Don't Step In That! It's A Big Electricity Man Hoop!

For a few weeks now I have been sucked into playing 'Name That Film' over on a flickr group called - er - 'Name That Film'. (There was sentence that could have done with a bit more thought behind it.) The purpose of the group is to post frames from movies up for everyone to see and then everyone else has to guess what film its from. Sounds simple enough but if you actually watch movies with the express intention of finding frames that are important in the context of the movie - but mean absoloutly nothing taken out of that context you can have a lot of fun. It's amazing how many inserts, POVs, establishing shots, moments of transition and just plain weird moments there are in every film.


It is sad and sobering (but gleefully fun) to realise that I instantly knew that this:



was from a Nancy Sinatra movie called The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and that without blinking I recognised this:



as coming from The Wild Women of Wongo.

The rest of my successes so far are here,if you want to plumb the real depths of my depravity.

I'm Stretching My Cheese To Make it Taste Nicer

Dread 7 Weird Things Meme.

I've been thinking about this on and off all day.

"Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself."

Right. Weird Things About Myself. I don't know how to do this. I don't know any weird things about myself. Everything I do is perfectly normal and logical and makes sense in the context of me. As soon as I start to think "Oh, I do this weird thing," and start to say so, I sound like a desperate saddo like Rik from the Young Ones. Desperate to be wild and with it and "Yeah wow! I'm so whacky! Me I'm really weird you know...!" Argh! Cringe. Cringe. Actually people used to think I looked like Rik Mayal (who played Rik) which I always thought was weird. OK, so that was number one. People used to think I looked like Rik Mayal.
Right. That's my way in. Other things people have thought weird about me:

1. People used to think I looked like Rik Mayal
2. I was so pissed off with the 'Millennium' and everything that had anything to do with it that when I was asked (on the day) to work for the night of the 31st December 1999 as a KP in the kitchens of a local 4* hotel (Their normal KP having presumably pissed off to London or Glasgow to earn £500 quids for a night's work doing exactly the same thing I was going to do) I only asked my normal hourly rate of five pounds an hour instead of the twenty, thirty, or even forty I might have got if I had asked for it. I hate New Year's at the best of times. Celebrating the start of a New Millennium a year early was just too much. I was much happier washing pots all night than being forced into drunken bonhomie with loads of other drunken strangers.
3. People in Los Angeles though it weird that after living there six months I couldn't wait to leave.
4. People think it weird that my CD collection is in alphabetical order and the CDs are the right way up in the cases.
5. People seem to find my fascination with Very Bad Science Fiction movies a bit bewildering but it is so simple. I can't imagine why people don't get this at all. So here it is again. In slow motion. With subtitles - and a director's commentary track: Most of everything is mediocre. It just is. Movies are no different. Most movies are mediocre. There's this big fat bell curve with utter crud at one end and sheer genius gob-stopping works of art at the other. In the middle is this huge fat bulge of mediocrity. The interesting stuff is at the edges, and the sheer genius gob-stopping works of art end of the spectrum is very well explored and documented. Everyone knows that Roshamon, La Strada, Citizen Kane etc. are Great Films. No, it's much more fun poking about in the sewage at the other end and finding mind numbingly awful movies that redefine the bottom of the barrel. It's great fun watching people inventing and reinventing new and interesting ways of fucking up. And believe me after watching a few movies like Robot Monster, Teenagers from Outer Space, or anything with Hercules in the title, the bell curve suddenly shifts. In trekkie terms you recalibrate your appreciation. A lot of the mediocre suddenly starts to look good. A lot of the dreadful looks interesting. Still hasn't made any Star Trek movies worth watching though.
6. I own a working Betamax player. Just in case.
7. I own a sixteen and two thirds RPM LP. With nothing to play it on - one of these days.

I am now going to cop out and NOT tag anyone else with this. Sorry.

Argh! Phoebe just tagged me with the Dread 7 Weird Things Meme.

Tomorrow.

In the latest stage of the constant biological warfare the kids have been waging against my poor, beleaguered, middle-aged body, Holly has pulled a neat double-whammy over the last two days. Not only going down with one of those weird childhood Lurgis that no one has ever heard of till their kids get it (Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease), she has also managed to get fucking nits. So, in addition to introducing me to the germs that made me shit like a fire-hose for a fortnight, followed by the Let's See If Daddy Can Turn His Lungs Inside-Out bug I am now faced with the prospect of doing some serious long-term Great Ape style grooming.

