Boingy-Boingy

Sunday: We've spent a lot of today talking Boingy-boingny language.

"Boingy-boingy boigny-boingy boingy boigny boing. Boingy-boigny boingy boingy boigny boingy shimpaty shim-paty shimpaty boingy boing! Shimpatty bing dong ding bang bing bonk king kong!"

I have no idea either but Holly and Daisy and I kept it up for ages - and, weirdly, after a while, it did somehow start to make some sort of sense. I need to get more sleep or to mix with more grown ups.

One of the reasons that Boingy Boingy started to make sense so quickly is the vast number of Children's books I read at the moment. Bed-time stories, stories during the day, stories whenever the kids want and whenever I can spare the time from my busy schedule of potato peeling and toilet cleaning. Some of the books are fine. Some I like and enjoy reading (anything Dr Suessy for example is a joy to read out loud). Other things make me scream. Daisy has a thing for the Miffy books at the moment.

I hate Miffy.

I am coming to loath the bland, two-dimensional, Ikea flatpack bunny with a vengeance usually reserved for Tory backbenchers playing to the Daily Mail readers in their constituency.

This is Miffy on her bicycle:

Miffy goes riding on her bike.

Like all Miffy books there is a picture on one page, faced by four lines of the most intensely painful, sometimes meaningless, bilge I have ever had to read on the other.

Ferinstance:

Then I'll bike through the forest
it's beautiful and green
because of all the trees there
you have to ride between.

or

Perhaps it will start raining
that's not so good for you
but biking when it's raining
can be exciting, too.

or (from a different book)

The teacher got up early too
she stood there at the door
and Miffy was so pleased to see
the pendant that she wore.

I have read these books so often that I'm not reading them any more. I'm chanting them. Part of my brain is involved in getting the words that are on the page to my mouth and the kids' ears but it is such a small part of my head now that the rest of gets a chance to actually look at this stuff. "and Miffy was so pleased to see the pendant that she wore." What? Miffy was pleased to see her pendant? Why? It's never mentioned again in the rest of the book. What is this? What is going on here? This is secret cult stuff I'm sure of it.

"So Miffy, you recognised my pendant - now give me the secret handshake and the Justified Mysteries of the Ancients of Mu Mu Land will be yours..."

It's not just the Miffy books. I've been convinced for years that aliens have already made contact and are softening the world up by infiltrating children's TV. The real aliens aren't grey like the UFO nuts have us believe they are just about every colour but grey. Red. Green. Blue. Orange. When the generation brought up on The Tweenies, Barney, The Teletubbies, BooBahs and all the other weirdnesses that fill the preschool schedules at the moment hold the reigns of power the aliens will step forward.

In 2065 a giant silvery flying saucer will land on the White House lawn. Troops will rush into place. Tanks trundle down Pennsylvania Avenue. A line appears in the side of the ominous silveryness. A crack. It widens! It's a door! A ramp starts to slide forward. Troops finger triggers in nervous anticipation. Around the world millions leanforward towards their TV screen. The ramp has touched the grass. There's movement inside the disc and a stange figure emerges. It stands for a moment at the top of the ramp and raises a hand in an unmistakable gesture of friendship. It speaks:

Eh-oh, La-la! Eh-oh, Tinky-Winky!

In my more horrible 4 am bouts of paranoia I'm convinced the world has been contacted by more than one alien race - and they don't like each other. For some reason they have chosen earth as their battleground and during my kids' lifetimes vast ranks of evil Tweenies and Teletubbies will fill the streets and blast away whole city blocks with powerful laser weapons as they attempt to exterminate each other.

Back to sanity...

Hello Miffy!

But, a few pages later.

Oh My God! Miffy's fucking face fell off!

In another book Miffy goes to school

...to design barbed wire

...and see the local pervert exposing himself to the class.

Stuff the homoerotic subliminal messages that were supposed to be hidden in Batman and Robin's relationship:

It's what the hell is being done to our toddler's heads that scares me.

Our only hope lies in the massive brain power lurking inside this kid's skull.

And no I haven't Photoshopped this at all. This kid just has the weirdest biggest head ever put on a book cover. (I think she is painting a map of the only weakpoint in the Tubby DeathStar.)

Oh God I don't have the willpower to go on with this, boingy boingy boingy boing

Daisy had an epiphany the other day:

After weeks of trying to play some of the little games on the CBeebies site and getting very frustrated just not understanding how and what she was doing - despite Merriol and I trying hard to explain and show her...

Me:

See the little arrow on the screen?
It moves when you move the mouse -
No don't click! Now what did you do?
Oh god how did you do that? How
did you close down the browser
from THERE? Ok, let's restart Firefox...

Daisy:

I want Cbeebies...

Me:

Yes, but we have to wait till Firefox starts...

Daisy:

I want Cbeebies...

Me:

Yes it's just loading...

Daisy:

I want Cbeebies...

Me:

OK, there it is... Right. Now Daisy,
hold the mouse and - Don't CLICK!....
OK... Let's restart Firefox!

