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

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

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

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

Zounds! Crivvens! - or something.

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

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

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

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


.

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

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

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

---

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

'Mannequin Skywalker'

but luckily common sense prevailed.

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No!...

Must resist!

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

...get thou behind me eBay...

---

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

Sorry About This...

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Me Bumped My Whole Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

(45 seconds of Googletime later**)

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

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

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

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

For some reason I keep loosing tonight.



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

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

Domestic Blissitude

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



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

I need to buy a Harley.

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

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

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

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



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

Another Brief Scene From The Screenplay Of My Life

Int. Night: Bathroom. Bathtime.

Merriol:
Holly stop putting that
toothbrush up your bum!

Holly:
But it is an OLD one!

Fade to black:

---

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

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

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

What the fuck was I trying to say?

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

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

Inside were two tickets for the Thea Gilmore gig.

How?????

I love that woman.

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

Form a queue.

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

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

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

Me baffled.


.

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

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

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

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

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

---

Next day:

I failed.

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn't cope.

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

---

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

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

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

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


Tomorrow. I'll start tomorrow.


.

Everything I Have Read In The Last Year - or started anyway

Well all the books. I haven't included all the backs of cereal packets, bus tickets and road signs I 'must have looked at:

1. The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
   
2. The Beano - Rony Robinson Cracking little read. Half-way through I seem to remember it having being dramatised on radio 4 (passed over to Merriol if only for the Sheffield connection).
3. The Gangs of New York - Herbert Asbury (started and quickly abandoned)
   
4. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (because my ex, Linda, hated it and boy is she wrong! I love this. Read it in two sittings.
5. The End of Eternity - Isaac Asimov. (Not as good as it used to be).
6. The Clue of the Twisted Candle - Edgar Wallace (Gutenberg.org free text on my Palm pilot - abandoned. I find reading on the Palm a bit of a chore and save it for 'last ditch nothing else to read and desperate for something to read' times, but, even then, I found this to be totally unreadable crap.
7. Sagittarius - Ray Russell (A former Playboy editor who can't write SF, but can do a passable ghostie story though)
8. Nobody's Perfect - Anthony Lane (Collected New Yorker film reviews)
9. Last Laugh Mr Moto - John P Marquand (Bizarre!)
10. Dick Donvan the Glasgow Detective- J E Preston Muddock
11. The Chase - L M Alcott (an early novel and hilariously awful Harlequin style "romance")
12. Virtual Light - William Gibson
13. Today We Choose Faces - Roger Zelazny. Abandoned on page 76(ish) had no idea what was going on, didn't care, and I suspected the author was in the same boat.
14. In Custody - Anita Desai (hard to believe this boring pointlessness was short-listed for the Booker!)
15. Red Shift - Alan Garner
16. A Gift From Earth - Larry Niven. Only one man can save everything because he has unexpected Psionic powers - or something. SF plot 3a. Yawn!

March

1. Surfacing- Margaret Atwood. Pub. Virago books 1972. Says it all really; standard Virago stuff of the period: all men are oppressive, brutish, casual rapists unable to articulate their emotions. All women are cyclical earth creatures who, if given a chance, become one with Nature and "sense" things. As a man I almost fell for this thesis during the Feminist Revolution (hah!) but it looks very crude today. First Margaret Atwood book I have not enjoyed.
2. Infernal Devices - Phillip Reeve (because it has been sitting unread since I bought it the day it was published - and the next in the series is out tomorrow!) Cracking, rip-roaring, blood and thunder ripping yarn. Loved it!
3. The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 12- Science Fiction for Mammoths? this has got to be good! It's an occasional pick up and read a couple more short stories between real books thing. Blessed with insanely clumsy title.
4. The Destiny Man - Peter Van Greenaway, abandoned half way through.
5. The Innocence of Father Brown- G K Chesterton (unfinished).
   
6. Them - Jon Ronson
7. Cosm - Gregory Benford (SF with graphs - but no story)
8. The Invisible Man - H G Wells (I couldn't find another book with a 4 letter title in my TBR pile)
9. Thinks... - David Lodge (Just how many humorous novels about sexual peccadilloes in a provincial English University life are there? Though this one was more thought provoking than most.)
10. Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture - Apostolos Doxiadis
11. The Einstein Intersection - Sam R Delany (the second book in a row - it was central to the Uncle Petros book - to mention Godel's proof that in any mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms of the system - what are the chances of that eh?)
12. The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh - H Montgomery Hyde
13. Hippopotomus - Stephen Fry (Unfinished)
    
14. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories - Elmore Leonard
15. The Gold at Starbows End- Frederick Pohl (...and guess what! Yet another mention of Godel's Proof. What the hell is going on here?