Apologies by the way if you are one of the people who went to Ilona's writing thing and were seduced into thinking I might have something relevant of interesting to say about anything other than the state of my bowels and my children's current parasites. If you are one of the people who didn't go to Ilona's writing thing, I will explain: Last night I got a phone call from Ilona who was doing a creative writing thingie about "Writing Your Life" the next day. Could she use my blog as an example (an example of what she was careful not to say). I being the reticent, publicity-hating, shy, retiring, utterly unflatterable hermit that I am said. 'Yeah, go on then, but just make sure you spell my name right.'

Gah! I hate the thought of nits. It doesn't matter how many times it says on the leaflets and the packaging of the bucketful of Anti Nit Gunk* we have applied to her tender little bonce, that head lice actually prefer clean hair, and that every kid in the world will get the little buggers at least once in their life, it still feels shameful to me that my kid has got them. It really does.

On the plus side of the week (is this a plus? Almost certainly not, but...) I noticed a friend of mine had breasts. If you had asked me the day before this happened I would have, in theory, known she had them, she is after all a woman but suddenly, that day, I noticed them. We were blethering away about something and suddenly her voice just faded out and all I could think was "Oh my god! she has boobs!" I found myself drifting off, doing that male talking to boobs thing that males do. To boobs. Wow. Talking boobs... Boobs. Booby, booby, boobs...

...sorry did you say something?

Right! Now... To... Carry... On... The... Conversation... Without... Looking... At... Her... Boobs...

Your eyes are drifting down again, Baldwin. Up! Up!

It was very disturbing. Boobs can be scarily hypnotic.





Track of the Day: 'Music for The Khurdakistani Space Programme'

*We've updated the Great Ape style grooming a bit. Up to all-out, neurotoxin chemical warfare status.

I have slipped horribly in my Noblmopo commitment. I have also forgotten what it feels like to feel well. Or rather not feel ill. I'm not sure I've ever known what it was to feel totally well in a Health and Efficiency, athletic bounding around way, but somewhere along the way I have settled for not having any identifiable symptoms at any particular time as being as good a definition of 'well' as I'm ever going to get. Over the past couple of weeks I have been a walking symptom factory. My most recent set includes very fitful sleep (I woke up at 4 am this morning with an entire sequence for a screenplay I'm playing with storyboarded in my head. I drew the whole thing out. Couldn't make head or tail of it in daylight) and something is making me try to turn my lungs inside out every morning so I can wipe off the accumulated gunk that has built up in them overnight. Not pleasant.

If this carries on for much longer I will have to finally admit defeat and go see the doctor.

I did blog last night. I just did it over here.

Dad? Can I Secretly Watch Some Telly?

Rehearsal tonight for the Panto. Everyone is horribly more off script than I am which is pretty usual as I do have this horrible horrible habit of leaving learning my lines till the last possible minute, but we did some good work tonight blocking out the scene in which The Dame and I end up doing the tango round her kitchen table. Mike wrote this scene and it is very funny. Lots to play with verbally as well as physically. Some great jokes and plenty of space for slapstick.

I must learn my lines. I must learn my lines. I must learn my lines.

Despite saying I will do NOTHING other than act (and learn my lines) tonight, I somehow contrived to say I would make a pair of stilts for the Giant. As it is, she is the shortest giant ever seen on stage anywhere in the western world despite our attempt to make her look bigger by only having her on stage with short kids playing mini-me versions of the adult parts. (It looked good on paper). I now have to work out how to make her a pair of hands free stilts that aren't going to catapult her off stage into the audience. I am my best worst enemy.

Track of the day:
Killer Pussy - Teenage Enema Nurse In Bondage (4:14)

A while back I had a righteous rant about the hideous awfulnesses that had been done to the Kelvingrove. Today I turned this up in a coat pocket. It's the floor plan of the place. I picked it up when we were there in the vague hope of finding my way around. Looking at it for a moment before it went in the bin I was struck by something.

Surrounded by the wonderful all singing all dancing and terribly exciting interactive experience that is the new Kelvingrove, what are our happy smiling typical family doing? They're reading a book!

Amazing. Even their marketing people can't be bothered.