Daisy:

I want Cbeebies...

That was the usual way it went. But, after playing for a while on the Jackson Pollock emulator site Merriol found here, she suddenly got it. Wham! Two year old baby brain put X and Y together (we'll get to the Z axis later) and suddenly no more random clicking, wondering where the cursor is, or closing browsers with the scrollbar (I have no idea how - but I swear she could do it.) About ten minutes after we realised she was in full control of the mouse we introduced her to clicking dragging and dropping. No sweat. She was moving cartoon characters around the screen like a professional.


Today was spent trying to find shoes for the kids at a price that wouldn't force us to sell one of them and doing shopping in the fleshpots of Oban (Tesco's). Merriol took the kids and I drove the car from where we had parked across town and in a moment of madness did a three point turn and ended up driving several yards down a one way road before I realised my blunder. It wasn't as bad as it could have been in that none of the many policemen in the town's police station - in front of which I committed this traffic violation - were looking out of the windows at the time.

Merriol and Daisy

Be afraid people, well, be almost afraid. I have been sitting in the dark for most of tonight giggling my stupid head off while battering bits of the keyboard with most of my finger ends (and occasionally my nose). I have, in short, started writing my bits of this year's Panto.

If the pattern of previous years is true to form what will happen between here and the start of Decemberish (the hall is already booked) is this:

1. I will hammer out a vast stream of conciousness nonsense which will have me in paroxysms of self-congratulatory giggles - I am a terrible one for laughing at my own jokes.
   
2. I will show this stream of conciousness weirdness to Merriol who will smile and pat me on the head with a pitying smile. (As it is at the moment, one of my characters is explaining Brechtian Alienation to a cow on page three).
3. I will show it to Ilona who will scribble things like: 'NO!' and 'What???' and "This is supposed to be a family show! - WE CAN'T SAY THIS!" all over it after crossing out all the obvious knob jokes.
4. She will then demand that there is some sort of plot.
5. (I will then sulk for about twenty minutes).
6. Mike and I will sit around and discuss everything but the panto, smoke stupid amounts of cigarettes, and drink stupid amounts of coffee. We will then be forcibly reminded by our best beloved that we are supposed to be writing not just skiving off the childcare and have a panic attack, do our surreal Woodward and Bernstein on acid impression, and shove in as many slightly less obvious knob jokes as we can - offering up, every few pages, a sacrificial goat of a line for Ilona to delete.
7. Two days before rehearsals are supposed to start in earnest (about a week before the show - though that week gets very busy. During last show of this kind we did two years ago, we actors were warned on the first night not to lean on the scenery - the paint was still wet. In all we did four performances over three days for that show and each time I went on I found a new piece of scenery that hadn't been there the last time. It was bit disconcerting to say the least.)
8. Anyway, two days before this intensive mayhem Ilona will notice that Mike and I never actually got round to putting the plot in, and we will have to cobble one together from somewhere. Knowing Mike and I's taste in all things rubbish, what will eventually be inserted will be somesort of bastard offspring of Dallas and I Married The Monster from The Black Lagoon.
9. Somewhere after that Ilona will make it funny.

So it goes.

Rag Bag

Out in the garden the other day...

Holly:

I accidentally threw a pair of
white underwear over there.

I looked and sure enough there was a pair of her knickers half-way up a rose bush. I couldn't work out how they had got there till I realised the bush was under her bedroom window.

Me:

Holly, how did you manage
throw a pair of knickers out
of the window?


Holly:

It was open.

---

I just fucking LOVE the web. Love it love love it (and having a machine that can cope with it). At the moment I'm blogging, while listening to a hilariously weird collection of music on a five year old radio show from the archives at http://www.incorrectmusic.com (please go and listen to them, they are wonderful.) In the background an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (Zaat, aka Blood Waters of Dr. Z) is being sucked down the wire from Youtube.com in handy bite size pieces (via the pure dead brilliant Videodownloader plugin for Firefox). I hope to be able to glue them all together at a later date and enjoy it in full. And doing the final fiddling with this new cartoon...


But you are going to have to wait for that, Merriol is kicking me off the machine - RIGHT NOW! Apparently she has something important to do - though what can be more important than listening to cheesy music and downloading 1970's monster movies I can't imagine...

I have finally finished a cartoon I have been fiddling with for ages. Finally Finally Finally. The bugger was driving me mad. I hate to think how long I have wasted putting this one together. I am resolved to spend less time doing them from now on - thus leaving me more time to read The World's Great Books and watch The World's Great Movies - stop laughing!

In lieu of anything fantastically interesting happening over the last few days (apart from long lost lover Mel and her husband turning up on Saturday and having a cuppa and a wee chat while their car tyre deflated in our driveway, and M's sister Gaynor, husband and two boys arriving later the same day to stay for a week, and me starting work in the evenings helping do up Mags and Simon's renter-outer cottage before they go mad with the workload and me suffering my usual Concrete Paranoia (I'm never convinced it will set) and Daisy just noticing she is two and has become a hellion at bed times - they are SO not fun at all at the moment. Screaming, shouting, crying, hitting, etc. etc. What happened to my darling wee daughter?).

