Happy Birthday Rough Trade!

• Independent record label Rough Trade is 30 years old this week - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! I do love their compilations, which in the past have turned me on to acts as diverse as Joanna Newsom and Susannah and the Magical Orchestra to Shackleton and, um, Do Me Bad Things. Long may the Rough Trading (if that can become a verb) continue. To celebrate this occasion, the fabulous Jarvis Cocker (whose first solo album is on the label) is embarking on a mini tour with a set comprising of lectures, a traditional gig and a disco. There's a great interview with him in The Guardian today which I recommend you read.

• TV comedy show Blackadder will also mark a special landmark - 25(!) years after it first aired, there is to be a brand new Christmas special this year. I can think of a fair few folk who will be mightily pleased to hear of this event ...

• In more frightening news, I hear that there is to be an Ace Ventura Junior movie. Dear God. Who financed that?

• Not quite as disturbing, but still perplexing, is the new movie featuring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughan, Four Christmases, which is essentially Meet the Fockers part II. From the trailer alone, some scenes seem to be directly lifted from said movie! I saw the trailer yesterday and was stumped at why an Oscar winner like Witherspoon would bother with such formulaic tripe. She surely can't need the money. She did look lovely though, albeit so dinky she appeared to have entered a world of giants when standing next to the bearish Vaughan. I do have a predilection for Vince in a cuddly kind of way (he was on the magnificent Fridge of Fitness my housemates and I once created), but even that wouldn't persuade me to see this atrocity. He can do better than this, surely. WHY?? If you think that I'm being unduly harsh on the movie, check out the trailer below:

See?! Who dresses like that at an airport?!