Two weeks to go to the panto. It's fingers out and start doing some work time. For me this means learning my lines. There are so many of them. Hundreds of them. All long, or complicated, or both. If I hadn't written or co-written so many of them I would be hunting the author down with a big stick right now. It was all so easy when it went down on paper. I keep forgetting when I'm writing that people have to actually learn this stuff. I keep forgetting I have to learn this stuff.
So, apart from the million and one other things I will be expected to do* for this show (and which I will try to refuse to do because if I do do them I will totally fall apart at the seams) all I have to do over the next two weeks is learn all this overly-complex bilge - though I am looking forward to the part where I rise from the dead wearing Noel Edmunds' beard and declaim "I Have The Power!" in my best He-Man voice. (Mike and I write very strange pantos - if the Mighty Boosh did a village panto it would probably end up looking something like this - though Ilona would probably make them put in songs, and 'romantic bits', and bunches of kids as well.)


* Ferrinstance: I spent four hours today going over the script with Mike and a fine-toothed comb writing down every prop and sound effect we could find, and then spent tonight chopping small bits out of Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor to fill some of them.

There's been another outbreak of Interior Decorating Porn in the house as a copy of Ikea Family Live has turned up (possibly connected to the swift pilgrimage to the great Swedish altar of meatballs, and things with funny names Merriol made earlier in the week.) I get a curious, yet pleasurable, bewilderment from reading the strange semi-detached English these magazines are written in. I presume it's English.

'The MANDAL headboards allows a personal sleeping zone as well as giving status to the bed area.'

I think that means, "it's a bed!".

"When I draw the curtain I've hung beside it, I feel cocooned in my sleep zone."

What the hell is a 'Sleep Zone'? It's weird. Nothing else in the magazine is referred to as a Zone there are no Cooking Zones, or Relaxing Zones, or Nose-picking Zones mentioned, which is surprising everything else seems to be labelled and cordoned off. TV areas, relaxing areas, everything painted white with lots of drawers and 'storage systems', and 'space saving solutions' (shelves) to tidy everything away.
Very big on tidy are Ikea.
The magazine has articles showing ideal Ikea homes from around the world. China, France, Holland, Germany - and they all look the fucking same! Sterile (tidy) white boxes with no personality at all. One of my most treasured books is a little gem of a thing called Tokyo Style. I have no idea what it is really about as it is written in Japanese but that doesn't matter that much because the text is incidental. It's a picture book, page after page of photos of interiors of Japanese houses, no people just house interiors - real house interiors and they are all messy. Very messy. Huge piles of things piled on piles of other things, unmade beds, tottering heaps of stuff that reach up to the ceilings and fill every available square inch of wall space. It's brilliant. Whenever I get depressed about the state of this place, I go and look at a few pages. It cheers me up instantly. Gets things in perspective. What I need is Interior Undecorating ideas.

Dave Bowman utilizes the space-saving OBLISQ Storage System
to define his sleep zone

I'm off to my low status personal sleeping zone.


Oh, I did a cartoon tonight as well to make up my NobloPumpo shortfall of the last few days

Well so much for PabloNomo. Sorry about that. I've spent the last few days half asleep, half on the toilet and 100% feeling sorry for myself. The bug I picked up on the massacre show dug itself in and invited a few friends. I have not been a well puppy for the past week - or a happy one. There's something about having your nose bunged up and your arse opened that will do that to you. Today I am feeling a little more human though still woozy from not having eaten for 24 hours in my latest attempt to starve the thing out of my system, this time aided by killer dose of loperamide hydrochloride ( C29H33ClN2O2 - or 'Imodium' to its mates, and I think I may well becoming one of them.)

As usual when in one of my Not Very Well, In And Out Of Semi-concious, Go To Bed And Wait Till Whatever Is Bugging Me Fucks Off states, I have been reading a lot, in the past couple of days I got through three of J G Ballard's early post-apocalyptic novels, and I've been watching bad Italian SF movies too, There's something weirdly dreamlike about them to start with, the bad dubbing, stilted language and plodding editing that lends them to being watched when you are half asleep. They actually start to make sense. Which is scary.