In lieu of anything else fantastically interesting happening over the last few days here's a quick rundown on what I've been reading listening too watching etc. this weekish. (Exciting stuff eh?)

I spent some time the other night watching the the Free-To-Air Playboy channel (that's 912 on Sky to save you looking it up) which is full of infeasibly smooth, shiny women taking their clothes off in slow motion, having showers without getting their hair wet, and occasionally licking each other. I'm sure these aren't real women. They are far too smooth and symmetrical and the whole thing looked like a car commercial. It was like watching Ferraris washing themselves. Dove cosmetics adverts are sexier, honest!

Today I have been mostly listening to Takeshi Terauchi And The Bunnys (sic) - Twangy fuzzy-guitar Japanese surf music which I downloaded from somewhere in here onto my phone which I then plugged into the stereo in the kitchen. "Here" is New York radio station WFMU's blog which, over the last few weeks, has been the source of much of the weird and wonderfulness that has been filling my ears. I love music that is both at the same time familiar and new, MFMU is providing me with loads to choose from - last night for instance I discovered a Dub Reggae version of Dave Brubeck's Take Five, a native American chanted version of the Flintstones' theme song - and, well, so on, and so on. It's familiar music strained through some heavy duty wrongness filters. Takeshi Terauchi is just sublime - imagine Dick Dale playing the theme tune for The Water Margin, or Monkey. Or even better imagine the soundtrack for a 1960s Japanese cop show: Hokkaidō-Five-O - "Book 'em, Mariko!".*

I'm currently reading The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka 1904 1924 - but only when I am not reading trashy SF novels - OK, I'm not reading the Kafka at all. It's just sat by the side of the bed waiting for me to admit that I am not going to finish it. Every now and then i have this need to prove that I am not a total mushbrain and read something what has got a bit of litrichure an that. (A bit like my "I must watch fewer uttershite SF movies" resolution.) Kafka is not turning out to be a good read. Great opening sentences. Boy could he write a mean opening sentence. Like this one from The Metamorphisis:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

Great opening! Unfortunately it's all downhill from there. Umptyump pages later Gregor gets bored with being a verminous bug and dies. Well fuck me sideways. Apparently the umptyump pages were full of "stunning psychological, sociological and existential angst" - all of which passed me right by. I just kept thinking "Will someone in this book please DO something recognisably interesting!" It's teenage wank. Kafka, like James Dean, Kurt Cobain and other iconic rebels without a clue, made the brilliant career move of dying youngish - or at least having spectacularly underachieved in their lifetimes.

Back to the Bug Eyed Monsters slavering over the perfectly rounded, Ferrari like breasts of an elderly scientists' beautiful daughter - but who's this racing to her rescue in his atomic powered underpants? It's ace newspaper reporter and interplanetary Polo Champion - Brick Chinstrong! Hurray! Something happened. It may be shit - but something happened!

I like things to happen - especially if they are fantastically interesting.










* I know Mariko is a girl's name but I love it. When I get reincarnated as a Geisha I want to be called Mariko. (You never know). If we have another child and it's a girl guess what she will be called if I had my way - or Siobhan, I like Siobhan too. Lousy name for a Geisha though. Or maybe both...

I find it rather alarming that my blog turns up on Google if you search for 'nude bingly'. Even more alarmingly it turns up on page two. This means there are twelve higher ranking (ie more nudely bingliful) pages than mine. What is actually terrifying is that someone today visited the blog after searching for 'nude bingly'. Presumably there wasn't the right kind of bingly or nudity on the other twelve - or maybe they are still looking.

Other recent searches that have landed people up here include:
Southern nudists
ripped sarking felt
and this week's favourite
Life cycle big nose monkey I'm number one on Google!



.

Letter

A while back I found a letter tucked into an old book. It was dated 1944. I love finding old papers used as bookmarks. I love having those strange little insights into other people's lives.

Unfortunately this one was written in some sort of Scandewegian.

Flutty over at Palimpsest.org offered to take a look. He lives in Switzerland and knows all sorts of clever people who speak lots of different languages (possibly all at the same time). He passed it onto a Danish friend called Lone, This is what she made of it:

Valdemar castle, Troense, Tåsinge [an island south of Funen]
27 July 1944
Dear Søren,

How are you? Many thanks for the letter you sent me, I was very pleased about that. I hope you are at "Sättra Hage" [in Sweden?] these days you must have a nice time. These days I am at "Valdemar castle" and have it really nice here. I am paddling a kayak and sailing a dinghy. The other day I stayed too long in the water and caught ear and stomach ache. It was kind that your father and mother wanted to have me over there some time [in the future]. We ride every day and it is very sporty. I fell off a few times when we had to do jumps. The horse I ride is called Tarzan and is a real fellow. Once when my father should [?...?] he fell off and got a concussion and now lies at the hospital in Svendborg [a town on Funen]. We were also at Brahkolleborg [?] and there drove four-in-hand and won a prize – wasn't that good?