April and May

1. Sentenced to Prism - Alan Dean Foster (total crap but all that my brain can handle at the moment. A self-hypnosis aid.)
2. May Contain Nuts - John O'Farrell
3. Lamb - Bernard MacLaverty (almost Wonderful but for the suddenness of the ending.)
4. Limbo Lodge - Joan Aiken (I'm sure she writes Dido Twite books in her sleep these days.)
5. Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper - Wallace Reyburn.
6. His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem. Abandoned (and yet another mention of Godel)
7. Starswarm - Brian Aldiss (Godel Free SF!)
8. THE HEART OF THE MATTER - - Graham Greene
9. Heritage of the Lizard People - Clark Darlton (Perry Rhodan 113 and utter scheiße) Interestingly my spell checker doesn't like the word " scheiße" and wants to substitute "Nietzsche" instead! OK it wasn't interesting
   
10. Death's Demand - Kurt Mahr (Perry Rhodan 114 and even more utterly uberscheißeisch than the last one - at last something that make E E 'Doc' Smith's Lensman Series look like literature! Why am I reading it? Good question)
11. Baggage - Emily Barr (abandoned at about pg 140 when I realised nothing else was going to happen except people were going to talk at each other a lot about nothing in particular and the annoying tense changes - each chapter starting in the 1st person singular present before shifting to the past tense and then back again to the present just before the end of the chapter - got totally on my tits.
12. The Best From New Writings in SF - Ed. John Carnell.
13. Tank Girl Vols 1&2 - Hewlett/Martin. Brain dead, mindless, very funny, very violent comic books about a kangaroo snogging psychopath in huge boots - and yes, I'm sure I moved my lips when I was reading them.

June

1. Wilderness Tips - Margaret Atwood
2. The Day The Martians Came- Frederik Pohl
3. Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
4. New Worlds 4 - Ed. David Garnett. Awful Wrightonian pointless stories of sex, violence, and violent sex (but not sexy violence). The low point of which was a story call The Last Phallic Symbol by Elizabeth Sourbut in which ALL penises, human and otherwise, turn out to be an alien life form which grafted themselves onto humans a couple of million years ago. As Earth is about to launch its first star ship all the penises in the world jump off their hosts and run off giggling and try and get on board the ship so they can return to the stars (stopping only to attack the odd stray cat on the way). Only a plucky bunch of lesbians armed with cricket bats and pointed sticks stand in their way. It it hadn't been so painfully earnest this weirdly Kilgore Trout like idea might have been hilarious. The author now reviews SF forThe New Scientist Magazine. Gawd help them.
5. A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro (Abandoned)
6. The Season of Mists - Neil Gaiman et al (OK, OK, it's a comic. I admit it!)
7. Watching Trees Grow / Tendeleo's Story - Peter F Hamilton, Ian McDonald.

July

1. Revolt in Proxima C - Robert Silverberg
2. Star Trek 1 - James Blish (Dammit Jim, I'm on holiday!)
3. Everything You Know - Zoe Heller
4. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters. Cracking read! Makes me want to read Wilkie Collins again. I'm so annoyed that this has been on my TBR pile for so long!
5. In Praise of Slow - Carl Honore
6. Arthur & George - Julian Barnes
7. Take Off! - A rarity, genuinely funny 'humorous' SF, which was worth it for the E E 'Doc' Smith spoof, Backstage Lensman, alone.
8. Nine Hundred Grandmothers - R A Lafferty. More humorously odd SF short stories, including one in which a group of scientists search for something known not to exist by a close study of the absence of evidence for it.

August

1. Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes - Ed. Hugh Greene
2. The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch - P K Dick
3. The Incompleat Enchanter - De Camp & Pratt
4. No Bed For Bacon - Caryl Brahms & S J Simon
5. The Glass Key - Dashiell Hammett
6. The Cometeers - Jack Williamson. One of the 'classic' Legion of Space series. 'Classic' in the sense of 1950s excruciatingly overwritten, over-padded guff about militaristic interstellar might being right. Weird subtexts; if I'm reading this aright, our hero was gang raped at the age of 12 by the villain and his cronies and has an almost incestuously close relationship with his mother. Not the sort of thing you normally find in 1950s pulp SF. Edit: It didn't get any better, fantastic coincidence piled upon fantastic coincidence, a space navy that keeps running out of fuel, and a lantern-jawed hero who burst into tears with monotonous regularity before he finally wins the respect of his father (and saves the Solar System) by obliterating an entire alien race with the push of a button. Also had one of those annoying semi-comic characters who talked about themselves in the third person. JunkMonkey hates that so much. He does.
7. Things Snowball - Rich Hall. Bit of a ragbag of stories articles and half worked out ideas but it did contain the funniest index I have read since Joe Queenan's brilliant If You Are Talking to Me your Career Must be in Trouble.
8. The Child That Books Built - Francis Spufford (Abandoned - well hardly started really and someone else wanted to read it.)
9. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World - Francis Wheen

September

1. How to Lie with Statistics - Darrell Huff
2. Ten Plus One - Ed McBain - an 87th precinct novel. Doubt if I will ever bother again.
3. A Short History of Tractors in The Ukranian - Marina Lewycka (I gived up upon on page 119)
4. The Script of the Play That I Should Have Been Learning For the Past Two Weeks - but kept putting off and now I'm in rehearsal and floundering.
5. Legends From The End Of Time - Michael Moorcock
6. The Road to McCarthy - Pete McCarthy. It seems to make sense reading travel books when I'm touring. I can easily identify with the feelings of "where the hell am I now?" when I wake up in the morning followed the crushing disappointment of realising - I'm still in Wick.
7. The Space Mavericks - Michael Kring. Godawful SF. Worst thing I have read since the Perry Rhodans. A sample sentence from page 102 describing an alien city:
   Quote:

   There were soft arcs and soft lines, and none of the phallic boxes shooting from the sky that most primitive cultures seem to think necessary to prove themselves.

