Three things

1. I've had the latest phonebooks lying around - they've been there for almost a year, I guess. I was looking through the white pages for a name for one of the characters in my new comic, when I thought I should check if my name is there. And it is! My name is in a French phonebook! I was almost as excited as Steve Martin was in The Jerk.

2. After not being in a cinema for over a year I went and saw the new Mission Impossible. It's not bad. It's not as good as the first one. It's better than the second one. The setpieces are great. There is some character stuff, and the problem with that is that you don't really care about Tom Cruise as a character. You want to see him run and punch people out. The talky/feely scenes are a bit boring. Some of the gadgets in the film, like making the new agent being able to hover over the ground was a bit hard to believe in. And the bad guy was a bit boring. Wanting to start World War 3, the Bond villains stopped doing that in the seventies. The rabbit's foot, in the third one, was a better macguffin, even not knowing what the damn thing was.

3. For some reason I've been thinking about the duet that Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash did together, Girl from the North Country. There are one of two places during the song where one of them starts to sing one thing and the other something else, then they correct themselves. I've wondered why they didn't make a second take. But perfection can be boring. And that small mistake actually makes it more memorable, more human.