Criminey cripes, Colossus!

I've used 'criminey cripes!' as a very mild form of profanity for more than 35 years, after seeing it once in an 80s panel of Uncanny X-Men by Chris Claremont and Rick Leonardi. There's something so charming about the innocent way Rogue uses it, even as her invulnerability protects her hand from melting off against Colossus' buff metal bod. 

I don't use it very often, but there are times in my life when a 'criminey cripes' is the only thing that will do.

Doctor Who and the Jeje Delight

As Twitter collapses into a black hole of sheer nastiness, there are still bright points of light on its event horizon, burning with the desire for some kind of happiness in this cold, cold universe.

Like so many of us, I've drifted away from almost all social media, bored by idiotic algorithms and the slow and dawning realisation that most people on planet Earth are actually complete cunts. Twitter used to be a genuinely invaluable source of breaking news, but has steadily become more and more useless, with extremely lax quality controls fucking it up for everyone. Even with an incredibly proactive block policy, it's got worse and worse, and now feels like just another dying suburban mall.

But even those terminal malls have some kind of interesting stores between the shuttered chain outlets, and if these are actually the last days of Twitter (I'm not calling it X because I'm not a fucking 14-year-old edgelord) before it fades away into terminal obsolescence, I will remember them as the time of one person's utter delight for Doctor Who.

For a long while I would go online and look up all sorts of instant reactions to Doctor Who episodes as soon as I'd seen them, but I stopped doing that somewhere in the reign of the Eleventh Doctor, because even the mildest of episodes were targets for unrelenting negativity. Just too much nitpicking, too much needless context, too much fucking baggage.

But then along comes jeje - a Matt Smith fan who just started randomly watching Doctor Who because they hadn't seen the big man in his first big role and just fucking loves it, with lots on intensely happy reactions.

You can see the glory of it all for yourself here, although the Doctor Who stuff is mainly in beautifully mad rambling and messy of threads, so there is no good place to start. But it's full of deeply inappropriate reactions memes, ridiculous nicknames for the cast and proper wide-eyed enthusiasm for this silly little show.

It's impossible for me to watch Doctor Who in such a pure way, coming at it with decades of backstory, and the sheer love is such a surprise after years immersed in Who fandom, that it's genuinely charming and refreshing. The fact that a 61-year-old TV show can inspire such joy is testament to the glory of Doctor Who, and to finding some light in the dark.

Taking care of my own parish

In times like this, you find hope where you can, even if it's in yet another bloody podcast.

I was listening to a recent interview with Dr John Cooper Clarke, the monumentally important punk poet, and in-between poetry readings and sartorial musings, Clarke talked about about his current political views, and how if you want to change the world, you have to start local. Keep an eye on your local parish, rather than the global community. It's the only way to change your world.

And those are some ideas that I've clung to with a feverish mental intensity for the past few weeks, as the global political situation looks increasingly grim, with vast hordes of people actively choosing bigotry, ignorance and downright malice in their leaders.

Because Clarke is right, when it comes to politics you can only make real difference on the local level, and take care of your own. Seeking any further political power always leads to compromise and inevitable failure, but you can change the world immediately around you.

It also makes me think of Ikiru, the classic movie by the mighty Akira Kurosawa, and the way a man at the end of his life finds purpose in doing one small, tiny thing for his own neighbourhood. He finds some peace in the task, although it remains tragic that it took a terminal diagnosis to actually do something. 

It's only natural to feel anxiety about world politics, even if you're far, far away from the epicenter of them all. But if you really want to do something, start small and start local. The worst thing you could happen is that you end up with a nice playground for the kids, and maybe you can change your local world, just a little bit.

(You can find the whole interview with Clarke here, on British comedian Adam Buxton's podcast. It's excellentt, like all of Buxton's interviews, although I am still confused over whether Rosie the dog actually exists or not. It's not the end of the world, all things considered, but it remains quietly infuriating.)

This is still a house of McMahon: Prime Dredd

Mike McMahon's classic version of Judge Dredd is so monumental, it's dizzying to note that he was only a regular Dredd artist for a few years, before moving off to other pursuits. That sacred cragginess, the relentless invention, the dynamic and distorted capabilities of Dredd's body, that truly idiosyncratic use of colour, those big drokkin' feet - it all flares up and burns out in just a couple of years.