   Wha...???? Towards the end of the book our hero and a bunch of rentagoons attack a gaol which 'sprawled over an acre of ground.' That's 4840 square yards. About 69 yards (207 feet) on each side. Total crap.

October

1. The Father of Frankenstein - Christopher Bram
2. The Art Fair - David Lipsky
3. Enterprise Stardust - Scheer & Mahr. The first Perry Rhodan book. A goldmine of bad writing. Chock full of sentences like

   "A sarcastic smile dangled from his lips."

   and

   "Perry drew up his eyebrows."

   I haven't laughed so much in ages.
4. The Radiant Dome - Scheer & Mahr. Perry Rhodan 2. OK, I'm a masochist but the sheer joy of the combination of bad writing overlaid with a thick treacling of bad translation is so delicious. Any half competent writer could tell this sort of story with their eyes shut but it takes extraordinary intellectual and creative power to come up with stuff like:
   Quote:

   Her spaceship is unable to start. Her degenerate crew is unable to repair the damage.They simply neglected to take along the spare parts because of criminal frivolity.

   or:
   Quote:

   Klein was observing Mercant while he spoke to the assembly. There was no hint in Mercant's eyes of what was going on behind his forehead. And yet it seemed to Klein he could sense a challenging irony hidden in the LLA Chief's words.

   This is genius stuff. It would be dead pure criminal frivolity to ignore it.
5. Withnail and I (Screenplay) - for years after having abandoned watching this film I have wondered why and how it got the cult status it did. I remember thinking it was crap. I strongly suspect I was very wrong. The screenplay is brilliant.
6. Larklight - Phillip Reeve. A delight. Pure page turning nonsense.
7. With Nails - Richard E Grant's diaries. I have this overwhelming desire to see Hudson Hawk. Interesting to start with, inasmuch as it was nice to read that he too suffers from the same "I-can't-act-and-what-makes-me-think-I-can-and-everyone-will-find-out" TERROR as I do, but it got terribly name-droppy by the end.
8. The People Vs Larry Flynt - The shooting Script- I picked it up. I opened it. I read in the intro:

   'The executives were giddily jumping up and down - "It's a Capra movie with porn!"'

   I had to buy it. I now want to read Hustler magazine - for the articles of course.
9. The Secret of Platform 13 - Eva Ibbotson
10. Amsterdam - Ian McEwan
11. Wilson - David Mamet. this has to be the funniest thing I have read for years. I didn't understand a sodding word but I laughed like a drain.
12. Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller. Thoroughly enjoyed this. if that is the right word; I was convinced, let's put it that way - though I stopped dead for a moment when the narrator, a pedantic teacher who at one point corrects the headmaster's grammar mid bollocking, uses the ugly, and very modern, tautology 'Hallowe'en night'.
13. The Chronicles of Clovis - Saki. Deliciously nasty.
14. Broderie Anglais - Violet Trefusis.
15. To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (Abandoned). Stuck in a B&B in a strange town with nothing to do, and warmed up by the Saki stories and the Bloomsberry Settish, Violet Refusis book I had just read, I though it was about time I tackled one of the Great Books of the Twentieth Century. Two hours later - and only 18 pages in - I gave up. I found it impenetrable.
16. Legs- William Kennedy

November

1. Excessions - Iain M Banks First of the Culture books I haven't thoroughly enjoyed. It felt very padded. The backstory to plot ratio was very... wrong. Every character, including those destined to die before the end of the chapter in which they were introduced, had to have a whole detailed history.
2. Jungle of Stars - Jack L Chalker. Turgid SF pulp (the indestructible hero is called Paul Savage, that should give you the flavour) enlivened only by some moments of unintentional humour like this speech from a hard-boiled bureau chief to an underling:
   Quote:

   Enough of that, though. I have more serious work here - a bum situation. It smells, and I need help.

   puerile I know but it made me laugh.
3. The Final Confession of Mabel Stark - Robert Hough. The fictionalised autobiography of a once famous female Big Cat tamer. The editors of this book need shooting. A spelling mistake on page one, numerous possible anachronisms including 'plastic roses' in 1928 and a strangely anticlimactic ending to what should have been a ripper of a book. Why he didn't write a straightforward biography puzzles me.
4. The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even by ERB's notoriously low standards this was pretty dire.
5. E=mc2 - David Bodans. Abandoned half way through. A pity because I have been looking forward to reading this for a bit. It got great reviews It turned out to be so dumbed down and stuffed full of meaningless analogies and imagery. Like this one for instance from a chapter exploring the potential energy contained in mass:
   Quote:

   A single page of this book,weighing only a few grams, seems be just an innocuous, stable mix of cellulose fibres and ink. But if that ink and cellulose could ever be shifted into the form of pure energy there would be a roaring eruption, greater than that of a large power station exploding.

