Steven Wells RIP

Fuck me, Steven Wells is dead:

And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity -- the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans -- the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks. (Check out the AMA logos, those smiling beasts are not snakes.)
You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.
Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.

Probably the greatest and funniest pop journalist of the age, and more. His recent cancer diaries (find them via the link above) certainly transcended the genre.


Next day edit: That sign-off reference to the song made famous by the Jacksons suddenly looks weirdly prophetic...

Bradford, city of film

Congratulations to Bradford for being named as the first Unesco City of Film. It's been a while coming (the bidding started back when I was writing for Yorkshire Insider regularly, if I remember right), and it might be hard to entirely grasp the logic of it, but good for them.

The city's proud Telegraph & Argus has a solid write-up (with some hilariously fruitbat comments), and the same paper's David Barnett bigs it up further in a Guardian blog.

I was going to link to the wonderful 'Every sperm is sacred' section of Monty Python's the Meaning of Life here, which I always thought was filmed in Bradford, but a bit of research finds that it was actually mostly filmed over in Colne...

Ecocomics

Here's the most entertaining economics blog I've seen for a while - Ecocomics, applying economic theory to problems raised in superhero comics. How do super-villains pay for their dastardly schemes (all those minions!), what kind of insurance structure could pay for all that downtown devastation, the challenges of establishing an intergalactic union and monetary fund. That kind of thing. The latest entries focus on game theory as applied to super-villain team-ups - amazingly, the Joker isn't always being rational when he collaborates with the other inmates of Arkham Asylum.

Proper wuthering

Lovely piece from Martin Wainwright in the the walks supplement with today's Guardian, in which he rhapsodises about the wuthering beauty of Ogden Water and Ovenden Moor, wind farm and all, just north of Halifax (described, rather curiously, as a 'market town' - while there is a great indoor market, I'd say it's still a classic mill town).

There's also directions for the walk, which I've been round a few times myself.