The waitress who served us was a ringer for Martha Jones. Geektastic.

Back from my other trip to Lake Como a week ago, but been too busy to note the fact. It was top. My mum's apartment in Lenno is 10 minutes stroll from Villa Balbianello. You may not have heard of it, but you may well recognise it. It was the site of the private hospital where Bond recuperated from having his testicles mashed up in Casino Royale. It was also the site of the excrutiating fruit-cutting-with-Jedi-mind-powers incident between Anakin and Padme in Attack of the Clones. Cheesy sci-fi associations aside, it is a fantastically pretty place.

Lake Como is just generally pretty. Since the Italians tend to render and paint all their buildings there's a certain timelessness to everything, the light is bright, and mountains are dramatic and, to an my eye, slightly frightening. In Britain we have mountains, obviously, but they don't have trees. They have fields, perhaps the odd sheep, a moor. But not trees. The mountains around Lake Como are densely wooded from the lake shore up to the snow line - look at these aerial photos of Lenno and compare them with the area around Wast Water. Couple that with a lake that's just mindbogglingly long and it all feels slightly unearthly.

Back on Arabica again after what seems like a very long time. Working on the axes tests of the OASIS suite. There are 130 tests in this bit of the suite, and as I type there are 3 fails - one each because I haven't implemented xsl:number or xsl:strip-space yet, and the last one because something's broken. Let's see if I can fix it :)

Three Pleasures

Yes, I know it should be Marathon

Chez Jez

When this comic was drawn I was very taken by Rick Veitch's Rare Bit Fiend dream comics. Still am, they're probably some of the more important comics published in the 90s, and certainly the most interesting product (even if indirectly) of Scott McCloud's 24 hour comics challenge. I don't remember the details of this particular comic, but it looks very much like I've tried to capture some of what I found so attractive about Veitch's work, both in tone and in layout. I think it still works.

Anna, if you're off to play tennis in the next few days, do take a turn around the park first. The first of this year's ducklings hatched last week and can now regularly be seen scudding about on the pond, making little peeping noises and generally looking cute.

As part of my informal ice cream van/duckling global warming monitor, I'm registering a perhaps slightly later than last year.

Took a trip last night to see Spider-Man 3 with my comicschums. We sat at the front so the screen filled out fields of view. Marvellous. Nothing as striking as 2's fight down a skyscraper or terrific stopping a subway train, but lots of top hitting and swinging fun. Good fun. You know, fun fun

I've never been a fan of the Spider-Man comics. I can appreciate them as comics, but they've never engaged me. The villians, in particular, I always found a bit silly. But I do love the films, they're terrific exuberant filmmaking. While many blockbusters seem reliably formulaic, Spider-Man is reliably formulaic (the hero must triumph) but really very daring. Raimi fills his films with details and scenes, some really very long, that really serve no story telling purpose: Bruce Campbell's supercillious "French" waiter tops his outing as a jobsworth theatre doorman in 2; the sticking door to Peter's tiny apartment; Ursula, the sweet daughter of Peter's landlord, is fantastic fetching Peter to the phone; Miss Brant's interruptions to remind J Jonah Jameson to watch his blood pressure gradually take over the entire scene; and topping them all, emo-Peter striding down the street, snapping his fingers like Tim Brooke-Taylor in Saturday Night Grease. Amazingly, in amongst the the thumping and the comedy and the swinging, zooming camera, Raimi fits a sweet, nerdy, romance neatly in there as well. Two romances, in fact, one old, one new. Bless.

If you think you might go, then do. I won't be half as so good on the telly.

The local Wetherspoons pub has sprouted lots of new window stickers proclaiming "Superchill". All draft beers are now chilled to between 1 and 3 degrees, apparently. Wetherspoons used to promote itself quite heavily on the quality of its beers. 3 degrees is far too cold for beer, even for lager. It'll kill aroma and flavour stone dead. I imagine drinking more than a glass or two would probably be pretty uncomfortable too.

A quick peek at their website confirms it, while simultaneously promoting their beer festival. Choose your favourite! View the tasting notes! Then ignore them, because we're just going to chill the hell out of them anyway.

What a shame.