I Am A Potty - I Come In Peace!

Flattered last night to see that someone posted this entry from my other blog on their Myspace space last August (with a credit). Nice to know I wrote something that someone thought was worthy pressing at least four keys on their keyboard to copy it somewhere

Just in case you were wondering that you were missing out. The other blog (Oh My God! Is that Cheese????) is, apart from that one entry, not very interesting. It's just a place I plonk the laborious methods I work out to do things like copying pictures from Flycr.com, just in case I ever need to do it again - knowing full well that if I just wrote them down on a bit of paper I would never find them again. I also know whiz bang grown up pooter literates could knock up a Perl script that would do it in three lines - but these work ok for me.

Bingly-Bong, Bingly-Bong, Bingly-Bong, Bingly Bong! - Is That Funny?

Back from the gig. 24 hours to travel 160 miles. The gig was fun though I missed the first 30 minutes because I got stuck in the most horrendous traffic jam in Glasgow - then got lost. Finally got the gig just in time to see Thea Gilmore do her stuff. Hurrah!

After the gig we spent 3 hours at the Festival Club watching a succession of people sitting on stage with guitars of various shapes and sizes going plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - (key change) - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky -plinky, alternating with girls standing up with various sized flutes going tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - (key change) - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle. Sometimes they did it very fast and people cried "Yeee-ip!". A large American with a beard sang about a mining disaster, a bunch of Swedish teenagers did World Music (World Music may recover from the beating it received - though the accordian player was pretty) and the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year pointed her impressive chest at us and sang something sad in Gaelic for a long time.

Jamie seemed to enjoy it, though he was disapointed that there were no bagpipes.

I guess I just don't get folk music but at least it was mostly accoustic which meant I was spared the mournful echo-laden drivel I was ranting on about the other day, and it was mostly Scottish Irish, it wasn't English Folk music which is even worse; adenoidal whining about long-forgotten injustices narrated, as it turns out in the last verse, by a dead person with no attempt at a rhyming scheme-o.

I would like to report that a group of singers with asthma got up and performed some gasple music but they didn't, so I can't.

I successfully hid from the intense girlishnesses of last night by hiding in the office and watching Lee Major movies. Merriol bought me up a tub of ice-cream, a half litre of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia! woo-hoo! It didn't taste right. I presumed it was because it had just come out of our freezer which keeps things too cold to be able to eat ice cream straight out of. (An ugly sentence but I'm too bushed to revise it).

I let the tub 'rest' for a bit - it didn't get any better, so I let it rest again. By now it was well within the WHO's comfortable ice-cream eating temperature range and it still tasted weird. (I had by this time still managed to eat a third of it - my tendency to persevere and eat thing while not convinced they are in fact edible is slightly worrying) only then did I realise what I was eating was not 'Ben And Jerry's (Original U.S. Recipe) Cherry Garcia Ice Cream', but 'Ben And Jerry's (Original U.S. Recipe) Cherry Garcia Low Fat Frozen Yogurt'. Not just Yoghurt, but 'LowFat' yoghurt! ('Low Fat' is just adspeak and means 'More Water') It's winter. I want to eat fat. I could eat lard by the bucketful right now. We are programmed to eat fat in vast quantities in cold dark wet winters (all right, MY body is programmed to eat vast quantities of fat in winter. Some sort of Eskimo gene perhaps? Who knows - whatever - 'Low Fat' yoghurt doesn't do it. I appreciated the thought though.)

Merriol finally fell into bed at 4am thoroughly waking me up. I went down to switch off all the lights and the (very loud) CD player, make sure all the (girly) candles were out before the house caught fire - they were all out, someone had poured red wine onto each one, and drape blankets over the recumbent body on the sofa. Even at 4 in the morning I realised that trying to sleep under a beanbag was not going to make for a comfortable night. Pausing only to wonder if the salad bowl was really was full of vomit I went back to bed. (I think the body on the sofa was Debs - I wasn't that awake at 4 in the morning and whoever it was wasn't there when I got up again at a more civilized time. The kids haven't asked me why she was sleeping on the sofa so I guess she must have gone before they got up too). In the cold light of day whatever was in the salad bowl still looked like vomit, so I dumped it in the compost heap.

