Strawberry Flavoured Conversation Chewing Gum

Sorry, but it's time for my quarterly 'Buks what i have red,' dump

June

1. The Seed of Earth - Robert Silverberg
2. A Rose for Ecclestiastes - Roger Zelazny
3. Decade of the 1960's - Ed. Aldiss & Harrison 'Classic' SF shorts.
4. War Reporting for Cowards - Chris Ayres . Genuinely Laugh Out Loud "How I ended up as a war reporter" madness.

July

1. Gentlemen of the West - Agnes Owen.
2. The Valley of Statues - Robert Holdstock
3. Kingdoms of Elfin - Sylvia Townsend Warner (This is turning into one of those read every couple of years books. It is delightful.)
4. Tara - Terence De Vere White

August

1. Moondust - Andrew Smith. Subtitled 'In Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth' a fascinating read which recaptured my childhood sense of wonder at the whole Apollo program - despite a couple of obvious factual inaccuracies.
2. Authentic Science Fiction - Not very good 1950s SF
3. Say, Darling - Richard Bissell. Funny backstage novel. I now want to read The Pajama Game to find out what it was all about.
4. Hieroglyphic Tales - Horace Walpole.
5. Welcome To The Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut.

I have only read 13 books in the last 3 months. This is pathetic.

And Movies:

June

1. The Lost Continent - Cheap Lost World knock off containing footage lifted from (Dear god! Noooooo!) Rocketship X-M
2. Lady Ice -Dull Thomas Crown wannabee that seemed to be have been made by filming Donald Sutherland on holiday.
3. Counterblast - 1948 British 'thriller'.
4. The Hound of The Baskervilles - Hammer films, l love 'em, total tosh but great total tosh.
5. The Phantom Planet - dreadful early 60s 'SF'
6. The Bride of the Monster - Ed Wood Jr's second greatest bad film with some truly inspired weird acting moments from Bela Lugosi.
7. Rancho Notorious - Great title! Fritz Lang, Marline Deitrich. and Cowboys. Odd.
8. Dark City - gorgous comic book nonsence. If you ever watch it keep the sound down until the watch shows 12, as it has one of those dreadful tacked on pre-credit narrations that fuck up the whole mystery before it starts.
9. The Dresser - Tom Courtney. What a brilliant performance and this is one of the reasons I don't watch good films. I was was an emotional wreck at the end of this movie. I have to stop watching films about long unexpressed love. I've seen two recently, Cyrano and this, and I was snivelling wreck at the end of both of them. Hanky jobs both times. I'm going back to watching androids fighting; cheap 60s SF movies don't make me feel life an emotional dishrag at the end.

July

1. The Dark Crystal - a cuddled up on the sofa (or in daughter number one's case behind the sofa. "It's a bit scary.") wet Sunday afternoon movie which was not as good as I remembered but it kept the kids hooked.
2. A Scanner Darkly - weird and interesting (and funny) but how did they let continuity errors get through in an Animated movie?
3. Prayer of the Rollerboys - in a future world, only one man stands in the way of formation rollerblading, drug dealing, fascist street gangs in white trenchcoats and Flock of Seagulls haircuts - and that man is... Corey Haim. As bad as it sounds.
4. Withnail and I - I laughed
5. Goodbye Lenin - I cried. The great thing about watching so many crap movies is that when I get to see a good one it really goes to work on me.
6. Jimmy Neutron - Boy Genius - CGI animated kids nonsense, and like a lot of animated kids nonsense a lot funnier and better made than most movies for adults.
7. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes - Stupid fun.
8. Wild Women of Wongo - I had never actually seen this classic piece of drek before. If I have, I had forgotten every frame and after it was finished ...
9. Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women - it was 'Women Night' on the Crapmoviethon sofa.
10. Attack of the Monsters - Space Bimbos! Giant Space Turtles! What's not to like? Best Line of the movie: "You're right, we'll eat their brains after we've fixed the ship."
11. I Was a Teenage Werewolf - (MST3K) This movie didn't have any best lines.
12. Samson Vs The Vampire Women - (MST3K) My first encounter with a Mexican wrestling Horror movie - a strange genre, and an experience I shared with Phoebe in Portland as she took a break from painting her kitchen. I went to the movies with someone 8 thousand miles away via Skype and a bit of ad hoc synchronisation. I love the Web.
13. Confidential Report - Orson Welles at his most baroque.
14. His Girl Friday - Comfort movie.
15. Steal This Movie - OK, but not great, Biopic of Abbie Hoffman only watched because I have a thing about the yummy Janeane Garofalo and it was only a quid in Tesco's.
16. Mr. Robinson Crusoe - they don't make them like this any more. Thank god.
17. The Man Who Knew Too Much - First time I had seen the original version. Some very nice moments but not my favourite (yet) early Hitchock
18. Orlando - I love every frame of this movie (even those with Billy Zane in them). Every frame.

August

1. Cabaret - Liza Minnelli - perfect! Joel Grey - brilliant! Oh but dear god why did they cast Michael York? Tomorrow Belongs To Me gives me the shivers.
2. I Heart Huckabees - What a pretentious, self-indulgent pile of crap! I hope this lost whoever made it a LOT of money.
3. Raising Arizona -
   
4. Paycheck - total turd of a movie. Pointless, explosion-ridden expansion of an adequate, but not that good, Philip K Dick short story.
5. The Return Of The Four Musketeers - almost good.
6. Django Against Sartana - Tinned Spahetti Hoops western.
7. Witchfinder General - A genuinely one-off piece of movie making. The nearest thing (that I know of) to an English Spaghetti Western. Great stuff.
8. The Amazing Transparent Man - (Note to self: Avoid Science Fiction movies made in Texas in future - especially those shot in only one week flat.)

That's it. You can breath again now.

Today's great totally non-surprising discovery: I chanced upon this site tonight. It's a site dedicated to Electronic Ambient Music. Always open to the delights of new music - especially if it is free, as this lot is, I had a listen.

'Electronic Ambient' turns out to be the sort of pointless, tuneless, invisible stuff that plays in the background of games like Myst. It's all vague and dribbley electronic ooooooooooaaaaaah and gentle gongs and bucketfuls of echo. Pointless pseudo Spiritually-uplifting musical Prozac that makes the inane Celtic drivel I ranted about a while ago sound like Satan Ate My Puppy Thrash Metal. It's the sort of stuff you don't notice until it stops.
After a few minutes of increasing boredom I tried playing several of the tracks simultaneously - and found it made no difference whatsoever. It was amazing. It sounded exactly the same! Okay, maybe it was slightly louder, but it was certainly no more interesting. Normally when you play two pieces of music simultaneously it either sounds dreadful or, if you are very lucky, weirdly mashed up funny. I added a few more tracks and it started to get a bit more interesting but hardly anything worth bothering to repeat. (I suspect the only interest I was finding in it was wondering just how many tracks Firefox could play simultaneously without crashing.)

How can you play seven pieces of music at the same time and still not get any discords?

I think I may have just invented the world's most pointless art form, and, as its only current practitioner*, I can tell you that 'Electronic Ambient Mashup' is the only kind of music yet discovered that is improved by the interruption of Windows error alert sounds.






* 'Electronic Ambient Mashup' gets zero hits on Google so I claim this art form as my own. It's mine! I am the Godfather of EAM! and if I could be bothered I'd write a manifesto - then stand up and mumble it gently to myself.


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Lack of bloggerising round here at the moment is down to trying to get the Panto into some sort of presentable shape. Or at least the fifty percent of it that Mike and I had already written.

I'll rephrase that.

Or at least the fifty percent of it that Mike and I though we had already written.

For one reason and another we haven't really been working on this a lot recently and stopped at the end of Act one. When, the other night, I finally got round to thinking about giving it a quick read through before printing it - I found I couldn't find it. I found various earlier versions but not the finished finished first act I remembered having last worked on. One everso cold-sweaty, slight panic later I found it on a laptop I had forgotten I own - only to realise, as I re-read it, I was supposed to have written an entire new scene to get some plot points in, and complete the final scene which sort of just dwindled away to a

So, for the past few nights I have been up till stupid times of the early hours of tomorrow trying to be funny. Some jokes came - when the kids are asleep and there are no distractions I can hear what's going on in my head they will come - "Type them, and they will come..." but I gave up trying to get the plot points in and just ended up having one character say to another:

"Hand me the piece of paper with all the exposition on it."

Which he then proceeds to read out.

As it was this turned out to have been a good idea because

a. people laughed on the read through, and
b. all the exposition he reads out has to be changed.

