick, I find myself very disengaged from the happenings in this serial. Also the characters are really boring. House is edgy in a very safe and acceptably edgy manner. Amitabh Bachchan set the bar high for medical edginess in Mrityudand, cleaning his teeth with surgical instruments, gargling with preservatives, collecting 'souvenirs' from the insides of his patients and hitting the bottle before surgery. I am reasonably House's bitch boss secretly loves him and things will get very tiresome because of House's inability to lurve blah blah blah.

The only people I see liking this serial are medical students who will try to 'crack' the case before House does, or people like my dad who've spent so much time researching disease on the net, they believe themselves much better informed than most doctors (and sometimes are too! When my dad was ill last year, he actually surfed the internet till he found a set of pills that would not have side effects with the other stuff he was taking, and the doctors job was down to pretty much signing off on prescriptions. Before that, they were experimenting with him and it was getting quite terrible.)

The A-Team has potentially gold characters. The old wise guy, the young smartass, the black badass and the insane redneck sound like they have great potential for an asskicking film. The franchise reboot movie of the A Team is NOT that film. It plays like an action film crossed with the complete works of Enya and the more ambient parts of Brian Eno's discography. It is gentle, fuzzy and very easy to fall asleep to. There is more random chatter in the name of 'character building' than there is in an average Marvel movie. I don't want to know or love any of these characters - I just want to see them kicking ass. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, it is. The action sequences are filmed in a leaden lethargic manner. Like these people don't know or care that they live in a world where films with fucking great action scenes like Shoot 'Em up and John Rambo were made. I must have seen a consolidated 30 minutes of this film. The rest I slept through.