No Middle Name

I watched the film . For the first hour I was thinking: "this is pretty good, quite scary and entertaining". Then it all went to shit just as I thought it was getting good. I don't want to go into detail, because I don't want to spoil it. Then I thought: " the book is a classic of SF, and horror - surely this must be a case of Hollywood tinkering with a good story, improving it for focus groups and merchandising purposes". So I read the book. It kicks arse, specifically vampire arse. If you've seen the film, read the book and think: "why the steaming fudge did they not just film this?". If you haven't seen the film, and don't want to, read the book. It is a classic, and rightly so. If you want to see the film, read the book afterwards. Not before. Otherwise you will sit there thinking: "oh fuckety-arse, they've shat all over the great story and now the title of the film makes no fucking sense". In the book, Robert Neville...

A short review for a short book: " All Star Superman " makes the iconic hero a rounded, interesting character; someone you end up feeling sorry for; a lonely man that you want to take out for a pint. Pretty impressive work by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant. Also, Lex Luthor is batshit crazy.

Here's what I know about baseball: it's a bit like rounders, except the rules are more complicated. That's about it. All I know of the game I learned from watching Charlie Brown. "Summerland" by Michael Chabon, is mostly about baseball. Oh, and werefoxes. Oh, and giants and fairies and that trickster, Coyote. But mostly baseball. This is a children's book, in the same vein as Narnia, and Harry Potter. Boy discovers he is the hero, doesn't think he can do it, does. With talking animals. What's different about this is that it's all about American mythology and fairy stories, and it's also written by a Pullitzer prize winning author. So you already know it's not as badly written as Potter, or as upper-middle-class-Englishy as Narnia. You don't need to know what a short-stop is to enjoy the book, the baseball parts were exciting and interesting even to someone who has never been to the bottom of the ninth. That's near the end of the ga...

ouch Originally uploaded by No Middle Name Estate agents are getting scarier. Mind you, it won't be a surprise any more.

"Please, sit down. We've been waiting for you for a very long time." "Where am I?" "You are in the Land of In-between-and-a-little-to-the-left. The Prophecy said you would come to us." The hero sighed. "There's always a prophecy." "Yes, it says that-" "Don't bother. They never make any sense until afterwards." "Oh, but our interpretation-" "I said not to bother. Let's get on with it. There's a MacGuffin, right?" "Eh?" "A magic sword, or orb, spell, holy toenail, sometimes a princess, sometimes a prince. You've got something that you think I need to defeat some bad man, monster, god or giant chicken. Only it's been lost for years, or eaten,or sealed in a crypt, or fired into the heart of the sun, and I have to get it. Right?" "Well, sort of. There's the Jaunty-angled Cap of the Flamboyant Sorceror-King, we believe it is the only hope against the murder...

Now anyone can use their blogger account as an OpenID account . Only OpenID 1.1, though, so a lot of sites won't work properly. To get OpenID 2.0 support, you still have to use this method . It's a good step in the right direction, though.

A couple of months ago I decided to write a little review of each book I read, mainly as something to make me write but also should anyone else on the interwebs need some half-baked, meandering drivel with a low signal to noise ratio to help them make reading choices. But I'm afraid I must confess a heinous crime. Sometimes I can't be bothered. I read a book and then can't think of anything particularly interesting to say. Shocking, I know. No fault of the books themselves, it has nothing to do with their quality or level of interest. It's a deep-rooted problem of my own - sometimes it's just too much bloody effort to hold an opinion on something. Anyway, here are three short reviews of books I read recently, but could not be arsed to write anything about. "Stories of Your Life And Others" , short stories by Ted Chiang. All very clever, nicely writtten, but lacking...something for me, not sure what and I might just be being picky. Standouts were the Tower...

ming protected Originally uploaded by No Middle Name remember - he's merciless.

To add to my once walking past Stephen Fry in London, almost knocking over Peter Ustinov on his way out of the bank, and pretending not to recognise Alan Titchmarsh in Leicester Square, I can now add Kirsten Bishop to my list of Famous(ish) People I Have Seen Or Have Commented On My Blog. I've only just made that list now, do you like it? Luckily, I hadn't said anything too awful about her book, The Etched City. Anyway, go to her (really quite nice) website and start reading her comic here . Maybe slightly too smutty for work in parts, unless you happen to work for a smut-mongerer, but very funny and very well drawn.

K.J. Bishop's book, The Etched City , is touted as one of the examples of the New Weird genre. Yes, that's right, there's a new weird - didn't you get the memo? You can throw out that old one you've still got in the cupboard under the stairs. Anyway, this genre is all about things not being quite right, a slowly creeping wrongness in an otherwise normal(ish) world. This story about a charmingly dodgy man in a city full of dodgy people manages that very well. It starts off quite slowly, but gathers a lot of momentum and it is worth sticking it out to the end. The main character is a slave-trading gunslinger of limited morality but a lot of style. He has a priest friend that regularly attempts to save his soul, in the hope that this will also redeem his own. Like Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris or Mieville's New Crobuzon, the city of Ashamoil functions as another of the characters in the book. Bishop conveys the feeling of a fully working city, with this only one...

"Constipated again?" "No." "What are you doing now?" "New smile." "Smile? Do you always cross your eyes like that?" "If you must know I am smiling moth-like." "Moths don't smile. They've got one of those long nose/tongue combination things." "A proboscis, yes." "Ah, hence the stuck-out tongue and the boss-eyed stare." "thwt ww thrllft?" "Stick your tongue back in and say that again." "What do you think? Does it look moth-like?" "Is this from that book again?" "Yep. 'Etched City', K.J. Bishop. 'She smiled moth-like, beckoning him.'" "Any good yet?" "Haven't finished it." "What's it about?" "It's very atmospheric, but not one of your traditional plot-driven narratives. You wouldn't understand." "You don't know, do you?" "No."

"You ok?" "Yep." "What's wrong with your face, then?" "Nothing." "You look pained. Or constipated. Or both." "If you must know, I'm trying out a new emotion." "Oh. What is it, exactly?" "I'm looking at you with baleful quiddity." "Does that mean 'constipated'?" "No, it bloody doesn't." "What does it mean then?" "It's too complicated to explain to the likes of you. I doubt that emotionally stunted people like you have ever experienced quiddity, either in its baleful form or not. You need to have a certain level of maturity and accumulated life experience to even comprehend the feeling." "You don't know, do you?" "No. I read it in a book." "Good book?" "'The Etched City' by K.J. Bishop. Haven't finished it yet." "Any idea what it means?" "Nope." "We'll stick ...

Ellen's lunch Originally uploaded by No Middle Name Party pies and tomato sauce. If that's not enough to get us Australian citizenship, I don't know what is.

New superhero Originally uploaded by No Middle Name Raise a cheer for Benign Girl! She's a super cellular phoe.