Before waking up this morning, I dreamt that my wife had a feud with an Albanian gang, and sent me and our kids against them; the gang, whose most frightening by far member was a boy of 14 or 15, beat our oldest and youngest boys horribly (the youngest scarcely had any teeth left in his mouth; the eldest had some kind of brain damage) and was on ( Read more... )

Finally finished watching Season One of Dexter, the still-running Showtime TV series about a "righteous" serial killer (played by Michael C. Hall) who works as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami police department by day and targets other serial killers by night ( Read more... )

I finally found something that Warren Ellis has written that I actually, honestly, no-shit like: Planetary.

Yeah, it only lasted 27 issues, and it took eleven years to play out; but with Planetary, Ellis has finally hit my sweet spot of bleeding edge conspiracy theory and pastiches / mash-ups of previously existing fictional worlds. Planetary ( Read more... )

From Sunday, 1 January 2012 to Tuesday, 17 January 2012, I read Robert Murphy's Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 1920-60 (London: Faber and Faber Limited; 1993; ISBN: 0-571-15442-5; 182 pps.).

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Thanks to my desktop PC's increasing debility -- hey, it's a veritable museum piece, considering the fact that I bought it brand-spanking-new at end of the summer of 2004 (*grumble, grumble*) -- I was finally nudged into purchasing a laptop. It's refurbished, and it has Windows Vista (*boo, hiss*), but the price was right. Maybe someday I'll even ( Read more... )

Just saw the best sci-fi movie I've seen in years: District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp (and co-written by him and Terri Tatchell ( Read more... )

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I've been reading Shantaram, the whopping (936 pages in the St. Martin's Griffin trade paperback edition [ISBN: 0-312-33053-7]) debut novel by Gregory David Roberts, the Australian ex-felon whose life serves as the template for the main character: a junkie bank robber who escaped from Oz's toughest prison in broad daylight and managed to flee to ( Read more... )

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Finally watched the last nine episodes of The Sopranos (Season 6, Part II) on DVD over the last, oh, 30 hours; as can be expected, not only has my casual use of profanity skyrocketed past longshoreman/merchant marine levels, my hunger levels have shot up past where they would've been had I actually smoked that yards-long spliff in Mel Brooks' ( Read more... )