One of those random “stuff” type posts

My horrible phlegm-filled lurgy is now finally subsiding, even though my throat is still raw and I keep coughing randomly. At least I no longer sound like a cross between Davros and Barry White, and was able to laugh at last night’s Mock the Week without actually killing myself. (Frankie Boyle’s Inuit Robot Butler was absolute genius).

Janet is off work today, and is happily ensconced on her PC playing Spore, which (despite annoyingly refusing to let her interact with any of the online content) is generally pleasing her in being a combination of every game style she’s ever liked, with the added bonus that she gets to design weird alien life and evolve it.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which turned out to be unexpectedly not-a-big-pile-of-crap, is back for a second season on 8th September. I might never have started watching this if I hadn’t been asked to review it, and seen a couple of other people praising it, but I’m really glad I did. It’s smarter than it has any right to be, and it neatly picks up on everything I liked about T2 while ditching everything I disliked about T3. Lena Headey is suitably obsessive and bad-ass as Sarah Connor, plus it has Summer Glau as a deeply unnerving ‘good’ Terminator, as showcased by this here poster (click for a bigger version).

Ben Folds Five are re-uniting for one night only to play “The Unauthorised Biography of Reinhold Messner” in its entirety. When we saw Ben Folds ‘solo’ back in June he was playing with two other musicians who were for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the remaining two members of Ben Folds Five (to a philistine like myself — I’m sure their friends and families see an important difference) so I’m sure this will be a breeze for Ben. This seems to be part of a MySpace “Front to Back” live album initiative.

Folds’s new album Way to Normal is out on 30th Sept. He played quite a few songs from it when we saw him live, and generally it sounds quite up-tempo; less acoustic and melancholy than Songs for Silverman. More of an early-BFF sound, in fact.