The scene as written has to be moved nearer the front of the show, and yet another scene added in its place to get the love interest in much earlier and make the baddy badder. I would have been spitting feathers if I had spent all those hours seamlessly weaving that exposition into the dialogue only to have to start all over again.

A night off, then back to the funny mines tomorrow night. Let's see what's happening over on the BarbieCam...


BarbieCam

I personally believe... it is dead scary that people applauded at the end of that, and that she will have the vote soon.

Merriol is away for a couple of days. Some NHS wallah has just discovered a rich new seam of previously undiscovered paperwork and has called together doctors and practice managers from all over the country to dump it on them. So my poor missus is far from home tonight, languishing in a "not very good" room - somewhere in here:

Dunblane Hydro

I'm sure I've seen this place in a bejillion movies doubling for castles all over the world (OK, Europe*) and in every genre of movie (bar Westerns - I don't remember any Westerns with castles in them). This place has four stars and the 'Free' facilities include Indoor Pool, Jacuzzi, Sauna, Solarium, Gym, and 24 hour room service! How come when I go on the road I end up in windowless converted garages with mad landladies who decorate each room of their houses with three different, clashing, wallpapers and the sort of insanely ugly ornaments you only ever see in Bed and Breakfast places in this country? I work for the wrong people I guess.

I became convinced last time I was on tour that there was , circulated only with the closed and closely guarded ranks of B&B owners, a catalogue from which they could order the ghastly crinoline lady toilet roll covers, ugly gold-rimmed lampshades, strange ceramic and crystal sculptures of dolphins, bad paintings of Scotty dogs, and all manner of things decorated with frogs! By god there are a lot of froggy things in Bed and Breakfasts in Scotland. Some of this stuff was so ugly it makes Argos crap look tasteful.

My other fantasy about this was that Bed and Breakfast owners regularly sneaked (snuck?) into each other's houses at night and planted these ugly things to make the competition look bad, but because they had all been at it for so long they had totally lost any grasp of whatever critical faculties they had in the first place and didn't notice any more that all their own houses looked like the Land That Taste Forgot.



* and I was so tempted to Photoshop in a lightning bolt into that sky...

...and drape a few of those long red Nazi flags down the front for good measure like some bad 60s war movie with Lee Marvin in it.

A weird half-tank half-armoured car thing zooms up the gravel drive to the front door where it stops with a screech of well-maintained brakes. A uniformed officer of the Third Waffen Ubergrupenngschaftenmeinenzeit, steps down from the running board and slaps one leather gloves onto his crisp black jodhpurs. A uniformed flunky runs towards him from the house.
"I am Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt of the Third Waffen Ubergrupenngschaftenmeinenzeit," roars the new arrival, "I wish to speak to your Commanding officer."
"Yes, Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt!" The flunky salutes and hurries off.
Cut to interior. The office of Reichsmarschallinsebensschtummer Hans Faltermeister. The Flunky enters:
"Reichsmarschallinsebensschtummer, there's a Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt of the Third Waffen Ubergrupenngschaftenmeinenzeit to see you sir."
"What! Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt? Here?"
"Yes, Reichsmarschallinsebensschtummer."
"Well, Untermarschallinsebensschtummer, you had better show him in..."

Meanwhile across the channel, Somewhere in England, the same conversation was taking place in a different language.
"Captain! there's Lieutenant Dick Smith to see you, sir."
"What! Dick Smith? Here?"
"Yes Captain."
"Well sergeant, you had better show him in..."

You see where this is going don't you? The Allies won the Second World War not because of any spectacularly wonderful planning, or because the American had more money, or even because we were right and Nazidom was an evil monstrosity that had to be destroyed (still does), no, the Allies won the war because a great chunk of it spoke English. It took half the time to say stuff in English. The grammar was a great help too. Putting verbs at the end of the sentence is not a good idea in emergency situations

English: Shoot that tank, over there!
German: Over there, that tank shoot!

The English shells were half way to their target before the German guys had been told what to do. "Ah! You want us to shoot them!" Obviously that is a silly simple example but anything more complex - possibly involving clauses and the English speaker is at a natural advantage. Indeed the average native English speaker doesn't normally listen to the second half of any sentence at all, all the good stuff is in the opening.

By the time Reichvicemarschallgesentinbumsfassenfuher Schmitt had, later in the movie, finally finished saying: "For you,Tommy, the war is over!" It was over.


I've no idea what all that was about but I think I'm glad to have got it out of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah.

Did You Just Put A Magnet Up Your Bum!?

As of Monday this week both Holly and Daisy go to school. (Pictures over on Merriol's Blog). I have been looking forward to this for ages. Much as I love my daughters to bits it is sometimes hard to know how children so small can occupy so much time and space. I've been looking forward to this week for ages because it meant that I would now have some time in which to do something above and beyond the basic "Keeping Everything Under Control and Cooking" which is all that I seem to be able to do at the moment. Currently a good day is when the place doesn't look quite as shambolical in the evening as it did in the morning. Real gold medal time is when I actually get to finish the things I list in my head I have to do during they day.
With Holly in school all day and Daisy away for the afternoon I would be able to think about larger projects like painting the bare plasterboard walls that didn't get finished when we built the upstairs four years ago, like getting to grips with the tottering piles of books and magazines in the office, like finishing the script I should have completed three months ago. Stuff like that.

The trouble is that for the first 4 weeks of the term Holly isn't at school all day. I found this out to my crushing disappointment only last week so had to immediately shelve any idea I had of actually achieving anything this month. Holly goes to school in the morning. Daisy goes to school in the afternoon. This means that I have to get Daisy her lunch, and get her up the hill by 12.30 to meet Holly coming out of school. We then kick about in the playground for fifteen minutes till Nursery opens then I take Holly home and feed her her lunch. If you add in dawdle on the way home time, unavoidable chuntering to Mums at the gates time, chitchat with teachers time, lost shoes searching time etc. etc. lunch, which used to take an hour, now takes two. By Holly going to school I actually have less time during the day than I did before. And, because when Holly is at school she can't play with Daisy, and vice versa in the afternoon, they both demand even more of my time because they haven't got each other to distract them.

Three weeks to go...

I hope I make it.

So, back to the trip to Glasgow we did a few days ago...

We arrived back in the village at the same time as our latest load of Couchsurfers phoned They too had just arrived in the village -all six of them. Mother, Father and four kids. (They have five but they left one at the airport, or at home with the grandparents, or something.) We got them to our place, offered them a cup of coffee - they don't drink coffee - or tea..

Okay, calm slow breaths, I've got six Mormons in my kitchen - and I invited them in...

I make them Roobush tea (it's caffine free), we chit chat for a bit and then, suddenly with no warning, they all go to bed. In my living room. This is about ten o'clock, about three or four hours before I usually even think about sleep - even as an abstract concept. If you know the layout of my house you are thinking "Oh no!", or "Oh dear!", or something similar. If you don't know the layout of my house, let me explain:

Our house is a converted old single room school. You walk in through the front door into the kitchen in the centre of the building with stairs up to the bedrooms. A door in the Kitchen leads to the Living Room which occupies the end third of the building. In the far corner of the Living Room is another door which leads to the Bathroom containing - and here's the crunch - the only toilet in the house.

There are six people wearing strange underwear between me and the bog.

I send Mike a text, ' I have Mormons in my living room, I may need to pee at your place.'

I don't know what time Mormons get up when they aren't on holiday but he wasn't too horrified when I burst into his house the next morning yelling, "Hi Mike, I've come round for a crap!"

I have never been one for great toilet anxieties. I don't remember as a child being scared that some great poo monster was going to bite my bum and drag me into the sewers but the thought of sitting having my morning dump with the Waltons sitting the other side of the door was just too much. I just can't shit in front of an audience.

The annual nominees for this month's weekly No Shit! Sherlock Award for pointless, weird or misleading guff in any category are in.

First up is Yahoo for this bit of their sign-up for a new username routine:

Gender: (Select One) ?

It just got weirder and weirder the more I thought about it. 'Select One' Why not just 'Select'? it's a pull down menu, you can only select one - and the list to select from is disappointingly short.

The second is a washing label, which I have lovingly recreated in Illustrator because I couldn't be bothered to scan it:


Apart from not understanding half of it (I have never knowingly triangled any of my washing but am now worried that I might have been unwittingly doing it for years) the instructions also warn me not to iron this item. Not that I need any prompting in that direction. I hate ironing and just don't do any, but it did make me wonder who in their right minds would need to be told not to iron a cushion?

