shynola bowling hardware firefly...

Give me caffeine, or give me death, I say. Actually, maybe no more caffeine, since I was drinking a can of Coke this morning at about 11.15 when I got all dizzy, and thought I'd started with the stimulants too early, only it was the Central Californian earthquake making odd rolling motions up here in San Jose. Go figure.

So, leafing through a magazine at the local Tower Records, I note that my current music video heroes, Shynola, have been hired to create all the Guide entries in Hammer And Tongs' film adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Damn. Apart from Chris Cunningham actually directing Neuromancer, something that seems pretty unlikely now, I can think of few other things more likely to fill me with Christmas cheer.

Times when you know you've been hanging around online for too long? When you surf obscure arcade game manufacturer websites long enough that you find bizarrely posed bowling game flyers, and giggle happily all the same. Look at the veins on Parker Bohn III's arm, too. Not to mention the beautiful moustache and furrowed brow. You go, Parker!

Finally, there's been a couple of television-based feasts that have caught my eye recently. Firstly, Showtime had the cult robot slasher flick Hardware on a few weeks back, and I finally got to watching it. Interestingly, Kevin O'Neill, the illustrator for Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is listed as a co-writer, and it turns out the film's plot was extensively borrowed without the slightest permission from an old 2000 AD comic, which O'Neill drew, hence a post-release credit.

But the film itself... wow. It's obviously low-budget, and borderline gory to boot (I suspect it should be much more gory still in an uncut version), but it has the oddest feeling of post-apocalyptic, voyeuristic, gritty, prescient style about it. There's an unofficial Richard Stanley site which has more info about the enigmatic, definitely cultlike director, including his barely-released documentary about the Nazi historians who were genuinely pursuing the Holy Grail.

The other thing that's impressed me is something I should have perhaps got to watching when it was on TV, thereby stopping it from being shelved. That would be Joss Whedon's superlative Firefly, tragically cancelled after just 14 episodes. I've only watched the first three so far (I'm Netflix-ing the DVD set a disc at a time), but.. wow. Again, I'm not so into space operas aside from Babylon 5, but the 'space western' stylings, convention-bending ideas, and beautiful, beautiful casting make it a show I dearly wish was still around.