TV

Dexter
2x01 It's Alive!
I happened to catch the first season of Dexter on FX (the UK one) last year, before all the hype surrounding it's ITV1 repeat run, and I'm very glad I did -- it's bloody brilliant, one of the best shows currently in production. Not having FX available to me this year (where season two is airing long before it makes its way to one of the ITVs), I'm having to find less than legal legal, honest, ways to watch this second season. Starting now.

Friday Night With Jonathan Ross
15x01 (5/9/08 edition)
Wossy returns for another 15 weeks of fawning over celebrities and wannabe-celebrities.

The Tudors
2x06 The Definition of Love

Fiction

Double or Die by Charlie Higson
Chapters 1 - 6
With the release this week of the fifth Young Bond adventure, By Royal Command, it's really time for me to get caught up so I can read the damn thing. So I now embark on the third book, The Deadlock Cipher... sorry, N.E.M.E.S.I.S.... sorry, Double or Die. It certainly has a strong opening, living up to Higson's description of it as "Da Vinci Code like". One of the best things about the Young Bond books is the level of variety contained within them (thus far, at least), especially as it's so successfully performed -- they don't just rehash each other in new locations with marginally different enemies, as even the regular Bond novels do at times.

Music

Greatest Hits 1970-2002 by Elton John

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Original Soundtrack
Available worldwide from iTunes.

Websites

getcloser.com
HMV bravely try to launch a social networking site, based on the USP of connecting your interests in music, film, TV, and the people who produce them.

It's not a bad concept, but the world hardly needs yet another social networking site, especially when there are already places that do similar concepts better -- e.g. sites that let you list your DVD collection, or YMDB (Your Movie DataBase) that allows you to list your personal top 20 movies, or various sites for music preferences, particularly last.fm.

There are a couple of other features HMV tries to offer in a USP-ish manner. The main one is a connections feature, which allows you to link artists, albums, films, etc, in a sort of brainstorm (or whatever the PC term is these days -- mindmap?) It's intriguing, but not always smooth to use and often downright awkward. Similarly, the displays of your films/albums/TV shows/actors/etc on your profile page is a nice concept, but seems difficult to manage and prone to suggest you like someone/thing much more than you actually do. getcloser can do other nifty things, like import information from iTunes to quickly fill out your profile, or use the things you're interested in to show categories in different font sizes... though my largest interest by far is "General" -- so that feature works well then.

If you're interested in investigating further, try the tour, or jump to my semi-complete profile (a link that wasn't easy to find -- another strike against it then).

"The Lost Journal of Indiana Jones"

The Lost Journal of Indiana Jones

A bit of a flick-through this Indiana Jones tie-in, which, as I'm sure you can guess, is designed to be the character's journal. As such it's a bit of an odd volume -- it's not a novelisation, or a new story, or a guide book, or a making of, but more a ragtag collection of all those stripped to their most basic, combined with a 'prop replica' souvenir value (though it isn't really a prop replica). The text is a bit slight and the images spartan, but it still sounds like a cool idea. I rather suspect the latter was the governing idea here: someone thought it was cool, but then it couldn't quite be executed.

Perhaps its primary value is in providing a unified canon of the Indiana Jones universe: as well as covering the four movies (obviously) it includes the TV series, a bit of time before that, brief allusions to Indy's World War II service, and also the various computer games (most of the focus here is on the popular classic The Fate of Atlantis, but there are hints toward others too). I don't know if the comics get a mention (I suspect not), but the period in which the tie-in novels occur is 'ripped out'.