Bats Can Smell Them With Their Ears

We did something Summer Holidayish with the kids! They go back to school next week and we finally got our act together. We went down to Glasgow to go to the "Glasgow Science Place" where one of the kids' favourite TV shows Nina and the Neurons is filmed. I love exploratory hands on science places like this, but this trip was hard work. I twatted my back last week and have been hobbling around very slowly, very painfully ever since (some days, getting out of bed has been a major and painful operation) and after two hours sat in the car both of kids had energy to burn, so, as soon as we were in through the doors, both of them were off, like rats up a drainpipe, pushing levers, pulling handles, and twisting knobs all over the place. As soon as Holly had found a brand new, ultra-fascinating, hands-on, vaguely educational thing to play with, (and I had got my head around which Basic Principle of Physics it was trying to demonstrate, but before I had worked out how to convert my high school science lessons - augmented by 30 years of 'real life' - understanding of the Basic Principle into Holly compatible terminology) she was off somewhere else whanging another lever back and forth, making another set of magnets bang into each other, leaving me to creak back onto my feet and stagger after her.
I soon swapped her for Daisy, who was a lot more biddable and a bit slower on her feet. At one point we encountered some of those giant distorting mirrors that used to be big fun at fairgrounds in the days before sophistication set in. Daisy loved them, "Look! I'm fat!" - and I have to admit so did I - not because they made me look fat, I don't need any help in that direction, but because for a second in one of them I saw Daisy stretched tall and thin. She didn't look like the cute little three year old girl at my side at all. I was seeing her as she will look when she she is eight or nine. It was a very strange moment. I was as if I was looking into the future. As she ran off to peer at her self in another weird mirror my back creaked painfully and I farted, both loudly and noisomely, and I thought "...and this is what I will be like when I'm eighty..."

Eva's Day

Yesterday was good.
Eva's ashes were scattered under the small tree in Mike and Morag's back garden. Words were spoken, a poem was read, drinks were drunk, and people were hugged. I got to wear my kilt and get introduced to loads of people I will never meet again. I sat, talked, played with the kids, and gave Mike a hug when he needed one. It was, strange to say, a good day. A sad one but good.
I think it has helped.

Just before the moment when Mike and Morag planted the tree and scattered their daughter's ashes beneath it, a camera was thrust into my hands by Morag's brother-in-law who had to go help them. They both wanted loads of photos of this moment and I had, at a moment's notice, been elected to take them. It was a very odd, unsettling, and unpleasant feeling. I took the photos, with part of my brain in automatic phototaking mode - trying to frame the picture so that no one's heads were sticking out of plant pots and moving to get clear shots without having someone's ear filling half the screen - but another part of my brain was feeling incredibly uncomfortable, as if I was intruding , taking pictures of my friends on what was a very sad, personal moment. Though I knew they wanted the photos taken, it somehow felt very - wrong.
And, even as I was taking the pictures, I realised this is what press photographers do every day. All those photos we see in the papers taken in war zones and disaster areas, the endless streams of images of death, illness, and despair, someone has to take them. I wondered how they do it, how they distance themselves from what they are seeing and take the photos they have to. The very nature of what they do means they have to look at the unpleasant and distressing much more closely than many of us could imagine. I wondered how they cope - I also found it pretty amazing how much thinking about the totally abstract I can do when feeling incredibly uncomfortable with my situation. Don't think about it, just do it - and if you do have to think, think about something else! Maybe that's how they do it.
Having that camera in my hand did remove me from the moment. Having a task, a role, something to do I was, for those few minutes, an observer of the event when I really wanted to be a participant.
I was glad to hand the camera back so I could join everyone again.

Topology for 3 year olds:

Me:
Do you want me to cut your
burger into pieces for you, Daisy?

Daisy:
Yes please.

Me:
How many pieces do you
want me to cut it into?

Daisy:
One...

It has not been a happy weekend. Our good friends Mike and Morag lost their baby on Saturday. The baby was several days overdue but, as far as everyone knew, healthy. Both Morag's boys were born several days late so no one was unduly concerned. Morag started labour on Friday night and went to our local hospital in Fort William. The contractions stopped, but that is is not uncommon. The baby was still moving well. On Saturday morning the baby's heartbeat became faint and Morag was rushed up to the Raigmore hospital in Inverness. The baby died on the journey.

It is hard to think about, though I have done little else over the last couple of days, and I'm finding it almost impossible to write about. For the amount of time I have spent going over this in my head I find it hard to put anything down that makes any sense. It is bewildering. I have no scheme of things to fit the death of a baby, I suspect very few people have. I am angry, confused, frustrated, bewildered - grieving. I'm glad I have never believed in god, because if I had I would have been burning down a church by now. There is nothing to say. Merriol and I have both been bursting into tears most of the weekend and I can't begin to comprehend what Mike and Morag must be feeling. They are the best people. They didn't deserve this. No one does.

Eva Anderson Pitt

28th July 2007

Loved







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Space Chickens Are Chickens in Space

Gah! Gerk! Pfui! - and other noises of disgust and annoyance. My sleep patterns are all ballsed up again - all my own fault.

Tonight, after a long day frolicking with the kids and trying to persuade them at meal times that bread pudding is wonderful - which it is - I think I just need to find a sexier name for it. 'Bread Pudding' just doesn't have "Mmmmmm-yummy!" written all over it. I really like it though. It's good old British stodge, the sort of food that made the Empire great and constipation a national obsession for a hundred years. Working class, frugal food, the major constituent is stale bread and, cheapness and ease of manufacture aside, a favourite of mine. I wish other people in this house liked it too - because I made a hell of a lot of it yesterday. Half a fridge full.

So, to get back on track, tonight, after this fun-filled day moving stuff around the house trying to make it look smaller and trying to convince the kids to try some of their cultural food heritage by burying it under custard, I flopped in front of box to watch, for a change, a good movie (or at least not a Teenage Lesbian Vampire Zombie Bikers From Outer Space Vs Gozilla's Evil Twin Sister 2* type movie) . I chose to watch Confidential Report a deliriously weird, Orson Welles flick. One of those ones he kept adding bits to as and when he had the money, wherever he happened to be in the world, even if it meant having to rewrite great chunks of dialogue that had already been shot. For half of the movie no one's voice is saying what their mouths are. It is a very strange, very funny, very odd movie. I love it to bits.

I fell asleep within 10 minutes. And woke up several hours later unable to move my neck, with the DVD starting over again.

How is it I can stay riveted to incoherent tosh about Belgian kick-boxing aliens and fat Japanese men in rubber suits belting the crap out of each other while standing on a model of Tokyo but anything of any quality sends me into a drooling stupor? I've gone wrong. I need my critical faculties rebooting.

So now it is 2 am. I have just spent 2 hours drawing a loaf of bread for a cartoon that isn't that funny anyway. At least it won't go stale.







*obviously the original, not the remake. The remake was crap.


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It's My Turn On The Ghoolie Thomas!

It was Daisy's birthday last week but we had a little party for her on Sunday. Some of her friends from playgroup and mums came round. The morning was spent frantically tidying the house and preparing food.

Daisy decided that, as we were having a party, we needed some party decorations.

So she carefully and diligently spent half an hour -

- taping an octopus keyring to the front of a drawer.

I am in constant awe of my kids. I spend hours fiddling with 'jokes' for my cartoon blog and other laborious attempts at humour which may or may not find their way into people's ears and eyes, and just when I think I have come up with something I am really happy with - like this over on the Toon Blog - Holly or daisy will do something so utterly surreal it makes my head hurt.

Just like the Tax Office:

Eight identical letter received from the tax office on one day.
Four for me. Four for Merriol.

The piece of paper on top of the left hand pile is actually an other half-formed, quickly-scribbled joke which may, or may not, find its way into people's ears and eyes.

It reads:

"And the Three Kings came unto Jesus.
But Luke had a Full House and scooped the pot."

Can't work out how to turn that into a cartoon, or how to work it into the Panto. I just may have to drag it kicking and screaming into a blog entry someday.

But not today.




Meanwhile could I point your bookmarking fingers at http://www.the-junk-monkey.com/ which is the address of my metablog. An easier and faster way to get to the Cartoon, Merriol's, and a couple of other worthy blogs (including Phoebe's). It's rough at the moment but works (a beta-meta-blog?). I will improve on it when time allows. (A better-beta-meta-blog?)

I forgot how long it takes to get anywhere around here in the tourist season so, despite having set off in good time to get to the Fort, we are a good fifteen minutes past the time of the kid's appointment with the dentist as we arrive in the nearest car park.