"Never work with Animals or Children". One of those standard (fake?) theatrical maxims. I had always assumed it meant that you were going to be upstaged by the cute little tykes whatever you did and so might as well just phone your part in - but now I have come to suspect it's a health and safety issue. Small children are microbial delivery systems. Pathogen filled Excocettes, vectors for just about every bug going and a healthy experimental breeding ground for new and interesting varieties. After mixing with 60 or so of the little darlings for a week on the show I first succumbed to a case of the galloping trots ("Quick Watson! Fetch your revolver and some newspaper!") and now have a healthy dose of a grade A finestkind head cold. No blog entry last night because I was in bed by 8pm falling asleep to a deliriously bad Spaghetti SF film called Battle of the Worlds.

It's now 7.52. Time to climb back in and fast forward to the last bit I remember...

No more than a token sentence today as I have just spent the time I should have been blogging drawing a leek in Illustrator for a very weak cartoon joke.

It's a very nice leek though.

I Feel A Bit Benty

Broke down the set today and gathered tools etc. etc. Lots of hammering, crashing, swearing and young girls in cheerleader costumes roller-skating past our ears. (The hall was doubled booked, our Get Out and the local roller disco formation ultra-girly roller-skating group. They were supposed to be staying up the far end of the hall near their incredibly bad, distorting sound system and their equally bad and distorted choice of music but kept straying down to where we were wrestling with miles of cables, lighting bars and one and a half tons of gaffer tape stuck to every available surface.)
During all this I managed to twat myself on the head, someone distracted me while I was taking down one of the lighting stands - not one of the scantily clad roller disco formation roller-skating ultra-girls but one of our lot who wanted to know where something was. By the time I had finished the conversation with him I had forgotten the nut I was about to undo was the final nut to be undone and, therefore, the only thing holding the heavy bar above my head in position - so when I blithely undid it, the bugger came down with a crash and cracked me just above the eye. It could have been a lot worse. I swore a lot, mostly at my own stupidity, and bled a lot less than I was expecting, much to my relief.

One of the tunes the roller disco formation roller-skating scantily clad ultra-girls played on their crappy, distorting sound system was 'Tomorrow' from Annie. I hate 'Tomorrow' from Annie. I have never dared Google the names of the people who wrote because I know that if I ever find out they are still alive I will be instantly overwhelmed with the need to do something about it.

When I'm stuck a day
That's gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And Grin,
And Say,
Oh!

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow...

You can't! Try it. Right now. Stick out your chin. Grin. Now try and talk...
It's impossible. No one can do it. Not without sounding like a total drooling imbecile anyway.

Mmmmm, Italian Style Lasagne

.

last night of the show tonight and I stank the place up. I was awful. I was totally unfocussed for the first act, gave myself a stern talking to in the interval, and was just getting into the swing of things when I bollocksed up the opening line of my final speech just before the massacre scene. I rescued it but I was fucking furious with myself. My prop retractable bladed knife snapped as I skewered the chieftain and I had to cut his wife's throat with an empty handle. I managed to disguise the fact that I was wandering around stage killing people with a small, very blunt piece of plastic by ostentatiously wiping blood of a blade that wasn't there with a cloth. Once I was off stage I ripped another of the prop knives off the end of a wooden rifle to which it had been taped to act as a bayonet. Back on stage to stab my doxie in the belly (my character was a real evil shit) and managed to add extra authenticity to her demise by practically concussing the poor girl as I whacked her in the face with my shoulder as I stabbed her. Then off stage left and rush round behind stage to enter stage right picking up two rifles on the way (one minus its bayonet) to shoot and then bayonet - or at least severely poke - the last two victims.

It a performance now immortalised on video. Why they had to shoot this performance not last night's much better show I don't know but I'm planning on seeing if I can get myself edited out

I'm glad that's over. In three weeks time I will be stinking up the stage in the village panto.

The show tonight clocked in at 2 hours 45 minutes. A whole 15 minutes shorter than last night and this despite the fact we actually did more of the play. Apparently last night a whole page or so was skipped (in a scene I wasn't in I hasten to add).

Part of the tightening up might be due to the pep-talk we got before the show from Ilona telling us to get our arses on and off stage faster between scenes or might be partially due to the fact that the projectile vomiting stomach bug has swept through the cast and no one wants to be on stage when disaster strikes.

I spent the entire day today running to the toilet and lying down feeling sorry for myself while trying to ignore the weird and disgusting noises emanating from my belly. I also spent the day not eating anything in the sincere hope that I would be empty by show time came round and wouldn't suffer the ignominy of crapping myself on stage in front of a paying audience. Something I don't want to contemplate any more than I imagine you do. Especially not in a rented costume.