   What the hell does that mean? Define large Power Station. What kind of Power Station? What kind of explosion? It's meaningless. I also disliked the breathy, "but what did this mean?, How did this relate to X,Y, or Z? The answer lay in the most unexpected place..." endings of chapters. It's a Discovery Channel way of trying to hold onto the audience before the commercial break. If this Trishing up is the best a 'gifted practitioner of popular science' (Independent) can do, I am in despair.

December

1. New Worlds 4 -
2. New Worlds 4 - That's not a typo. New Worlds is an SF magazine that has undergone several reincarnations. Sometimes the numbering continued from where the last incarnation left off, other times (at least twice) the clock was set back to zero. This is the third edition of New Worlds numbered 4 I have read this year (see June above). The stories in these two, published in 1972 and 1949 -I read them in reverse chronological order, were better than the drek I read in June and varied from the quaintly naive in 1949 (one author is so ignorant of the basic laws of physics that a stranded ship is able to escape an alien world because of its low escape velocity. Apparently the planet was spinning very fast and centrifugal force helped) to the archly self-consciously literary in 1972. Either way both of them were much more satisfying reads than the last incarnation with its escaping penises and gay characters disappearing up their own anus while doing sex in hyperspace.
3. Starman Jones - Robert Heinlein.
4. Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke. A disappointment. But then again, after Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, anything would be, and to her credit she neatly side-stepped the Second Novel Problem by publishing a collection of short stories. Many of them related to or set in the same universe as the first book but somehow if left me dissatisfied. The stories were okay but they didn't have that unpudownability that I was hoping for. The novel was an obsessive read for me an accidental find in a charity shop, the stories I could take or leave after buying the book new, a rare and special treat for me.
   
5. The Unholy City - Charles G Finney. A wonderful book I reread every couple of years.
   
6. Zorro - Isabel Allende (as yet unfinished)
7. The Complete Robot - Isaac Asimov (ditto)
   

Every Movie I have Watched This Year

As an exercise in futility here's every movie I watched in 2006. - Boy do I watch a load of shit.

January:

1. The Final Curtain
2. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
3. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
4. Underworld
5. Don Juan De Marco
   
6. Schweigende Stern, Der
7. Career Girls
8. Night of the Blood Beast (MST3000 version)
9. L'Appartement

February

1. Dark Star - One of THE best low budget SF films.
2. Hercules Against The Moon Men - Italian muscleman Sword and Sorcery epics. Just the sort of thing you need when you are too tired to think - and don't want to, even by accident
3. Markens grøde - Norwegian silent movie with live orchestral accompaniment. Lovely way to spend a wet Sunday afternoon in Fort William (and I get to pop the cherry of another movie on IMDb.com Wahaay!)
4. Thunderbirds are GO! - erm... Merriole bought it for me.
5. Rebecca - The perfect Sunday afternoon ... (moved to Wednesday night because the kids got in the way.)
6. The Pillow Book - Ewan McGregor is no better an actor naked than when he has his clothes on but I sat there entranced for 2 hours as people painted Japanese poems on each other and did other totaly arty Peter Greenaway stuff for no apparent reason.
7. Laserblast - Mystery Science Theatre 3000 went out with a goody with this one. Awful! Awful! Awful!
   

March

1. Abraxis, Guardian of the Universe - almost as bad as the title suggests. One IMDB review recommends it only to "the most disciplined bad movie watcher". That's me, folks.
2. Pieces of April - Nearly gave up on it after the first 10 minutes but persevered because I like Oliver Platt's acting. By the end I was in tears.
   

April

1. Red Zone Cuba - MST3K version
2. The Wild World of Batwoman - MST3K version ("END! END! END!")
3. Attack of the Giant Leeches - MST3K version
4. Manos Hands of Fate - MST3K
5. Missile to the Moon -
   
6. Earth Vs The Flying Saucers - Big budget crap 50s SF, so not as much fun as low/no budget crap SF movies of the period
7. Planet Outlaws - Which made even less sense the second time I watched it.
8. Boggy Creek 2- MST3K
9. Teenagers From Outer Space - MST3K (though, for my sins, I have seen it straight.)
10. Gunslinger - MST3K (and it's only the 9th of April today!)
11. Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders - Some people should have to apply for a licence to make movies. MST3K
12. Shoot or Be Shot - Lo No Budget movie starring Larry (Clash of the Titans) Hamlin and William Shatner. How could I resist?
    
13. Mitchell - A Jo Don Baker movie to be avoided at all costs (oxymoron! oxymoron!) MST3K

May

1. La Fille de D'Artangan - A great swashbuckling romp! My four stars may be overdoing it a bit as it's the first movie I have seen for ages that hasn't involved robots in some form or other but great fun all the same.
2. Eegah! - again! This time with the MST3K bots!
3. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians - That's it. No more trash. I have got to the bottom of the barrel and licked it clean. I'm cured. I'll finally get round to watching Rashomon, La Strada and The Seven Samuri next. Honest!

