It's more than likely that Holly Daisy and I ate a fair proportion of a toad this afternoon.

A few days ago one of the ducks was running around the garden trying to eat a toad and making a fair go at it too.

Tonight the girls and I had pancakes made with duck eggs.

It's statistically impossible (assuming the duck that ate the toad laid at least one of the eggs) that some of the ex toad molecules weren't now egg molecules - and are now becoming Me, Daisy and Holly molecules.

I love the idea that every day we ingest hundreds (Thousands? Millions?) of atoms that have, over the years, been through hundreds of famous people. Think of the millions and millions of atoms you breath, pee, and shed, or excrete via a variety of other methods every day: we shed thousands of skin cells and hairs every day, and then there's earwax, bogeys, poo - the list isn't endless but it's long.

Wherever we go we leave trails of ourselves behind which settle to the bottom of the food chain, get eaten by microbes and slowly work their way up, getting reprocessed over and over again until somone else shoves then in their mouths, or breathes them in, and they become part of another person for a while. There are bits of me that were once bits of Cleopatra, Gengis Khan, Hitler and George Formby - all four of the Beatles, Grace Kelly, Chaucer, every King and Queen of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and (I presume) some from that bloke who used to play Albert Tatlock in Coronation Street.

Same as you.

Though I guess if you are reading this in Mongolia the chances of you having bits of Ghengis Khan in you at any one time are higher than mine, but I probably out percentage you in Shakespeare, Albert Tatlock guy - and toad.

---

At the end of last year (or the start of this one, I can't remember) I punted up here a list of every movie I had watched through the year. Some people seemed to find it an intimidatingly huge list, others were just bewildered by the sheer, and hitherto unrealised levels of, anal retentiveness I sink to when left alone for more than five minutes with anything with serial numbers, or dates on the spines - or just about anything that can be stacked neatly. Leave me alone with a stack of magazines, or a shelf full of books for more than ten minutes and I get twitchy and start wanting to neaten the piles and alphabetise them.

Like, I am so in touch with my inner Monika, yeah?

Just to keep Ilona from feeling too intimidated, this year I'm going to do it in 4 easy to digest, bite-sized quarterly Nugget McLists. And to keep Phoebe from thinking I'm an even bigger freak than she thinks me already I didn't put them in alphabetical order...

January.

I make a New Year's resolution to watch fewer crap movies... Three days later I watch:

1. Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD - A streetwise New York cop is, by a twist of fate at the opening night of the first kabuki production of The Odd Couple, transformed into a Crime-fighting Japanese Superhero! I have NO WILLPOWER! Things can only get better as the year goes on...
2. The Train (aka "John Frankenheimer's The Train") - a film that just gets better every time I see it.
3. Daughter of Horror - Public domain weirdness downloaded from here. Aka Dementia this has got to be the oddest movie I have seen in ages, a silent journey into madness that looks like it was shot by Ed Wood and Orson Wells on alternate days from a script idea by David Lynch - and made in 1955! The movie is most famous for being the film that was playing in the movie house in The Blob (is that 'famous'?).
4. La Morte Viene Dallo Spazio - coo! forrun fillums! The New Year's resolution taking hold? ...er ...no. The American title of this badly dubbed 1958 Franco - Italian co-production was The Day the Sky Exploded. Hides head in shame and sneaks off to watch:
5. Teenage Zombies - I need help. A Jerry Warren movie. Not as bad as some of Jerry Warren's movies - but still worse than 99.9% of all movies ever made
   
6. The Corpse Bride - A real disappointment. I am going to start avoiding movies with Danny Elfman scores.
7. Agency - I watched a Lee Majors movie‽
8. Sabotage - early sound Hitchcock, beautiful stuff.

February

1. Alien Autopsy - slight but fun little movie. Surprised to see my mate Paul as a TV exec. I'd forgotten he'd told me he'd worked on it. Harry Dean Stanton as ever was just plain brilliant. The man does less and less and just gets better and better.
2. L.A. Confidential - it would have been a but (and I feel like a total prick for saying this) Kim Bassinger was too old for her part. There was a really crappy edit that hit me in the face too - a weird little double action when Pierce's character goes to pull out his badge twice before going on to insult Lana Turner - which reminded me it was a movie - which I hate when I'm engrossed (as I was).
3. Spontaneous Combustion - laughably awful Tobe Hooper thing about people who burst into flames after nuclear experiments. So bad it was weirdly good.
4. The Saphead - (1920) which has not stood the test of time and would have easily vanished into oblivion unnoticed, if it wasn't for the sole fact it was Buster Keaton's first feature length film. Because it IS Buster Keaton's first feature length film it is available on DVD with a couple of his brilliant shorts.
5. The Apartment - one of those film I always thought I had seen but, as it turns out, hadn't. Loved it!
6. Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory - aka I Married a Werewolf. 1962 Austrian Italian werewolf movie with far less T&A than the title would suggest - well, none to be exact - Poo!
7. The Alpha Incident - Dull, low budget 'SF' the only plus side being it did contain slightly more boobage than last night's werewolf movie.
8. UFO: Target Earth - Sublimely incomprehensible awfulness that took 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Close Encounters Of the Third Kind, added a budget of nothing, and scored a massive 9 on my What-the-fuck?-o-meter.
9. The Doomsday Machine - Lurid trash SF which started filming in 1967 but was abandoned half way through shooting and shelved. Five or so years later a different director, who couldn't afford to hire any of the original cast - or anything else for that matter - 'completed' it. It's a shambles. I loved it.
10. Prisoners of the Lost Universe - The scriptwriters ran out of ideas after they came up with the title.
11. The End of the World - Killer aliens disguised as nuns!
12. Evil Brain From Outer Space - 1950s Japanese kid's Super-hero movie serial edited down to one baffling indigestible feature-length chunk.