Anyway, it seems to have worked. I haven't eaten for 24 hours now and apart from the odd boiling toad noise from my guts nothing disastrous has happened. Tomorrow is the last night. Hurray! My brief but brilliant career as an evil slaughterer of innocent children will be over. Leaving me three weeks to learn my part as an evil scheming Baron for the Panto.

The show, it turns out, is three hours long. No disasters that I noticed - none in my bits anyway For a first night it went remarkably well. Which is all very well and good for us and the paying public, but doesn't make for an interesting story. I even got my character's name right for a change.

I'll try and think up some disasters for tomorrow.

Oh God. We're on tomorrow night.

The set looks good.

I'm being disingenuous. I just have the Oh God We're on Tomorrow Night whim-whams. I've been living on coffee, fags and terror for the past three days as we get this thing ready and apart from a barely suppressed willingness to commit bloody murder on one cast member who is driving everyone up the wall, I think we're doing pretty well under the circumstances. The latest of which was tonight seeing our director vomiting copiously into the bushes outside the hall as we were leaving. If I didn't know that both her kids had just recovered from a stomach bug that involved copious amounts of vomiting I would take this as a bad sign. As I do know that her kids have just recovered from a stomach bug that involved copious amounts of vomiting, I will merely spray her with disinfectant when she come round tomorrow morning to make sense of the illegible notes she gave about the programme.

The set looks good.

We ran the whole show today for the first time. We started at 5 (ish) and ended at about 10 (ish) having lost over half the cast along the way. They had to go home halfway through because it's a school day tomorrow.

4 hours. It felt much longer. We will run it again at least twice tomorrow and we should knock off at least half an hour from the running time just by me alone now knowing which side I'm supposed to be coming on from.

If you have ever been behind stage during an amateur or mixed amateur/pro show like this - especially one with a lot of kids - you will know this, but the entire time the audience are sitting there enjoying the show there is a frantic babble of conversation going on behind the scenes:

"Which bit is this? Which side do I go one next? Christ! When am I on next! Fuck! I'm on the wrong side of the stage! Get out of the way, Get out of the way! Get OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY! Where's my hat?"

All conducted in various degrees of manic whispered shout. Today's hissed whispered babble was louder and more confused than normal. People had costume on for the first time. A few people, me included, had two costumes on, one on top of the other to speed up a dress change. Instead of taking one costume off and putting another one on we just have to take one off. Well, that's the theory.

The lighting has been the big techy problem. Today I spent the morning winching half tonne lighting bars up and down and hanging lights. Later in the day it turns out that some previous user of the hall has managed to trash some vital section of the lighting racks, and the cable that connects the bits that do work to the lighting desk doesn't seem to be doing much either. Kiree, who is driving the lighting desk, is one of the calmest unflappable people I have ever met. Faced with near calamity in the lighting department she raises an eyebrow and mutters " That's interesting!" before doing a few more workings out scribbles in her note book and going off to fix it. Don't know how she does it. I would just want to hide.

Another day locked in the aircraft hanger recreating the Massacre of Glencoe with ballet dancers, Girl pipers, bad actors, and a cardboard mountain - parts of which changed colour several times today accompanied by the sounds of increasing frustration and confusion from Felicity who is painting the set.
Felicity is a lovely woman but does have this dreadful habit - which she gleefully acknowledges - of leaving everything till the last possible minute. Literally. The last show I worked on that she was involved with she was still painting the scenery as the audience were taking their seats. I was first person on in that show and instead of the usual "Good luck!". or "Break a leg," or "Knock 'em dead!", just as I walked on the give the first line of the show, the stage manager leaned over to me and whispered: "Don't lean on any of the scenery, it's still wet."
Felicity's trouble today was that none of the colours she was mixing looked right when she put them on the flats. The purple she was trying to get kept turning into a blue. It took me and Kiree, who is doing the the lighting for the show, a while to convince her that if she was mixing the paint over there <-- under the nice, pinky white Mercury vapour house work lights and then painting it on the flats over there --> which were bathed by the nice bluey-white Halogen flood lights we had rigged up for her, of course the bloody colour would change.

The rest of the day was similarly frustrating. Lots of stop, start, nothing getting finished, trying to work out what to do next faffing about and waiting for other people to stop faffing about and decide what they were going to do next so you didn't get in their way, etc. etc. etc.