June

1. It Came From Outer Space 2 - I am ashamed. I have no will power. Just when I thought I had this thing beaten Channel 5 tempted me with this piece of shit. I'm an addict.
2. Adaptation- Did it! Pity the movie wasn't better. this has been on my TBW pile for so long and I've really been looking forward to it.

July

1. Jump Cut (Another fucking awful no-budget movie about no-budget movie making. Probably the worst of its kind - and that is saying something.)
2. Tony Takitani - (I got to see a grown-up movie in a cinema!)
3. Di Que Si - Unfunnily, unromantic (but Spanish) RomCom remarkable only for the lead actress' extraordinary tongue exercises in one scene.
4. Powers of Evil - which turned out to be two thirds of Histoires Extraordinaires, a 1968 portmanteau film based on Edgar Allan Poe stories and directed by Fellini Vadim and - well, the bits I got were directed by Fellini and Vadim, the third section, directed by Louise Malle, was edited out of this version. On the plus side it did have, an all too brief, shot of Jane Fonda in a bath being naughty with another woman, which, if truth be told, is the sort of thing I was hoping for when I bought it...
5. Bartlelby - strange, slow, creepy, funny beautiful film based on a Melville short story.
6. Star Wreck In The Pirkinning - The ultimate (so far) piece of fan fiction. A 90+ minute SF movie, downloadable from here, which pits the Star Trek universe against the Babylon 5. Given my fondness for the latter and loathing of nearly all things former, the sort of thing that should be just up my street. As it was, it was surprisingly watchable. The SFX were stunning for a lo/no budget film and there were some genuinely funny gags in it, but the story and script were, for the most part, atrocious. The first movie I have ever seen with left justified subtitles. Made in Finland.
7. The Sender - I must stop buying 97p DVDs from Tescos, I must stop buying 97p DVDs from Tesco's, I must stop buying 97p DVDs from Tesco's...
8. The Stranger - ...but paying £1 for them in Poundland is obviously worth it.

August

1. Return of the Killer Tomatoes - and yes, I am ashamed. (It was funny!)
2. The Silent Partner - Long forgotten, not bad, bank heist thriller with Elliot Gould and Christopher Plummer.
3. A Touch of Class - Glenda Jackson and George Segal. Not as good as I remembered it being 20 years ago, but still fun.
4. Love and Death - Woody Allen. Over the years I have slowly and sadly lost any enjoyment I ever found in Woody Allen's films. Were they ever really that funny or did people just pretend they were? The low point of this one for me was the joke about the old priest saying the best thing about life was 12 year old blonde girls - "prefererably two at a time". Oh dear.
5. Shadowchaser: The Gates of Time - Total "SF" shit
6. Interruptions - Zero budget unfunny home movie with pretensions.
7. Rollercoaster - Mad bomber on a roller-coaster. Beats Snakes on a Plane as a concept hands down - having said that I haven't seen Snakes on a Plane but my initial thought was. Snakes on the plane? Snakes are reptiles. Lower the cabin temperature and all the snakes will just go to sleep. End of movie. Goodnight.
8. Zelig - Another Woody Allen movie and I liked it! Never seen it before and I thought it was delightful. Aha! I think, maybe I was wrong about WA! (see Love and Death above) so I started to watch Stardust Memories which was on the same tape immediately afterwards - and turned it off after 15 minutes. What a load of self indulgent tosh! No. I can't stand the man. He can write; he can direct but there is something creepily narcissistic about him on screen. He was hardly in Zelig, and even then mostly in long shot and not speaking. I will look and see if he has written/directed but not appeared in anything else and test my theory.
9. The Owl and the Pussycat - I seem to have this 1970s George Segal groove going on in the movie watching at the moment. Whatever happened to George Segal?
10. The Changeling - Genuinely creepy Haunted House movie that starts out badly, gets better, and is just working up a good head of creepy steam when it looses the plot (by having to have one), then gets silly.
11. The Incredibles - Great Fun!
12. The Touch of Satan - The last unwatched MST3K Phoebe and Tyler bought over in the summer. What a bad film. Took me two nights to watch it as I kept falling asleep.
13. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - Which kept my eyes (but not my brain) busy as I ate a litre of ice cream and deeply deepened my loathing of all things Trekky.

September

1. Spiders - 99p from Tesco's. Giant, semi-alien, homophageous spiders. Plucky Girl Reporter. Evil government agents. Total crap. (Except for the bit where the cute PGR fell into a convenient and unexplained vat of water with very few clothes on and got very wet, that was mildly interesting for a few moments.)
2. Solaris - The American version. Why, with so many almost good, or nearly good movies crying out to be remade and done properly, does Hollywood keep on remaking classic masterpieces that don't need fiddling with? (Note to self: Stop asking yourself that; it's the money dimwit, it's always about the money.) This wasn't as bad as I was expecting.
3. The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse - I remembered Film 4 was now free! No Legs Akimbo in the movie; I am bereft!
4. Bellville Rendez-Vous - Great film. Came with a free newspaper! (which I didn't read).
5. I don't normally include part watched films but, because I'm sodding off on tour for a while, and because no one reads this anyway, I just wanted to put on record that I, in total brain-dead, trash-candy mode, gave up on Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy after about 10 minutes. There is some hope for me.
6. The Road to Wellville - Not as funny as I remember it being.
7. Catwoman - Even worse than I had been lead to believe.

