The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

An avante garde thriller, directed by John Cassavetes, from the 1970's. A night club owner Cosmo Vittelli (Ben Gazzara), in debt to gangsters, is asked to murder someone else who owes them money.

I can't really recommend the film to anyone much: Vittelli owns possibly the most awful night club I've ever seen, everyone channelling Bertolt Brecht (I actually fast-forwarded through the worst bits, pretty much all of them), although the thriller parts are handled well enough. Apparently, it was significantly cut on release and still bombed.

As an aside, when John Cassavetes died in the 1980's, 2000AD commemorated the event by issuing a Judge Dredd story (Issue No. 627) in the style of the director called "John Cassavetes is Dead", about an old man who's arrested for collecting newspapers.

Judge Parry

I found a web site that makes Judge Dredd badges:

Friday: Signing off

There's a Judge Dredd story called "Sunday Night Fever", (2000 AD, Prog 416). In Mega City One, there's a gazzillion percent unemployed and jobs are quite rare, so instead of Sunday night being quiet, with most people preparing for the following work day, it all kicks off like a bad night in Bas-Vegas. The story concerns a guy in a bar. He says that he's lost his job as a human canary at the local Munce factory (Mega City One's equivalent of Soylent Green). Somehow, he mistakes someone at the bar for the guy who took his job and kills him in a fight. "You know what this means", says someone. "There's a job going at the Munce factory!!". The resulting job riot results in a chemical explosion at the factory, wiping out half the sector.

With that thought, I signed off at the job centre today. I got a job, starting on the 15th for a software company in Camden. The Job Centre is the only place in the world where you can say "I hope I never see you again", and get a smile.