No Middle Name

Compare and contrast: Nirvana - All Apologies and Coldplay - Life In Technicolour . Give them both about a minute to get going, then spot the difference.

today's footwear Originally uploaded by No Middle Name The benefits of working from home. mmm... comfy and warm.

My minions and I made this, it may even work:

Rattling through the freebooks now, another one bites the dust. This time, " Four and Twenty Blackbirds " by Cherie Priest. Tor have finally opened their group blog site , which I thought was going to be more of a social network, and you can download all the freebooks they've distributed so far if you want to catch up. There's some good ones in there, but I'm only halfway through the list. Like James said , the site is another feed to subscribe to and "mark all as read" because you don't have time to read all the other group blogs out there. My feed reader rapidly fills up with shite, and that's just from boingboing and io9 . Still, I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens. So, back to the book. It's a ghost / horror story, set in the South of the U.S. This meant I had to read it in a comedy accent, which cheered me up. I have no idea if any of the characters were supposed to talk that way, and I had to add in a couple of instances of...

My freebooks are backing up, a relentless stream from Tor. I'm now several weeks behind, only just having finished " Sun of Suns " by Karl Schroeder. This is the first in a seven volume SF saga, which I'm glad I didn't know when I started it, as that would have put me off what was otherwise a corking read. Set in a big balloon world dotted with freefalling islands of rock, miniature fusion plants operating as tiny suns and wooden galleons sailing through the sky, this is big fuck-off display of world-building. There are some great characters, a cracking plot, pirates, sky motorbikes and sidecars, swashbuckling naval heroes, swordfights, post-human AIs and general arse-kickery. Read it.

I picked up an old copy of Mark Twain's " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court " from the Salvos (I'm picking up the local dialect, helps me blend in before I hatch my plan to steal all their land, and enslave their women. Step one of the plan: get them all addicted to cheap booze; already done for me). The hardback claimed to be part of the collected works of Mr Twain. Sadly the Salvos had disbanded the collective, no other volumes were to be found. I remember watching the Bing Crosby film version one long Saturday afternoon as a kid. Lying on my front, chin propped on my hands, on the rug in front of the fire, wondering when Bob Hope was going to pop up and make the film funnier. There's a scene near the start where he fools the populace into thinking he's a great magician because he happens to know there's an eclipse on the way. He tells them he'll destroy the sun unless they stop trying to kill him. That's all I remember from the f...

I always liked the Queen Mum .

Qui custodiet Originally uploaded by No Middle Name Watchmen biscuit. I'll be expecting my 10 per cent if the marketing droids actually come up with this when the film comes out.