I'm off to Glasgow to see Thea Gilmore this afternoon. I have swapped the spare ticket with Jackie for a night's kip at her place. I may suggest going for a curry after the show. Jackie being a total foodie will know all the best places to eat. If we do, I will be having a Koorma with as much full fat yoghurt and ghee as they can cram in.

Zounds! Crivvens! - or something.

It's Friday night and I, sad old fart that I am, am tucked up in the office scanning the covers of most of the CDs I bought today so they can go on eBay next week. Merriol had the day off so she could go wander round Au Natural a shop stuffed full to the gunwales with male baffling girly pointlessnesses (most of it was brown this week). We left the kids with Sue and scarpered into the Fort. It was great being free of them for an afternoon. Merriol got to go and do intense girl shopping. Thirty quids worth of coloured fats in plastic applicators from the make-up counter of Boots seemed to cheer her up no end. And I wandered around the charity shops and stocked up on "I have never heard of them but for 50P I'll give it a go" CDs, most of which are now heading for eBay after I found out why I had never heard of them (or they end up in the box where un-eBayable CDs live against the day I get signed up with a decent CD swap-site). Still, it's added a few more names to my, extensive, "I have heard of them and they are shit" list.

We also got to eat lunch slowly and without having to wipe noses or take one of the kids for a pee half-way through. We went to Fired Art I was too busy enjoying my bagel and coffee to pay much attention to what was going on around me, which is a pity as behind my back there was a long saga unfolding which involved lots of coming in and out of the shop, calls on mobile phones and people out on the pavement waving dead mice around in carrier bags. I think the bag (and mouse) was eventually left under the windscreen wipers of someone's car but I have no idea what it was all about. Merriol saw most of it so I'll let her tell all when she gets round to blogging again. (The mouse I had best point out, was nothing to do with the cafe. It was out in another car - it had been driven there.)

Tomorrow is Merriol's birthday and she has invited women round to be girly and silly without anyone trying to sell them Tupperware or Rampant Rabbits at the end of the evening (hence the trip to the shrine of anti-testosteronishness - she was buying stuff to put in the party goody bags - wait a minute! Where did this weird habit come from? It was bad enough that kids now seem to stand in line waiting for a handout when they leave your house but now it's spreading to adults? It's bad enough that we have invite people round to the house at all (Bah! Humbug!) but apparently we now have to bribe them as well! It's getting to the point where everyone who comes through the door wants stuff - I wonder how long it would take to dig and stock a moat with piranhas? or I could just nail the doors shut I suppose, that would be easier.

Needless to say when all this girlishly pink girly girlyness is going on tomorrow night I will be upstairs with big headphones on watching something stupid and violent, with explosions, no plot and people wearing colour coded hats.


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A Great Lump Of Cheese Has fallen Off That Mountain - Look Out! - There's Cheese On The Loose!

Most of today has been spent in the office wrestling with the electric spaghetti that comes out the back of our pooters, disappears into a handy home-made cable duct along the back of the desk, and reappears at various points to connect with all the toys and gadgets essential equipment scattered around the place. Today, for the first time for a year or so, I took the top off the duct and wrestled all the cables that hadn't yet made it in - in, and removed all the cables that had somehow become redundant and added them to the Museum of Antiquated and Useless Cables Which Are Being Kept - Just in Case! (just in case of what, I don't know. Just in case every computer in the world get chip rot and the only computers immune are Amstrad PCWs? - or something. Don't look at me like that! You never know; stranger things have happened (in comics) - don't tell Merriol but there are at least two PCWs hidden somewhere in the house. They're insurance!)