I'm not in a good mood having spent the last 15 minutes swearing silently at the tourist bus and camper van doing a steady 35 mph along a road I usually zip along at 60ish. Actually it got quite fascinating watching the camper van brake at the corners. I don't know what he was up to but he consistently braked (broke?) very late at every bend - quite often at the point that I would normally be starting to accelerate out of it.

We arrived at the car park. Drove into the space right next to the ticket machine (Score! 15 seconds saved!) and found I had no money... I searched the car and found a quid and some other coins in the guddle bucket in front of the gear stick reserved for old sweet wrappers and CDs. Hurrah! Saved.

Notice on the ticket machine.

£1.50 for one hour or part thereof. £20 fine for non-possession of ticket.

Bugger! Damn! and Blast!

So I'm standing there with £1.27 pence in my hand and I find myself asking Holly if she has any money. And the sweetheart looks! She's five years old and on the off chance she has a few coins in her pocket she starts to look. She has no concept of money AT ALL - other than it's round and the Tooth Fairy seems to think it's worth teeth. I don't think I have loved her so much as I loved her in that instant. Needless to say she didn't have anything. So I ended up scribbling a note and shoving it under the windscreen:

Late for Dentist. No cash. I'll get change and buy ticket when back! Promise!

The dentisting was done in minutes and on the way back, standing in front of an ATM, I discovered I didn't have my cash card with me.

Dear Highland Council
IOU £1.50

Next time. I promise.

Happy Birthday Daisy!

Daisy was three today.

To celebrate, Merriol came home from work to have lunch with us and help Daisy open her presents - or at least be there while they were opened. Holly was more than eager to get in there and start ripping off wrappings. This is the first time Merriol has been home for lunch for ages. Shortly before she arrived back from work Fraser from over the road arrived waving his laptop, desperate to get an Excel spreadsheet printed. This was turning into a bit of a saga as his laptop has Vista and doesn't recognise his printer - and I couldn't get his machine to save the spreadsheet into a format my pooter would recognise to enable me to print it off on the printer here.
Merriol is the village Excel goddess. Fraser, a builder by trade, is damn good at putting in showers.
Two hours later Fraser has his documents, we have a working shower, and I understand how agents feel when they put a deal together.

No news today from the Lakeland Product Query Team. I am disappointed and worried. Disappointed they haven't got back to me and worried that, from his secret underground bunker, Ernst Stavro Lakeland has dispatched a team of highly trained Lakeland Ninjas to deal with me. They are probably sitting in a large cardboard box waiting for the carrier to pick them up at this very minute.

Mister Plastics has responded (after a nudge) to my pedantic email the other day asking if a Lakeland Plastic product really was 'Completely chemical-free' as advertised in one of their catalogues:

Dear Mr Baldwin

Thank you for your email, and I am sorry we did not get back to you earlier. The Ant Stoppa Tape is chemical free.

As always, if there's anything else we can help you with, please do let us know. You can email us at net.shop@lakeland.co.uk or call our friendly customer services team on 015394 88100. We're available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and will be happy to help.

Kind regard

I reply:

Hello,

Thank you for your reply, it was very fast. You say in your mail
The Ant Stoppa is 'chemical free' not 'completely chemical-free'.

Could you confirm it is 'completely chemical-free' as it says in
the catalogue?

Liam Baldwin

Their turn:

Dear Liam

Thank you for your reply.

I can confirm that ,according to all the information we have here ,the Ant Stoppa Tape has no chemicals in it at all. It works as the basis of being a double sided adhesive tape and as the ants cross it they will stick to the glue.

I trust this helps and as always, if there's anything else we can help you with, please blah blah blah...
Kind regards,

Blah Blah
Customer Services

NO chemicals at all?

Hello,

Again, thanks for your quick reply. Nice to know the system works - I wonder what happened to my first mail?

I find it extraordinary that you say "Ant Stoppa Tape has no chemicals in it at all". As I understand physics, every material thing in the universe is made of chemicals of one sort of another.

There must be some chemicals in this stuff - unless, of course, you are selling an empty box.

ARE you selling an empty box?

Liam

This evening I got this:

Dear Liam

Thank you for taking the time to get in touch with us about the Ant Stoppa Tape.

I've passed your email on to our Product Query team. They'll be in touch with you shortly with more information.

Presumably the Lakeland Product Query team (now there's an idea for a TV series) will go and open a few boxes and find out.

I will keep you informed.

This week's TV pick

Tuesday Channel 5 11.45 pm - LPQ: Miami
Lakeland Product Query Team spin off series. Flashy camera work and dramatic music, as week by week a mixed bag of actors who couldn't get jobs on Torchwood get to the bottom of Tupperware related mysteries.


.

Occasionally, when I'm bored, I play a game called Inventing Confusing or Pointless Metaphors and Similes To be Used in The Staggering Work of Genius Novel I Am Determined To Write - One Day (But Not Soon). Today's winner was:

Pissing up a one way street.

I have no idea what it means - though I would guess it depends on which end of the street you are standing at the time - but it made me laugh.

But then again I think THIS is funny. No, wait, I'll go better than that I'll say it is very funny. It has to be the funniest thing I have heard in ages. I literally cried with laughter when I heard it.
You don't need (though it helps) to know it comes from an LP called The Two Pete's - Live At The Ever New Montague Arms recorded in 1981. The Two Pete's (sic) comprised "a blind keyboard player with more synths than Rick Wakeman and a drummer with a kit matched in scale only by his beard." This is their assault on 1970's standard Macarthur Park seguing into the ever brilliant Popcorn for a bit. I love both bits of music. They are both pieces of near indestructible kitsch; no matter what you do to them they come out the other side just as perky and clean as when they went in. These guys bash the hell out of them...

Shopping

I was pushing Daisy around Aldi on Saturday, she was sat in the little seat in the back of the trolley and I was doing someone else's shopping for them, when a rather attractive young lady waved a friendly little wave to my beautiful, blonde, nearly 3 year old, daughter.
Daisy immediately went into hyper-shy mode, trying not to look at the woman while hiding behind me, and failing to do either thing very well.
This is NOT like my daughter at all. She is usually the most gregarious and friendly of children.
"Are you going to wave back, Daisy? Are you going to wave back at the nice lady?"

No. She wasn't.

I smiled at the rather attractive young lady (who, on closer inspection,turned out to be to be very attractive) and pulled that 'Hey-ho, she's two - Kids eh? - Sorry about that.' expression that comes so naturally to me these days. Round the corner (by the crisps) I asked Daisy why she hadn't waved back.
"I didn't know the lady's name" she said reluctantly. I thought for a moment. Ok, fair enough. Some of Holly's Stranger Danger schooling wearing off in the right way. I gave her a little hug
"But it's okay, Daisy; I'm with you. It's all right to say hello if Mummy or Daddy are with you." Round the next corner we bump into the Very Attractive Young Lady - and her, boyfriend and her parents (?) again.
"Hello again." I said. "She says she didn't wave back because she didn't know your name."
"That's okay," says the Very Attractive Young Lady. She smiles at Daisy. "My name is Jamilla, can you say that? Jamilla."
Daisy goes into Hyper-shy mode cubed, says nothing and clings onto me. There is no way she is going to say or do anything other than look extremely cute.
I make my pathetic. 'Sorry, she just gets like this sometimes' face.
"Daisy, are you going to say 'Hello' to the lady? Going to say 'hello'? No? Oh well, never mind. Next time. Sorry about this, she gets a bit shy sometimes. Come on Daisy, let's go and see what's in the fridge over there. Bye. Going to wave bye-bye? No? Well, bye, nice to have met you."
And off we all went in our separate directions.

The thing here is that Jamilla, apart from being VERY attractive*, is also probably, outside of the television, the first black person Daisy has ever seen.

That is one of the drawbacks for me of living in such a small rural community. Nearly everyone here is white - or, more accurately, various shades of grubby pink. There is only one non-Caucasian child at the village school and my woofelly Liberal brain was wobbling all over the place when Daisy got all self-concious and shy and staring. What should I do? What was I supposed to say? "Hi, sorry my daughter is staring at you but she's never seen a black person before."? Maybe not... I don't think so.

What I did was what all good, woolly liberals have done since time immemorial when faced with potentially embarrassing behaviour from their children. I changed the subject and pointed at the first thing I noticed in the opposite direction, no matter how banal, and tried to sound enthusiastic.

"Look Daisy! Feta cheese in olive oil!"

*"I'm a married spud, I'm a married spud..."

.

