Tom Lennon • Freelance Writer: comedy and pop culture

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

Latest Stuff

Lord of the Frogger

In the Seinfeld episode The Frogger, the eponymous Jerry and his "short, stocky, slow-witted and bald" best friend George Costanza visit a soon-to-be closed down pizza parlour they used to frequent at high school. They discover that the owner still has the old Frogger arcade game they used to play as kids, and the Frogger machine still displays George's high score of 860,630 points. George regards this as his greatest ever achievement, so resolves to buy the machine off the pizza parlour owner ("I'm never gonna have a child. If I lose this Frogger high score, that's it for me"). [...]

Treme Trailer

HBO have just released a teaser trailer for Treme, the new series from The Wire's creator David Simon. The show is set in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and centres around a group of local musicians. It stars Wire alumni Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters (who played Bunk Moreland and Lester Freamon in the Baltimore-set TV masterpiece) as well as the mighty John Goodman and - somewhat bizarrely - Elvis Costello. Here's the trailer:

TCB, Elvis

Friday would have been the 75th birthday of Mr Elvis Aaron Presley, a name you probably won't need to look up in Wikipedia. Like most anniversaries (or, for that matter, most things in life), the news coverage was a fairly predictable affair. Stock footage covering both ends of his career followed by smug observations about Elvis impersonators and obligatory soundbites from eccentric fans, which invariably consisted of a random great granny from The King's original target demographic (who, ideally, doesn't much care for modern music) juxtaposed with some young arsehole with a quiff. I assume the latter was "going through [...]

Movie Haiku: My favourite films of 2009

As a blogger, I'm contractually obliged to produce and publish annual lists of things. It's one of those tedious tasks you try to put off until the last moment and always bitterly resent, like getting your car serviced, completing a tax return or flossing. If I don't do it bad things might happen. I could lose my weblog licence, get a nasty email from Technorati or even end up with a terrible gum disease. So what follows are my favourite films of 2009 at this particular moment in time. These are movies that were released in the UK between 1st [...]

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