Tom Lennon • Freelance Writer: comedy and pop culture

Freelance writer specializing in comedy and the geekier end of the pop culture spectrum.

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11-11-11: Handsworth

(By way of a recap: on 11th November 2008 Clare & I embarked on a public transport-based Kerouacian Carousel around the City of Birmingham. I'm writing up the journey in a series of urban travelblogs that are insterspersed with low humour and the occasional knob gag. Think Bill Bryson meets the late Reg Varney.) As we make our way out of Winson Green along Handsworth New Road, onto Boulton Road, across Soho Road and up Rookery Road, I notice ubiquitous fly posters advertising a Public Enemy gig at the Custard Factory in December.Three things come to mind:I like Public Enemy.I'd [...]

Oscar Deutsch Entertained Our Neighbourhood

Nick Horner's article in last week's Great Barr Observer about the virtual reconstruction of Kingstanding's former Odeon cinema will be of interest to those odd critters like me who have a weakness for magnificent old cinema buildings. I don't know what the technical term for this is, but I suppose you could call us necrocinephiles. Anyhow, I posted about this recently, but in the meantime Nick has since done some proper journalistic legwork and uncovered some additional information. King's Visualisation Lab (KVL) created their VR Odeon Kingstanding in 2003 and their plan was to eventually construct a comprehensive database of [...]

Batman vs Batman

From Variety:Batman has a new adversary: Batman.The mayor of an oil-producing city in southeastern Turkey, which has the same name as the Caped Crusader, is suing helmer Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. for royalties from mega-grosser The Dark Knight.Huseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman, has accused The Dark Knight producers of using the city's name without permission."There is only one Batman in the world," Kalkan said. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."

JJ Abrams’ Star Trek trailer

Yummy.

11-11-11: Winson Green

"The road you can talk about is not the road you can walk on." Lao-Tse - Tao Te ChingAt about 2.10pm the bus is driving through Winson Green.For the uninitiated, Clare and I are indulging in a spot of guerrilla ethnomethodology aboard Birmingham's legendary number 11 bus. Some youths board the bus and sit behind us. This doesn't concern us, however, as everyone else on the top deck is sitting behind us, too. That's what happens when you sit on the front seat. Before long, we notice a suspicious, burning odour coming from behind. This isn't the typical, pungent, herb-based [...]

11-11-11: From Bearwood to Edgbaston

By 2pm we've left Harborne. It happens to us all eventually.After crossing Hagley Road (home to my old sixth form, St Philip's College), the number 11 saunters wistfully along the Bearwood High Street as another song comes to mind. This time, it's the sublime This is What She's Like from Dexys Midnight Runners' wilfully uncommercial and criminally underrated 1985 album, Don't Stand Me Down:On the album version of the song, The Little Nibble café on the Bearwood Road gets name checked during some pre-song banter (legend has it that Kevin Rowland and his bandmates used to meet there for tea-dinking [...]

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