At last...

...a charitable way to waste your time, and improve your vocabulary. Click here.

As you can see, the labels below are quite irrelevant and are merely attached to this post to draw in the unwary and allow them to do something useful for a few moments.

Schlock

I went to see the new Quentin Tarantino film last night with Sally. The two of us were alone in the cinema apart from a group of teenagers, mostly boys, nerdy types as QT must have been, who behaved in a fairly respectful way and then went home, no doubt to squeeze their spots and dream about Butterfly.

The film had all the essential ingredients, raunchily attractive women in hot pants discussing sex, car chases, gory and apparently gratuitous violence, an intellectual's attention to tacky period detail, deliberate anachronisms, lap dancing - everything you expect and love (or hate) from Tarantino, in a particularly stripped-back form. Underpinning all this was an extraordinary simple but effective structure: essentially, the same story told twice but with all the difference in the world, which is where the film's moral purpose (because, of course, it has one) comes from.

I won't say any more, because I wouldn't want to spoil it for you, but it's extraordinary how something that is so much sheer fun in such a superficially mindless way can also be intellectually satisfying.

Now just let me squeeze that spot.

When your cavity needs a little filling

The dentist's chair is often a locus for sexual fantasies but I've never seen the notion expressed quite as blatantly as it is in this sign, spotted in Kingsland High Road and snapped by Jane.

And if you think the title to this post is gratuitous vulgarity (as of course it is), let me hastily refer you to its onlie begetter, Bette Midler, who wrote and performed the song it comes from: Long John Blues.