No news yet from Mr Plastics as to his 'Completely chemical-free' product. I will give them till Monday before I annoy them again. (This will be dead pure 100% displacement behaviour to avoid ringing the mighty and feared Tax office to enquire why their on-line Tax assessment form thinks I owe them EXACTLY the same amount of money they have already refunded me this year because I didn't earn enough money to pay any tax. I only bit the bullet and filled my return in now - instead of waiting till 20 minutes before the deadline as I usually do - because Merriol was threatening my testicles with heavy pointed objects if I didn't. Apparently it has something to do with the Insanely Complicated Family Tax Refund thing. They need to know how much money I don't earn last year before they can decide how much money not to give us next year.)

Part of the money I didn't earn last year is going to have to buy a new shower tomorrow. The old one has been getting weirder and weirder and would only go properly for a couple of 5 minutes before you had to lean out of the shower and turn the sink cold tap on and off rapidly till the low pressure water light came back on and the water started heating again. Alternatively you could turn the cold tap in the bath on and off. Turning the tap in the sink meant fighting with the clingy plastic shower curtain and leaving your arse sticking under the still running shower getting slowly chilled. Twiddling the bath taps meant having vast quantities of cold water plunge your feet into hypothermia. (Leaning over to avoid getting them splashed was at best ungainly, at worst dangerous in a slippery bath, and either way left your arse sticking under the still running shower getting slowly chilled). I preferred the sink method.
Yesterday one of our Couchsurfing visitors nearly had a breakdown trying to get the thing to work.
Today I found the manual, tracked down the one consumer serviceable part inside the thing, and serviced it - only to kill the shower stone dead.

Off to Oban tomorrow to buy plumbing bits.

Meanwhile, my apologies for any useful links I may have temporarily lost as I fiddle with the appearance of the blog. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Though given my history of servicing things today, don't hold your breath... Cheer yourself up with the weakest pun I think I have ever come up with over on tonight's entry on my cartoon blog.

Today's No Shit, Sherlock! Award for pointless guff on the side of packaging goes to Lidl's Maxitrat Non-Bio washing machine tablets. The side of the box announces the product is:

• Suitable for baby skin
• Easy to dispense

and, more importantly:

• Soluble

Just in case you thought it was one of those washing powders that didn't dissolve in water and just sits there in a big solid lump in the bottom of your washing machine.

In a fit of anal retentive pedantry I emailed Lakeland Plastics today .

Dear Mr Lakeland Plastics,
I have your current (Summer 07) catalogue in front of me and I am fascinated by your description of The Ant Stoppa tape (item number 9581). It is described as 'Completely chemical-free'.
Is this really the case? Does this product really contain no chemicals at all?

I will let you know if they reply. But what a stroke of genius. 'Completely Chemical-free'. You could advertise anything as being "Totally Chemical-free", promise you'll send it in "Totally Chemical-free" packaging, take punters' money, and then not send them anything at all. 100% profit (minus advertising), no capitol outlay, and it would be 100% legal!

It's even better than my dehydrated water idea.

...

This evening the latest of Merriol's Couchsurfers arrived.
Initially when Merriol signed up to this thing I was, at best, sceptical about the idea, and at worst hostile. But after three sets of visitors I am rapidly changing my mind (and especially after Lisa and Uwe, the two Germans who left this morning after staying with us for two days, cooked a meal for us last night). I like getting cooked for.

The latest arrivals are a couple of young female French schoolteachers hiking around some of the hillier bits of Scotland for a couple of weeks. They turned up late in the afternoon having travelled up from Glasgow, after (not) sleeping in an airport the night before. As Merriol put the kids to bed, I cooked the tea, and they grabbed a quick shower. It is INCREDIBLY intimidating cooking for French people. I'm not a good cook. I don't do Grown Up proper cooking and here I was trying to feed two total strangers from the country with the proudest culinary heritage on the planet and I had no idea what they liked, if they had any cultural / religious / ethical prohibitions - and nothing in the fridge. I did my number one, emergency, Get Out of Jail Free Card cooking thing. A pile of plain warmed tortillas and lots of bits of anything and everything I could quickly throw together all in individual, help yourself to what you want bowls. Everyone takes what they like and nobody ends up trying to rearrange stuff they couldn't eat, even if you paid them, into as unobtrusive a pile as possible.

"Well, they didn't eat much of the shrimp and parsnip curry did they?"

It's flat pack, self-assembly food. Knife, fork, and one of those dinky little Ikea allen keys on each place setting.

And the winner of this week's No Shit Sherlock Award for pointless guff on packaging goes to whoever it was at Whitworth's who looked at a very small 'snack sized' packet of dried pineapple and thought "I know, I'll add the words: "Ideal for snacking" to the back."
Sadly this was probably the most innovative and creative thing this anonymous Dilbertian executive did all week.

£80,000 plus per annum (with stock options) well spent I'd say.


.

Ignore

This

Knowing My Place In The Pecking Order Around Here

Yesterday Holly asked me what a 'Headmaster' was. I told her and then she wanted to know what 'head' meant, so I explained that it meant a boss person - someone who was in charge. I then jokingly (foolishly) asked both my kids who the head of our household was. As one they both said: "Mummy!"

Today after breakfast...

Me:
Holly, have you finished with your Rice
Crispies, or shall I put them in the duck food?

Holly
No, I've finished with them. Put them in the
duck food - or you could eat them.

Thanks Holly.

Some macho, territorial, pissing in the corners type activity coming up soon - as soon as I've got on top of the laundry and tidied things up a bit - and got the wife's tea on so it's hot when she gets in from the pub.

Phoebe, this is Stalag Luft Morag.




And here is one of the teddies that my kids keep held there



I think they were trying to make it a dress and it didn't fit - but they might just want me to think that.




.

Sorry to do this to you again but it's end of the quarter, info-dumping, backup my What I've Watched For The Past Three Month's time again, and what a fine crop of crap I have been watching too:

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. 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- Five Stars! I just love the weird unearthly quality of Lynch's movies. They are like semi lucid dreams - bad dreams but 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? FIVE STAR PLUS! and then some. Next night, wanting to avoid any disappointment, I watched:
10. Good Against Evil - a total Turd of a Rosemary's Baby / Exorcist clone TV pilot. I kid you not. A 1977 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?!" It did.
11. Alien Zone - A 1978 portmanteaux 'Horror' film made in Oklahoma. However bad that sounds to you the reality was worse.

May

1. Dünyayi kurtaran adam (AKA The Turkish Star Wars) - My god! I am watching this movie in instalments. There is only so much of it I can take at one sitting. It is insane. Imagine, if you can, a Science Fiction Bollywood Kung-fu film with great chunks of Star Wars sliced in seemingly at random and the subtitles written in pure Borat. It is incomprehensible and hilarious in equal measure. The Star Wars footage was spliced in from an anamorphic print (all squashed up and needing to be projected through a special lens to make it widescreen) while the Turkish bits were shot in academy format (more squareish). Result? The Death Star looks more like the Death Egg. Huge fun. Watch it on line free here.
2. Eraserhead - I get at last! This must be the fourth time I've seen this movie and I finally get it! It's a comedy!
3. Space Mutiny - (MST3K) A good week for really bad movies made in exotic locations using bits of far better movies in an attempt to make themselves look more expensive. First Turkey, now South Africa. If I tell you that the 'better movie' in this case was Battlestar Galactica you will get an idea how truly bad this was. The MST3K version is here if you want.
4. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? - (MST3K) I've been finding a lot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000s on the web at the moment (At this point I should like to say "Woohoo! Google Video Rocks!" - but I'm a middle aged Brit and it would sound wrong so I'm not going to.)
5. Robot Holocaust - (MST3K) Dire, stand in a line, and deliver barely intelligible, barely memorised lines, crap 80s SF directed by someone who went on to greater things - directing porn movies.
6. Godzilla Vs Megalon - (MST3K) Sweaty Japanese guys in rubber suits thump each other a lot
7. The Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy - (MST3K) This counts as three movies! A 1958 Mexican threequell, the first 2/3rds of which consisted of the first two movies in the series rehashed in stonkingly clumsy flashback, which culminates in a hilariously stupid fight between the Aztec Mummy and a radioactive robot with no knees that looked like it came out of a Crash Corrigan serial. Why do I watch this stuff - i mean why?
8. Future War - (MST3K) Belgian kick-boxer from outer space teams up with novice ex-hooker nun to defeat pursuing alien android overlords and their variably-sized trained killers dinosaurs. God, it must have looked so good on paper...
9. The Space Children - (MST3K) Better than not very good, low budget, cold war, aliens saving us from all out thermo-nuclear heck movie.
10. Operation Double 007 aka Operation Kid Brother aka Secret Agent 00 aka OK Connery - (MST3K) an Italian 1967 James Bond knock-off / spoof and the screen début of the great, and tragically neglected Neil Connery, brother of Sean Connery, who thanks to an amazing bit of casting, plays the brother of the world's most famous secret agent, a lip-reading, plastic surgeon with oriental hypno-powers, by the name of Dr Neil Connery. How I laughed.
11. The Man Who Would Be King - More Connery - blessed synchronicity. Loved this film for years. Cracking acting and effortless direction.
12. Alphaville aka Dick Tracy on Mars, or Tarzan vs. IBM - Laugh out loud, part Noir pastiche, part incomprehensible existential European SF by Jean-Luc Goddard.
13. Rocketship X-M -
14. The Independent - as a break from the cheesy low budget movies - a very funny little movie about a cheesy low budget movie director. I so want to see Twelve Angry Men And a Baby.
15. Bedknobs and Broomsticks -
    
