Random stuff

I thought Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's Demo (2005) was a tremendous piece of work: certainly one of the best comics I have read in the last year. It seems that Becky is a pretty good writer too as this creepy MySpace Dark Horse Presents comic called I See The Devil in My Sleep shows. Nathan looks like Alan Tudyk.

I'm listening to Judy at Carnegie Hall (1961) on Spotify at the moment. I own this album on vinyl and so I haven't listened to it in years. It is really rather good. Garland's voice is still strong and the song selection is fabulous. She recounts a story about a newspaper article that describes her so: "She's not plump, she's not chubby, she's fat." - I guess the Daily Mail was around then too.

Talking of Spotify reminds me of The Gadget Show and Gail Porter's recent stint on the show while Suzi Perry was unwell. Gail and Jason did a comparison between Spotify and iTunes but that is besides my point which is that I can't tell you how fantastic it was to see a bald, large, unapologetic woman fronting a TV show. I admire how Gail has dealt with her alopecia areata.

I thought this recent post over at Sociological Images about Facebook's neutral avatar was really interesting. It is a man and so not neutral and goes in the face of Facebook's demographic. The leaflet that has just come through our door (only eight days after the day I thought we were supposed to get one) called Important Information About Swine Flu has two images of people: a man sneezing on the front cover and an avatar type image of a man inside. I don't think it would have occurred to me that there was something iffy about that before.

The follow up post is interesting too.

Awesome! Feminists have just been told by a feminist to lighten up. Her exact words are "Chill out everyone, it was a bit of fun!". Bingo! Julie, get lost.