I just watched Warrior King, a Thai martial arts movie featuring ‘new Bruce Lee’ Tony Jaa on fine form as a young man on a roaring rampage of revenge after his two elephant friends are stolen from his village in Thailand and shipped to Sydney, Australia, by a crazy woman with a whip (no, I couldn’t make this up).

The film is absolutely dreadful – plot, acting, editing, everything – but HOLY CRAP, WHO CARES? Every time a fight scene starts it suddenly becomes the most amazing thing in the history of the world. Just as in his previous Muay Thai jawdropper, Ong-Bak, Tony Jaa fights without wires or CGI or stunt doubles or anything even resembling camera trickery: it’s all real.

And nowhere is it better displayed than here, in one continuous shot – no cuts at all – which lasts almost four entire minutes and is probably one of the greatest fight scenes you’ll ever see. The quality isn’t 100% but I just watched this on DVD with a crystal clear picture and can assure you, IT’S REAL.

Enjoy…

Here’s a clip from this week’s episode of Nathan Fillion’s detective series Castle (which, may I say, is kicking ass in its second season). You may recognise this outfit. If you don’t… go watch Firefly, you mooks!

I fancied a change, so here’s the new design for your perusal…

I took that header pic of the Daily Planet sign last year in Vancouver when I stumbled upon the filming of an episode of Smallville. (I snapped the picture from the steps of Luthorcorp!) I thought it was too cool to leave neglected in a folder on my desktop, so I’m happy to put it to good use here!

To continue my theme from yesterday: I’m still fuming about Jan Moir’s Daily Mail article and I note that not only has the newspaper STILL not issued a decent apology – only the one in which Moir seemed to blame everybody except herself – but they’ve also left the article up, despite the fact it has now become the most-complained-about piece in British newspaper history (or so I hear; I haven’t been able to confirm that story yet).

Which just goes to prove, and I very, VERY much apologise for my language here, that the Daily Mail are a bunch of utter cunts.

At least more people know that today than knew it yesterday morning. Progress of a sort.

I’m fascinated by the Twitter phenomenon, and never more so than on days like today. In case it’s escaped your attention, this morning a columnist at the Daily Mail - not one of my favourite newspapers, minority-hating, self-righteous bastards that they are – posted an article online about the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately.

Here’s a jpg of the article’s first headline:

(Since then, the headline has been changed to the marginally less-offensive “A Strange, Lonely And Troubling Death…”)

You can read the article here.

To sum up, what Jan Moir is saying is that Stephen Gately’s death, despite being put down to ‘natural causes’ by the coroner, was actually something far more sinister. She mentions how he was out partying beforehand (how terrible of him!); how he may have taken drugs (god forbid he do such a thing!); how he and his partner brought home a young man with them that night to ‘play canasta’ (and Jesus, of all the euphemisms, how nice of her to choose one so appropriately 1950s in tone – which is where her homophobia belongs, too). She lists the death of another gay celebrity last week, too, as though that had ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS STORY WHATSOEVER; calls into question the future of gay marriage in the UK (because now two gay men have died within a week of each other, clearly gay marriage is eeeeevil) and claims that “Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again” (which obviously never happens, because she is an expert on such matters, even more so than the coroner who said Gately died of natural causes).

In other words, she’s saying one of either three things happened to this poor young man:

1) Stephen Gately drank himself to death that night (despite the coroner saying he died from natural causes).

2) Stephen Gately drugged himself to death that night (despite the coroner saying he died from natural causes).

3) Stephen Gately died that night because he and his partner brought home a young man to have sex with.

Or, to put it bluntly, Stephen Gately died because he was a young man with a lively social life.

…AND BECAUSE HE WAS GAY.

Moir claims that she’s not homophobic, but her article is all the evidence we need to prove that she is. She’s since issued possibly the most laughable apology in the world, the Daily Mail has had to remove advertising from the article because its advertisers were unsettled, and Twitter…

Well, Twitter went MAD. Moir’s name has been at the top of its trending topics all day, along with the Daily Mail and Stephen Gately. Thanks to the efforts of celebrities Stephen Fry, Derren Brown, Peter Serafinowicz (who came up with the hashtag thedailymailisgay, which trended all afternoon as well) and Charlie Brooker, so much of a storm was whipped up on Twitter (and then on Facebook) that the Press Complaints Commission have already received over a thousand complaints. Their website crashed and it’s looking likely that this will be a record-breaking subject for them. And other news sites are reporting the furore, too; you know it’s hit big when the BBC deign to cover it.

