Off topic: Russell Brand on Amy Winehouse

I've never much enjoyed Russell Brand's work,as a comedian or as an actor.

I do not profess to know anything about him as a person, it's purely a matter of taste.

His cogent and heartfelt heartfelt blog post about the late Amy Winehouse is a beautifully-written piece of work. I told a lot of my friends about it but the traffic to his blog is so high, it seems, that the servers are creaking under the load and many can't read the article.

That's a shame, because it really is very good.

I reproduce below, as a small act of public service, the article in full.

In copyright terms that's a bit iffy, so after a day or so I'll remove all but a short quote and the link.

Try Russell's site first, and if it's still misbehaving read my copy - I'm not trying to siphon off his traffic.

Elsewhere on the web: In which I see Captain America

It's my totally unscientific opinion that the two big comic book publishers draw their fans from slightly different demographics.

Fans of DC Comic characters tend, I think, to be conventional characters who respect authority. Your Marvel reader tends to be slightly more countercultural. A little more out there.

You know me: I'm dull. I've always been a DC man, even though these days I'd have to say my all-time favourite funnybook is the Mark Millar / Bryan Hitch run on Marvel's The Ultimates.

So what did I think when I reviewed groovy hippy publisher Marvel's squarest, most conventional character for Bleeding Cool?

Well, it's my raviest review ever. and I don't mean there are glowsticks. I liked it so much, I simply couldn't find space for any jokes. I prefer my reviews to contain at least one decent gag.

You might want to read my take on Captain America anyway.

Further reading: Yet more breezy Michael Moran piffle to read

I can't pretend that Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is a great film. But I had a lot of fun writing about it.



Green Lantern got a pretty rough ride from a number of critics. I think that may be in part because it was being judged by the wrong standards. It's a cracking kids movie. Here's what I said about it on Bleeding Cool.

Who cares how bad TV gets, when it's this buttery?

Swede Mason reduces all the Masterchefs there ever were into this piquant video jus.



And just in case you thought this was a one off....

Elsewhere on the web: Stevyn Colgan on the state of TV

The 'baby food diet' is currently exciting the imaginations of slimming faddists across magazine land. Imagine if we only ate pre-chewed mush all the time. Evolution is economical. If there were no advantage to having teeth we'd lose them.

There's a baby food diet for your mind too. It's called television. Here's Stevyn Colgan talking about it. He's funny, he's clever, he's right and he makes me afraid.

TED, if you've not found it yet, is an organisation dedicated to encourage us all to think. They hold conferences and shows and invite a staggeringly diverse range of people to deliver short 20 minute talks on their area of expertise. All of these videos are then posted to the TED website for us to watch for free. And they are watched. Over 100 million viewers per year. Staggering. But guess what? TED offered their talks to the BBC and they turned them down as being 'too intellectual'.