Once the cables were sorted I spent the rest of the day doing paperwork. Doing paperwork in this house consist of letting the stuff pile up until it is just high enough to fall over, then spending an entire day carefully going through it, filing the bits that need filing, throwing away the bits that need throwing away (it is truly amazing how many problems DO go away if you ignore them hard enough), puzzling over the bits that have unintelligible, but at the time incredibly important, phone messages scribbled on them, and generally getting fed up with the vast amounts of the stuff. Whatever happened to the promised 'Paperless Society'? Once it is all binned, filed, or sorted whatever is left is carefully placed back on the desk as seed core for the next load - and ignored for the next nine months, or until it becomes too difficult to approach without having the lot collapse on you, whichever comes sooner.

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I'm off to bed now, I was going to Photoshop a picture of a shop window dummy with the words "Luke, I am your father!" coming from its mouth then caption it

'Mannequin Skywalker'

but luckily common sense prevailed.

I've been thinking about the question Holly asked yesterday:

"When you go round and round, why does gravity go sideways?"

As I lay in bed last night I tried to work out the answer (I didn't even try to answer yesterday because she immediately followed up the question by saying "Oh! I'm dizzy!" and falling over.)

I mulled it over, trying to work out just why gravity does 'go sideways', trying to remember what I learned at school about Inertia, Centrifugal Force, and all that other stuff - conjuring up in my mind images of buckets of water being swung round people's heads on the end of ropes, and, for one brief, glorious moment, fully understanding the concept of Angular Momentum (though I may have been asleep at this point and only dreamt it) it occurred to me that I want to be a dad like Richard Feynman's dad or Jenny Eclair's. Both apparently answered this sort of question by saying "I don't know, let's find out." Feynman was hooked and went on to win of the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics, Eclair became the first female to win the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival - because after thirty seconds she would just scream "Dad, put down the boiled eggs and the paper clips - and just tell me the answer!"

I may want to be a Feynman dad but are my kids Feynman daughters?

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My will power is being tested to breaking point! My New Year's resolution:

I Will Stop Watching (so many)* Crap SF Movies This Year"

is being weakened by knowing that THIS is loose in the world.

Nightmare Worlds. Another DVD boxset from Brentwood containing 50 SF movies so bad no one thought it was worth renewing the copyright - many of which I have never even heard of let alone seen like:

Evil Brain from Outer Space, Prisoners of the Lost Universe, Purple Death from Outer Space, and Atomic Rulers of the World.

Woohoo! This is Grade A, finestkind, movie-crap paydirt!

I so want this boxset. The last boxful of mindbogglingly awful dross in this series kept me entertained for weeks, (I'm still not sure I have watched them all yet - there are just so many badly dubbed Italian "Hercules" movies any one person can watch before organ failure sets in - and since the organ in question is the brain, and I occasionally need mine for other things like keeping my hat warm, I would be loath to part with it.)

This new box has got fewer muscle-men movies than the last but It has got the 1925 version of The Lost World in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appears as himself! - and Radio Ranch! - a feature length version of the Phantom Empire chapterplay which has Gene Autry and his singing cowboys battling an underground civilization bent on world conquest! and...

No!...

Must resist!

...walling up computer behind an impenetrable wall of Kurosawa videos...

...get thou behind me eBay...

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*The First Amendment to the Resolution (made on January the 4th)

Sorry About This...

...but today is a Things My Kids Have Said Today post. Not because they have said anything cuter, weirder, or more alarming than usual, it's just that today I thought to write some of them down and before I lose the pieces of paper I wrote them on (see yesterday's post) I thought I would share them with the world. Aren't I generous?

Daisy:
Me don't want to play Doctors any more.

Holly:
We're not playing Doctors,
we're playing Mountain Rescue!

Daisy:
(long pause)
I want to play Doctors!

---

Holly:
Oh No! There are two more clowns
the way - but clowns are scared
this kind of fire engine! Oh Good,
they have gone away!

---

Holly:
When you go round and round
why does gravity go sideways?

Len and Sue arrived this evening, maybe they have the answer.