Now I will not write any more but will you give my regards to your father and mother and Dida [not a typical Danish name – maybe Swedish?].

With love, your devoted Niels.

Now my father and mother have decided to send me to Stenhus [literally 'Stonehouse'] but will you not want to come during the Autumn holidays to H??? [Hvidovre – a town on Sealand?]

Valdemar Castle, Tåsinge, Funen

Tåsinge, south of Funen

(A few words in Lone's translation were changed by Flutty to a more correct English phrasing or meaning, and I tweaked a couple of bits of punctuation to make it read a little more betterly*. Lone was so kind as to attach a photo of the castle and a map.)


It is weird to think of this young boy staying in a castle having an idyllic summer holiday riding horses and canoeing while World War Two was raging on all fronts. On the day this letter was written: Anne Frank was still in hiding and keeping her diary in Holland, not that she was to write many more entries because she and her family were denounced and arrested by the Gestapo on August 4th, some eight days later. In the Pacific Ocean, The Battle of Guam, in which 20,000 troops were to ultimately die, was raging. In the Ukrane the Russians had liberated the first of many Nazi concentration camps, and in Poland, just across the Baltic Sea from Denmark, the start of The Warsaw Uprising was three days away; 250,000 civilians were to die before it was finally crushed in October.

It is such an incongruous letter. Not what I was expecting at all, not that I knew what I was expecting it to be about - but I am glad I got to read it. Thank you Flutty and Lone.

It also made me think that I don't write to people any more. I can't recall the last time I wrote an honest to goodness, pen on paper letter. It's all PMs, emails and texts with me these days. In 60 years time no one is going to find an out-of-context page of this blog tucked into the pages of a book. I should write to people more often. Apart from from anything else it might inspire someone to write back giving me something to use as a bookmark and loose in the pages of books because, other than around Christmas and birthdays, we never get any real letters from people any more. All our postman delivers these days is envelopes with windows - and whatever we have bought on-line recently. eBay invoices, house insurance quotations, and snotty letters from the bank may hold some interest to future generations but nothing like a genuine hand-written letter.

In July 1944 a boy rode a horse called Tarzan.

I should write more letters.

---

* misplaced joke.

You De-neated It!

Len and Sue took the kids to Oban for the day and so, after I had basked long in the glorious silence that followed their departure, I've spent my time working on the kitchen, learning how much I had forgotten about woodworking, and being awed by the amazingness of wedges. Wedges are wonderful. The Get Out Jail Free Card of woodworking. The world would collapse without wedges - well anything I've ever built would. I think from now on the first thing I will do when starting a job is make myself a pile of the little buggers.

I have spent ALL NIGHT working on a cartoon. It is now two in the morning and I'm still only two thirds of the way through it. I know I'm only two thirds because what started out as a stupid one panel joke has turned into a stupid three panel joke - actually it really started out as the only salvageable bit of the script I am not writing for the thrilling Rocketman movie. I think I can honestly say that the movie just isn't going to be funny. I concede defeat. Still I learned something - not sure what but I learned something, and I did get one half decent joke out of it. Though the longer I work on it, it gets unfunnier and unfunnier - by the time it gets posted it will be a three act play that will make a Strindberg double bill look like a good fun night out. Don't get too excited.

I couldn't resist. I spent far too long today trawling the web looking for Japanese Sock vending machines - and I didn't find one. I found lots of other things. Sock Glue' for instance (you're going to have to trust me on these or Google them up yourselves because I can't find the links from this pooter, Merriol is hogging the other machine drooling over pictures of pink washing machines - strange woman). Sock Glue is what Japanese schoolgirls glue their insanely baggy socks to their legs with (hmmm, suddenly Merriol doesn't seem so very strange...) And I daren't think what 'Gothic Lolita' is all about. But, eventually, I did find one! I found a sock vending machine! - in a bowling alley in the USA. Somehow I feel a great sense of disappointment, but smell a business opportunity...



Another cartoon today as well.

Merriol and I started playing Myst IV - Revelation tonight. See you in a couple of months...

Daisy, I'm Going To Wipe Your Nose Because I Can't Paint Over Bogies.

Not much blogging done the last few days due to the fact that it has been Sunny and Nice and Springlike for the past few days. The annual wonderful gap between howling gales and horizontal freezing rain, and The Midges is here. (It's here now because we have relatives visiting next week and it is going to piss down all the time they are here and we will have to repeat the Highland Mantra - "Och, you should have been here last week, the weather was chust sublime!" And they will not believe us. Again. This happens every year.

So, for the past few days, Merriol, the kids, and I have been wandering around smiling at people we haven't seen for months and being amazed the sky is still blue. Look, the sky is still blue! Daisy just looks up and says "It's not raining," a lot in a puzzled tone.

