The Rock and Roll lifestyle existed before Rock and Roll, and it was lived by the Rat Pack. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis jr were the core, with Peter Lawson and Joey Bishop key members and any number of showbiz chums, gangsters and girlfriends rounding out the numbers. The name was originally coined by Lauren Bacall, a slightly condescending term for the guys who hung out with her husband Humphrey Bogart. After Bogie's death Sinatra became The Leader and his merry band went on to become loved and hated in equal measure.

Rat Pack Confidential takes the filming of Ocean's Eleven as the starting point of the Pack's heyday and looks first back, at how the main players got there, and then forward at the slow disintegration of the group.

Sinatra comes across as a prick, a spoilt child given to tantrums if he didn't get his way and always over estimating his closeness to his mobster friends and influence with the Kennedy clan. He so misread the Kennedys that it almost got him killed by the mob after promising far more than he could deliver.

The hero of the group, albeit tragic and terribly flawed, had to be Sammy Davis. A black man who converted to Judaism, he fought prejudice throughout his career. At first he just wanted to be let onto the floor of the Vegas casinos he played at, if only to gamble away his winnings and chase white women, but along the way he had an epiphany and started working for full integration. His friendship with Sinatra certainly helped, and Ol' Blue Eyes put his weight behind equal pay and billing, but Sammy's mentor would still stand in the wings making racist heckles whilst Davis was on stage.

Dean Martin was just along for the ride, that little bit distant and possibly the only person who could stand up to Frank and still stay in favour. But it is Joey Bishop who comes out of the tale with the most dignity. Brought in to emcee the Pack's chaotic "Summit" shows he was the only person who could keep some semblance of control on stage without causing a Sinatra hissy fit. Lawson, last and certainly least of the five, was a tragic figure. Mostly he was courted because of his position of brother in law- and pimp for- John F Kennedy and suffered at the whim of the egos on both sides.

Fascinating stuff, and all told in a conversational style that reads like the patter of the Pack, or at least one of their closer hangers on. Of course, after reading a book like this it's hard, no matter how great his talent, to have any affection for Sinatra the man, but that's a risk you take.

The Watchmen trailer. By all accounts it's going to be absolutely faithful to the graphic novel, and watching the trailer I could guess where most of the shots fitted into the comic. And that will be rather spectacular and lovely, but also a bit disappointing. I know there isn't as massive a history in superhero movies as Moore and Gibbons had to draw from in comics, but there could be room for a film that examined that in its medium the same way they did in theirs.

(A convoluted way of saying yes, of course I'm going to watch it, I just wish they could come up with something a bit more original.)

Buy the Watchmen graphic novel on Amazon.

They didn't know where it had come from, who had made it or what it was for. But it was pretty, so they left it there and admired it.

Until the day it split open.

We've been dancing around the idea for a while in Casa Spinneyhead and today I laid out a whole ten pounds (well, $19.95, but I just divide by two nowadays) on lifetime subscription to Tune Up, a plug in for iTunes. I'm cleaning mystery tracks in small bunches at the moment, and it seems to be doing a good job, though I think it's having trouble finding stuff I've downloaded from MySpace etc. on Gracenote. Next up I'm going to throw a hundred or so tunes at a time at it.

Now, all I need is a way to use iTunes to delete duplicate tracks- listing and file- and I'll be able to really clean up my collection.

Because I've been dragging myself away from the computer (even if it's just to another computer to do video editing on) and Orange internet email has become so unreliable I don't know whether to bother with it.

There will be posting again soon. Honest.

I've uploaded to last of my photos from Budapest, check out the Budapest collection to see them all.

Given to Jack Marsden, who organises the Being Bond charity nights.

A couple of random things that have been in my head for the last few days but haven't coalesced into anything long enough to post by themselves-

We need leaders, but what we get are politicians.

Fundamentalist levels of danger: individually, Islamic fundamentalists are more evil, but they're not going to destroy our society unless we help them. Collectively, Christian fundamentalists are far more dangerous, because they exert an influence on the US and other western governments far out of proportion to their grasp on reality.

Plus- I just challenged the Daily Express to send me a journalist I could take cycling around Manchester. I don't think they will, but you never know until you try. Next week the Daily Mail.

