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So You Wanna Be a Track Star?
British sprinter Jeanette Kwakye 's colourful blog. Congratulations to her for qualifying for the 100m final and then managing a 6th place with a PB.

What Michael Phelps listens to on his iPod.
Not as unpredictable as you'd hope. Outkast and Eminem. So much for my "It's all about The Carpenters..." theory.

Kevin Smith Has Seen Watchmen: “It’s F**king Astounding”
Meanwhile, is it too long? It does seem odd that we live in a decade were Lord of the Rings can be as leisurely as a walk in the Pennines and TV boxset watching is the norm, yet studios get the jitters over the length of a superhero film, one which is in no way for kids. Why would anyone finance something on this scale and then not want its potential audience to see everything?

New scandal hits British Comedy Awards
Tape delay meant people were still paying to vote for an award even though it had already been presented.

Boring weekend ahead for Netflix users
"The company said it shipped no DVDs on Tuesday, some on Wednesday and none on Thursday." That sounds like my Lovefilm experience every week lately. The loss of the Sunday post means that if I post a dvd back on Saturday afternoon, it won't be picked up from the postbox until Monday which means it'll hopefully turn up at Lovefilm on Tuesday, they wait their usual day before send a new one out which means something might turn up the following Thursday, which too close to sounded like a Craig David single for comfort. And that's assuming that the post office deliver the thing the next day in both directions. One week, I posted something on Saturday then didn't get a replacement until the following Saturday...

No Penn students, ever.
Disappointingly I'm linking to Gawker. But it is a very good post explaining why a US magazine would not hire from a particular university. I wonder if there are any UK magazines with that attitude. "None from DeMontford, ever." etc.

The left side of my face seems to be melting off of my skull.
Actor Dane Cook isn't at all happy with the look of the poster for his film, My Best Friend's Girl, and not entirely because it looks like promo art for pretty much every film comedy Jason Biggs has every co/starred in. It's a funnier evisceration, though he has to hope that it's not more grinnable than the actual movie.

The AV Club interviews Naomi Klein
Klein's one of my favourite writers and the book is on the list; the comments from readers are fairly amusing at least at the beginning since most of them can't understand why the website is interviewing someone with an opinion about something other than whether the last film/television show they were in was actually any good.

Philip French reviews Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Mainly it's a synopsis, but the final line is classic French.


Synopses and Final Cover For Star Trek: Destiny Trilogy
I link just to make the point that given the criticism that Doctor Who's had recently for all the crossovers and spin-offs, that when the show went off air, with only a few examples it largely went to ground and produced a range of stories in keeping with what went before and were very circumspect about crossovers and 'fanwankery' and generally ignored the Daleks. To quote said synopsis:

"On Earth, Federation President Nanietta Bacco gathers allies and adversaries to form a desperate last line of defense against an impending Borg invasion. In deep space, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Captain Ezri Dax join together to cut off the Collective’s route to the Alpha Quadrant."

To echo some of the comments at the linked article (a) since when was Ezri Dax a Captain? (b) the bloody The Borg again (c) I know shared universes often plough ahead and ours did but I don't see anything in here which hasn't already been done a hundred times by that franchise. It looks like I got out of Star Trek at just the right time. There really is something to be said for being monogamous about these things.

This trailer for the next chapter of Heroes shows that Kring and the gang have decided to start making a different, better programme (with the characters actually using their powers). Though I always remember how good The Phantom Menace looked in the B-Trailer so these things are designed to deceive.