The cover of today’s Indy.

It is hard to put into words just how much I want one of these.

My mate Doug Walker is in line to be on Popworld – well, he could be, if enough people download his song from Popworld Promotes before the end of the month. He’s currently in second place and only needs another 50 or so votes to overtake some snotty little emo kids. His song is called “Stranger Than Fiction”, and it sounds quite a lot like E.L.O. – summery, shimmery pop – and it’s really very good.

Seriously, though, if you could pop over and vote for him, listen to the track or maybe even buy it (it’s only £1.50) I’ll be your best friend forever. Even if you don’t like Superman Returns..

I can’t help it, I’m a genius!

I… really don’t know what to say.

Normally when a film has a production history as long and tortured as this, you can pretty much write it off straight away as a disaster: it’s usually so mired in rewrites and politics and personality conflicts that you can be reasonably the whole thing is going to suck, bigtime.

Superman Returns, surprisingly then, not only doesn’t suck, but is the best ‘family’ action movie I’ve seen in a long time. If you can watch beyond the opening five minutes without breaking into a big silly excitable childish grin then, sorry, you have no soul and I don’t want you to be my friend any more.

Sure, it’s cliched and hammed up, but that’s part of what a superhero movie is all about. Yes, the “stopping the plane crashing into a full baseball stadium with centimetres to spare” thing is predictable – of course the plane was never going to crash – but this film is all about spectacle and in that it delivers in spades. It’s cliched and overblown and – dare I say it – predictable but that doesn’t matter because it’s all done so goddamned well that you can’t help but enjoy yourself. I haven’t just straight out enjoyed a film so much since the first Pirates of the Carribbean movie.

The thing that bugs me, though – or is going to bug me, anyway – is the film’s constant allusion to Superman as a Christ-figure. Not because this offends me in any way or anything like that; no, it bugs me because I know – I KNOW – The Church is going to latch onto this and try and superimpose a “gospel message” onto the film. They’re going to take all the father/son riffs and saviour of the world allusions and things and try and cram an evangelistic message around it and it’s going to be shown at Alpha courses and youth outreach events all over the country and it’s going to be horrible. Hey, guys? Maybe, right, maybe Bryan Singer isn’t trying to put across a coded evangelistic message here; maybe he’s making all these allusions to Jesus because – religious stuff aside – it actually is a really good story? Just a thought.

(and besides, there’s a massively important distinction between the work of Christ and the work of Superman – hint: it involves a cross, a rock and an empty tomb – that makes the superposition onto the gospel perhaps just a little untenable; KTHXBYE)

Anyway, all that aside, you should go and see it, because it’s brilliant and it’ll make you feel like you’re six again.

Look, just fucking grow up and stop it. Neither of you has the moral high ground so stop posturing, put your guns away and sit down and talk like fucking adults before you blow us all up.

Oh, and, America? Please, just for once, admit that Israel might actually be guilty of basically, being being a bit of a dick. Thanks.

My room, y’see, is a loft conversion. It’s the only double-glazed room in an old Victorian town house, and the ceiling above it is quite well insulated. This means that, in the summer, it gets just a little bit warm. Today, windows open and fan blowing, it was still too hot so I finally snapped and decided to do something about it. I drove over to B&Q in the Trafford Centre and bought a length of pre-coiled copper tubing, 4m of rubber tubing and several hundred cable ties. I then went to ASDA and sought out a plastic cool-box (I had intended to buy some freezer blocks too, but I couldn’t find any)

I attached the copper piping to the front of my fan using the cable-ties, and then connected the rubber tubing to the ends of the copper pipe. I filled the coolbox with icy water, positioned a receiving bucket lower down than the cool box, turned on the fan and started the sipon going. Bingo! Home made air-conditioning.

I wish I could say the whole thing had been a roaring success and that my room was now lovely and icy cool. Sadly, so far I’ve not really bean able to detect a real difference. However, the whole thing does look very cool, so it’s not all bad 🙂

Pictures just here.

EDIT: I’ve added flow control (uh… an adjustable kink in the output pipe) now – restricting the flow seems to have improved the efficiency somewhat. There’s now a noticable difference in temperature (to the touch) between the input pipe and the output. Using a cooking thermometer, I reckon I’ve got about 10°F difference between the two, which is alright. I’ve closed the windows in my room and left it going to see whether it’s capable of making the room bearable. So far, it’s not too bad.