As a consequence I found myself doing Classic Dad Thing number 34 today. Holly came from school and wanted to watch the box. "No," I said slipping into 'things I swore I would never say to my kids' mode, "it's a lovely day. Look, the sun's shining, go outside and bloody frolic."

---

I have also been contemplating the The Mathematical Impossibilities of Socks. (There's a doctorate just waiting to be picked up by someone here). I hate pairing socks. I'm sure I've blogged about this before - but the chore I hate mostest in the whole wild world is matching socks up with their mates. And I seem to do so much of it. Every day I pair up more pairs of socks than any four people could possibly wear in one day (unless they were professional sock filthiers of course - I'm sure there are such things somewhere in the world. Japan probably. I'm not going to look just in case I'm right, but I just had a vision of middle-aged Japanese businessmen buying professionally-soiled, white, schoolgirl knee-socks from vending machines on station platforms - oh god, I need to get outside more often.)

Where do they all come from? (Socks I mean, not weird pervy thoughts about Japanese Businessmen). There's some sort of Inverse Square law going on here; the further you get away from a pair of feet the more odd socks there are per cubic whatever. I'm sure we have a greater number of socks in the odd sock box than than we actually own in total. I'm sure if you added up all the odd socks in the world it would turn out to be some impossibly high number - possibly larger than the number of atoms in the Universe. How can socks disappear in such vast numbers? Socks in our house live in a closed cycle:

Feet > Laundry Basket > Washing Machine > Drying room > Feet

It is possible for socks to go through the whole cycle many times without leaving the house. At what point is it possible for Adult Socks to vanish from this virtuous circle? There isn't one. It's a closed loop. It's impossible. Where do they go? The kid's socks live by completely different and complicated life cycle. A typical Holly sock cycle might go something like:

Right foot > Welly boot > Bedroom Floor > Laundry basket > Washing Machine > Odd Sock Box

Left Foot > Welly boot > Back of car > Teddy Head > Down the back of the sofa (for weeks) > Living Room Floor > Laundry basket > Washing Machine > Odd Sock Box.

I would guess that in our house you are never more than three feet away from one of Holly's lost socks.

---

Today when I was fuming away in the Drying Room pairing up today's sock mountain I had the urge to justify the space taken up by the six hundred or so LPs in the living room - and actually played one for the first time in months - only to discover that though the syncopated style of Gene Krupa was happily belting out of the right-hand speaker, I was hearing the kid's Ceebeebies TV channel through the left. Somewhere in the insane tangle of electric spaghetti down the back of the TV / AMP /MiniDisc / VHS/ DVD / Tape-Deck / Record Player /Skybox / Playstation mountain - something had come loose. Luckily I have a lot of Mono records so I played them with the balance whanged over to the right hand channel.



I hate tracing cables more than I hate pairing socks.

Velux window upstairs which has been a gaping eyesore ever since it was put in months ago - one of the thousand unfinished jobs - looks a lot better and is a lot less draughty now I spent the afternoon whittling a facing to cover the sawn ends of all the boards in the ceiling and squirting insanely sticky mastic into all the cracks, (it's a varnished wooden plank ceiling. Victorian. It looks wonderful but is a sod to do any work on as whatever you do stands out like a sore thumb, there's no chance of plastering over your mistakes and then whacking a couple of coats of white emulsion over it before anyone notices like you can with most ceilings. Well, like I do with most ceilings.)

This evening I did the last Lochaber Youth Theatre session for a couple of weeks . It's just a fun and games thing at the moment but I dread the day when Ilona asks me to actually do any work with them.

I finished a cartoon tonight and posted it. And then finished another- twice. I don't know how many years I have been playing around with computers, but you would have thought by now I would have learned rule number one. Save regularly. Having a think? Save. Having a stretch? Save. Going for a pee? Making a cup of coffee? Doing anything that doesn't involve typing or mousing? SAVE! When will I ever learn? I spent an good half an hour fiddling with little fiddly bits getting them just so - and the application crashed. Pouf! Swearing ensued.

I'm off to bed before I start on another...

My whole day has been buoyed up by the utter weirdness that is Holly in the morning. I am so glad I keep a notebook by the side of the bed. Today I lay half-awake in bed listening to Holly and Daisy on the balcony playing with their dolls I heard:

"Barbie's nose is tiny! It's the biggest thing on your face, it's the smallest thing on Barbie's - she'd never get her finger up there!"

A few minutes later she came in waving a Barbie around her head and announced an amazing discovery.

"Daddy, Barbie can't touch her toes!"

It's true. I had never noticed before - not, I hasten to add, that I spend a lot of time playing with Barbie, Cindy, or even Action Man

This was the second thing I wrote down in the bedside notebook today. Earlier I had rolled over and scribbled down a fully formed cartoon idea. It was still funny this evening so I spent ALL night getting into the computer and annoying Merriol by asking her whether grey is funnier than blue, and other such imponderables. That will teach me for getting smug to soon. I'll post it in a couple of days - if it is still funny. I am going to have to put a lid on the toonery nonsense it's getting in the way of my bad movie watching nonsense.