Argh! I am fucking insane. I have just spent an hour meticulously listing shots and I am now half way through Radarmen From the Moon! Episode 11: The One Where Rachel Snogs Rocketman* and I am starting to suspect I am barking up the wrong tree. I only managed to think up one vaguely funny line. Ach well, at least it kept me distracted long enough for me to be now far too tired to fill out the job application form that has been propped up in front of me all evening. If I ever got round to putting as much effort into doing what I should be doing as I put into finding new and interesting ways of avoiding doing what I should be doing then I would be... someone else I guess.

*This title may change, I am open to any and all suggestions.

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How People Found This Blog
number whatever in an occasional series.

There's a counter down the bottom of this page and every now and then I go have a poke about and see how people got here and where they came from etc.

Recently people have landed here by searching various bits of Google for :

• 'Junk Monkey Blog' (obvious, but glad to see I was top of the list),
• 'stop Liam being naughty' (?)
• 'kinlochbervie high'
• 'Dido father died'
• 'merriol dobby' - some mysterious person from my wife's past looking for her? Actually they visited twice but the second one was probably a mistake as they only stayed 0 seconds, (they were on for 17 minutes the first time). Whoever you are I'm sure Merriol would love to hear from you.
  

Me Bumped My Whole Self

The Radarmen From the Moon! (Episode 11: The One Where Rachel Snogs Rocketman) thing is turning into a bit of an obsession. At the moment I am going through the whole movie breaking it down into a shot list and putting in what jokes occur to me as I go. When I have finished that, I will just watch the thing over and over again and see what strikes me. Long and drawn out though it is, at least this way I have a ready made framework in which to drop the funnies. It's probably the most irritatingly labour intensive way I could have devised to do this but, given the haphazardly random way I come up with 'funnies', I need the discipline of having a script to work to, otherwise I am just going to have a huge pile of unsorted and unsortable bits of paper full of half scribbled ideas.

Paul has agreed to help, though I don't think he quite knows what he has let himself in for. The first thing I need him to do is write some music for a song. The opening titles to this thing are so deadly dull that no one will sit through them till the fun really starts, so we are going to have a stupid song running over them in an attempt to keep the audience from turning off in the first 45 seconds. Though, given that I know nothing about songwriting and the first draft looks like this, I doubt if anyone will be watching after 30 seconds.

RocketMan! RocketMan!
Fighting against depravity!
RocketMan RocketMan!
Defying the laws of gravity!
He zooms from left to right,
He always wins his fight,
He flies from here to there
He never musses his hair
It’s Rocketman! Rocketman! Rocketman!

RocketMan! RocketMan!
Zooms through the air in defiance,
RocketMan! RocketMan!
of most of the laws of science!
He’s got a bucket on his head
His uncle’s name was Fred
He can fly right over houses
In his flame retardant trousers
It’s Rocketman! Rocketman! Rocketman!

This is weird. The whole "I've made you a sodding cup of tea and have hidden it down stairs in an attempt to lure you away from the computer" thing I mentioned the other day is, as I suspected it was going to be, a thing of the past.

We are both currently sitting here at the same desk; me blogging away and re-installing anti virus software on the old pooter, Merriol updating her bebo profile (it's some sort of young people's girly Myspaceish thing) on the new one, she is also downloading a thrilling episode of "Radarmen From the Moon!"* - I have some daft plan to write and record an alternative dialogue track for a movie (Why not? Everyone else is doing it.)
I was going to try this with a full length, out of copyright, movie, like the bloody awful, free to play with The Day the Sky Exploded which I watched the other week, but coming up with 90 minutes or so of stupid jokes was too daunting. Actually the thought of watching The Day the Sky Exploded again, even once, was just too daunting. Terrible film. So tonight, I had the fantastico idea of just doing one episode from a creaky old Republic serial. They're short! And Episode 11 of Radarmen From the Moon!! is it. It's only 13 minutes long. (Or maybe episode 12). All I have to do now is convince some other people to help me with the acting and the techie bits - recording the soundtrack, then glueing it onto the pictures - Hello Ilona!, Hi Paul! Hi Ben! and bingo! One movie. Hmmmm.
Question: I wonder how you submit movies to the IMDb?