I’m so angry with Moir’s vile homophobia that I’d like to punch her squarely on the nose, but I must admit that the worst thing about her article was the wilful disregard she showed to the feelings of Gately’s family, friends and, most of all, his partner. By implying – however carefully – that Gately’s death ‘wasn’t natural’, she’s all but saying that he was murdered, and by drawing attention to his two companions that night, she’s placing the blame squarely on them. Her contempt for Gately (who, from all accounts, sounded like a thoroughly pleasant young chap with no scandals in his past and no skeletons in the closet) is sickening.

But thanks to Twitter, the outrage of the general public on this subject was both swift and loud. At times like this, Twitter is truly extraordinary.

And I’ll leave the final word to Charlie Brooker at The Guardian…

I’m currently drowning under a pile of work. I’ve only had one day off in four weeks. Hence this blog, sadly, is being neglected. Apologies.

However, on the bright side, I can pay my rent next month! Yay!

I had to go to my local sorting office yesterday to pick up a parcel I needed to pay customs duty on (an occupational hazard when you buy so many DVDs from the USA). When I pulled out my card to pay the £12 fee, the guy behind the counter looked rather embarrassed.

Post Office Guy: “I’m sorry, we don’t accept cards.”

Me: “You only take cash? Seriously?”

Post Office Guy: “There’s an ATM across the road.”

Me: “But why don’t you take cards? What is this, the 19th century?”

Post Office Guy: “We’re the Post Office, you know. I’m surprised we don’t still use horses and carts to deliver letters.”

Me: “In that case, you won’t mind if I pay you in shillings and farthings, will you?”

Post Office Guy: “It’s only fair.”

Honestly, the Royal Mail are trying to position themselves as an organised 21st century business but they don’t even accept Visa? How dumb is that?

Sometimes it amazes me this country even has the internet. Or the wheel.

This is what happens when you pick up a takeaway cup of very hot black tea in the cafe at Future Publishing’s London office and the lid isn’t on tightly enough so you end up spilling scalding water all over yourself.

What also happens is that you get first-aided by about nine different people because it happened in the workplace and they’ve all been trained in first aid but rarely get to use their skills so they get all excited, and you get burn gel smeared all over you that smells like raw alcohol and tea tree oil and sears the inside of your nostrils, and when you go home that afternoon because you can’t do any work you discover one of your favourite fish has died (sigh) and the filter in the tank has stopped working and you have to take it apart to fix it while trying to keep your bandages dry. Eventually you remove the bandages completely to have a rather painful shower and then discover you don’t have any fresh ones afterwards, so you have to wrap your arm in a tea towel and hold it in place with Sellotape because you are really sad and pathetic.

And then you’ll wake up in the night with burn gel all over your nice clean sheets, and you won’t be able to sleep at all, so you’ll go back to work the next day feeling like crap and you’ll get first-aided again and receive a nice new bandage, which becomes less important during the course of the afternoon because your burn’s improving underneath it, but it DOES come in handy when you end up having an impromptu shoving match on the Bakerloo line on the way home when a woman goes to sit in a seat at the same time as you and you accidentally knock her out of the way. She’ll take one look at the bandage and think, “This woman’s hurt! She can have the seat!” And then she’ll apologise profusely for trying to steal your seat and tell you she really likes the ring you’re wearing (ring not pictured above) because she feels so guilty about almost knocking you over, even though you were the one who almost knocked her over, and it feels really bloody weird having a stranger looking at you so guiltily when really they haven’t done anything bad at all.

And then you’ll arrive home and remove the bandage and marvel at the giant red stripe around your arm and be very thankful you don’t have hideous blisters or anything.

And then you’ll watch the third episode of Supernatural’s fifth season, hear the Lynyrd Skynyrd song ‘Simple Man’ being played over the opening credits and wonder HOW THE HELL YOU GOT TO THE AGE OF 37 (38 NEXT WEEK!) WITHOUT EVER HEARING IT BEFORE BECAUSE IT’S POSSIBLY THE GREATEST SONG IN THE WORLD.