Why do I like stuff like this so much? Austrian mashup. I'm sure I used to have a brain.

New 'Toon today. Quite chuffed with this one, not so much for the gag as all for the ease with which it came together, the penny finally dropped about how to do a couple of things on Illustrator and it all went very smoothly though, very annoyingly, I did find the button I REALLY needed after I had finished it and was fiddling around wondering whether to start on another.

Holly is, according to Sam, the headie up at the school, past the infectious stage of the chicken-pox and will be going back tomorrow. Hurray! Life returns to normal. but, with my usual luck, Daisy is probably erupting into a million spots at this very moment.

A couple more moments of surreal household bliss from today. After a week at home with the kids Merriol is starting to understand a little why I get so twitchy and irritable when she is even only a few minutes late home in the evenings...

Daisy:

Mummy, Holly peed in the box.
Mummy, Holly peed in the box.
Mummy, Holly peed in the box.


Merriol:

What?


Daisy:

Mummy, Holly peed in the box.


Merriol:

In this box?... O my god she did!

Holly, did you pee in this box?


Holly:

erm... yes.


Merriol:

Holly, WHY? Why did you pee in the box?


Holly:

... it's a long story...

At which point I had to leave before I burst out laughing, so I didn't hear her explanation. Bet it was good though.

---

Later:

Holly:
(Proudly)
Liam, look what I've done!


Me:

Holly, you've Sellotaped a grape to a piece of paper.


Holly:

Yes.


Me:

Why?


Holly:

To lead the crab with! Hold it upside down and follow me...

A Tale of Bad Parenting (probably a better name for this blog)

What with one thing and another - only one of them being another crap Bela Lugosi serial chopped down to an incomprehensibly unwatchable movie - Merriol and I didn't get to bed too early last. The girls were up at 6. We weren't. After watching the telly on the landing for a while, then getting bored with that, the girls decided to play 'house-moving' which consisted of moving the entire contents of their bedroom on to the landing and vice versa. I, at least, was in bed half-asleep, half-awake and half-keeping an ear on proceedings but unable to actually get myself up. I was woken up at 9.15 by Daisy saying "I can't find Holly".

Panic.

Up. Merriol, Daisy, and I ran round the house looking for her. Or rather Merriol and I ran round the house shouting for her, looking in and under things - Daisy sat on the stairs and 'phoned' people on the old totally unfunctioning Bakelite phone which lives on the sideboard; I guess she thought she was helping. This house hasn't got many rooms but it's a big place to search if you are looking for a small child - who may be hiding. I was managing to generate the start of a real panic when she came out of the kitchen looking guilty.

And on the Breakfast Menu today we have Brioche layered with a slice of chocolate spread and blackcurrant jam topped with a hefty sprinkling of little silver-ball cake decorations...

She had just started to add some piped icing when she was interrupted.

As new obsessions go the toonery is lasting longer than most of my recent compulsions. I got two done today. The first one got me out of bed at 4 am! A small part of my brain just kept needling me till I got out of bed and did it. Which does raise a question; given that everything looks like total shit at 4 am (4 am is, according to statistics I just made up, the time of day when people are most likely to realise the futility of existence and the meaningless of life - Jean-Paul Sartre apparently only wrote for quarter of an hour a day 4 - 4:15 am. There's no way even a Frenchman could have written a sentence like "Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object." on a day when the birds were singing, and the sun was shining, and beautiful shag-happy French girls wandered the streets in summer dresses - that's 4 am type thinking).

So, the question: Is something that you think funny at 4 am still funny in the light of day? I dunno. I think so, it still struck me as amusing when I looked at it later - but then again Phoebe has been poking about in my head with a spoon, so what do I know.

The second one came to me this afternoon when I was round at Mike's being hypnotised by him explaining his latest essay to me (he's doing a Master's in English Literature). He uses me as a sounding board and it's fascinating. I don't understand half the concepts he is talking about, and don't recognise a lot of the words he uses either, and even then I have to translate the ideas he's playing with into movie terms before I can get a glimmering of what he's on about. (Today for example I managed to grasp some difference between Wordsworth's poetry and Keats' by playing in my head the shower scene from Psycho, and the scene where Anna Massey watches the movie in Peeping Tom. Something to do with the implicit and explicit. It made sense at the time.)
I guess if Mike can explain things to me he stands a chance of getting them down on paper. Though his evaluation of Matthew Arnold, considered by many to be the Victorian Age's third greatest poet, as " a boring cunt " might not make it into the final draft of the essay.


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Reading bedtime stories last night

Me: On Tuesday he ate through two pears, but was still hungry (Daisy helped me turn the page)... On Wednesday he ate through three plums, but was still hungry... (Daisy helped me turn the page) On Thursday he ate through four strawberries, but was still hungry...
Holly: ...but very healthy.





