Various news and thoughts ...

• With just a few episodes of season one to go Jericho (ITV4) has suddenly hit a great patch where it is really making the best of its various elements and limitations. There were even some genuinely funny lines in the script last night. It looks like it will have a gripping finale as inter-community tensions in the economically and politically unstable state explode into outright conflict.

• Exciting news from Torque Control; "Neal Stephenson’s next novel ['Anathem'], due August. No details on the Amazon page, but a reliable source informs me that this one is actual science fiction, set in the future and everything. Whee!"

• There's apparently a strong possibility that Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) may direct The Hobbit (the much shorter prequel to Lord of the Rings in the unlikely event anyone reading this doesn't know) which would be a good thing I suspect.

• Anime News Network reports that; "Kon Ichikawa, the filmmaker who earned worldwide acclaim with his live-action documentaries and dramas and gained generations of fans with his anime adaptations of manga classics, died of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital on Wednesday at 1:55 a.m. He was 92." Amongst other things Ichikawa directed the anime adaption of Osamu Tezuka's manga Phoenix (Hito no Tori) Saga which I highly recommend.