March

1. The Manster - Misguided Japanese scientist turns nice guy American newspaperman into two-headed homicidal fiend. Better than it sounds - but not much.
2. They (aka Invasion from Inner Earth) - Indie, no budget, no idea SF movie about Martians from the earth's core incoherently destroying the world.
3. Robot Pilot - Boring 1941 B pic.
4. Ring of Terror - Dreadful 1962 drive-in crap.
5. Frozen Alive - dull
6. Hercules in New York - Bad oh sooo bad bad bad bad bad. Best line:"He is but an impetuous youth, Zeus!" Try saying it; it's a line that fits the mouth like an old sock.
7. Octopus 2 - Jaws with a giant Octopus. In New York.
8. TC2000 - moronic 'SF' kick boxing movie. Two lines of exposition followed by five minutes of take-it-turns-to-kick-each-other-into-piles-of-things fighting followed by two lines of exposition etc.
9. Im Stahlnetz des Dr. Mabuse (The Return of Dr. Mabuse)- Gert Frobe, lots of John Alton type 'one big light' cinematography, dodgy dubbing, and Tarzan in a suit.
10. Flight to Mars - cheap 1951 SF from a company more used to making westerns.
11. The Lost World - the first 1925 silent version.
12. This Is Not A Drill - 1962 cold war no budgeter that could have been a lot better but was still better than the sum of its parts.
13. Bakterion (aka Panic) - Godawful Spanish / Italian 'horror' flick starring a Kiwi and a Swede, set in the UK and containing the dullest 'chasing a monster through a sewer' sequence ever shot. Dire.
14. Funeral In Berlin - OK-ish sequel to the staggering work of genius that is The Ipcress File.
15. Le Dernier Métro - two hours of my life spent watching other men snog Catherine Deneuve - I now officially hate Gérard Depardieu.
16. Memento - I'm sure there are holes in the plot you could drive a bus through, but interesting nevertheless.
17. The Pink Panther - sad I know, but I laughed like a drain.
18. Masters of the Universe - He-Man with a mullet? Come on!
19. The Mistress of Atlantis (1932) - weirdly hypnotic tale about two French Foreign Legionnaires discovering Atlantis in the Sahara.
20. Night Fright - 1967 Drive in shit in which Middle-aged Teenagers are terrorised (a bit) by a Gorilla-suited 'mutant'.
21. Young Einstein - a deeply stupid little movie which I love to bits for all sorts of reasons.
22. Eternal Evil - Canadian TV 'The Hunger' wannabee which was a confusing mess but had a couple of nice moments - and Karen Black. I love Karen Black.
23. The Brute Man - (MST3K remix) Not even Mike and the Bots could make this sad little film anything but a tasteless waste of time.

April

1. The Norman Rockwell Code - Funny little parody of Dan Brown's thing. See it here.
2. Gremloids - silly low-budget Star Wars spoofoid, that makes me laugh.
3. Death Race 2000 - I finally got to see it! I've been trying to get to see this movie for about 20 years on and off and there it was on some Free to Air low rent movie channel. Movies4Men 2 or some such. Dated but it still has it's moments.
4. Alien Contamination - Gory cheapo Italian Alien rip-off with an interesting solution to the famous and perennial Bad Italian Movie Dubbing Problem - gas masks.
5. How To Get Ahead in Advertising - Hmmmmmm my internal jury is still out.
6. Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell - (MST3K) - Oh I am so overwhelmed with indifference.
7. Blue Velvet - I just love the weird unearthly quality of Lynch's movies. They are like semi lucid bad dreams.
8. Memoirs of an Invisible Man - brain dead mediocrity from John Carpenter that kept my eyes occupied as I kept the sofa warm. (24 hours later the true horror of what I had done hit me. I had watched an ENTIRE Chevy Chase movie... and laughed.) Then, going from the rediculous to the sublime, the next night I watched:
9. Cyrano de Bergerac - The 1990 version with Gérard Depardieu. I was hooked from the opening shot and I was in tears by the end. A magnificent movie. Why did it take me so long to get round to watching it? Why don't I speak French? and then some. Gérard Depardieu is forgiven for snogging Catherine Deneuve. Next night, wanting to avoid any disappointment by watching anything that might suffer by comparison, I sat down to:
10. Good Against Evil - a 1977 total of a Rosemary's Baby / Exorcist clone TV pilot. I kid you not. A TV pilot about a lone wanderer and his priest sidekick/mentor seeking, week after week, his one true love who an evil sect have groomed since her birth to be the bride of the devil Astaroth. I can just see the light bulb going on over the producer's head "The Exorcist: The TV Series? How can it fail?!" Praise the lord and pass the ammunition! It did.
11. Alien Zone - A 1978 portmanteaux 'Horror' film made in Oklahoma. However bad that sounds to you the reality was worse.

May.

I make a Quarter Of The Way Through The Year resolution to watch fewer crap movies...

And those are just the ones I got to the end of. Titles in groovy clicko-text will take you to my fuller reviews on the IMDb

More in four months time.