I'm doing this on my phone, so it may be some time before you see it. It's about 6.45 on Wednesday for reference.

Does anybody know which mobile companies have more reliable and better value mobile email than Orange?

Probably not. The Traffic Commissioner will today announce her decision on whether the owners of deadly but defunct bus company UK North can ever run a similar business. In the unlikely event that she says yes we still have a year or so of safety as they were sentenced to 15 months each for their dangerous business practices.

The Google Streetview cars are out and about in Britain.

Not major computer woes, but annoying nonetheless. My PC has been getting slower and slower to bootup over the last couple of months, and hung a couple of times this morning. So I've gone and got some registry maintenance software to see if that makes a difference. I expect it will, as it's found over a thousand errors (it does checks in sweeps of a thousand a time, I'm only on the first sweep and I expect at least one more).

Maybe when that's done I'll no longer have time to make and drink a cup of tea whilst I wait for the computer to start.

And life is grand

And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor

With those of you who have appointed yourselves

To expect us to say something darker

And love is real

And though I realize this is not a deep observation

To those of you who find it necessary

To conceal love or obscure it, as is the fashion

Life is Grand - Camper Van Beethoven

When I make a film with enough of a budget to licence a few songs, I want this one over the end credits.

I've been doing some thinking about a change of direction for Spinneyhead. Some connections fired whilst I pondered this last week and I headed off to the new home of Monitor Duty, a comics blog I posted on for a while a few years ago.

It came as little surprise that I'd been retconned(*) out of MD history, given that I called out the site's owner on his prejudices and left when it became obvious he was using circular logic to support them. (All Muslims are evil terrorists. Any Muslim shown to not be an evil terrorist doesn't count because they're obviously not a True Muslim. Because all Muslims are evil terrorists.) It's not as big a deal as Violet Blue being unpersonned by BoingBoing and I have no problems not being associated with the site except on the Wayback Machine. [For transparency I ought to admit that I have removed posts about a particular person from Spinneyhead's archives. If you've known me long enough you'll know who and why. If you haven't, sorry, I'm not going to elaborate.]

Anyway, scanning the front page I came across a post about the assumed politics of writers. This isn't so much a response as thoughts arising, but I'd always assume that a good writer is more likely to be "liberal" than conservative. Good fiction is about change, and conservatives aren't about change- it's right there in their name. Partly because of this, and a need to make political points, conservative writers lack depth in characterisation- most often trying to compensate with a detailed biography- and an inability to flesh out the antagonists. I'm thinking, chiefly, of Tom Clancy and his technothriller brethren. In particular I remember one of Clancy's books where a character whos only action was to cut down a tree got a page and a half of biography, almost as much as the chief villain.

Authors of all political shades are capable of coming out with polemics, of course. I just think that those of us to the left of centre, and the occasional libertarian, do it so much better.

This is a response to the last bit of the post-

"We" are not winning in Iraq. There is no winning in Iraq, there is merely sacrificing fewer people to a criminally stupid decision and trying to leave the country less fucked than it is at present. We are sacrificing fewer people, thankfully, but hundreds of thousands have died because of an illegal invasion and an incompetent occupation. You can't win with that many corpses.

I'd love to see an attempt to justify the "Obama's more ignorant than George W. Bush ever was", which will probably be based upon some ignorant, unchecked opinion piece from a professional liar like Ann Coulter.

The Antarctic Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve holds about enough oil for a month of use by the US. Why spoil something for so little. Get a smaller car, turn down the air conditioning, fit solar panels and learn to walk!

Yes, McCain is a lousy candidate. All the Republicans were. Don't be an idiot. Don't vote for him.

The transport museum charged you to get in then wouldn't let you take photos unles you paid them. Sadly I didn't figure this out until I was in the aerospace annex, so there are no pictures of cars, trains and bridges.

Transport Museum set.

Memento Park, or Szorbopark as it was labelled on the road signs, is a rest home for Soviet statuary few miles outside Budapest. I was hoping for more, and larger, pieces but it still provided a good home for a GI and several opportunities to photograph Ike interacting with statues.

More pictures in the Memento Park set.

....but the release date for Midnight Club Losangeles has been put back by another month.

(You could still pre-order it though- Xbox edition, PS3 edition.)