16. Rocketship X-M - (MST3K) I have watched two different versions of this very dull movie in the last two days. I suspect I will shortly need medical help. (I mean, apart from anything else, I find it slightly scary that I OWN two different versions of this very dull movie.)
17. The Day The Earth Froze - (MST3K) 1959 Finnish Wagnerian weirdness. One Finnish movie a year is enough.
18. The Fury Of The Wolfman - bewilderingly bad 1964 Spanish werewolf movie.
19. The Projected Man - (MST3K) Dull British clone of The Fly.
20. Prince of Space - (MST3K) Yet another serial rendered down to a movie length mess - this is the fourth I have seen this year. It is not a form that lends itself to any kind of appreciation as it has no redeeming qualities what so ever.
21. The Nightmare Never Ends - Total 70s horror shit, but with three Directors on the credits and two DPs why did I expect anything else?

June

1. The Lost Continent - Cheap Lost World knock off containing footage lifted from (Dear god! Noooooo!) Rocketship X-M
2. Lady Ice -Dull Thomas Crown wannabee that seemed to be have been made by filming Donald Sutherland on holiday.
3. Counterblast - 1948 British 'thriller'.
4. The Hound of The Baskervilles - Hammer films, l love 'em, total tosh but great tosh.
5. The Phantom Planet - dreadful early 60s SF
6. The Bride of the Monster - Ed Wood Jr's second greatest bad film with some truly inspired weird acting moments from Bela Lugosi.
7. Rancho Notorious - Great title! Fritz Lang, Marline Deitrich. and Cowboys. Odd.
8. Dark City - gorgous comic book nonsence. If you ever watch it keep the sound down until the watch shows 12, as it has one of those dreadful tacked on pre-credit narrations that fuck up the whole mystery before it starts.
9. The Dresser - Tom Courtney. What a brilliant performance and this is one of the reasons I don't watch good films. I was was an emotional wreck at the end of this movie. I have to stop watching films about long unexpressed love. I've seen two recently, Cyrano and this, and I was snivelling wreck at the end of both of them. Hanky jobs both times. I'm going back to watching androids fighting; cheap 60s SF movies don't make me feel life an emotional dishrag at the end.

Then Princess Upside-down Margaret Gave The Chair-lift Polish to Queen Gerald...

Today Merriol dragged me to a wet and muddy field infested with midges to partake in the Torlundy Festival, a local Glastonbury wannabee that didn't have any of the things that would make Glastonbury at all bearable as an experience. In fact it had fuck all exept a lot of people camping and several empty tents with ear bleedingly loud techno tosh pumping out of them. Inside a beer tent a line of ranting poets battled against the background noise to witter on about 'Long Nights of the Soul' and other bilge. But mostly it was camping. Lots of camping. I hate camping. I mean HATE camping. Really really hate it. 'Camping' is one of the seven circles of hell. Festivals are camping with lots of noise, and drunks, and stoners falling on you, and picking fights with each other ( and you ) and saving the planet by driving all over it in converted fume belching old ambulances and cutting down trees to have fires.
Fuck that.
Luckily we weren't planning on staying overnight, because the mood of rebellious "I-fucking-hate-this-and-I-want-to-go-home-NOW!" that oozed out my every pore would have bought down even the most hardened hedonistic reveller.
Tonight, I think I have just lost two hours work on the thing I am writing. I keep getting a Save error when I try to close which means I may have lost it all. I don't know. I don't want to look.
This has not been one of the better days of my life.

Tonight for the first time in days I WILL get to bed before 3 AM.

I will. I will. I will.

Between writing things that need writing, and suddenly finding Phoebe on line and having a good chunter with her, and the incredible compulsivenosity of Perky Pat Place I seem to be surviving on five hours sleep a night at the moment. This is not enough for me. I need a good eight hours. At least. I could sleep for Scotland given a chance ( at last, a sport I could get behind: Sychronised Sleeping! ) and if I don't do something soon I am going to make myself ill. I wonder if there is such a thing as a tamper-proof computer switcher-offer somewhere out there that you could programme to switch off your computer for set periods of the day - or night. It would have to be tamper-proof because I would immediately override the bugger if it threatened to shut down the machine as I was in the middle of typing something dead important - like this.

I can't see how it would work. It would have to be a web thing. A service provided on some huge remote server. Users, or, more likely, user's spouses, would log in and instruct the service provider to turn their pooter off at 1.30 am or whatever. Sitting there typing away the customer would suddenly get a warning window saying "Switch off now - 'cos we're pulling the plug in a minute." Panic.! Lots of frantic [Alt] + [F4]ing later ( or on a Mac [Command] - [Option] - [Griddle] - [Plunge] - [Shift] - [Cuddle] - [Shift] - [Other Shift?] - [Why Isn't This Working?] - Ohhhh! BUM! ) everything is off and people go to bed.

Result? People like me actually getting some sleep and a brazillion dollars for whoever writes the software when it's sold to Google. I want a cut.

Stalag Luft Morag II

The minute prisoner of war camp is complete. Six to eight hours my arse! Mike and I spent the best part of 20 hours assembling the bugger - and improving it. Some of the delay was due to the fact we were putting the thing on a hillside when it clearly would have been easier to errect on the flat. The two pieces of timber which secure then end of the arm the swings hang from took us an hour to get in position. An HOUR! digging holes moving one leg then another it was - to say the least fucking frustrating. On flat ground it would have taken us five minutes. Still. It's done.

Sitting afterwards looking out over the Loch down towards The Ballachulish Bridge and Arnamurchan beyond,I realised I have been living here for a third of my life.

Stalag Luft Morag

Most of the day has been spent wrestling with the idiot instructions for the lumber yard of roughly sawn timber, and the sack of assorted screws and bolts that Mike and Morag bought under the impression it was a kid's adventure play thingie. It's one of those huge wooden two towers, a shooglie bridge between them, slide, swings and climbing rope affairs.

The job was supposed to have been done today (how long can building something that looks like a small POW camp take? The people who sold it to them said 'two blokes should get it up in six to eight hours'. The instructions (hah!), when we eventually found them in all the tons of shrink-wrapped timber, said ten to twelve hours - but whether that included the concrete, which we had been assured we wouldn't need - we're not sure. With the dedication and determination that only two Fathers presented with a large toy that needs assembling for their eager and expectant kids, Mike and I spent a happy two hours counting all the bits of wood and stacking them in neat piles, counting all the screws nuts, bolts, and washers and separating them into easy find little pile-ettes of their own, having several cups of coffee and sits down (sit downs?) while we worked out the 'best way to tackle things'...

Then we went for lunch.

After that masterful piece of avoidance (oh we're good!) there was no getting round it, we would have to enter the seventh layer of hell that was 'The Instructions'. Now, I'm pretty good with instruction books, they aren't my choice of bedside reading but I have ploughed through a few in my time, working out how to assemble stuff, or take it to bits and fix it and then put it back together again. Though I may joke about it: "When all else fails, RTFM!", I do usually look at plans before I start a job. What I don't usually end up doing is making wax effigies of the writers* and sticking three different sorts of wrong sized pins into the buggers which is what I am so tempted to do for whoever is responsible for the bits of A4 incoherence I have been wrestling with all day.

Okay, my mood wasn't enhanced by the fact that we were building something designed to be built on firm, flat ground on a swampy slope (I know, I would have thought it was impossible too, but Mike and Morag have a sloping swamp in their back garden - a sloping swamp moreover, with an insanely dense midge population) but you would have thought the writers would have put the size of the damn thing in there somewhere. How much space did we need? We didn't know and could only find out by laying the whole thing out. Measurements were inconsistently given to different edges for no apparent reason, bits of wood were not the same size as the instructions would have us believe, and as a master stoke were bizarrely Labled A,B,C,D,D1,E,F... it took us ages to spot that '1' on the page. Life got an awful lot easier when we realised that two components were, pointlessly, labelled almost identically - but why two Ds? Why??? It's not as if they got up to Z with all the components. They had a whole slew of other letters to choose from. Over half the alphabet. Grrrr!

