“Amy Hastings” sent me a friend request on Facebook on 12 February 2012. I think “she” had four or five friends by the time I accepted. She didn’t have a profile picture or any other photos up on “her” page. I waited to see what happened next and wasn’t particularly surprised when “Amy” sent me an unsolicited message. Here it is followed by my and “her” replies: Amy Hastings on February 13: I have some really erotic photoz, but I can’t post them here. Do you have an email or mobile number I can send them to? That is if you want to view them.

“Here Come The Kung Fu Clones” is a book about the superabundance of Bruce Lee imitators who attempted to fill the void created by the Little Dragon’s death in 1973 with movies such as “Bruce Lee Against Supermen”, “Bruce Lee His Last Days, His Last Nights”, “Bruce Lee Fights Back From The Grave” and “Bruce Lee In New Guinea”. While a lot of work has obviously gone into this book, the writing is fan level and could have been much better organised. As you’d expect the focus is on summarising plot rather than critical analysis. Bruce Li is well covered – the other Bruce Lee clones are not well served.

Pho is a small chain of family owned Vietnamese cafes. They have 5 branches in London and one in Brighton (UK). There are two branches in the west end, one in Clerkenwell, and one apiece in the Westfield shopping centres in Shepherds Bush and Stratford E15. Their food is both good and modestly priced but it was only recently that I noticed they sold weasel coffee for £5.95 a cup. This struck me as cheap for the world’s ‘most expensive’ coffee – since I remembered reading newspaper articles a few years back about how the brasserie at the Peter Jones department store in London’s Sloane Square was selling a single cup of this rare brew for £50 (US $79.

This is an interview I did with Playground Magazine for translation into Spanish around the publication by the Barcelona based literary press Alpha Decay of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured I might as well run it here in English too! I’m told this interview was published about ten days ago but the urls I was sent to it don’t work – so I can’t link you to the Spanish version here…. Playground: First of all, I’d like you to tell me about the place you are at the moment, answering these questions. What things do you have around (is there a cup of coffee, a little pencil, something like that)?

While Videodrome (1983) remains my favourite Cronenberg movie and on the whole I prefer his earlier to his later work, he is a director who continues to amuse me. When I went to see Cronenberg’s latest flick A Dangerous Method (at the Soho Curzon) I was apparently surrounded by a bunch of badly dressed shrinks and therapists who found the film ‘intense’ and lapped it up in the same way they’d ‘appreciate’ any other worthless costume drama designed to appeal to the type of middle-class and middle-brow film-goer who thinks a TV show like Strictly Come Dancing is raunchy. In stark contrast to the bits and pieces of conversation I overheard on my way out of the cinema, I knew I’d just sat through a slab of exploitation schlock rooted in horror and art house tropes, which simultaneously provided a bellyful of laughs at the expense of the founding fathers of psychoanalytic pseudo-science.