Tom Lennon • Freelance Writer: comedy and pop culture

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

Latest Stuff

Is Nothing Sacred?

From here: Comedic actor John Michael Higgins ("Best in Show," "Fred Claus") has been cast in the lead role of an American remake of cult Irish comedy "Father Ted." According to Higgins: "It's not on Craggy Island, it's a fishing village down on its luck in New England..." The big question is, will it work? Only a scant few shows (eg. "Pop Idol", "The Office") have made the transition, most have crashed and burned or not even gotten off the ground. Higgins himself is dubious "The English have a very robust history of being unkind about religion. We don't have [...]

Dystopian Myopia

I finally got around to watching the film Children of Men this evening. First impressions? Let's see: "Phew", "Fucking Hell" and "Wow". Those were my first impressions.I've always been something of a connoisseur of dystopian fiction. I don't know where it began. Maybe it was while reading the classic comic series V For Vendetta at a formative age, or maybe it goes further back. Perhaps it was Judge Dredd in 2000AD, or maybe it was the "Days of Future Past" storyline in the The Uncanny X-Men comic series. This will mean nothing to anyone who wasn't raised on Marvel Comics, [...]

To be or not 3D

I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been to see Beowulf at the cinema and enjoyed it tremendously. I didn't get around to saying why I enjoyed it tremendously, but that's because I was interrupted by a phone call. These things happen.I thought Beowulf was a grand, bold and jaw-droppingly magnificent piece of classic heroic fiction that was epic in every sense of the word. There, that wasn't so difficult. It was a guilty pleasure of a movie that reminded me of why I fell in love with cinema in the first place. Sorry, Rol.It certainly broke new ground [...]

Many Small Worlds

I've liked the band Eels ever since I listened to their Beautiful Freak album ten years or so ago. I've never seen them live, but they're touring now so I might try to catch them. The reason why I mention this somewhat tedious factoid is that I just saw a trailer on BBC4 for a forthcoming doc about Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett. It turns out that his father was Hugh Everett - he of the Everett-Wheeler-Graham school of quantum physics. Robert Anton Wilson's bloody marvellous Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy is what first got me interested in quantum physics. Here's how [...]

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