Still Waiting...

...on the house sale, which is agony. Do we get a new kitchen, bedroom, carpets, and media setup? Or are we back to gold coving, magnolia walls and Value Baked Beans for the next X years? This experience is not endearing me any more to bankers, who I'd have thought were fairly keen to make a few friends at the moment. Ho hum.

A year of moderate-to-heavy carkage has now seen off J.G. Ballard, an author with whom I've had a love/hate relationship, but he never bored me. Despite writing the same two novels about five times each, he did have plenty of ideas, a healthy cynicism and an easier reading style than many other "trippy" authors. We were better off with him.

Recommended Ballards: The Drought, High Rise, The Crystal World, Crash.

Not Naked; The Other Thing

Norman Mailer was once rhymed with Maxwell Taylor by Simon & Garfunkel. Maxwell Taylor was played by Paul Maxwell in the 1977 movie "A Bridge Too Far". You might remember Paul Maxwell as "Panama Hat Man" in "Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade", which also starred River Phoenix, whose first big break had come in Rob Reiner's "Stand By Me". Regular Reiner collaborator Christopher Guest is the son-in-law of Janet Leigh, who, in 1966, starred in a rather poorly-received movie adaptation of the novel "An American Dream", by Norman Mailer.

I've read it. It's rubbish.

Good Ol' Little Boy

Hiroshima bomb pilot dies aged 92

Another one to file under "He Was Still Alive?". Paul Tibbets - best known as the answer to the world's fifteenth most popular pub quiz question - has belatedly joined the celestial squadron.

Contrary to myth, Tibbets never expressed any regret at his role in history. His subsequent 62 years of happy life would seem to suggest that someone upstairs concurs. It's certainly true that hardly anyone remembers Charles Sweeney, who dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki - an act far harder to justify in any military context. I guess that just shows the value of being first. Ask Buzz Aldrin.