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This is completely off-topic help request, but....

 The union rep at my work wants to make a little newspaper.  Does anyone know of any good templates he can find online which are easy to use?

Actually he did it ages ago, according to Wikipedia.  But why is the Guardian reviewing it this year?

Beats me. I'm talking about Joe Sacco's 'Safe area: Gorazde', a comic about the Yugoslav wars*.  I haven't read it, but 'The Fixer' was terrific.

Has anyone else read his work?






*apologies if that's not the correct name for them

Link: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2146059,00.html" target="_blank">by the time I reached page 9...

a cosmic nothingness, which seems to defy explanation (the way nothingness does). Surely this is crying out for some sort of 2000AD dark matter kind of explanation.  How would the various droids explain/exploit this?

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6962185.stm" target="_blank">Plenty of nothinggggg

a cosmic nothingness, which seems to defy explanation (the way nothingness does). Surely this is crying out for some sort of 2000AD dark matter kind of explanation.  How would the various droids explain/exploit this?

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6962185.stm" target="_blank">Plenty of nothinggggg

Nazi Germany wasn't all shouting Heil and invading places. Or was it?

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6955249.stm" target="_blank">I spit on your effete zionist Monopoly

Our opposition leader Kevin Rudd has - gasp!- been to a strip club and gotten drunk. In 2003.

Would Gordon Brown do that? If he did, would it make him a worse PM? Should it disqualify Rudd from taking over from the Worst Australian PM Ever?

(the Tintin reference is to the fact that cartoonists almost always depict Rudd as Tintin, since he has blonde hair and a circular head)

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6953563.stm" target="_blank">billious blue barnacles!

Matt Damon has been rubbishing the Bond movies, saying that they are 'rooted in the 60s' and that his Bourne character is more complex because he's a serial monogamist who feels bad about killing people.
  I haven't seen the Bourne movies, but that makes Damon's character sound like a bit of a drip as far as action heroes go.

What do you think? Is Damon right? If the Bond movies are rooted in the sixties (which is better than being simply rooted*) does that mean they're no good and I'm wrong to enjoy them? Are the Bourne movies any good?

over to you

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6948445.stm" target="_blank">essence and truth, not frippery

A techno-incompetent writes:

I took my students on an excursion to darkest Melbourne on Friday.  Amazingly none of them were shot in gangland killings*, so they took a lot of pictures of themselves being non-murdered around the place.  
  I want to put the pictures on the class wiki, but don't know how to make the pictures nice and manageable like pictures are here.  Can anyone help me? My undying grattitude and a copy of a David Bishop** 'Phantom' comic





*we've had too many of those recently

** other authors also available inlude Lee Falk and some swedish bloke

Michael Chabon, who wrote the mostly brilliant The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has a new book out, 'The Yiddish Policeman's Union'.  It's about an alternative world in which Israel wasn't created in Palestine. Instead the Jews were given a 'settlement' in Alaska.
  It's an interesting premise and a change from the usual "if Germany had won the war" counterfactuals.  
 Has anyone read it? Can anyone think of any other good counterfactual scenarios which haven't been done to death?

I'm taking my son to a movie tomorrow. Assuming it's possible to sway his opinion, which should we see, Transformers or The Simpsons Movie?  The former has big robots and an allegedly cute female lead, the latter may well be funny.
  What would you recommend?

Some time ago PVS kindly sent me a bunch of his various comics, including Omnivistascope, Solar Wind, Big War Comic and Sunny For Girls. I've only just started reading them and am thoroughly enjoying the experience.  
  I'd urge you all to buy them rather than waiting for PVS to have another random attack of kindness.

yours smallpressreadingly,

Floyd

My son is borrowing books fromt he library and bringing them home to read. I'm over the moon about this, as most parents would be (like a lot of parental thrills, it's completely predictable and nothing special but great for me).
 Anyway, he bought home a cartoon network book of Superman comics by Mark Millar.  I've been reading them with him and they're quite good, but I keep remembering that Millar is loathed here for his Judge Dredd work. So I thought I'd ask you: is reading Millar's comics bad for Roy's young mind? Are Millar's other Superman comics any good?

well?