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A strange day. I spent most of it stuck in the airing cupboard painting it white. Merriol is off work for a week - or something (I'm sure she has told me no end of times how many days she isn't going to be working this month but my brain just doesn't retain facts any more - unless they are to do with Bela Lugosi movies) so I get to do heroic things like finish all the jobs I started over the previous four years and abandoned for a variety of reasons - most oftenly to start another unfinished job.

Oftenly? Did I just type 'oftenly'? Oh god... That's the kids. I am forgetting all the grammar I ever knew, forgetting how to construct simple words too. They are leeching it all out of me. They have built some sort of brain sucking device from Lego blocks and Barbie parts and point it at my head while I'm not looking. I'm sure as hell loosing the ability to do joined-up thinking.

Tonight to give my brain a rest from the tedium of standing on a small ladder in a tiny room an painting white paint on top of white paint I flopped in front of a Bela Lugosi movie. I love Bela Lugosi flicks, he is such a wonderful ham and appeared in some really dreadful films. (The only drawback to watching them though, is I tend to talk like the Count from Sesame Street for days afterwards: "One machine with lots of electrical sparks... Two machines with lots of electrical sparks... Three machines... The fools! The fools! I wil haf my revenj upon tem!"
Tonight's offering from the deeply shit box of 50 all time unwatchable tosh was The Phantom Creeps - which, after a bewilderingly incomprehensible first few minutes soon sank down into a level of unwatchability I have rarely encountered before. Nothing made ANY sense whatsoever - I abandoned it. (Gasp!) Yep. It was THAT bad. Turns out what I was attempting to watch was a 265 min (12 episode) Saturday morning serial edited down to an breathtakingly messy 78 minute feature film. No wonder people kept arriving at the same door over and over again and there was a car plummeting over a cliff every five minutes - sometimes the same car, quite often the same cliff. Nice to know though I still have some will power and critical faculties left after Holly and Daisy have syphoned off most of my higher cerebral activity via their Brain-Suckotron.

If only I could lurn to use it's powerr for myselv. I could maik miselv Invincible! I could efen rule Te Worlt!

Mwahahaha!



And another Cartoon - which is slightly funnier than yesterday's, but that wasn't difficult - Guilt! Phoebe Southwood! Guilt!

Another new toon today. A bit of a quickie because the one I laboured over for hours last night just looked like unfunny crap when I came to look at it again. Partially I think because Phoebe described my stuff as 'wonderful' over on her blog. As I react to praise like a slug does to salt I am now paralysed into inactivity. Guilt! Phoebe Southwood, guilt!

After last night's mammoth brain rotting session of three fucking-awful movies (Flight to Mars - a cheap 1951 SF based on a novel by Tolstoy* from a company more used to making westerns. The Lost World - the first 1925 silent version, which contained a weirdly disturbing white actor in black face with 'Yes bass I gwine do dat ting' captions and no sign of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle making an appearance as himself as promised by the IMDb, and This Is Not A Drill - a 1962 Cold War no budgeter that could have been a lot lot better (but was still better than the sum of its parts) I restricted myself to just one tonight, an inept Italian/Spanish horror movie set in Britain starring a Kiwi and a Swede which featured the most boring and pointless 'chasing a monster through the sewers' sequence ever shot -God it was boring.

I have watched 33 movies so far this year. Most of them utter shit. I need to carve my New Year's Resolution into a piece of three by four and hit myself over the head with it.

*Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1883-1945) not Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) who wrote Anna Karenina, Warren Peas etc. I don't think he wrote any SF. There, you learned something. My watching this drek isn't a total waste of time...

Last night I spent far too long for my own good watching footage of spaceships on Stumblevideo. Not pretend spaceships from TV shows and movies (I'm not that sad) but real spaceships - loads of NASA footage of the shuttle taking off and people doing Saturday morning science in The International Space Station (OK, I am...).

A couple of the films really stood out for me, not because of what they showed but because of the voices on the soundtrack. What they showed was pretty spectacular. In both cases they were films of unmanned rockets blowing up moments after takeoff. In the first movie a US military rocket blows up just as it clears the tower. There is a massive explosion. A gazzillion tons of rocket fuel and several billion dollars worth of hi-tec stuff just explode in a HUGE Hollywood style mid-air fireball. Enormous chunks of burning crap fall, hit the ground, and explode again. There is a moment's silence before the cool, dispassionate female voice of Mission Control comes on "...we have an anomaly on the launch pad."

"An anomaly"... that's one way to describe it.

At the other end of the scale was the amateur footage from a field somewhere in Russia. It's night, there's a cloudy sky and in the distance a Soyuz launcher sits on a pad. There's a flare of orange light and the rocket slowly takes off, a glowing plume of light reaching into the air then - WHAM! the whole sky lights up. A gazzillion tons of Russian rocket fuel and several billion Rubles worth of probably slightly less hi-tec stuff just explode in a HUGE Hollywood style mid-air fireball.

Up till this point the amateur cameraman had been chatting to other people standing around in the field in what? Russian? Hungarian? Polish? I don't know, some intensely Slavonic language.

"Dobri-slonski whatsiti whatsiti do-dahski Do-dahski!"

The Rocket takes off...

(Excitedly) "Dobri-Dobri-slonski!"

And up...

(Awed) "Dooo-Daahski!"

WHAM!

"Fooky - nell!" (pause) "Fooky-nell! Fooky-nell!"

English is truly the international language. When ships at sea, whatever their nationality, get in trouble they send out a Mayday distress signal, I have no idea what 'Mayday' means* but everyone yells for help in English. It now seems that everyone reverts to English when faced with imminent catastophe of any kind.

Fooky-nell!

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New cartoon

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*actually it's French (M'aider is the infinitive form of the reflexive verb "help me") but I'm not going to let mere facts get in the way of a cheap joke.

test

Been fighting off a migraine all day, I woke up this morning with the sparkly lights right in the middle of my field of vision - I know they have a real name but have no idea what it is. Not a good start to the day. I don't get migraines often but when I do they are horrible. Today I seem to have avoided the worst by taking lots of painkillers and sleeping for a chunk of this afternoon when Mum and Dad looked after the kids. I've been walking sideways a lot all day - or feeling like I have; it's very peculiar. My vision is very funny too, everything seems flatter than normal. I didn't attempt anything difficult today. Just a quiet day looking after the kids and putting the bathroom back together.

How do shower curtains get dusty?

My Feet Are Giggling

With the kind of ironic counterpoint, without which my life would be much less interesting, after yesterday removing vast amounts of liquid from the bathroom floor I spent a great chunk of today sticking liquid onto the bathroom ceiling. A few days ago I was having a shower and looked up; I could have sworn that ceiling was white. It wasn't. Nowhere near. It used to be - about 15 years ago. Somehow over the years it has dinged into a mid- dark grey (varying from Pantone 14-4 102 TPX to 17 4405 TPX in places). It is now white again, and the top of the tall cupboard doesn't have a 7.5mm layer of felt on top of it. It must be ten years since I was on a ladder tall enough to see the top of the thing. On the top I discovered a dense layer of greyness, a ten year accumulation of bathroom fluff. It was like a blanket. I tried to wipe it off but it wouldn't come - so I ended up rolling it up and dumping it. The bathroom now has an echo.

I recently upgraded / moved / whatevered the blog over to the Improved! All-singing! All Dancing! with THX Surround Sound! (on selected computers) NEW! ("no longer beta") Blogger*. As a result my counter doesn't work any more so I have installed a new one. Not very interesting but true...



*I liked 'Beta Blogger'. It sounded like a blood-pressure medicine with a cold.

Google thinks there are more important sites than Google?



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Not a lot happened today so I drew two cartoons. This cartoonery thing is turning into another of my (possibly short term - like so many of them) obsessions. I'm getting faster though, my periods of staring at the screen in blank stupifaction wondering what it was I just did, or periods of intense puzzlement as I try and find the tool I KNOW IS THERE! are getting shorter and shorter. I haven't shouted at the computer all night.

When I say not a lot happened today, I did make the discovery that my bathroom floor isn't as level as I though it was. Not that I have given it a lot of thought for the past 15 or so years since it was put in. The assumption that floors are level is a pretty basic assumption after all. Unless your plates are sliding off the table you somehow assume that the thing you spend so much time walking around on is flat.

Today Holly decided to wash one of her toys. She put the toy in the sink, put the plug in the plughole turned both taps on full - and then went off to find something else to do while the sink filled up (which it probably had done before she got to the bathroom door). When I came into the living room a few minutes later she was flopped watching the telly and there was the sound of a small waterfall coming from the bathroom.

I have no idea how much water went under the floorboards but it was an inch deep at one end of the bathroom and a lot less than that at the other. I find it slightly worrying that presented with a flooded bathroom, water going god knows where, possibly getting into the wiring and blowing up the washing machine or electrocuting me and all I can think is 'Hmmm, the floor's not level.'

After a few futile and frustrating minutes trying to get up all the water up with the mop, a task which it became patently obvious would have taken ages, I launched plan B. Plan B was to dump the entire contents of the (very full) laundry basket, which luckily included a couple of towels, onto the floor, and walk about on it till it squelched then throw it all into the bath.

Not subtle but it worked.

Apart from shopping not a lot happened today so I drew another cartoon. This one has been hanging around in a notebook for several years. It's good to get it out of my system. I guess that's why I called the cartoon blog "Scatching My Itch"; a lot of what is going to get put up there will be reworkings of doodles on scrappy bits of paper that have been knocking about for ages annoying me waiting for me to do something with them. Today's was rediscovered in a notebook that fell out of a long unworn jacket pocket the other day. It was part of a long bunch of doodles I did one night in Barcelona - about six years ago - that started out with me wondering what would have happened if fish had been into disco.

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

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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.




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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.