Good:



Rammstein’s video sonne. Nasty Snow White making the dwarves work in a dirty mine to get her diamonds, sexually teasing the little men as she towers over them, flashing her garter and then giving them a good spanking afterwards. The glass coffin scene is very nifty. I always knew that Snow White was a dirty girl. And the less said about Cinderella the better (I’m not one to spread gossip, but a couple of Babychams down her throat, tell her you’re a prince with his own shoe shop and your in). The Little Mermaid is a slapper. But if Sleeping Beauty tries to tell you about me slipping rohipnol into her drink she's a dirty rotten liar. Which brings us to Princess Fiona and Shrek 2 which is pretty good, but a little too much by-the-numbers and not as original as the first one (which is to be expected I guess, but still).



Dan Dare: Mission to Venus (vol 1). The original story from the 50s Frank Hampson Dan Dare. Straight-up boys-own adventure yarn but still wonderful. Colourful, clear graphics of gleaming rocket ships and a shiny future Earth as Dan tries to find new sources of food for the world while dealing with the dastardly Mekon. Of course, the unimaginably distant future that was imagined is now in our past as it was set in the 1990s. How the future used to look…Hard to believe this is classic British SF from the same period that gave us other classic Brit SF like Quatermass. The light and dark flipsides of each other, perhaps?



Singularity Sky’s UK edition finally arrived in the store this week. Nice to have a good display of it out for Charlie to add his moniker to. And Jess at Charlie’s publisher, Orbit, told me that I could expect a proof of his chum, Iain M Banks’ new novel, the Algebraist, in the next few weeks too, his first SF novel in several years so one eagerly anticipated. Second volume of Charlie’s book, Iron Sunrise is due in import form soon with the Orbit edition next February.



Bagging the groovy Vincent Price vehicle the Abominable Doctor Phibes for £4.99 on DVD.



Discovering Vegar actually likes to call his Viking war-axe 'Skullsplitter'. Nice. Admittedly in this more civilised time he tends to use it less for terrorising sea-side monasteries (except on his holidays) and rather more for trimming the garden hedge.



Olly has become the latest to come into Stalag Waterstone’s Escape Committee with a workable escape route back out to the real world of decent work - good on you.



Bad:



Er, my escape plan failed again. Note to self, trying to leap the barbed wire at the Swiss border just doesn’t work.



Indeterminate:



After refit the SF section is finally pretty much back together again and looking smart. But as I am being moved downstairs to the dungeon to ‘oversee’ the goods-in I won’t see much of it, or indeed anything else. On the other hand I can listen to music, avoid customers and mostly work Monday-Friday for a while which is a novelty for me. Just wondering what the hidden agenda is as our new Evil Boss Who Hides Behind Amiable Mask strikes me as the type who has several reasons for what he does when moving staff around, not all of which he tells you or that you would be happy about.



Finding out Pandora (my larger pussycat) can open the bedroom door handle even when I don’t want her to. Impressed with her abilities to leap, hit and turn the handle and push open the door, less impressed by being woken with rough cat tongue on my toes.If it ain't Christina Ricci it ain't worth it.