As any aspiring blog-egrity knows there are a number of hard and fast rules for giving your readers a good time. One is giving full RSS feeds (something I didn’t used to do, but now bugs the shite out of me if you don’t), the other is the need for a regular feature or hook.

Now, I’ve been frantically racking my brain to come up with something as half as good as Andy of WildARSChase’s “What I learned from Cosmo” feature or maybe joining in with TMI Thursdays (such as this one from Brookem at Shrinkering Hearts) or doing a kind of miscellany like Nutty Cow or LisSara.

But that would be plagiarism and as recently someone has done that to me, it’s just not on.

Anyways, the other website I sort of work for (Edinburgh Clubbing Community Forums) regularly has a thread every month about In’s and Out’s (and i’m not referring to how many shags out members have had in the last month) so i’m going to bastardise it here as kind of minutiae of my life, things ive done, things i’ve seen.

So, welcome to my inaugural feature creature… just for you I present Wee-Travelling’s “good and ungood”.

….this week I’m recommending a good film and warning against an awful book…

Good – Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire

If you haven’t seen Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 days later (we’ll miss out The Beach), and Sunshine you better get yourself acquainted with British Cinema quickly because you are missing out on a potential new favourite director (along with Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro). Boyle’s latest outing is a hard smack in the face with a big bag of naughty sugar, a feel good hit without the laughs, a guilty pleasure it’s a crime not to watch. Beautifully shot and with acting so raw that the kids in the film are probably getting the same dream break as the main character Jamal Malik. A violent, traumatic film that ultimately has romance at its heart, this is one not to miss even if you have to resort to kidnapping a date.

Ungood- Neal Stephenson’s Anathem

I’m a massive fan-geek of Stephenson, loving everything he has written from cyber punk in Snow Crash to nanotechnology in The Diamond Age (TV series coming soon) to code breaking in Crptonomicon and alternative history in The Baroque Cycle. So I was in a state akin to arousal when I spotted that he had a new book out.

What a mistake; the only use for this novel is to scare the cat off to his own bed via the means of a cracking whack on the head as I pass out whilst reading this load of codswallop. 800 hardback pages mostly written in a language that’s trying very hard to be funny (Bulshytt) or close but different for no apparent reason (The Ret instead of The Net) would put even a hardened sci-fi reader into a long coma.

Ill go with the Washington Post’s critique “fundamentally unoriginal”, “grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull”. I’ve yet to finish it but can’t see it getting any better. Avoid.

Suggestions for my next good and ungood welcome, it wont all be reviews, i might talk about football or vibrators or good and ungood sex…choices choices…

Kx