October

1. Uchûjin Tokyo ni arawaru (or Spacepeople Appear in Tokyo to give it its informal literal English title) - To make a change from the crap German SF I am reading at the moment I thought I would see what the other former WW2 Axis power could throw at me in the way of bad SF. Giant Klu-Klux-Klan starfish from Earth's twin counterworld warning us about a rogue planet "from another galaxy" on a collision course.
2. Berlin Express - a not very good Jacques Tourneur movie I bumped into on the FTA Movies4Men channel. I will watch anything Tourneur directed at least once. Anyone who made Cat People and The Comedy of Terrors and Night of the Demon has to be worth a look. (Too many links, Mr JunkMonkey) Groovy! Movies4Men is showing Hell Squad tomorrow. It isn't directed by Tourneur but looks awful:
   

   "In order to rescue the son of a diplomat who has been kidnapped by terrorists, a group of Las Vegas showgirls undergo commando training and organize a rescue operation. 1987."

   Looks awful! I must run a tape under it! (Later: Merriol cocked up taping it, so I'll have to wait till next time it's on. Bugger.)
3. King of Kong Island - If you're looking for a zero budget Italian movie about a mad scientist planning to take over the world with radio-controlled gorillas but who is foiled by a hunk who can't act (or dance) while the camera pans, and zooms in on stationary objects, almost at random. Then this is the movie for you. No King No Kong and set on the mainland. My brain hurts.
4. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome - 1947 B feature with Boris Karlof. I love Karloff movies; he's such a ham. No matter how many movies he made, and he was still acting up until 1972, he's still basically doing the same silent movie acting he was in 1919). And no matter how evil, or what nationality his character is supposed to be, he still can't get rid of the underlying fact that he's an English gentleman at heart.
5. Blood Tide - Which, I suspect, was only made to prove the waiting world that Greece could make really bad international cast 'horror' movies too. Though the sight of James Earl Jones delivering lines from Othello while wearing a snorkel was a moment of genius. The only decent shot in the movie was nicked from the utterly weird Carnival of Souls.
6. From Russia With Love - It was on the telly. I was knackered.

November

1. Cast Away - The bits with Tom Hanks on the Island were OK but Dear God! the third act! what a tedious drawn out piece of shit!
2. Green For Danger - I just love Alistair Sim. I could watch him reading the phone book - to himself.
3. The Lavender Hill Mob - amazingly, the first time I have ever seen it.
4. School For Scoundrels - Alisair Sim wonderfully stealing an otherwise mediocre British 'comedy'.
5. Amateur - Dir. Hal Hartley. Never seen any of his films before this. I think I may turn into a fan very quickly.
6. The Jerk - sorry but it is funny.
7. Le Bossu - Swashbuckling nonsense with subtitles, dashing dukes, scheming villains, beautiful heiresses in mortal danger. Dumas with knobs on. Great fun.
8. M*A*S*H - R.I.P. Robert Altman. You were one of the greats.
9. Total Reality - mind-numbing SF trash (it cost me 12.5p in a car boot sale - I bought 4 movies for 50p - and I feel ripped off.)
10. The Last Patrol - A Dolf Lundgren, post-apocalyptic Mad Max influenced Israeli American B-movie which turned out to be almost quite good and not at all what I was expecting.
11. Undercover Brother - a sort of black Austin Powers - but funny.
12. Revelation - my first encounter with a new source of bad movie hysteria. The Right-Wing Christian Millennial SF/Horror movie...

December

1. The Astral Factor - Dear god! Masochistic Gold Stars all round for getting the end of this one.
2. Galaxy Invader - More MG stars! Jeeso! One of the joys of watching drek like this, is the undiscovered weirnesses lurking in the credits. This lo/no budget piece of shit, for instance, had opening title credits for a "Meteor Effect" that were on screen for longer than the meteor effect itself. It also had an end title credit that read "Hat by Don Zeifert". Hat singular. Now as the only person in the film who was wearing a hat was played by an actor called Don Zeifert, we possibly have here the only instance of someone getting a title credit for wearing his own hat in a movie. Movie history. I feel somewhat privileged to have seen it.
3. The Snow Creature - Nothing to recommend it apart from it's being only 71 minutes long and a stunning attempt at not actually appearing in the film from one of the leads.
4. Maybe Baby - This would have quickly become one of my movies "abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they stink" but for the fact Merriol appeared to be enjoying it and I wanted sex.
5. Lost Jungle - watched only because it starred someone who appeared as a character in book I read recently.
6. Toto le héros - Like most films I really enjoy I have very little to say about it. I always find plenty to say about total crap but when the thing sweeps me off my feet I don't have time, or the inclination, to be analytical. I just want to savour the experience. Next time...
7. Project Shadowchaser III - trash Alien clone. The 100th review I have written for the IMDb. I think I now get let in on the secret handshake and a key to the executive wash room.
8. Def Con 4 - much better than I was expecting (especially after seeing New World's logo appear in the titles).
9. Moon 44 - Total shit.

Abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they stink: Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, Team America, She's The One,

Running total 91

Linked titles, in bold, are pointers to my reviews/comments on IMDb.com. Unlinked, I didn't have anything worth adding to what was already there.

Welcome to Turkey Disguising Week

All over the English speaking world family home-makers are racking their brains to find new and interesting ways of sliding the remains of the vastly over sized turkey they cooked two days ago under the noses of their loved ones without said loved ones throwing it in their faces.

It's hard.

A Few Bits and Pieces:

Shopping today in Oban, I came across this totally resistible offer in Lidl:




Mmmmmmmm Fat Balls.

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Holly is not well. For the second Christmas in a row. She has the current bug that is doing the rounds of all the kids in the area. She's sleepy, tired and achy and has a sore throat, no appetite. Daisy on the other hand is a fully wound-up clockwork dynamo on steroids and keeping her occupied and out of the way while Holly sleeps is fun. With luck Holly will be over the worst of this by Monday but may end up eating her Christmas dinner snuggled up on a beanbag in the living room while the rest of us sit down at the big kitchen table.

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A former neighbour died the other day. Tylie and his wife Betty moved to another house in the village a couple of years ago and we saw them less often than we used to but, as is the way of these things, my Mum and Dad had been round to see them the night before and I bumped into Betty on the way back from the Post Office in the morning. She was on her way back from the doctors and told me he was "still in bed" with a hangover, Tylie was 'fond of a drink' as they say around here. He was probably already dead when she was talking to me. Merriol phoned me with the news about lunchtime.

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I've had this going around in my head all evening:

Away in manger,
No crib for a bed,
the little Lord Jesus,
Gold plate on his head,
And Joseph has got one,
And Mary has too,
Don't know if they grew there,
Or were stuck on with glue

This is why I'm never going to Heaven

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If I don't get a chance to get back here before Monday a Merry Christmas to one and all, and, if you are one of those people who believes and prays, you might put in word for Tylie; he was all right.

This Is My Slug, It Has A Broken Leg

We have a robin which lives in our garden, over the past few weeks it has been getting tamer and tamer and if you are quiet it will come within 30cm or so (6"). It's been sticking its head into the hall, presumably it's pecking up bits spilled from the duck food food we keep there. Today I came in from emptying the garbage to find it sitting on the kitchen table. (Though it had moved by the time I got the camera out.)

Daisy and I had great fun manoeuvring it out of the front door. She makes a good sheepdog (robindog?) does Daisy.

Otherwise today was very uneventful, which in itself is no bad thing. Holly went to her nursery Christmas party, we all three had lunch with Merriol, Mike and Morag (and their two boys whose names don't start with M) at the TIC, came home cooked, tidied up a bit, cooked a bit bathed the kids and read them stories, tidied up some more and now I'm off to bed.

Goodnight.

I thought I was going mad the other day. I finally started hearing voices. Weird little voices just on the limits of my perception. If I kept really still I could just hear them and I couldn't work out where they were coming from. There was this conversation going on just outside my hearing and after a while it started to get really distracting.; I wandered round the house looking for their source but couldn't find them anywhere. I checked everything. All the radios were off neither of the televisions were on, none of the kids toys make that kind of noise, no talking books on the CD player, phones were on the hooks, computers were muted... Wherever I went in the house the voices followed me and never seemed to get any louder. I thought it might be someone out on the street. I wandered outside and couldn't see anyone.I was just starting to believe that I was truly going mad when I realised my phone's MP3 player, on my belt was switched on and playing an old Science Fiction radio play I had downloaded on the lowest possible volume through its tiny inbuilt speaker.
Instant sanity.

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Holly's School concert yesterday. As usual leaving everything to the last minute we ended up there just on time but with a camcorder with a flat battery and loaded with a tape which I hoped had nothing too important on it. Daisy and Mum settled themselves in seats and I wandered up to the back of the hall where the School Christmas tree was resplendent with TWO sets of lights. I traced the cables to the plugs and after a surreptitious fiddle with the switches decided which of the sets was least likely to be missed, unplugged it and ran the Camcorder off the socket.

Holly was beautiful (but you would expect me to say that wouldn't you) the best Gaelic Christmas Angel ever and I have the footage to prove it.

CSI:Toytown

Please tell me it's not just my kids who do this sort of thing.

My Brain Is Invisible; That's Why I Sometimes Leave It Behind

Merriol found her Christmas pressy today.

This not a bad thing.

It is a good thing.