I want a job. I want companies to send me stuff for free without the instruction manuals and I will build these things (whatever they are) in my workshop, or out in the garden and I'll write the manual for them as I go. The company will get a manual NOT written by someone who already knows how to do it with their eyes shut and the technical names for everything and which says things like "Ease the Trunion Gussets" or whatever. They get a manual that says "Hit the flat bit with a big hammer", the sort of language that bad tempered people, kneeling on boggy hillsides can understand - and I'll get to keep the stuff.









*(Insert pin A into groin of effigy E whilst holding locking nut F against both the upper trunion flanges...)

Schrödinger's Carrot

Well that was fun.



The other day I received a mail from Ilona, aka The Job Pimp, saying "I kno u don't want to hear this but I fink yore stuff is dead gud and that and you shud maik it into a buk." Except, being a well respected, and often performed, playwright she spelled it almost correctly (I promised I would big up her part in this blog just in case any mildly influential people actually read it.)



My reaction (as always),Aw shucks! Pshaw! Piffle! Don't be daft, awa' with ye, etc. etc.



The next mail not offering me Canadian V14gr4! was from JS over at Palimpsest saying that, if I was at all interested in the ever-so ever-so ever-so slight possibility of getting some of my stuff into a book, I should drop a line to a friend of his over at Web-to-Book publishers thefridayproject.co.uk.



Aw shucks, pshaw, piffle, etc. be damned! A real publisher. A carrot! Dangling! - an ever-so slightly possibily hypothetical carrot albeit, but there it was: dangle, dangle! Fuck me!



A short email correspondence ensued:

Me: I'm interested.



Him: Phone me tomorrow.

So, apart from rolling the phrase "my publisher" around in my head for a few hours to see how it fitted (I like it!), and composing dedications to my forthcoming book...

"...and auntie Ethel for all the buns, and everyone else who knows me..."

...my brain went into huge Hugh Grant, uber-faff, panic mode and refused to function on any useful level. I spent a while looking through the blog, occasionally laughing at my own jokes (never good), and wondering how the hell anyone could consider these ramshackle wafflings bookworthy.



I phoned the man this morning. Nice bloke. We had a bit of a chat (and I feel like an idiot for not even trying to blag at least one book off him when he asked if I was familiar with their publications, but proud of myself at the same time*), but I was right, the carrot suddenly became as totally very hypothetical as I knew it was all along, these ramshackle wafflings aren't bookworthy.



Basically the man liked (some of) what do and said if I want to think about getting some sort of idea together he wouldn't immediately throw it out the window unopened. (I'm paraphrasing wildly here because I can't actually remember exactly what he said, but that was the gist, and, having seen unopened, unread scripts tossed in Roger Corman's wastpaper baskets because they didn't come via an agent, I am flabbergasted at the compliment - can I stop crawling now?) I guess I have to get my finger out my arse**, get my act together, draw together all the bits of web funnies I've left scattered all over the place, and get organised (stop laughing!). I need to get some traffic. Create a demand. Make myself a bit more culty.



"Here, Liam? "

"What?"

"You're a cult, you are."



But most of you know that already.









*There is a long German word for this feeling, I'm sure.

**Removing fingers from arses is always a good idea when sitting at the computer (or sitting down in general come to that), typing one handed is a pain, and it's awkward having to use the Caps Lock key every time you want to use a proper noun.

Daisy Has a Very Big Sense of Hearing

I find it hard to believe it's a week since I added anything to the blog. A whole week. That's seven days - unless they've been metricated since I last looked - which is possible, I wouldn't put it past Blair to ensure his place in history by lumbering us with a ten day Euroweek. I'm all for the metric system but there are limits. Mind you the surreptitious introduction of the ten day week could be one reason I permanently have no idea when I'm supposed to be doing anything at all, and how I have managed to miss Dr Who not just once, but three times a week for the past month. (Is David Tennant still the doctor? I have no idea).

I also have no idea what I have been doing for the past week. Which means either nothing happened, or I have forgotten, which is why I need to update this blog more often that I do. The meaningless trivia of my life need recording before they evaporate.

(Insert a vast Swathe of Googletime here as I try and find out what the singular of 'Trivia' is - if there is one. What is one trivial item called when it's surrounded by lots of non trivial stuff? Wikipedia says it's a 'Trivium' - but I'm not convinced. The only way I can even start to convince myself that's true, is if I imagine Stephen Fry saying it: "Here's an interesting little trivium, did you know that frogs only mate on a tuesday?")

Yesterday I started work on a job I've been promising to do for my parents for ages: building a raised bed from blocks in their back garden. Yesterday was a nice summer sunny day, the few midges that were around, were flitting about under the trees happily playing chicken with the vastly expensive but under performing Midge machine which - when it is working at full speed - sucks the little buggers up by the horrifying bucketful. The chickens were just playing at being chickens; scratching holes in the dirt, having dust baths, and stalking very small things in the shrubs. Daisy was happy playing with her sand in the sit-ooterie. A good day to be working in the garden.

I set to work. After masterfully measuring the space where The Bed was going to be three times and then pounding sticks into the earth at the corners of where it was going to be, and running strings to mark out the edges of where I had to dig, and measuring them all again just to make sure, then asking my mum to come and look and make sure that everything was going to go where she wanted it - Did she realise it was going to be as big as that? Was she sure it wasn't too big? I mean I could make it smaller if you wanted? Please? - I set to with mattock, spade, and wheel barrow. Two hours later, drenched in sweat I had managed to scratch out a long, thin, shallow hole that might do as the start of the job. But only down one side. The chickens could have done better. I was bushed as soon as I started digging, and quickly rationalised a whole raft of reasons why it would be simpler and easier to only dig one side of the ditch, build the first course of the wall and then start on the other side. Some of the reasons actually made sense when I said them out loud - which is always comes as a surprise when I start trying to justify putting things off.

I was so depressed by the discovery that I am getting, fat, old, and out of condition that I went and flopped on the sofa and ate a half a litre of high octane ice cream while watching a Bela Lugosi movie. The Ben & Jerry workout.

Today I relinquished my post as the Secretary of the Rainbow Parents and Toddlers Pre-School Playgroup and Plastic Dinosaur Sanctuary - or whatever the organisation I have been Secretary for over the last year is actually called. I'm not too sure what it's called because over the past year I have done bugger all in the way of secretarying except to not read the vast folder of stuff that was handed over to me when I took on the role, pass every letter I have received addressed to the Playgroup over to the treasurer who lives just over the road, and, in return, sign every cheque she has pushed in front of me. (Luckily none of them were from my own chequebooks but I doubt if I would have noticed).The hardest thing thing of the whole gig will be typing up the minutes of the AGM we held this morning in which I gave up the job. I might just get round to it by next week. However long that is.

Merriol had the day off today - so I escaped. Off like a rat up a drainpipe to Fort William to shop, get a hair cut, buy some shoes, donate blood, NOT THINK ABOUT HOUSEWORK OR THE KIDS! It was great! (Didn't get the shoes though.)

The first thing that struck me about walking down Fort William high street was, that after spending far too much time in my Perky Pat layout recently, that people walking down the street looked really weird without floating orange and brown signs above their heads displaying their names.

This is why I need to get out more.

Being free of the kids for only a couple of hours and my brain suddenly had enough space to start telling me jokes again. It wasn't a full blown performance from Dermot O'Brilliant but a few slight gags popped into my head. A couple of which are cartoonable. It's nice to get in touch with my inner jokes again. I've missed them. I've known they were there but it was a bit like communicating with the "Other Side". It's nice to get my seance of humour back again. (Rimshot please!)

And I spotted this in W H Smiths while wondering what DVDs not to buy. For some reason it amused me no end, though why a DVD and a PC game were next to each other on the same shelf I have no idea.

If I had had the wit to take a photograph of it with my rinky dinky camera phone I would have done. But I didn't. So I have lovingly recreated this wonderful juxtaposition in widescreen Photoshop-A-Scope and couldn't help adding word bubbles.

