Another Brief Snippet of the Screenplay of my Life

Which, amongst other things, demonstrates that my kids do listen to me.

INT.  DAY. KITCHEN.

HOLLY is trying to describe to DAISY the plot of 'Killers From Space', the bloody dreadful  film that she'd watched earlier in the day with her DAD.

HOLLY:

...and all they did to make them
 look like aliens was make them wear
 black and stick ping pong balls on

 their eyes and they they were in
 this underground tunnel thing only
 it wasn't really a tunnel it was
filmed in Bronson Canyon...

DAISY:
(The penny finally dropping.)

Aaah!  A Bronson Canyon movie...

Nice to know they do listen to me sometimes - even if it is only when I'm prattling on about shite movie locations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronson_Canyon

Blog, Son of Blog

In a rare outbreak of adventurousness (prompted by Flickr's newly improved totally fucked-up interface) I have been exploring other places on the web to shove miscellaneous photos.  (And redefining the word 'adventurousness' to mean: 'adding a few new bookmarks'.) 

In an un-rare outbreak of semi-obsessional faddism I am filling this one up with scans from a huge pile of 1980s Photoplay magazines before I bind them into sturdy hardback volumes -  a process which makes them difficult to get flat enough to scan, reduces their value to nothing,  but makes them a sod of a lot easier to store (and read) - and it's fun.  

Bookbinding is fun?  Christ, I'm getting old....

For some reason I find the explosion of video advertising that exploded onto the pages in 1980/81 fascinating.

Magazine and Book Scans

I've also found a home to post one of my slightly longer-term, pointlessly, time wasting projects: 

A Thousand to One in Film Stills

I'm slightly stuck on 12 but once I've got that one sorted I have a whole pile ready to go...

I have also updated my Every Film I Have Watched list for the first time in several months.  Ye Gods! I watch some awful drivel.

Here's a story I wrote a wee while ago that has just been published in the latest edition of Mythaxis webzine.

http://www.mythaxis.co.uk/5issuev14.htm

Don't worry, it's very short.

For a while now, after I fiddled with something it turns out I shouldn't have fiddled with, my scanner thinks it's Italian.  (Or my computer thinks I'm Italian, I'm not sure.) Either way I do know that when I scan anything I have no idea what half of the options I have available to me actually are any more.  The help files are in Italian too so I can't work out how to set  it back to English. 

Here's what I see when I scan anything: (click to bigger up the image)

Some of the options I can figure out.  'Scansione' is pretty obvious (in context) and 'Zoom' is pretty self-evident but what the hell is 'Ritaglio multiplo'?  I have no idea and I'm too scared to fiddle with anything else in case I really bugger things up and the computer decides I'm Finnish or Arabic and I really loose contact with it.

I'll tell you what 'Ritaglio multiplo' sounds like to me.  It sounds like a really nice interesting pasta dish - some sort of complex ravioli thing with a rich sauce.  Most Italian words sound like foods to me: 'Selezione Larghezza'  is obviously a really posh pizza, 'Impostazioni' sounds like a plate with a selection of cheeses and sliced salamis, and 'Dimensioni foglio' are really fat, tagliatelli-like noodles in a creamy, butter-heavy, spiced sauce. (The fact that the pull down box next to it offers 'Platina completa' as the first option suggests to me that smaller portions are available if I wanted them.)

Scanning makes me hungry.

After a year(ish) I suddenly got round to having an idea for a cartoon for my cartoon blog tonight.