(45 seconds of Googletime later**)

Answer: Get it broadcast and/or distributed first. Damn!

Oh yeah, and I got to write it - Hi Mike! I think to make it work I will have to make it genuinely funny. So many mashup things I have seen done have just been crude and pointless. Little boy humour. "Let's make Postman Pat say "fuck" a lot, Tee hee hee !" What made Mystery Science Theater 3000 so great for me and such a success was the fact that the humour was already in the film. They just dug it out. Stuff that was just sitting there waiting to be laughed at, unnoticed until they pointed it out and then, dammit Jim, it was funny.

(Edit: Having just watched the episode which eventually finished downloading after I posted this I can see I'm going to have my work cut out, but I will give it a go.)

Anyway, here we are sitting side by side in our own little cyber-caff, doing our own wee computery thingies, and resisting the impulse to eMail each other while in the same room (we actually did that once a few years ago, we had two pooters in the living room wired together through to 56k modem via a mess of serial cables and data switches and used to have to take turns getting on line. Tell that to the young people of today and they won't believe you. It was 3 years ago) Anyway! (again) There we are sitting there typing away, and trying to remember where I put the spell checker, and after a very short while indeed, it turns out we are trying to manoeuvre each other into going downstairs and making a cuppa because, "well it's just not my bloody turn and I'm parched!" At least when we were queuing up to use the machine the tea used to arrive a little more regularly.

For some reason I keep loosing tonight.



* there isn't really an exclamation mark in the title but there should be.

** 55 minutes in real time, time spent Googling being infinitely elastic.

Domestic Blissitude

A nothing day. Really, we did nothing. Got up late went to the National Trust Place in Glencoe because, being local, we get free coffee (local coffee for local people). Coffee turned into lunch, which turned into wandering around the exhibition doing all the kiddy bits (actually most of it is pretty kiddy even the 'grown up' bits) one pretty groovy bit shows the history of the geology of the Glen on 3 big widescreen TVs all synched to show one panoramic image. A bit like Cinerama. Trouble was for me that there was no commentry on the video, which means you have no idea what the hell all the flashy CGI you are looking at actually means. Mountain Volcano -er... Glacier? Merriol reckons that the lack of any commentary means there are no language barriers, or, to put it another way, it is totally uninformative in every known language in the world, including Esperanto, Interlingua, and Volapük.



Came home and Mike and his boys called in to have tea with us. Mike's the only other stay at home dad in the village. Within moments of his arrival he was admiring, and I was enthusing about, a little squeezy mop thing I have for cleaning the kitchen floor and he was saying he wanted a brush and dustpan on a stick thing like the one I use for sweeping the stairs. Then it struck both of us simultaniously that this was a bizarre conversation for two adult men to be having. It was almost like we we performing some parody of a 1950s commercial. "Yes! it's so handy and stores away so conveniently!". All it needed was one of us to have been wearing a floral pinny and the image would have been complete. The utter awfulness was we were both deadly serious. The mop thing is brilliant. The brush on a stick thing IS the best thing for sweeping the stairs.

I need to buy a Harley.

Merriol spent the night away in Edinburgh last night doing some hotel staff training thing - how to do it faster cheaper and with the new whiz bang system, she came home pooped and after reading the kids a bedtime story went straight to bed herself. Last night was the first night I had spent in our bed alone for 2 years, since Daisy was born in fact. I would like to say it was a weird experience being alone in the bed and it seemed huge without her, and I couldn't sleep because it was so empty and quiet but, despite the wind gusting up to 95 mph outside, I was snoring within minutes.

This evening, left to my own devices, I have (with the help of Paul who knows how to do such things) been networking the new computer with the old one - thus saving me hours plugging and unplugging the USB stick that I have been using to shuttle stuff backwards and forwards between the two.

