Month: June 2026

Everyone’s got punk roots, apparently

Yeah, even Dieter Meier from Yello was a punk once. I only just discovered this tonight from a show I was listening to on Mixcloud; I knew he’d already had an interesting history before he joined Yello, but I never knew he did music before joining Carlos and Boris, and I obviously never knew it sounded like this, and I’m even more astonished to discover a music video of it was made at the time. Goddamn right it’ll be on the podcast soon.

Meanwhile on Shitter

Reassuringly normal as ever. I don’t know who the first guy is, so I don’t know why an “African” would want to behead him in the first place, but if an “African” did that to Edolf I suspect millions of people would want to give the guy a gold fucking medal rather than go on a pogrom of the sort witnessed in Belfast recently and which Edolf is fully in favour of:

“Bunnesses”? Fuck, these cunts have less idea how to use their own languages than the immigrants they hate so much. But it’s Yaxley-Lennon posting it, so why expect anything better…

I wouldn’t dare buy anything else

I mean… you’d be scared not to, wouldn’t you? Fucking thing looks like it’d tear your throat out if you got your pineapples from elsewhere… Saw this posted on Bluesky; I don’t know the exact date of it, but evidently it’s a product of the Empire Marketing Board, part of their “Buy Empire” scheme, and the EMB only lasted from 1926 to 1933 so it has to date from then. Which is why there’s a certain bleak irony in them using that tiger as their image of choice, cos I didn’t know if tigers were especially associated with Singapore (cf. how the ad for Australian sultanas on the EMB Wiki entry used kangaroos), so I did a bit of research… and, well, the last known wild tiger in Singapore was shot in 1930. They’d been a menace for a century, so there were considerable rewards offered by the government for them, meaning they were almost wiped out by the later 1800s, and then finally went extinct just a few years before the EMB itself did.

The greatest shitshow in the galaxy

I’ve seen rumours about the Doctor Who xmas episode being canned, and… yeah, evidently it has been.

The corporation announced last year that there would be a festive special in 2026, but confirmed on Wednesday that it will no longer proceed.
Instead, the broadcaster is inviting production companies to put themselves forward to help co-produce the next series.
Showrunner Russell T Davies also confirmed he will leave the long-running programme, writing on Instagram that it is “goodbye from me but hello to a big new future for the show”.
Referring to the announcement of the Christmas special, he explained: “We only cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it.
“You’ll have to wait a bit longer for new Doctor Who… but you’ll be waiting for more Doctor Who than a one-off. So it’s worth it!
“For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor.”

So there never even was a Xmas episode? Am I reading that right? Did the production team have so little idea of what they were doing in Ncuti’s era? One day there will be books about the production history of 21st century Who and they will be damning reading, especially the last few years.

On Wednesday, the BBC gave more details of Doctor Who’s next era and said it had collectively decided, along with Davies and Bad Wolf, not to go ahead with the planned Christmas episode.
“This decision was not taken lightly, and we know it will be disappointing for fans,” the corporation said.

Bullshit, the FANS will fucking LOVE this. No more Rusty, no Billie Piper as the Doctor, and quite possibly no more show that they purport to love (despite the BBC’s insistence that it’s looking for co-producers for future series). They would miss being able to piss and moan about it, but they’d get over it and find something else to complain about. Fucking FANS.

Guardian readers save literature?

Remember that Guardian 100 greatest novels poll? Of course you don’t, that was three weeks ago, which may as well be a lifetime in this modern age… Anyway, the probably predictable sequel has eventuated in which the readers have answered back… and the results are interesting; the readers’ list is drawn from a much bigger and broader range of submissions, 3000+  more general readers as opposed to 172 writers and critics, and the list includes a number of titles that were noticeably absent from the first one (most notably Lord of the Rings at the top of the list). But there’s also a good amount of overlap, too; the relative positions of some books may be different, but they’re on both lists somewhere, and in some cases they’re in similar places on both. Tolkien may have displaced Middlemarch, but only to second place. Ulysses is still in the top 10. Proust still comes in at 15.

I said of the original list that it was full of the sort of stuff you’d expect to find on a list like that, but interestingly the sane is kind of true about the readers’ list; almost anything on it could turn up on another greatest books list and I wouldn’t be surprised. Neither list surprises me much somehow, though for some reason I find myself liking the new list more… I do wonder if the readers’ choices were determined at all by the fact that they were responding to the “professional” one, you know, did the conspicuous absence of Tolkien inspire at least some of them to vote for him to make sure he turned up on the “amateur” one? I don’t know, but I did see some discourse about whether or not the original list was kind of “performative”… knowing that their individual top 10 choices would be visible to readers, did the authors & critics perhaps choose titles they thought they “should” pick? Did the readers perhaps do something similar? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the bigger and broader range of submissions. Maybe I’m hallucinating something. Mme Bovary and Gatsby can still fuck off either way.

It Came From the Grey Room #1

I’m rebooting the music podcast with a new name, me doing back-announcing again. and trying to make a regular thing of it. No, I’m not sure why either, but I’m doing it anyway. Starting things off relatively gently with a bunch of mostly 80s “hits”…

    1. Ministry – Cold Life (1981)
    2. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry – Hand on Heart (1985)
    3. Xymox – Obsession (1989)
    4. Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Opportunity (1980)
    5. David Sylvian – Red Guitar (1984)
    6. Cabaret Voltaire – Spies in the Wires (1984)
    7. 23 Skidoo – Coup (1984)
    8. Blondie – Kung Fu Girls (1976)
    9. Minor Threat – No Reason (1983)
    10. New Order – All Day Long (1986)
    11. Icehouse – Dusty Pages (1984)
    12. Executive Slacks – In and Out (1985)
    13. Blitz – Warriors (1982)
    14. Devo – Planet Earth (1980)

Should anyone?

That Joel Webbon nonsense also reminded me of this nonsense:

Found this on Tumblr recently. This was published in 1963, by which time enough research existed to say that “yes, yes it does” was the correct answer to the first two questions; Wikipedia notes that pipe smokng and cancer were linked to each other as early as the 1700s. As for the third question, well, the numerous authors of that volume had no idea what tobacco even was, so… no? I gather that Gordon Lindsay was opposed to smoking anyway, so I presume he didn’t let the fact that the Bible doesn’t even mention it get in the way, much like tobacco enthusiast Joel seems to be doing (just the other way round)…