poppy alexander change and decay in all around I see

This is classic Baxter. It spans millions of years, all the characters die, and by the end not only has everyone we know ceased to exist, the human race itself has de-evolved. No super-race of the future in Baxter's vision, humanity evolves eventually into little monkey like creatures that are symbiotic with trees.

Saw 'Moon' at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. Another home cinema screen, like FACT (though that has trendy sofas) and the cinema in Oban (not trendy at all). 'Moon' was ok, enjoyed it. Not mindbogglingly new but perfectly acceptable, like a reasonably good Twilight Zone episode. Started out hinting at Solaris, went on to Space Odyssey, finished up a bit like a cross between BladeRunner and The Truman Show. With a hint of that Arnie film - no, not that one, the unmemorable one, 'The 6th Day'.

I miss Primeval, the weekly hope that someone might get eaten by a dinosaur. The premise wasn't all that subtle: Walking with dinosaurs did well - lets do running from dinosaurs. It did better as a kids show in spite and probably partly because of not being initially aimed at kids. Once evil Helen stopped flashing her cleavage and just started being Cruella de Ville, and the scripts started mixing in slapstick and sibling bickering in that old Scooby way it started to pick up.

Here's my basic categorisation scheme for movies: A is obviously top stuff; B is typical B-movie material ie I like it but I'm not saying it's especially good. C is just about passable, D is dreck. I put Blade 3 at C, along with Chronicles of Riddick. The titles are great, but then they often are in bad films, as if someone realises the product isn't so hot and ups the budget on the packaging.

Sowing and planting season is just beginning to turn into harvesting season, and it's quite exciting. The weather is not so bad as last year, so the slugs haven't been so bad, though still a problem. They've had all the lettuces bar two in a pot which they haven't found yet.

Atmospheric but confusing. It's a long time since I read the Earthsea books, and this animation doesn't bother with explaining plot points. Why are the dragons there, and how is the girl a dragon? Who is Sparrowhawk and why is he involved?

It's nearly very good. The architecture is lovely, great pillared halls, castles and ancient crumbling towns. In one scene Sparrowhawk comes over a rise onto a great deserted beach strewn with the huge hulls of abandoned warships. What is lacking is the strong storytelling heart, that would have us care for the folk that inhabit this impressive world.

I finally manged to get Clean URLs to work on my test Drupal site. First I had to enable mod-rewrite for Apache (a2enmod rewrite, advice from http://www.epicarena.com/c/Linux). Then check that php was installed - yes, it came with Drupal. Took me a while to work out how to get the test page to work though. Then had to change Apache2.conf to AllowOverrideAll and AccessFilename .htaccess. Finally enabled RewriteBase/Drupal in .htaccess, and it worked. The page I mainly used was http://drupal.org/node/15365.

Dawn dark city rain
Seagulls spin
racing porpoise cars

Six months down the line I'm still with Amazon, but Alibris has come and gone. I'm currently trying out Biblio.com, and Biblion.co.uk, its smaller UK-based cousin.