So now all my old bookmarks and USEFUL stuff I had on the old machine is much more get at-able and it also means that since both machines can access the web simultaneously it will end the meaningful pacing and heavy hints that go on when one of us thinks the other is hogging the WWW. "I've made you a cup of tea - I'll leave it down here on the kitchen table, and isn't that programme you have been wanting to watch on soon?"

And BOTH the kids can play on Cbeebies at the SAME TIME without me having to act as referee.



This may turn out to be the best tenner I spent on eBay for a long time.

Another Brief Scene From The Screenplay Of My Life

Int. Night: Bathroom. Bathtime.

Merriol:
Holly stop putting that
toothbrush up your bum!

Holly:
But it is an OLD one!

Fade to black:

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Earlier in the day I was idly flipping through the Celtic Connections programme that had fallen out of one of the Sunday papers. I'm not a great country folky, twighlight of the celtsy musicy sort of person.

Huge Parenthesis coming up -skip the next paragraph - it has nothing to do with what happened today.

It is a little known fact that 90% of the music posing as "Celtic" released after Clannad re-drew the whole sound of Scottish / Irish "traditional" music (which they did when they recorded the soundtracks for the movie Harry's Game and the Robin Of Sherwood TV series back in the 1980s) is bogus shit. I was lucky enough to see Clannad live in a tent somewhere in county Sligo in about 1979. They were great, a great fusion band Jazz and Jig. the whole tent was rocking (it was windy and the beer was cheap). I still own one of their albums. Then some fecking eejit bought them a synthesiser and they started making money. Previous to this Irish / Scottish music was all pipes, fiddles, accordions, getting pissed, and having a rare old time playing the theme from Captain Pugwash at various speeds - sometimes backwards. After Clannad it's all misty doe-eyed waffling around, haunting close-harmony vocals and loads of echo... ..loads and loads of echo. It's tedious and anodyne dribble.
A forinstance of its utter dribblyness; last year sometime we were having lunch down at the Tourist Information Centre where this sort of bland musical dross is compulsorily played in the background by the terms of their lease. After half an hour I realised we were just listening to the same track over and over again.
I went up to the counter and mentioned to Stewart, who professes to like this sort of music, that the CD was stuck.
"So it is!" he replied, taking a look at the CD player. "It's on repeat. It must have been like that since I came in at 8 o'clock this morning, and I never noticed." - I rest my case.

What the fuck was I trying to say?

Yes! A-aha! I remember. Celtic Connections. Right, yes. I was flipping through the Celtic Connections catalogue thingie when I realised I actually wouldn't mind seeing a couple of the acts: The Klezmatics who I have always meant to get around to checking out after having heard just one of their tracks on a documentary about Jewish music many years ago - and the wonderful Thea Gilmore who I discovered more recently on an old, second-hand, compilation magazine cover freebie CD. Her CD Rules For Jokers is just dead pure brilliant. (note to record marketing people - getting your acts on freebie CDs does eventually sell copies).

I remarked in passing to Merriol that if had been in Glasgow I wouldn't have minded seeing them. About ten minutes later, when I had stopped running around doing stuff long enough for her to catch up with me, she shoved an envelope into my hands.

Inside were two tickets for the Thea Gilmore gig.

How?????

I love that woman.

She doesn't want to go, so I will have to take someone else.

Form a queue.

There is a mania (with lots of funding) around here for all signs to be in Gaelic as well as English. Most signs are pretty straightforward and understandable, both in motive and legibility. Town Names and street names for example. Sometimes they are just plain confusing on both counts. The most bewildering example I've discovered so far is at the Stalker View Cafe overlooking "The Castle Aaaaaaaargh!". We stop there occassionally when we are on our way to Oban

On a panorama of the view you could see if it wasn't raining all the time, various geographical features are picked out. Including this:

Loch Laich - from the Gaelic for "Duck Loch" Loch Laich - bhon Ghaidhlig airson "Duck Loch"

Me baffled.