The usual pre-show chaos.

I managed to run away and avoid a lot of it by hiding behind the cardboard mountain and pretending to add more bits to the supporting structure. It is now pretty robust now. I screwed a shitload (that's a theatrical technical term) of wood to the back of it and piled it high with concrete blocks swiped from the skateboard park next door. Later Andy turned up with a pile of weights he 'borrowed' from a gym somewhere and we piled them on as well. We are nothing if not inventive - and safe. It would take a bulldozer to knock the thing over now.

3 (or 4ish)

So, day three of NoMoPabloOmo (though technically it is now day four - though not in anywhere west of me yet).

Today was spent in the Nevis Centre in Fort William avoiding looking at the stage. The stage there looks HUGE and I spent the entire morning doing anything and everything I could think of to avoid actually erecting the set I had built to fill it. This included laying carpets,erecting small thrust stages that were twice as big as I had been led to believe, eating too many disgusting but addictive marshmallow snowball thingies off the techie food table and generally fannying about.

There was no way on earth that what I had made flat-packed in Ballachulish village hall was going to fill the space. It was going to be a humiliating failure I just knew it. Like the tiny Stonehenge in Spinal Tap, only flat. Finally, sometime in the afternoon, I gave up and dragged all the parts up onto the stage and with a help from Andy and a couple of other guys screwed it all together flat on the ground and then, with a few other people helping, lifted it up into place. Much to my surprise and relief it didn't fall to bits. The relief was short lived because in my anxiety to get the thing up I had forgotten to organize any way of keeping it up when (if it ever) it got there. A few moments frantic running around followed as we improvised some bracing so we didn't have to have people standing behind it holding it up for the whole run. Then we got to have a look at it completed for the first time. First thing Ilona said was "It's bigger that I thought it was going to be - is it too big, do you think?"

Andy and Ilona make Ross and Paul walk
about being Very Scottish on stage while
they contemplate the relative bigness of
a cardboard mountain.

Other highlights of the day (you may want to skip this next paragraph Ilona) include Paul (Sound engineer and heroically conciousness and love struck Redcoat) mentioning, in passing, that he really aught to start learning his lines. I responded by launching into one of the speeches I had learned yesterday.
That's great." he said, "Where does that come?"
"I'm not sure," I said, "but I know I'm saying it to you."
"Really?"
"Really."
"I have to read the script again. Don't I?"

And I have to stop mangling a line in the middle of a speech I give just towards the end of the play - just before the massacre scenes. Finally, with the order to kill everyone in sight in my grubby little mitt, my character launches into a impassioned rant about what a rotten lot of murdering thieving bastards the MacDonalds of Glencoe really were and how they had raided his family lands the year before. Somehow the line keeps coming out as "They burned all the cattle and stole our houses!" A surreal image which might distract ever so slightly from the tragedy that follows.

"Take that you cattle burning bastard and where's my Winnebago?"

Another Micro blog tonight as I'm getting an early-ish night. Tomorrow I have to be in Fort William early-ish erecting the half-painted scenery I constructed earlier in the week, and which I have to stand in front of in four days, wearing a radio mike, and, I hope, speaking the words I have been dunning into my head all afternoon.

So, to save my face on day two of DaGlo Pablo, please lend an ear to darling daughter number two who, at the tender age of three, has more natural comic timing that I ever will.

Overheard this morning:

Daisy (Singing):

A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
(pause)...
...W, X, Y, Z...
Now I know half my ABC,
won't you sing along with me...

Tomorrow: Tales of set-construction, swearing and other arty, temperamental stuff.

Seven Little Guys Called NoBloPoMo

Well, Write More Fucking Blog Month* gets off to a flying stop. I am just going to bed, having just been woken up from being asleep on the kids bedroom floor for an hour and a half. I fell asleep while reading them a bedtime story. It's not yet 10 pm. Who ever thought November was a good month to do this - when half the computer owning world is suffering from having their internal clocks buggered about with by the weird, and possibly pointless, transition from Summer Daylight Saving Time to Winter Pouring Daylight Down the Drain and Dumping it Out at Sea Time - needs their head examined.

Good Night all.





*A rallying cry inspired by the famous Australian meat marketing slogan of "Eat more beef, you bastards." The standard by which all advertising should be measured.