This evening the kids, Merriol, and I trolled off to the local inter Primary School Highland Games in Glencoe. Let me tell you, folks, you haven't lived till you have stood in relentless drizzle, randomly walking from one place to another in an effort to outpace the cloud of midges forming around your head (and immediately walking into the cloud of midges someone has just left behind) while watching wet six year olds running foot races, and tossing the caber* somewhere through a thick fog of insect life. The midges won. Evil bastard fucking things. When I got home I found I had picked up a tick which was happily gnawing its way into my belly before I managed to pull it out.

Perk Pat never gets ticks in Second Life.

This is why I need to stay in more.







*Though not, unimaginatively, at the same time. That would have been fun.

After several days of assiduously avoiding the panto script because I wasn't feeling very funny I finally forced myself to team myself away from my Perky Pat layout - sorry - Second Life, for long enough to tackle the scene I am supposed to have written by now. Enter left Bert and Ernie two not very loyal but very stupid henchmen of the villain and comic relief for the hero . (The names will change of course - if I remember to do it).

An hour and a half and a page and a half later Bert and Ernie get to deliver a couple of good jokes (both of which Ilona will chop out I have no doubt) I am going to have to just grit my teeth and do this. I don't know why I put it off and off and off. When I finally get my bottom in front of the script and get to it, I enjoy it.

It's Cheese Juice!

One of the few things that keeps me sane while doing this job (looking after the two psychotic dwarfs that are my beloved children) is the vast amounts of music I play while I'm doing it. I need it. I need to know there are people out there whose attention spans are longer than the kids' (and by extension mine). Some tracks are over three minutes long!

The other day I realised I was getting in a rut. Playing the same dozen or so Thud Thud Thud heavily bassed electronica CDs over and over again - which is stupid given that I have some 1500 CDs and LPs to choose from, I think it was the fact that we have so many that was just short circuiting my choice circuits. Too many! Too many! Panic! That one! ...and whoopee! I'm listening to Royksopp or Leftfield yet again.

So this week I have started a new regime. Each day I am restricted to listening to artists starting with a certain letter. One letter a day. (Phoebe, you might want to put your fingers in your eyes for the next sentence...)

Because I have all my music thoroughly alphabetised this isn't difficult.

Friday (you can look now, P) was C: Elvis Costello, Cheryl Crow, Nina Cherry, Nick Cave; yesterday was H: John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Olaf Hund, Haydn and Handel. Today is F (There's no rhyme or reason behind the choice of letters). The Family Dogg, The Fugees, Quatre Black Brothers (recorded in a dustbin, 70s Afrojazz - and I know Quatre Black Brothers starts with a Q but - absurdly weird Franglais of the name aside - it says 4 Black Brothers on the cover so it got bunged in the Fs . Calm down, P, it's over.).

It's great discovering all the stuff I had totally forgotten I had bought, some I'm sure I have never listened to after buying and filing it. Why for instance, do I own quite so many Frankie Goes to Hollywood LPs? I played one and Daisy asked me to take it off after side one. She "didn't like it". So we listened to Connie Francis singing 'Never on a Sunday and other Hits From the Movies' instead. She liked that a lot more. Sad to say so did I.

So, there I was, sorting the laundry, rediscovering Aretha Franklin*, joining in, belting out You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman) at the top of my lungs, when I realised I had tears streaming down my face. I had forgotten what a great song it was. Gets me every time. Trying to explain it to Holly was a little difficult.

"Why are you crying?"

"I don't know. This song made me cry."

"Stop listening to it."

"No, it's a good kind of crying."

I may have to go back to the sterile Electronica. I don't have to explain it to the kids. I just have to turn it down because I play it too loud. "Too loud, Daddy, too Loud!". They'll get their revenge when they are teenagers I'm sure.











*How had I forgotten about Aretha Franklin? I mean how? Though it was gratifying to see as I typed this that Firefox's spell checker knows about her and hasn't queried her name! Didn't like "Firefox's" though. Baffling.

I think Holly has been secretly reading Science Fiction books when no one is looking.

This morning on the way to school...

Holly:

Pretend I am a little girl and you are my Daddy.


Me:

(Guardedly) Er... okay...


Holly:

And you are holding my hand and we are going to school.


Me:

Right... So, essentially, you want me to pretend this is reality?


Holly:

Yes.

That's the plot of several of Philip K Dick's better books right there.

My problems with Merriol's minimalist approach to dishwasher filling are over. Yesterday, after hearing the non-verbal comment I made on seeing the the last 'load' she put in, she swore she would: "Never ever touch that machine ever again - ever! Your job. Over to you buddy, if that's the way you feel about it..."

(I think we are both secretly relieved).

Mind you, I didn't think my "Gmmmph!" on seeing that she had 'filled' the thing with glass jars and bottles which were on their way to the recycling bin was THAT extreme. I mean, what kind of noise are you supposed to make when you find you are paying to have your garbage power-washed?


No idea if this will work but...



Bugger I, it did.

Hello much neglected Blog.

Neglected because nothing of any sort of interest or amusement has happened over the last week or so. Apart from adding to the steadily growing list of totally shite movies I have watched this month* I have done very little - Highlights of the week (so far) include Holly discovering new ways to bewilder me:

Holly, being five, has mastered the art of the toilet. Holly being five has got bored with just using the toilet the same way every day and is starting to try variations on a theme. So far this week these have included pooing in a waste paper basket and going for a pee on the toilet while 'wearing' a sleeping bag.

Merriol finding new ways to bewilder me:

In our kitchen we have a big sink and a small dishwasher. We have the big sink because I bought it at an auction years ago, a huge industrial stainless steel double sink and draining boards. Came out of some hotel and I love it. It's a pity it has some weird Bulgarian standard pipe fittings and solid lead waste traps, which means it is connected to the rest of the world with vast quantities of Deso tape and finger-crossing because nothing we have found will actually attach to the waste pipes. We have a small dishwasher because there is not a lot of room for anything else in the kitchen with the sink in there and Merriol hated doing washing up by hand so much she bought me it for a birthday present.

Merriol and I have this recurring conversation (which only happens in my head)

Me:
I do all the housework. I'm fed
up with doing all the house work!


Merriol:
No you don't do all the housework!
I... er... I emptied one of the upstairs
waste paper baskets ... last week... sometime.


Me:
See, I do - well, okay I don't; but I do do
ninety-nine point nine nine nine (stop
me when you get the message) nine nine nine..

Merriol:
I get the message!

I think it was after a real-life version of this conversation that M bought me the dishwasher.

Occasionally she will, without any provocation, load the thing (ie without me getting all stroppy and slamming around the house in full I'M DOING ALL THE HOUSEWORK AGAIN! martyrdom mode). Usually this consists of 'filling it up' with three plates, a mug, and about seven knives and a spoon. She doesn't put a lot in - but boy does it come out clean. I, on the other hand, cram the thing so full I can hardly shut the bugger sometimes. I spend ages arranging dishes and plates so every cubic millimetre of the machine is filled with filthy pots. They might not be quite as clean as the stuff Merriol puts through but the dirty pots don't back up in the kitchen quite so fast.

The other day Merriol pulled a stunner.

Faced with a mountain of dirty pots and pans she decided to - put the washing-up bowl through the dishwasher...

???

Daisy has yet to bewilder me this week. I think she is luring me into a false sense of security.

The only other thing I have been doing is the occasional bit of woodworkery down at Mags and Simon's. A lot of the time spent cursing and fulminating against cheap rubbish scews and cheap rubbish screwdrivers. With all respect to Baz Lurman, Nat King Cole and any one else who has recorded or used "Nature Boy "The greatest thing you'll ever learn," is not "How to love, and be loved in return..." but "DON'T BUY CHEAP TOOLS!". Buying cheap tools is just a total fucking waste of time, effort, money, natural resources and just about everything else you can think of. It is pointless. Having said that one of my favourite screwdrivers (I'm sad; I have favourite screwdrivers) cost me a quid in a cheapo "Everything for a Pound" shop many years ago. This was back in the days when cheap rubbish tools were made in India not China where cheap rubbish tools are made these days. Back then even cheap rubbish tools used to be made from real steel made in real steel mills from Iron and Cobalt and all the other stuff real steel is made from. Now they are made from recycled fridges which we ship out there, and which are probably just melted down without even taking the magnets off the front, or checking to see if anyone took the milk out first. As soon as it's vaguely liquid, the resultant sludge is poured into tool shaped moulds and shipped west as fast as possible with some stiff packaging to stop them getting bent in transit.

Screwdrivers are supposed to be able to put more than one screw in before you have to junk them!

*Titles watched recently include: The Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy, Robot Holocaust, and The Fury Of The Wolfman.


** Merriol's dishwasher habits almost probably grossly exaggerated for comic effect.