Strontium Dog by Carlos Ezquerra: Thanks, big fella

Strontium Dog by Carlos Ezquerra: Nice try, Fly's-Eyes!

Strontium Dog by Carlos Ezquerra: I'll be back

Strontium Dog by Carlos Ezquerra: I'm nobody's chum

Lone Wolf and Cub: A gateless barrier.

Lone Wolf and Cub (First Publishing) #3
Written by Kazuo Koike
Illustrated by Goseki Kojima

A Rivers Runs Through It!

Bojack Horseman could get really grim at points - I think about the 'Oh Bojack, no, there is no other side'  line from the penultimate episode a lot more than I really should - but it could also be really fucking funny, and some of my favourite jokes are buried in the background, to the point I do the dipshit thing of pausing when they have a whiteboard full of fake movie names and actor puns, and I'm as delighted as a Mr Peanutbutter by many of the gags.

Dr Who: A time of reading

Exterminate! Regenerate!: The Story of Doctor Who by John Higgs is a book about the history of the show through a largely metatextual lens. It was recommended to me by a friend, and while I'd never read Higg's work before, he seemed to tackle interesting stuff in his other books like the Lightning Seeds, William Blake and the connection between the Beatles and James Bond.

And it was a fun read that only took a couple of days to get through. It is highly unlikely that any history of something that has been going pretty much non-stop for more than 60 years could ever be contained to a single book.

It has some fun ideas, although it went back to the 'Time Lords are really a metaphor for BBC management' a few too many times, and does spend a lot of space on what the personal history of each actor who played the Doctor brought to the role. 

But it also glosses over a lot of the show's history, and while every single aspect of this show has been covered in considerable depth elsewhere, it leaves this chunky hardback feeling rather thin, especially as things ramp up in the 21st century. (Not everybody who was turned off by the clear storytelling failures of the Chibnall era were angry little misogynistic boys upset that the Doctor was now a woman - that was the one clear success of that period.)

So an easy read, and one I got through quickly. But after an entire lifetime of reading about the production of this show and the eternal themes it brings up, I need more meat in my literary sandwich.

And it doesn't get much meatier than the About Time books by Tat Wood, Lawrence Miles, Dorothy Ail and occasional chums. These thick and chunky reference books are hard to get around these parts, so I only manage to pick them up years after they were published, and Volume Eight was my most recent find.

And that volume was about one single year of Dr Who, and took me a fucking month to get through it, and that is very much a compliment.

Because these books are dense with fact and opinion and analysis. I feel sorry for the authors having to think about the contradictions that inevitably pile up with this amount of material - a long devotion to all things Who means not stressing the small stuff too much, or it will all collapse. But I truly appreciate their efforts, and their dedication, and the huge amounts of trivia they bring to the table.

I'm probably fortunate that I only get my hands on one of these books every couple of years, because they require a lot of time to get through, and I don't have and police box to skip through it.

But this is most definitely my kind of book about Dr Who. I always appreciate a new perspective, no matter how slight, but it's all the meaty details that I crave in my Who diet.

Don't go chasing numbers

My job is to write and edit online news stories, updated by the minute for the third biggest news website in the country. It's very busy keeping on top of everything, and one thing I don't have time to do is keep track of the numbers, or worry about them too much.

Getting the readers' attention and keeping them engaged is apparently what it's all about, but I don't have time to worry about it, when there are 12 more stories to sub in the next two hours. Besides, there are other fine people whose entire job is based around getting the numbers to go up, so they can stress about it. 

When you're putting news stories on the homepage, and deciding what to do, you have to go with your gut. And it usually works. If I think it's interesting, many other people seem to think it's interesting. In the 10 years I've been in the current job, the numbers have exploded, thanks to an influx of resources and some keen editorial judgement.

But the main reason I don't worry too much about it is that I don't trust a fucking thing I ever see on the internet and I think that a lot of the numbers are pure bullshit.

I know this because the stats have gone complete bullshit on this blog, getting hundreds of thousands of hits in the past few weeks. It broke the million hits mark in September, when I was usually happy to get about 10k a month.

I don't get excited about these figures, and am certainly not going to try and leverage it in any way, I'm just going to keep doing my thing. Because it's not people reading my intense thoughts on X-Men or Sapphire and Steel, it's almost certainly AI scrapers, sucking up all the copy I've published and turning the words I write into their general mush.

They're just fucking parasites - literally, because I'll never use their products, so any interaction is strictly one-way - and I can only hope my garbled grammar and general bullshit help break AI just a little bit more.

Numbers are good for management - gotta hit those KPIs - but they mean nothing to me. It might be nice to have a million people reading this stuff, but I'm just happy with the real people like you. 

Most of us would probably shake Nixon's hand

It does feel hilariously quaint with its idea that major political figures could be shamed and actually feel shame, but the Frost/Nixon movie does feature some terrific performances, and my absolute favourite is when Sam Rockwell's character makes a huge fucking deal about having no respect for Nixon, but still shakes the disgraced former president's hand when it is offered to him, because he doesn't want to be rude.

So the movie may not have aged as well as it hoped, but that bit with the handshake just felt like one of those moments that says so much with so little, and is as relevant today as it ever was. 

And just because we're on the subject of Nixon, I have to share my favourite Adam Curtis film, about how we're all Richard Nixon now, and what we see when we look in the mirror, because Nixon really was a great metaphor for the US in the 20th century and beyond: