Mummy, What Does "Shake Your Ass" Mean?

Wednesday. I was hired to drive a van for Ilona and the Lochaber Youth Acting Drama Whatever they are called Group. Another one-night production of the Strictly Scottish play I had built the set for last year. I spent last Sunday tarting up what was left of the set, and replacing bits that had vanished and on Wednesday I borrowed my dad's car and picked up the Van from the van hire place in the Fort*. Parked the car round the back of the hire place in the customer parking and drove to Kinlochleven, picked Ilona and 'stuff', drove to the Clachaig to pick up Andy who was doing the lighting and as much of the heavy lifting as I could arrange before he cottoned on, then to Ballachulish to pick up the set (and more 'stuff') and then to the Fort where we set up the show and fretted about whether all the cast were going to turn up.

There were seven in the cast. The girls all lived locally but the boys were hot-footing from all over Scotland just for the one show. Paul from Aviemore, Grant from Dundee and (mind gone blank insert name later) was coming up from Glasgow. Paul arrived and helped set up. The Girls arrived. (Mind gone blank insert name later) phoned to say he had missed his train but it was all right he was on a bus! Grant arrived at ten past six. The show was due to start at seven. (Mind gone blank insert name later) phoned to say there was an accident and the road was blocked and he was hitch-hiking back to Glasgow to try and get up another way. There was no way on earth he would make it in time. Ilona looked at me. Would I go on instead, with a script in my hand and read (Mind gone blank insert name later)'s part? There was no way I could say no. We quickly ran through the show (or at least the bits I was now in). - "Ok, Come on that side, Sit down. Go off there, do this, do that, do the other, laugh at him then, be sleazy there...". I frantically wrote all over the script I had borrowed.

Twenty minutes before the show we found out the costume fitted me - kilt, shirt, waistcoat, and jacket followed later by a bad periwig and a very real sabre.

The show - I don't remember too much about. I was too busy trying to remember where the hell I was supposed to be, where my props were (all 2 of them), and trying to work out how to get my voice to reach the back of the steep raked seating while looking down and reading a script. I managed to fuck up at least twice - even with the script in my hand - but we got through. Then we reached the final scene. We walked on. The play is set in a cheap interactive tourist attraction - we were playing the actors playing the parts of historical characters. Scottish History for tourist (I was playing a guy who played Bonnie Prince Charlie). In the final scene it's the end of the season and all the actors in the tourist trap have just put on the final show and are about to go their separate ways. There's an air of finality and sadness. It was only at this point I realised that the last direction Ilona had given me on the run through had been "get changed into your civvies." seemed reasonable. The scene is set in the changing room but... wait a minute! I'm on stage! (downstage yet) in front of a whole bunch of people who have paid to be here - and I'm supposed to take my clothes off? I considered ducking behind the bit of scenery the girls were changing behind - while popping up and down delivering their lines - but they were girls. Girls I don't know that well, teenage girls getting changed on stage in front of friends family and paying public... erm... as a boyhood fantasy it might have been entertaining, as a middle-aged man it was big scary "oh noooo - don't even think about it!".

Fuck it.

I took off the dress-shirt and quickly pulled on my t shirt. Okay, that was painless. How do I get my kilt off and my trousers on without - oh bum! I remembered I was wearing pretty loose baggy boxers shorts, the type with a fly... Okay, trousers on UNDER the kilt first - then take the kilt off! Brilliant! but I couldn't get the trousers up all the way and ended up doing the most ungainly bandy-legged wriggling as I managed to hold up my trousers (mostly by will power) while using both hands to unbuckle the kilt. Meanwhile I think I lost a cue and the whole scene went a bit very wobbly. We got to the end though. No one threw anything and people were complimentary afterwards.

The set was struck and in the back of the van in 20 minutes.

The set and 'stuff' was delivered to Kinloch and Ballachulish. We raced back to the Fort to:

1. pick up Ilona,
2. fill up the van with fuel,
3. leave it at the hire place and
4. drive home in Dad's car.

Parts 1 and 2 of the plan were pretty painless. We arrived at the hire place about 11pm - there's no one there but we were to lob the keys through the letterbox. We got out of the van. I locked it. I said "Are we sure we have taken everything out of the van? Because I'm going to put the keys through the letterbox." Nothing in the van says Ilona. Right. I lob the keys through the letterbox and walk round the back of the building to find someone has parked their car right behind my Dad's. We're blocked in. I've just posted the keys to the van, and the last bus left town about 20 minutes ago. We can't get home - and it's raining.

I say "Fuck". A lot. Very loudly.

Thank god for power steering. I said we were 'blocked in' not 'boxed in'. There was, thank you gods of the Theatre, an empty space to the left of the car. With Andy out in the rain peering at the very small gaps front and back, Ilona relaying his signals to me and me doing a lot of steering while driving VERY slowly backwards and forwards we managed to get out.

Home at midnight.

Still, it's better than working for a living.

Nerd Alert! (The Following Blog Entry Contains Scenes Of Unrepentant Nerdyness)

Just started another small blog a place where I can put up my stupid cartoons and 'poems', at least one a week is my aim but sometimes more if the mood and inspiration strikes. The world will be relieved to know there will not be too many poems ,and I hope the pictures will get better as I improve my skills in Photoshoppe (it's a very old version).

Tonight I indulged in the ritual torture that is Star Trek. Each and every time I watch anything Star Trekky made after The Original Series (which has a quaint, kitch charm which I quite enjoy) I am struck dumb by the overwhelmingly pompous bloody-awfulness of it all, and each time I watch it I add another WTF to the catalogue of nerdy (cue Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons voice) "That is so Stupid!" moments. Tonight, and I feel so sad for noticing this - and even sadder that it has taken me so long too notice this, I was struck for the first time by the monumental stupidity that is the widescreen telly that seems to fill half of the bridge. Every week alien spaceships heave into view and park themselves slap bang in front of the Enterprise, and each week our gallant crew step forward to gaze in awe and wonder at whatever is in front of them (aka 'the wiifot'). Sometimes the captain, or whever is occupying the captain's Lazyboy, will order "Full magnifcation!" the picture on the telly will jump to a sooperdooper close up view of the wiifot - at which point everyone on the flight deck will take a step closer to the screen to get a better look!

Tonight, the wiifot hovered around in front of The Enterprise for ages doing wiifoty things, then slowly descended towards the planet's surface - and slid down out of sight below the bottom of the screen leaving the crew staring at a blank starfield and pushed my WTF button. The wiifot just slid out of frame. No one tilted the camera down to follow it... The Enterprise, The pride of the United Federation of Planets' Starfleet, this vast starship, has a fixed camera nailed to the front of it like a miner's lamp - with no way of moving it? What happens if they do want to look up? Do they have to point the whole spaceship? It's pants! It makes no sense whatsoever, totally unthought through like a lot of Star Trekky stuff (the ship has one of these fixed view cameras nailed on the back as well, because sometimes the captain ask to look through the rear-view mirror. Thinking about it I would guess it's got wing mirrors too but even so it's going to have some HUGE blind spots. It's beyond me why the Klingon's went to all that trouble to develop their Cloaking Devices and skulking about in invisible mode when all they had to do to win against a Federation spaceship was to fly up to the side of the thing and start blasting away.


One of these days I will write a book (sad to say I have lots of notes): Why Star Trek is Utter Pants - or maybe I'll start another blog.

Commercial:

If you have enjoyed this post you may be interested in more of my inchoate Trek Rants on the IMDb Here and Here

*

Not a lot happened today either:

Not a lot happened today, so I drew a cartoon









With Apologies to Harold Gray and Jack Kirby

Sweep Sweep Sweep - Come On Rubbish, Let's Go Home.

Merriol went down to the pub tonight with Len. I stayed home and watched a film about killer nuns from outer space (successfully) destroying the world. I may start drinking again.

I've got a cold. I have a sore throat. My voice is awful. It is one of the great minor injustices of life that when men get colds their voices sound dreadful, adenoidal and rough, like a pubescent frog, but when women get colds and sore throats their voices get deep and weirdly sexy. Merriol's voice turns into Kathleen Turner's and mine turns into Adrian Mole, aged 13¾.

It's not fair.




.

Barbie Is Smelling You...

I'm making my house big again. I have a big house; it used to be a school, and for many years was the biggest public building in the village. They used to hold dances here, and that was before we put in a second storey and added a couple of bedrooms upstairs. Somehow over the years it has become cramped and full of STUFF...



OK. I'll tell you something now. How I write my Blog is like this: I switch on the pooter first thing in the morning - for some reason, lost in the mists of time, all my clothing is a chest of drawers in the office - so while I am finding socks and pants I fire up the machine and often read my mail by the time I am dressed. Then the machine stays on, on-line, all day. I stop by every now and then during the day to chat with M at work via Google Talk if she's free, or check my mail, not that any bugger ever writes other than to remind me about stuff I was supposed to have done ages ago (Ilona) or to try and sell me OEM V!49r4 at massive discounts but only if I mail them first with all my eBay details which they need to unlock several Millions of British Pounds in a Liberian bank account of the... yadda yadda yadda delete delete delete (everyone else.)



At some point during the day I may have a wee moments internal monologue which is slightly above the average background noise of

"wheredidIput...ifIputthewashingonnowwillIhavetimeto... WhattimedidMerriolsayshewasworkingtilltonight?... WhatAREwehavingfortea...?".

If I remember this thought or idea next time I'm passing the machine, I'll slap it down into the performancing plugin window on Firefox. Later, I may add other bits as they occur to me. It gives me something to think about sometimes as I'm doing the washing up, or sorting socks. Later at night when everyone else is asleep (or at least in bed) I write up what I want to say properly. Sometimes it doesn't work and I just delete it and go to bed, sometimes it doesn't make sense and I leave it till the next day.



Today that first paragraph up there was written about 1pm. And it's true; we do live in a whalloping big house. Linda (long time ago ex) and I used to play badminton to try and knock the cobwebs off the ceiling, there was no other way to get up there, and it's true we do have an awful lot of clutter that has just spread. There is just too much stuff here. I seem incapable of parting with anything. I have untold hundreds of books, CDs, LPs... piles of STUFF. Merriol is, by her own admission, not the tidiest person in the world*. Add two kids aged two and four and several Metric Tonnes of brightly coloured plastic and I have almost forgotten what the floor looks like (big horizontal thing made of wood as I recall). For the past couple of weeks slowly and surely, and with Sue's help, I have been pushing back the tide of kipple and today I realised what it was I was doing. Instead of just dealing with individual little messes and crisis-managing the clutter I suddenly understood I was actually making a difference. I was making my house big again!



At 4pm, three hours after jotting down that first paragraph up there, Kath, my oldest friend in the village, came round. Could I do her a favour? She needs to store some furniture for a bit, not a lot, a wardrobe, six dining chairs, a gate-legged table, a...









*Non-UK residents may like to consider the well-known traditional average Brit's tendency to underestimate and downplay their own massive achievements here.

Another attack of the Dreaded Lurgi. Not sure if it's the last one come back for another go or a completely new improved with added whistles and bangs version but whichever it was I felt a lot more achey and snottier than the last time; it has seen me in bed for the past couple of days and I have done nothing. I have slept a lot, and read a lot - I seem to have absorbed eight books over forty-eight hours - OK, seven books and a collection of short stories by Alan Dean Foster. I feel better for it now but not fully recovered. I strongly suspect that sitting in a freezing Village Hall for a great chunk of Sunday reading prompt for the play that I'm techying next week had something to do with me getting ill. I also strongly suspect the kids are going down with it so I will, in all probability, be running up and downstairs feeding them hot juice and reading them the complete works of Dr. Seuss before the end of the week. Oh what fun.

I finally got to use the Lidl Mud bath gunge I was raving about the other day. The contents are brown as well. Brown and dense. I poured some into the bath as it was running and it just sat there at the bottom quivering until I poked it vigorously with one of the kids' bath toys and it broke up and scuttled around the bath looking for somewhere safer to hide. The back of the bottle which I hadn't really looked at before has the following instructions

Directions: Use daily as needed in a relaxing bath. For a full bath (200 Litres of water), fill the screw cap twice and pour into the bath water.
Water temperature: 36-38 degrees.
Duration of bath: 15-20 minutes.

Did I mention Lidl was German company?

This raises all sorts of questions in my mind. I have never been to Germany and know nothing about their plumbing or bathing habits (except they are supposed to have really weird toilets*). Do German baths have a scale up the side of them like a kitchen measuring jug? or maybe the taps have little flow meters on them that shut off after 200 litres. How else would you guess what 200l of water actually looks like? I can only suppose German baths also come fitted with a thermometer. How hot IS 36-38 degrees C? I have no idea. Mind you I have no idea what 36-38 degrees F is like either, except I think it's colder. What happens if I stay in the bath longer than 20 minutes? Do I become over-relaxed? (possibly dangerously French?). I need to know.

*please read this, if only to find out what 'Sitzpinkel' is and wonder why there isn't such a word in English.

It's To Stop The Noises Falling On Our Heads

And tonight...

After spending an hour faffing about with someone's pooter to try and get their eMail working again (just to add to the fun this guy has profound hearing problems. A stone deaf computer illiterate trying to make sense of whatever someone in an Indian call centre was telling him over the phone - oh, and he has dial-up, so there was no way he could be on the phone and on-line at the same time).
After ages on the phone with a very nice giggly lady from India and resetting all his settings I discovered the reason his eMail wasn't working. It was because someone had sent him a HUGE pile of photos as an attachment. He had never encountered attachments before and had assumed because his Mail wasn't coming down as fast as normal it was busted.

...I flopped down to watch: The Doomsday Machine - a terrifically awful piece of lurid trash SF which started filming in 1967 but was abandoned half way through shooting and shelved only to be discovered five or so years later by a different director, who couldn't afford to hire any of the original cast - or anything else for that matter. Undaunted by this obvious fly in the ointment, and with a totally misguided faith in his ability to direct, he 'completed' it. It's an utter shambles. I loved every bewildering second of it.

Merriol hid in the caravan with her mother and plotted things.

I think That Puddle Likes Valentine's Day

My first Annual Hero Of The Week (sic*) is the unamed Guardian reader who took The Awful Poo Lady (aka 'Dr.' Gillian McKeith) to the Advertising Standards Agency and got them to tell her to drop the 'Doctor' from her advertising. Her Doctorate comes from a pay-as-you-go institution called the American Holistic College of Nutrition which also gives doctorates to dead cats if you give them money - more over at the always excellently readable Badscience.net

Last Week's Annual Hero of the Hour was the unknown celebrity I caught being interviewed as I was flipping round the radio in the car looking for something to drive to. I've no idea who he was but he was being interviewed by some BBC bimbo (probably called Kirsty - most of them are) who was obviously creaming her knickers at the thought of being in the same room as him. The subject had got onto some semi-nude scene from his latest movie "You went topless in that," gushed the simpering media bimboette. "Did you shave for the scene?"
"No," replied the Unknown Celeb. "I've only got three chest hairs and I'm pretty proud of them, so no."
"You won't be getting a crack and sack then?" Giggle.
"No, I've already got them."

Doesn't look so funny written down but I was splitting my sides.

The lack of Blogging over the last few days has been due to lack of time. Rampant springlike tidying behaviour, and the arrival of a certain box of cruddy SF DVDs have been consuming most of my time. I've had great fun being bewildered by the awfulness of two movies so far: The Alpha Incident and UFO: Target Earth (this one being one of the most incomprehensible, dreadful movies I have ever come across).

Meanwhile, I want one of these:

*Let's not kid ourselves I'm ever going to do this again.

Since I have now posting my 100th review over on the IMDb a couple of weeks ago I've noticed my reviews are getting approved incredibly quickly. It used to be days before I got an eMail back confirming my rantings were fit to print, now it is sometimes only minutes (OK, dozens of minutes but it's still faster than it used to be). Tonight I watched, and waffled a bit about, Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory - aka I Married a Werewolf. The best thing about it is the title (either of them). But it was free! Another of the movies so bad no one can be bothered to renew the copyright downloadable from the magnificent Archive.org.

Basically I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting for the big box of drek SF to arrive from the US. I'm only rooting through the bad Italian Horror movies there in case I accidentally watch SF movies I just spent money on.

I've got a job interview up at the school. I got a letter through the other day. I can claim travelling expenses at something like 4.7 pence a mile. ; Since I can walk there in under three minutes (less if I climb over the parent's back garden wall and shortcut through Doc Ellis' drive) I don't think I'll be putting a claim in. ; I'm going to shave though. I hate shaving. It's cold without my beard.

I love Lidl, it's my kind of shop. No music for a start, no way! PRS licences cost money! Lidl is the most frill free shopping I know. No pretence of corporate 'caring', no rewards schemes or loyalty points, no concern for anything other than shifting stuff. We're here to sell stuff, you're here to buy it. Pile it high sell it cheap, no nonsense, buy it or fuck off, shopping (they still have the Fat Balls on offer).

It's Male Pattern Shopping:

- go in get stuff, get out.

As opposed to Female Pattern Shopping:

- wander aimlessly, picking up everything in sight and examining it minutely before putting it back.
- endless vacillation between identical products in slightly different packagings.

Today in Tesco's for example I watched a woman pick up a packet of washed salad, stare at it for a good ninety seconds, turning it this way and that, before putting it back on the shelf and just walking off. Was there something in that packet of salad that put her off having salad today, or had she never seen bagged salad before and was just curious? I have no idea but it was an extraordinary thing to watch.

Except it isn't extraordinary; it happens all the time.

The other week I was in Morrison's meat counter just as they had reduced a whole pile of stuff. There were joints at ten pence each, well within their sell-by date, perfectly good. I thought: 'I'm having those thank you very much!' and just filled my trolley with as much as I thought I could get in the freezer at home, the woman next to me stood there and held a joint in her hand for a good minute just looking at it. I asked her: "It's ten pence, why are you hesitating?" She said "You're right." put in her basket and walked off. A couple of minutes later I saw her walk back and put it back in the chill counter. I just don't understand.

I tried doing a bit of woman shopping today in Lidl when no one was looking (actually I was half forced into it as for some unfathomable reason - probably the opening of the Aldi store just up the road - they had rearranged EVERYTHING. My usual high speed, zig-zag, cornering the trolley on two wheels, supermarket-sweep route had been done away with and I had to wander semi-aimlessly looking for the stuff I wanted), so when Merriol wasn't looking ( - at me - obviously she was looking at something, she wasn't just standing in the store with her eyes shut) I did some Female Pattern Shopping. I picked up some tortilla chips - then put them back, picked them up again, put one back, and picked up a packet of a different flavour - two cheese and one slightly salted, or one slightly salted and two cheese... hmmmmmm... I tried to get into a zen-like mystical female shopping place - and got nowhere. It did nothing for me. I got bored. I was staring at tortilla chips, and it was boring. All I felt was I was wasting my life staring at plastic bags full of food.

Further evidence of the male patterness of Lidl come in the form of a bottle of bubble-bath we bought today. (I would scan the label for you but it means turning on the other computer which is just out of arms reach unless I move my chair six inches and therefore far too much work at this time of night). It's nothing special, just your bog standard solution of Sodium Laureth Sulfate with perfume and other gunges in a plastic bottle:

Cien
Wellness

Wellness
Bath

MUD

Pleasant warmth
and relaxation

With Mud Extract

Mud. No bullshit hyperbole about nutrient-rich Dead Sea, anti-ageing, visibly reducing the appearance of wrinkles, "Because you're worth it" detoxing, crap. Just mud. It's got mud in. We dug some mud up and threw some mud in. In case you are not quite convinced it's got mud in it we'll make the label brown. Brown mud. It's got brown mud in it. Buy it or fuck off.

I like Lidl.

My Lips Don't Like It - But I Do...

Yesterday was spent in bed with the dreaded lurgi and a couple of books which I absorbed in some manner. I don't remember reading them. I remember the stories and have opinions on them so I must have. I could have sworn I was asleep for most of the time.

I did get up to take Holly to her ballet class. As her class in the Fort, a good 15 miles away, and starts 15 minutes after the school day ends I picked her up from school early and drove like the clappers - for all of a mile - before coming up to the end of a very long line of traffic doing 35 miles an hour.

My snot laden brain wasn't working too well but even I could do the maths. We were going to be very late. There was no point in trying to overtake a queue of traffic I couldn't see the end of; our car isn't blessed with the kind of engine that does accelerating too well and the road is a bit too bendy for long slow determined assaults on columns of traffic. So I just sat there at the back of the line, talking to Holly and fuming at whatever was going so slowly at the front.; Idiot tourists? - wrong time of year - idiot little old lady drivers who couldn't find third gear - more likely, tractor? JCB? - could be.; Whatever it was, it was slow, and it was boring, and I was fed up. We plodded on. There was a police car at the side of the road.; Its lights were flashing and a uniformed officer was standing by the side.

Suddenly everyone in front of me pulled off the road into a huge lay-by. In a matter of moments I went from following a solid phalanx of cars to suddenly having an open road in front of me. I was confused. I tried to remember if the Policeman had been signalling. He didn't seem to have been. By this time I was at the head of the line of parked cars. I had visions of police chasing me up the road if I didn't stop. I pulled in at the head of the line. A couple of the cars that had been near the end of the line with me pulled out and drove off. - What? - People started getting out of their vehicles. I was totally confused. I got out of the car and walked back to the car behind. A man in a dark suit was just getting out.

"Did I miss something?" I asked.

"It's a funeral." he replied.

Only then did I realise we were at the Druim na Birlinn cemetery. I mumbled something, got back in the car, and drove like the clappers.

We were only 5 minutes late.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about my testicles.

Partially because, like most men, I think about my bits quite often - several times a day wouldn't be an exaggeration. The standard medical advice to 'check your testicles monthly' is laughable. I would guess most men do it on a daily basis. Yep! - fumble fumble - still there.

Partially I've been thinking about them because of this I punted up as a reply to a post about how 'easy' men have things over at Chicago Peggy's blog, :

'On the other hand we do have external genitalia which, I have discovered, are not compatible with child care. Especially if the children are very young and don't posses external genitalia of their own. Several times up at nursery or play group, where I am usually the only male over 4 years old, I have been whacked in the goolies by small children. I stifle a curse. My eyes water. The mums look patronising and tell me that child birth was much worse. Once! One day of mindboggling agony then that's it. Men? We get wellied in the balls by the little buggers at least once a day, every day, for years! No wonder most men run back to the workplace as soon as they get the opportunity.

My testicles used to be round...'

This started me thinking about why it is 'funny', by which I mean comedically acceptable, to have characters kicked in the balls. What was it that made a (well-timed) boot in the nads something to laugh at but a (well-timed) punch in the boobs not. I didn't come to any conclusions but it just made me wonder.

But mostly I've been thinking about my wedding tackle because I am going to have to seriously think about redefining my relationship with my testes.
I threatened to have a vasectomy after both of my kids were born. I never again wanted to put Merriol through what she went through having Holly. As I have said before it was the most horrible day of my life and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. If I had had the snip after Holly was born we would never have met Daisy and it's just impossible for me to conceive of a world without her in it now, so I can't help but think that there is another wonderful little girl or boy just waiting in the wings. I get so broody sometimes. No. Wrong. I'm broody most of the time. Like a rabid smoker who gives up and turns into a anti-smoking Nazi on steroids I have gone from a total child avoidance workshop on legs to full on Earth Daddy. If there is a baby anywhere within arms reach I have to have a cuddle. I alarm total strangers with babies in supermarkets by smiling at them. I love babies. I love kids. I would, if I could, (if I had money) have a dozen of them - at least. A whole Walton Mountain of kids (only poorer).

We can't afford to have another kid (especially if it turns out to be a boy and we can't recycle all the dresses I can't bare to part with because Holly and Daisy looked so cute in them). On the other hand I don't fancy the idea of total strangers poking sharp pointy things into my gonads and tying knots in things, no matter how many letters they have after their names and how many times they have done it before. Reports I have read about chronic postoperative pain and discomfort affecting 50% or so of men who have the snip don't fill me with much confidence either. Don't know what to do. I think I'll just end up giving my balls a stern talking too and leave it at that.
It might not be the best form of contraception available but it is cheap and painless.

I gave in and bought the 50 DVD set. I have no willpower! We have no money! I do have 75 hours of really bad SF movies!

A long and frustrating day today in which I achieved - NOTHING. Oh tell a fib, I emptied a waste paper basket. I think that is the only constructive thing I managed to do around the house all day. Not sure how or why but I just seemed to be rushing from pillar to post* getting nothing much achieved. Got up, made lunch, took Daisy to Gaelic Playgroup, ate the lunch I had prepared at 9 am (ha! you thought I had slept in didn't you?) , took Holly to school, put Daisy to bed (she wasn't feeling too good this afternoon), emptied the waste paper basket, collected Holly from school, got the MP3 player we bought Pa for his birthday working, came home, got Daisy up, cooked and ate tea, bathed kids (bubble bath and hairwash). Merriol got home just in time to read bedtime stories while I fell onto the sofa and embraced the awesome mindsucking powers of TV - and so to bed.

What does 'from pillar to post' mean? One of those idioms I use from time to time and have no idea what it means.

One variably definable amount of Googletime later:

OK, according to most sites, including this one it is, apparently, 'an idiom' (which means I will have to go and edit the preceding sentence to make myself look more erudite) that is either: an ancient tennis term, or a medieval punishment, take your pick.

Fuck! It's 1 am! What happened to my early night? A: TV and Google.

I Am A Potty - I Come In Peace!

Flattered last night to see that someone posted this entry from my other blog on their Myspace space last August (with a credit). Nice to know I wrote something that someone thought was worthy pressing at least four keys on their keyboard to copy it somewhere

Just in case you were wondering that you were missing out. The other blog (Oh My God! Is that Cheese????) is, apart from that one entry, not very interesting. It's just a place I plonk the laborious methods I work out to do things like copying pictures from Flycr.com, just in case I ever need to do it again - knowing full well that if I just wrote them down on a bit of paper I would never find them again. I also know whiz bang grown up pooter literates could knock up a Perl script that would do it in three lines - but these work ok for me.

Bingly-Bong, Bingly-Bong, Bingly-Bong, Bingly Bong! - Is That Funny?

Back from the gig. 24 hours to travel 160 miles. The gig was fun though I missed the first 30 minutes because I got stuck in the most horrendous traffic jam in Glasgow - then got lost. Finally got the gig just in time to see Thea Gilmore do her stuff. Hurrah!

After the gig we spent 3 hours at the Festival Club watching a succession of people sitting on stage with guitars of various shapes and sizes going plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - (key change) - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky - plinky -plinky, alternating with girls standing up with various sized flutes going tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - (key change) - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle - tootle. Sometimes they did it very fast and people cried "Yeee-ip!". A large American with a beard sang about a mining disaster, a bunch of Swedish teenagers did World Music (World Music may recover from the beating it received - though the accordian player was pretty) and the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year pointed her impressive chest at us and sang something sad in Gaelic for a long time.

Jamie seemed to enjoy it, though he was disapointed that there were no bagpipes.

I guess I just don't get folk music but at least it was mostly accoustic which meant I was spared the mournful echo-laden drivel I was ranting on about the other day, and it was mostly Scottish Irish, it wasn't English Folk music which is even worse; adenoidal whining about long-forgotten injustices narrated, as it turns out in the last verse, by a dead person with no attempt at a rhyming scheme-o.

I would like to report that a group of singers with asthma got up and performed some gasple music but they didn't, so I can't.

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)