I'm a whore for shiny, shiny toys and the PSP is the latest of these to win my heart. After an unfulfilling relationship with my GBA (once the initial passionate throes of Advance Wars had passed) I was lukewarm towards hand-held consoles. The PSP has won me back, but this has little to do with the games. Admittedly I'm likely to lose several years of my life to Tony Hawks Underground 2 Remix (if only in typing out the sodding name) and Metal Gear Acid is nicely quirky but the real killer is the ability to port movies onto the device for viewing on the move. With the help of a $15 shareware program (PSPWare from Nullriver - Macs only of course) this was surprisingly painless and the compression rate is impressive (a 300MB avi file went down to 50Meg) as is picture quality. 20 quid UMD movies are rather excessive (though Lovefilm are now doing UMD rentals) but the ability to have a large chunk of my bittorrent goodies to watch on the move is powerful stuff indeed.

I'm sure I'll find reason to moan in time but as of the moment the PSP is the best thing ever. Fact.

Hunter S Thompson dead at the age of 67. Have knocked up an obituary on Europhobia. Also some touching stuff on Metafilter.

To the NFT last night for Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, part of their fine season of American cinema.

Not the best to be shown in the last couple of months (in my opinion this one was) but good to see in relation to Peckinpah's other 'anti-westerns' Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch. I liked the jibes at typical motifs of the Western, in a contemporary setting horses are replaced by cars, visitors to a camp-out are actually vicious rapists, the 'hero' is a seedy bar owner. Nice enough conceit but there's little else to recommend it.

for the real AvsP, check this stuff out.

Been spending most of my blog-power posting ill-thought musings on US politics to Europhobia, trying to write arsey movie reviews for Shinyshelf and cobbling together a proposal for a book on Bad Movies to send to Virgin.

Will take a few seconds to say: go and see Resident Evil Apocalypse, buy the Star Wars DVD boxset, don't bother with Sky Captain (or the new Terry Pratchett), watch Deadwood, listen to The Killers, drink booze and don't trust anyone over 25.

Oh. Bollocks.