See? TV makes everything better. I’ve been saying it for years.

*DEEP BREATH*

So, in conclusion: always make sure the lid is on a cup of boiling hot water before you move it. Or, at the very least, put milk in the damn thing.

I’m becoming a fish bore, so I’m shutting up about my finned friends after this. But seeing as I got so many comments on my post bemoaning the fact that I wanted to give my tank a makeover, I thought you might like to see the results!

I went with a ‘Monument Valley’ theme in the end:

…although now I desperately want a Marlboro Man-style cowboy figure in there, too. Darn it.

Oh, and I finally managed to snap a nice shot of Bobby the plec:

I’m sure you’ll agree he’s both rather pretty and also rather grumpy-looking. That’s Ruby the shark poking her head into shot, by the way.

…AND THAT’S ENOUGH ABOUT MY GODDAMN FISH.

It’s been a crazy week. Each year around this time I sit down, look at my workload and think, “Bugger! I have nothing to do this month – how will I pay my bills?” And every year, by some miracle, within a day or so of having that panic, I suddenly get inundated. This week I’ve written six features already and have three more hanging over my head; I’ve written an advertorial and it looks like there are more on the way; I’ve written so many reviews I’ve actually forgotten how many there were; conducted a fun phone interview with an actor and arranged an email interview with a casting director; and as of Monday I will be working for three weeks as a sub-editor on DVD & Blu-ray Review. So I can pay my bills next month after all. Phew.

Thank you, oh Lord Of The Freelancers, for looking out for me! I’m very grateful.

I’m also cat-sitting my neighbours’ kitten for them this weekend, which at the moment seems to involve popping downstairs every few hours and dangling a feather on a stick in the air and making the cat leap up and down trying to catch it until I wear it out. Which was all very entertaining, for both me and the kitten, right up until I came up with the idea of shouting, “Wingardium leviosa!” every time I made the feather fly in the air, and now I can’t stop giggling. Even the kitten’s looking at me as if to say, “What’re you, six years old?!”

I hope my neighbours didn’t leave a webcam running to check I’m not stealing their stuff. How embarrassing.

Friendly man at the tropical fish store: “Wow, how can you possibly be in such a good mood on a miserable Sunday afternoon?”

Me: “It’s because whenever I leave the house to buy fish I always make sure I snort a lot of coke first. It really helps take the edge off.”

Friendly man at the tropical fish store: “…”

.

Nobody gets my humour.

::sigh::

As you can see from this picture:

I have a very serious living room. After years of living in student accommodation or studio flats or houses that were pretty much falling down – I’ve moved around a lot – I finally have a place where the wallpaper isn’t peeling off and I don’t have to cover up the damage with posters. I have grown-up things in my living room. Beautiful art prints by photographers Lehnert and Landrock, all the way from Cairo. An antique typewriter. Pretty plants. Fancy velvet sofas.

And a tropical fish tank.

I’ve not had much luck with my fish since I started keeping them back in April; only one of my original batch remains, a spotted plec named Bobby (after Supernatural’s grumpy old hunter) who makes me smile because he is (a) spotty and (b) grumpy. Last week I brought home some more fish – three silver dollars I’ve named Dave, Dave and Nick after the SFX team (don’t ask), two boesemani rainbow fish I’ve named Fred and George because they’re ginger like the Weasley twins; and a ruby shark I’ve called Ruby, after Ruby on Supernatural (what? It made sense at the time!). They all seem as happy as fish can be, their tank looks pretty and all is well with the world.

Except that I’m a bit fed up with being sensible. You know how you can buy special laminated pictures to stick on the back wall of your fish tank? Pictures of submerged mangrove tree roots or sunken shipwrecks or deep blue ocean ripples? They tend to look tacky and fake, but they give the fish something to look at that isn’t their own reflections, and I’m tempted to buy one.

The thing is, my living room is a nice, adult, grown-up, serious living room. BUT I WANT A PICTURE OF SOME DINOSAURS.

Someone talk me out of it. Please?