Flyboys innit

Armstrong & Miller bring the wartime RAF up to date (six sketches, ten minutes in toto):

The hammer is still

Alasdair Gray and Irvine Welsh commemorate cherished Glasgow author Jeff Torrington.

Four-letter word

Don't call Scientology a cult, say the City of London Police.

There goes the neighbourhood, dear boy

The Blairs buy Gielgud's
old home.

Darling, Do You Love Me?

Say yes, it's Germaine Greer in 1968 (3 mins):

William burrows

He spent forty years building a maze of tunnels under his house, only to be evicted and forced to pay for the damage.

From flop to classic

Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party reaches its golden jubilee.

Sinister cherub

If you needed to know about vampires, Montague Summers was your man.

"There are brave lawyers waiting"

Will Blair and Bush be prosecuted? Clare Short - on Al-Jazeera - thinks it could happen:

Click to see video (1 minute)

Dubious

WhiteHouse.org may not in fact be the genuine website of the real, proper White House.

The proto-Prescott

A tribute site for Stanley Unwin, the entertainer who made his living by talking gibberish.

Predictions to remember, #1

Daniel Hannan rhapsodizes:

Under Boris Johnson, our capital city will experience a flowering of artistic and intellectual life. BoJo will be a second Charlemagne, attracting scholars and philosophers from all Europe. You doubt me? Just you wait.

Hillary can still win

…insists this comical video, made before the Pennsylvania primary (90 secs):

Liquidity crisis

A rare opportunity to buy shares in something that has already plunged to oblivion: the liner Laurentic, sunk in 1917.

Shortly-to-be-beside-the-point question

Those guys at Stupid Comics sure know where to find the dross.

What's Chris Morris ON?

One or two readers were puzzled by my earlier allusion to Shatner's Bassoon, so - just to make sure I wasn't misremembering - I checked out Wikipedia's write-up of the Brass Eye "drugs" episode, and found myself laughing hugely; so here's a transcript.

Celluloid prophecy

Footage from Algie the Miner (1912) reveals how Truman Capote came to write In Cold Blood
(7 minutes):



Truman/Algie is Billy Quirk, who died in 1926. Director Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female director in motion picture history.

The drunk driver who thinks he's God

Of course he was all over the road. He's omnipresent.

Stigmatized

Mick Hall condemns media class prejudice:

When working class people are portrayed on our screens, they are increasingly being played by middle class actors as either stupid chavs, layabouts, criminals, incompetent half wits or victims of their own class, in much the same way as black people used to be portrayed.

"Bogart was sweet"

Rest in peace Joy Page, last-but-one member of the cast of Casablanca.

(She's survived by Madeleine LeBeau, who played Rick's jilted mistress Yvonne.)