I've just read the superb prog 204, which I found in a bookshop in a little country town here. Bizarely, this little country retreat,famous for Goldrush era buildings, hot springs, witches and lesbians, also has a bookshop with a HUGE comics section. I bought four old 2000AD's there.

Anyway, was Return to Aermageddon any good? I'm a bit underwhelmed by the one episode here.

yours curiously,

FLoyd

...and that Christmas invasion special. Yoincks! This is the first Dr Who we've seen since Rose got dumped on an alternative Earth.  After months of studiously avoiding all the Dr Who threads, I thought I'd post one of my own on this. The title is meant to warn non-Orstrilians that the thread is way old news for them, although you're welcome to post of course.
  Well I liked both of them.
 Runaway Bride was fun. Thanks to looking at some of the Who threads here, I've avoided Catherine Tate's comedy stuff, but she was okay in this show.  Various implausibilities notwithstanding (wouldn't a tunnel to the centre of the earth split the thing in half?) and ignoring Who continuity (which I'm happy to do. So what if they almost destroyed the planet by getting close the the centre of the earth in Inferno?), it was bags of fun.
  Smith and Jones: Fun also! I thought the Juddoon/Rhino cops were very Dredd-like, what with their instant sentencing and execution. Too much flirting between the Doctor and Martha for my taste, but that's a quibble.  This show cost me some sleep as I had to search my kid's room for vampiric old ladies before he'd go to sleep. I noticed the references to Saxon planted not very subtly. I think he's the Master returning,which, given my track record for predictions, means he almost certainly is not the Master. Martha is a babe, which is nice.

anyway, that's what I thought. Over to you

well, kind of. Should 'Flesh' be re-written to include these monsters? What will the Creation museum say?

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6239846.stm" target="_blank">one foot shorter than me

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_enl_1182842199/html/1.stm">

A pathetic computer amateur writes.....

I have a new car stereo system. Hooray! It can play CDs with MP3s on thim. Yippee!
 Does anyone know how I make such CDs?

yours embarrasedly

A pathetic computer amateur writes.....

I have a new car stereo system. Hooray! It can play CDs with MP3s on thim. Yippee!
 Does anyone know how I make such CDs?

yours embarrasedly

Recently, I've started reading the Biggles books again. There are some very nice looking paperbacks around.  At times the writing is laughably sketchy, at others it's suprisingly good and much better than many other writers who have more cred than Capt W.E Johns (which is pretty much every other writer. To be specific, Johns writes better than Clive Cussler, the later Len Deighton and than John Fowles).
  I mention this because a running theme of this board is nostalgia for things popular and pommy and I think we can see traces of Biggles in Dan Dare.  I'll leave you with a corball Biggles quotation:

we are not doing this for money, Count
Stanhauser' he [Biggles] said quietly. 'If you want the truth, we are doing it because there is in us, as there is in most Englishmen, a love of justice, a sense of
right and wrong, and sympathy for the underdog'
  (at which I thought, there must be a lot of underdogs out there who'd disagree with you. Also, bollocks because the same book makes it clear that Biggles is only helping Stanhauser's tiny fictional country out because the representative of the neighbouring fictional country was rude, pushy and had a German sounding name)

 So there's a tip for you. Does anyone else have a favourite Biggles book?

Everyone likes ninjas. But are they as fearsome as we've assumed?

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6746051.stm" target="_blank">Not very Ninjaish

So I get home today and find a massive parcel containing one Extreme Edition and four of those Abbadon books.  I'm chuffed! God knows if the books are any good, but it's still nice to get free stuff.
   As for the progs - are they still a reason to be cheerful?

yours gratefully,

Floyd