I was in Sainsbury’s and it beckoned to me with its front-page headline “Bush rips up the roadmap”, and its science pull-out Life, and its article about bioinformatics. Reader, I bought a copy of The Guardian.

Anyway, inside was a report on an interesting new band BlöödHag. They describe themselves as “edu-core”. This genre involves their alternately playing 2-minute-long thrash metal numbers and raging at their audience to read more science fiction novels—sometimes encouraging them by actually throwing paperbacks into the crowds. The Guardian gives BlöödHag’s motto as “Read to Live, Live to Read”, but I prefer the one cited in this article: “The Sooner You Go Deaf The More Time You Have To Read”. The band members claim to have a strict spectacles-only rule for sex with groupies. Their real achievement, however, is their songwriting—I quote from their tribute to H G Wells:

“Writers still swipe from your most famous books
Yet they forget the social satire of your later works.”

BlöödHag’s official Website seems to be unavailable at the time of this posting, but you can read more about them and an interview with the members at this page.