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Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen are making a spoof Sherlock Holmes movie (as Watson and Holmes, respectively). This is almost certainly a bad idea, but as usual they failed to run it past me before greenlighting the project.

Meanwhile Guy Ritchie is making a not-spoof Sherlock Holmes movie. Or not intentionally spoof, anyway, since this is the previously reported "sexed up" version emphasising Holmes's bare-knuckle boxing skills. Insert "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Jackets" joke here. On the other hand Robert Downey Jr. is playing Holmes, which makes me all intrigued. And afraid. And intrigued. And afraid.

Meanwhile David Simon will be following the incomparable The Wire and the upcoming Generation Kill miniseries with Treme, an HBO pilot for a series set in post-Katrina New Orleans; details of which can be found in this excellent and detailed article about Simon in the New Yorker (which contains some spoilers for the fifth season of The Wire).

Joss Whedon has an online webisode supervillain-musical thing called "Dr Horrible's Sing-along Blog" starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. Trailer, article and review. It looks strangely awesome.

NOW NEWSPAPERS TELL YOU LIES

This is a fantastic dissection of a particularly odious anti-Muslim story in the generally extremely odious Daily Express.

What perhaps shouldn't surprise me quite as much as it does is that the story has only the slightest resemblance to the truth. The headline ("Sniffer dogs offend Muslims so now bomb search police face restrictions") is in fact not just a distortion but literally untrue and is disproven by the fine print later in the story.

This stuff really annoys me. Most days I wander past the news stand and see the headlines on the Daily Mail and the Daily Express and feel vaguely amused at how biased they seem to be. All tabloids pander mercilessly to their perceived demographic, after all, whether left wing or right wing.

Sometimes though I do get disheartened by how relentlessly the more right wing publications are brazenly trying to stir up xenophobia and make their reader (some hypothetical middle class, middle aged white person) feel that their way of life is under attack from all sides. For example, during the recent petrol strike (that only minimally disrupted the country) the Express chose big headlines stating "Government says not to panic but FUEL COULD RUN OUT!" To be fair, most of the media became obsessed with seeking out areas where there had been at least some disruption. Most didn't actively set out to cause panic, however. The Express is particularly fond of headlines that sound like they've been screamed by someone experiencing a nervous breakdown. Starting the headline with the word "NOW..." is their preferred means of indicating that this latest indignity is the final straw.

The website linked to above notes some of the more extreme comments to this story, which appear to be made by people who only read the headline. Okay, even the BBC website tends to have comments threads filled with slighty deranged people ranting from their chosen soapbox, but I still find this a little depressing.

I know the Daily Express is an easy target. I know they pander to a readership who already believes these things. I just find them particularly shameless and manipulative, and the one thing that really does aggravate me in journalism is Making Stuff Up.

(Link courtesy of the ever entertaining badscience).

Lipstick

That Tom McRae single I mentioned, "Lipstick", is out now. It's one of those "featuring Tom McRae" arrangements where the original artist 'Wills and the Willing' supplied the backing track and a bit of rap and he wrote and performed the rest.

I have to say I absolutely love all of the Tom McRae bits - it's the best thing he's done in quite a while, especially when he gets to rock out a bit towards the end. Sadly, although I'm not normally averse to a bit of rock/rap fusion, the rap bits just don't work for me.

Still, I've bought it on iTunes. You can also hear it on his myspace account (although the contrast with the downloaded version from iTunes only serves to remind me how much streaming audio changes the mix and sound of a song.)