The casa Spinneyhead trip to Budapest was great fun. Up until Monday the only negative factors were Orange mobile email's unreliability and Saturday's hangover being aggravated by the heat to the point where I felt faint.

Then we had to come home.

We made it to Ferihegy terminal 1 early without a hitch or taxi fare, having discovered the Metro laid on connecting buses. We hung around for a while in the terminal, then checked in. So far so good.

The first disappointment was finding that airside at Ferihegy isn't that good, but we managed to get rid of excess Forints at the expensive cafe.

It started to rain just before we boarded our plane. Not a biggy, it was the first rain during the daytime since our arrival and even if it was a bit heavy that was just preparation for our return to Manchester. We even managed to make the short bus ride and transfer to the plane during a break in the showers.

The problems started once we were aboard the plane. Two rows back was a screaming ill child who promised to be annoying throughout the flight. Then it started raining again, more heavily and with lots of lightning. The fuel trucks sat at the end of each wing immediately uncoupled and scooted away, afraid of exploding.

As the rain and lightning continued and the muzak on the intercom cycled through Robbie Williams and worse, things deteriorated. Alex began to tell a tale about flying through lightning in a commuter jet that kept getting hit. This prompted the man in the seat in front to turn around and tell us off because his wife was terrified of flying. With that cliche out of the way we tried to stay quiet, going back to reading and waiting out the storm.

We waited, but the storm had more patience. The captain came out to talk to everyone and convince us all that, should we ever get any fuel on board and take off, we'd be perfectly safe. After over two hours we were told to get off and wait in the terminal building.

At least four other planes worth of passengers were in the same situation, and Ferihegy 1 isn't built for that many people hanging around, but couldn't or wouldn't open up any extra space for us. We found floor space near the air conditioning vent. Alex slept, Ruth listened to an audiobook, Damian tried to chat up a student returning for her graduation and I broke out the politically incorrect sweeties. Time dragged on, water built up on the tarmac and a spectacular light show kept turning the Eastern skyline purple.

More than once we were teased as fuel trucks appeared only to scuttle away again as the sky lit up once more. I started planning to build the world's largest capacitor and just once be able to shoot lightning back into the sky as revenge. One plane was wheeled away because of some fault and its passengers told they would fly in the morning. A Transit van crossing the tarmac hit a patch of standing water and through up a plume that reached halfway up its windows.

Finally, just before midnight, there was a long enough break, our plane was fuelled and we were shuttled out to it. The flight was uneventful, surprisingly, and there was almost no cloud over England. It was just after 2am when we finally traipsed out to the taxi rank, over four hours later than scheduled. We got into a taxi and slowly pulled away.

That should have been it, but the bad journey mojo just wouldn't let go. It took us a little too long to realise that the taxi was really, really going slowly. By the time we'd worked out it might be a problem we were on the motorway, straining to grind along at 22 whilst HGVs went past us at 70. A grey cloud of we couldn't tell what followed us along the slow lane.

Our driver explained that this was an intermittent problem that had been going on for a while, and he was angry about it because the vehicle was still under warranty and therefore shouldn't break down. I didn't try to explain warranties to him, but we all employed varying levels of forthrightness to tell him he shouldn't be on the road with a car in that condition. Oblivious to our meaning, he asked us to write a letter of complaint to the person who sold him a vehicle which broke down even whilst it was under warranty. All the while we squealed and rattled our way along the slow lane, stopping once when he thought another cabbie had stopped to offer to do a passenger swap on the hard shoulder. Anger, and terror, mounted as he then tried to pull back onto the motorway with lorries charging toward us.

A journey that should have taken ten minutes ended up taking nearly forty and, whilst the cabbie received far less than the meter said, he still got paid more than he deserved. There's a contact at the council to report bad or dangerous taxis. We have his number, so we shall be making the call.

Heroes Square, Budapest.

Memento Park, outside Budapest.

Left on a statue in City Park, Budapest.

We were a false star, blinking high above.

Manchester was the biggest concert crowd ever- a million streetlamps lighters held aloft for the anthem of our return.

On a statue on Deak Ferenc Ter.

On a big nipple (lucky boy), Deak Ferenc Ter.

Overlooking the Danube.