My blog was down for a day or two there, yeah. You can blame BT for that; my phoneline was inexplicably disconnected and thus the machine that hosts it couldn’t see t’interwebnet. I suppose that should provide some kind of incentive for me to migrate it over to the server that hosts my other website. Maybe I’ll get round to it later on.

Anyway. I know you were all deeply concerned and everything, but it’s back now, so you can relax.

In other news, making watches is absurdly complicated.

What I’ve been listening to, and why you should be listening to the same thing:

• Mogwai – Mr Beast
  Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I had my way, all music (except that which is played by earnest heavy metal Japanese guys in their bedroom) would sound like this: epic, glorious post-rock soundscapes. My only complain is that the album is too short: look guy, clearly there’s no singles on here so there’s no reason at all to stick to the radio-friendly 4 minute pop song – go the whole hog and do a single 60 minute track. Please.
• Muse – Black holes and Revelations
  Muse don’t do subtle. Nothing on this album is anything short of a full-on classical-influenced synth-rock extravanganza (well, except the two tracks that aren’t, but they’re only short so they don’t count). This time they’ve broadened their influences from what was previously essentially Chopin-with-electric-guitars, adding Queen (circa Night At The Opera), Depeche Mode and, um, disco to the list. No, they’re never really going to win any fashionable music awards because this really isn’t fashionable music – this is, dare I say it, proper 21st Century pop music, but it’s brilliant with it, and if there’s a better single than Supermassive Black Hole this year, I don’t want to hear it.
• The Head Club
  In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that this band are on a record label run by my boss, but that I’m not in line for any kind of promotion or anything by publicising them. The thing is, much as it pains me to admit that my boss has decent taste in music, they’re actually really rather good: imagine if the Flaming Lips did a Beach Boys influenced pop record and you’re getting close to the sound – pop-rock with an unusual experimental edge to it. The album is a bit rough around the edges and, if I’m honest, there’s a few songs it could live without – the more straightforward numbers that sort of feel like they’re there to pad out the space between the psychadelic rock-outs of the standout tracks. But there’s still enough here for me to think they’re worth paying attention to.
• The Raconteurs – Broken Boy Soldiers
  I’ll come clean: I think the White Stripes are overrated. I really don’t get what all the fuss is about. Okay, they can come up with a decent hook (Seven Nation Army, My Doorbell, etc) but… that seems to be about it; I’ve never been terribly excited by what happens afterwards. On the other hand, Brendan Benson produces some nice enough sounding but not incredibly exciting indie-pop-rock sort of tunes. So, the idea of bringing a pop sensibility to the Jack White and/or bringing a more stripped back indie-cred sound to Brendan Benson seemed like a good thing to me – and, to be fair, for the most part it is. The trouble is, this still sounds like two half-albums. There are songs that are clearly Jack White with a full band and there are songs that are clearly Brendan Benson being less poppy than usual, but it never really feels a completely comfortable compromise. That said, Steady As She Goes is still catchy as hell and that’s gotta be worth something.
• Seth Lakeman – Freedom Fields
  Seth has a formula, and he sticks to it. 3-3-2 rhythms led by frantic fiddle or tenor guitar parts interspersed with haunting violin-and-vocal ballads are very much the flavour of the day here. Fortunately, he’s really very, very good at what he does, and this is a shining example of modern English folk. It’s also far closer to his live sound than Kitty Jay was, dispensing entirely with the full band arrangements on the previous album and stripping things right back to the live band of fiddle, guitar, double bass and bodhran for the most part. If this isn’t in the running for the Mercury Music Prize, I’ll eat my hat.

Right, that’s (almost) your lot, but only because I’m going to bed now. You should also dig out “Recording a tape the colour of light” by Bell Orchestre (a sort of Arcade Fire side project – orchestral post-rock noodlings that put me slightly in mind of what Mogwai might sound like if they composed for an orchestra) and “Apologies to the Queen Mary” by Wolf Parade (which is a perfect example of why Canada is the greatest place in the world for indie music right now).