No Middle Name

A later train than usual. Mostly full, but I see several empty seats clustered together. I sit down next to a skinny man, who is wearing denims and is hunched over the freebie newspaper. There are a couple of other empty seats near us, but people are standing. The man's jeans are dirty enough to have become shiny in parts. The skin on his hands and neck is papery, blotchy, abraded in strange places. His hair is cut very short and is either naturally a faded ginger colour, or the man smokes a lot and has white hair. We sit next to each other for a few more stops. Nobody sits in the seats opposite. He carefully folds his newspaper, then puts it in his holdall before getting off at his stop. He leaves behind a slightly sickly, persistent smell and a fly which will not leave me alone.

David Blaine embarks on his most ambitious stunt ever . The renowned magician will today attempt to fold himself into his rectum, vanishing forever with a slight grunt. "It's the trick I've been training for", said Blaine through a megaphone standing on a street corner, shouting at anyone who was unfortunate to be passing by. "Look at me! Look at me!", he added. Reaction to the news has been overwhelming: "Thank fuck for that", said Milton Armtwistle, society burglar; "Twat", enthused Devon McCreamy, lady-adventurer; "Didn't he do that before?", enquired Lennon McCartney, 57, a retired hamster sexer.

Today I cast aside all pretence at normality and wore my geekdom in public. I watched the first episode of season 6 of Smallville on my phone on the train. A double-whammy of nerdhood - firstly, that I watch Smallville at all; secondly, that I like it enough to work out how to get it onto my phone to watch; thirdly, that I have a phone capable of playing video. Ok, so that's a triple-whammy, but considering that neither you nor I would recognise a whammy if it ran up and bit us on the bum, you can bloody well stop being so pedantic. Anyway, this season looks promising. There's a nice setup for some super-baddies to appear in later episodes, Jimmy Olsen has turned up, and things might actually happen this season. Then again, I have said that at the start of every season, and for the first four seasons of monster-of-the-week episodes that ended with Clark making big cow eyes at Lana but not doing anything I was proven wrong. Season 5 broke the mould by having things happen that w...

My workplace , originally uploaded by No Middle Name . My workplace has The Empire Strikes Back on the telly in the kitchen. Beat that Bloomberg. (that's Chewbacca holding c3p0's head in his hands, by the way)

One for Mr. VanderMeer , I think. [via Warren Ellis ]

I bought an ibook just before they started bundling bluetooth, but after they started bundling airport extreme. On Friday, my new i-mate jasjam (also called a HTC Hermes / TyTN ) was delivered. It comes with Active Sync, which only works on PCs. It comes with a USB cable, but all I could do with that was charge the battery on a Mac. It has Wi-Fi and joined my home network easily, but it won't sync over wireless. A bit of googling later, and I found out that you can share files, and get it to work as a modem with a mac - but only via bluetooth. Grr - no good for me unless I shell out for a dongle. There's also Missing Sync , an Active Sync replacement for Mac OS X, but it costs money and requires OS 10.4 (I've got 10.3 - so that would be an extra $200 on top). I thought of using FTP to transfer files, but Windows Mobile doesn't come with a FTP client. You can buy them, but I'm a skinflint. Ah-ha, I thought, Windows Mobile probably supports SMB (the windows standard ...

On a whim, I ordered Howard Who? from Small Beer Press (along with Kate Wilhelm's excellent Storyteller ). I'd read a couple of Howard Waldrop's stories before on the now-defunct SciFiction (the archives still work, worth a read), and was keen to read more. The man's a fucking genius. In the last week I've read about a man searching for the last dodos; Elvis wishing he could play the clarinet like Eisenhower instead of being a Senator; fishing for Leviathan after the Great Fire of London; zen sumos throwing their opponents with the power of their minds; and what happened to Mickey, Donald, and Goofy at the end of the world. All meticulously researched, and completely believable. Every single story is great. They're all examples of a writer getting an idea and running with it, elbowing aside worries about whether the story will find a market or any of the other crap that gets in the way. "Horror, We Got" is the perfect example. In it Israel builds a ...