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I am constantly amazed and baffled by the ingenuity of my children. How (why?) for example did they manage to position an unwrapped After Eight mint dead centre UNDERNEATH a one by one point five meter rug on the landing? I'm guessing the brown compressed sticky lump was originally an After Eight, it was about the right size and colour - and smelled vaguely minty when I finally managed to get it scraped up.

No more mousey corpses left suspiciously near mouse traps last night. I suspect they have something planned. (The mice, not the kids. The kids just make it up as they go along.)

I find it hard to believe it was Tuesday when I last blogged.

Precious little of any real note seems to have happened over the past few days.

I will try and have a more interesting time starting tomorrow.

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Next day:

I failed.

Saturday was spent shopping in Oban. An event notable only for the incredible length of time it took Merriol to get past the clothing sale on the first aisle of Tescos and the fact that the shop had the first Easter goodies on display. It's the 6th of January. The baby Jesus is only 12 days old and already the celebrations that go with nailing him to a tree are in full swing.

I think I frightened a mouse to death last night. We have our annual mouse problem; every winter one or two of the little sods take up residence, and every year I set traps and manage to get them. Over the years I have discovered that chocolate seems to be the best bait though over the last few days I have been experimenting with dried mango. Last night I set the trap in the kitchen and this morning found it had tripped. Lying next to it, but not touching it in any way, was a very dead mouse. I didn't do an autopsy but it didn't exhibit the usual signs of having been killed by a mouse trap (ie having its head stuck in the thing, and its brains coming out its nose) so I guess it must have died from shock when the trap went off as it approached. That or a bunch of other mice left the body and ran away trying to fool me into thinking I have got them all.

Christ! the web is evil. It has just taken me an hour to type this mainly because I kept getting distracted by watching 1980s Estonian TV commercials. I don't understand Estonian, have no idea what half of these commercials are advertising even after watching them several times, but I found them weirdly fascinating (especially, curiously enough, the one with the naked girl in the paddling pool full of bubbles.)

I seem to have lost the ability to talk to adults without a PC in front of me. I discovered this horrible fact the other night when Merriol, the kids, and I went round to a Christmasy, New Yeary party at a friend's house.

After weeks of desperately wanting some adult conversation, weeks of wanting to be able to use words of more than two syllables without having to define them, to be able to walk through a door without explaining where I was going - and that I would be coming back; "I'm just going for a poo, you don't have to follow me!" - I finally had a chance to talk to some adults!

I couldn't cope.

I walked in and there was a room full of people whose heads were higher than my knees. Synapses fired in my brain and nothing happened. My Brain just went blank. I had no idea what to say to any of them. I ended up in their kid's room reading Roald Dahl books. Not to any of the kids mind you, they were all off having a whale of a time with the adults, Holly was driving a miniature, battery powered quad bike into people's ankles and Daisy was off being a charming little princess, no I was reading to myself. I hid in the dark and read James and the Giant Peach until Merriol found me and told me to fuck off home.

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One of my major new Year's Resolutions is to stop watching so much CRAP. I do spend an incredible amount of my movie watching time staring slack jawed at stuff no one in their right minds would choose to watch, or should be forced to watch, or even choose to be forced to watch. (I think I just invented a new perversion. BDSF. Bondage Discipline and Science Fiction. "How do you like them cheap special effects baby? - you like them huh?") There are hundreds, if not thousands of GREAT movies out there I have never seen, and never will if I carry on the way I am going. Looking back at last year's movies it's plain I have a problem. For every wonderful film I managed to watch like: Bellville Rendez-Vous, or M*A*S*H, there are a dozen pieces of shit like Attack of the Giant Leeches, The Wild World of Batwoman, and Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy cluttering up the list - though in my defence I will point out that even I gave up on that last one half-way through.

I will not watch so many badly made cheap science fiction movies this year. I will not... I will not...

So, tonight, what do I flop down and watch?

Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD! - a bloody awful Troma production about a streetwise New York cop who is, by a twist of fate at the opening night of an amateur kabuki production of The Odd Couple, transformed into a Crimefighting Japanese Superhero!


Tomorrow. I'll start tomorrow.


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