Tom Lennon • Freelance Writer: comedy and pop culture

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

Latest Stuff

Danse Macabre

"Sometime in mid-July 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and started to dance." There was a fascinating piece on this morning's Today Programme about a historical curiosity I'd never heard of before. This dancing woman was soon joined by others - men, women and children - and by the end of August 1518 there was more than four hundred of them. This was no lavish, Busby Berkeley production number, however: these people were in the grip of some mad, uncontrollable compulsion. They danced all day and all night and they danced against their will. [...]

When life turns into a Robert Anton Wilson novel

It was 8am and I was driving to work, listening to Radio 4's Today Programme as John Humpreys served me a hearty breakfast of headlines. He told me that Republican Presidential candidate John McCain had promised to transform Washington and win back public trust. He said something about research indicating that some food prices had risen by as much as 40% this year. Finally, he reassured me that scientists working on CERN's Large Hadron Collider had insisted that their research into the start of the universe will not create a black hole that will swallow the planet next Wednesday.Thanks for [...]

Who Watches the… What?

With the hype machine for next year's Watchmen film already powering up (it was the cover story to last month's Empire and the trailer is attached to Dark Knight, that bat-themed vigilante flick that's currently doing the rounds), it's only a matter of time before non-comics literate friends and affiliates start asking me: "What's it all about, fanboy?"Sadly, I'm no better equipped at providing a straightforward, snappy and easily digestible answer than I was when other friends and other affiliates were asking another me exactly the same question over twenty years' ago. It's just as well, then, that there are [...]