GORE AND MORE

Grindhouse is the latest attempt by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to give censors palpitations. It’s a loving tribute to the sex and gore-drenched movies that once filled low-rent American cinemas. The official site for this forthcoming double-header has a suitably dirty and scratched look and disturbing windswept soundtrack. You can watch a video interview with Rodriguez and Tarantino explaining what the genre is, and why they are tackling the zombie genre in Planet Terror (Rodriguez) and the tale of a psychotic stunt driver in Death Proof (Tarantino).

But, most interestingly, the site allows you to create your own Grindhouse trailer by remixing a large selection of clips and adding effects and music. There is also a poster feature, while the “Scream Machine” lets you pummel, slice or shoot a zombie with your weapon of choice. www.grindhousemovie.net

PAINT IT RED

Tomato ketchup is not just for eating, it’s also a useful painting material. At KetchupArt.com ( above), a number of no doubt bored individuals have sprayed out pictures of just about anything you can think of on their dinner plates. The Top Ten features such efforts as ( clockwise, from main picture) Mr Ketchup, Mao Tse Tchup and Overall. They may not be the most skilfully rendered artworks but anyone can upload their mealtime creations, and the “random” feature is a fine timewaster. www.ketchupart.com

BLOG FEATURE OF THE WEEK

Largehearted Boy is one of the most valuable music, literature and pop culture blogs around. Apart from its daily dose of free and legal music downloads, what raises it above peers is the brilliant Book Notes feature. Here authors get to plug their latest literary outing by writing about the music that helped to inspire it. Thus, we have the cult satirist Neal Pollack explaining why he and his toddler son Elijah delight in such songs as Purple People Eater and Les Sans Culottes’ SOS Elephants, which helped in the creation of his book Alternadad. The crime novelist George Pelecanos dissects the sounds of Washington DC, the setting for his book Drama City.

Entries span everything from graphic novels and travelogues to horror fiction and literary biography. All are filled with insights. Well, nearly all. Bret Easton Ellis seems to have just sent in a laundry list for his last novel, Lunar Park. www.largeheartedboy.com/ blog/archive/book_notes

THE JOKES, FOLKS

Sometimes websites can succeed with nothing more than lines of text set against a white page. Such is Funny2.com, delivering jokes and nothing but the jokes in dozens of categories, including “Guy Walks into a Bar” and “Light Bulbs”. A select few individuals are given their own pages, including Homer Simpson, Ralph Wiggum (“Me fail English? That’s unpossible”) and Steven Wright, the laconic one-liner king who was the DJ in Reservoir Dogs.

Fans of Goodfellas can further marvel at the old-fashioned zingers of the late Henny Youngman, who made a memorable cameo in the 1990 Martin Scorsese film. He was the stand-up responsible for “I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back” and “Take my wife . . . please!” www.funny2.com

PODCAST OF THE WEEK

Many podcasts are just two people wittering about random rubbish, but some duos do it very well. Take Helen Zalztman and Olly Mann of Answer Me This. While fielding listeners’ outlandish questions, the pair ponder such subjects as what would have happened on the Ides of March if Julius Caesar had owned an i-Pod, the “unredeeming appallingness” of rock band Nickelback and “Why do you get a runny nose when eating spicy food?”.

Other insights concern Christopher Biggins, cupboard weevils, evolution and “naughty French films”. answermethis.wordpress.com

COOL IN THE CAPITAL

Launched in Barcelona in February 2003, le cool magazine quickly established itself as a vital weekly guide to the cultural life of the Catalonian capital. The difference, however, with this publication is that it is a free e-zine or “graphical e-mail, laid out in a horizontal format with pages, as if it were a traditional magazine”, and since February a London edition has been arriving in subscribers’ inboxes every Thursday.

Edited by the former Suede bassist Mat Osman, London’s le cool is a thing of beauty complete with the sort of insouciant writing on gigs, art exhibitions, club nights and films that knows its youthful target audience. Therefore, expect fusty-looking dramas such as the National Theatre’s The Man of Mode to be reviewed as “Nicholas Hytner has given George Etherege’s play a fabulous kick up the derriãre”. www.lecool.com/london/ OLAV BJORTOMT