You see, I bought Merriol's present when we were in Glasgow last month. Repulsed at the door of Lush by the eye-watering anti-bloke punge they pump out to keep the husbands and boyfriends at bay while they sell expensive soaps to hypnotised women (I guess I'm much more heterosexual than I thought) I rushed over the Buchanan Street to the safety of Borders, (at least their stock doesn't attack your sinuses).
Wandering around in hypnotised bibliojunkie bloke mode I found THE PRESENT!; the thing I needed to buy for Merriol for Christmas, but hadn't realised existed until I saw it there on the shelf. I grabbed it and hurried to the checkout, and got a phone call from Merriol who was now in Borders with a huge bagful of girly punge stuffs and looking for me. I told her I was invisible and not to try and find me, bought THE PRESENT!, had it wrapped at the handy "We Know It's Christmas Soon And You May Have To Smuggle This Past Your Insert Loved One Here" wrapping station, and went to find Merriol before she got to the Paperchase section of the store and went into spending mode again.

Two days later, back home, I realised I had absolutely no idea where the THE PRESENT! was. Tonight, the mystery was solved; it turned out that Merriol had planked it in one of our cupboards with all the other stuff we smuggled (unwrapped) into the house past the kids. Luckily she recognised it as the missing PRESENT! and didn't try to open it.

We got heat!

We came home from visiting Julia and Emma in Aviemore (John is up a mountain in Italy) this evening to find a warm house. The boiler isn't fixed totally but it is going. Apparently they stopped making spares for our type of boiler about thirteen minutes after we bought ours, so the nearest possible motor was found as a replacement. Unfortunately it doesn't quite fit the pump it is supposed to be driving so more phoning to seek advice from manufacturers is being done next week but, until then, it should go. If it does stop I'm to phone the plumber (who rejoices in the nickname of 'Tiger' and whose greatest claim to fame is that he was a policeman in Monty Python and the Holy Grail ) and he will come around and tell us exactly where to hit the thing to make it work again.

Phoebe, over on her blog the other day, mentioned the kids in the house she is living with at the moment threatening one another with a "licking".

Little sister threatening big tormenting sister: "Don't make me lick you, Catherine!!!"

Today, Holly told Daisy off in the back of the car with the words:

"Stop being rude to me or I will lick you down to your toes.

Now I'm not quite sure what Catherine was being threatened with, if I remember my Tom Sawer, 'lick' in the US can mean to get the better of; defeat: licked her weight problem (thank you Answers.com), but when Holly threatens to lick you - you get licked, great, slathery, wet tongue licks. It's like being attacked by a swarm of huge warm slugs.

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The Plumbers returned today bearing expensive parts which were tried one by one - and then in all possible combinations.

Nothing worked.

So Roddy is off to Glasgow tomorrow to get us a new motor, the only working part of the boiler not yet dismantled, driven around the country for a few hours, and put back. The house smells of diesel again - apart from the kitchen which smells of diesel and polyurethane from the shelves which still haven't dried.

I'm going to bed with a tub of ice cream and may not emerge until April or May when it starts to get a bit warmer...

How Many Best Friends Have I got?

Bedtime tonight:

Me:
I love you Holly, more than anything in the world.

Holly:
Even more than chocolate?

Me:
Even more than chocolate.

Holly:
Even more than ice-cream?

Me:
Yes Holly, I love you even more than ice-cream

Holly:
How about chocolate ice-cream?

Me:
Okay, time for bed.

She almost had me!

The Central Heating - or lack of - Saga part whatever: the component for the central heating is not being posted to us now, the earliest the manufacturers could promise to get it here was "some time in the New Year", instead the plumbers have located the relevant bit in Inverness, so one of them, Roddy, is driving 180 odd miles tomorrow to pick it up. This is going to cost us a fortune!) Over the last week or so - in an attempt to keep warm I have been clearing out the workshop and making some space in there. Last night I got to do some house improving stuff for the first time in months, putting up some shelves in the kitchen. I bought the wood on Wednesday and the shelves are now finished, varnished and drying. The shortest turn around time for a job in this house for years!

The Plumbers came and dismantled the boiler, the plumbers went - taking bits of the boiler with them. The plumbers came back and remantled the boiler, then dismantled it again and went went away with different parts. A new part is on order. It will arrive some time in the future. The boiler is in pieces. The house is cold. The house smells of diesel. I am disgruntled. I am going to bed.

I am not going to bed.

I just managed to post this on Merriol's Blog. I'll have to sneak in and delete it before she notices...


Sneak
Sneak
Sneak

"I Dropped Myself!" - Daisy On Falling Over

So what the fuck went wrong last time!!!!



Sorry for that. i just spent ages typing a long entry on the new pooter, which arrived this afternoon only to get a humongous error message (even on a 17" screen it would have been big) and then the thing vanished taking all my hand-crafted witterings with it.

A test with the same settings went through okay.

Bugger.

In Short: It's freezing. The central heating boiler has died but we do have the new shiny pooter to keep us occupied as we freeze to death. After only three hours the pooter is starting to feel like our machine. By which I mean I've ripped all the soft cuddly warm rounded corners, and fuzzy stuff off every display option I can find, Merriol has started filling it up with pictures of the kids, and there is a web cam sellotaped to the top of the casing.



Just like old times.

Test of new pooter settings

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