Another sighting of the box!

Yesterday's cardboard box has turned up again. It's 28 pounds in the catalogue, it's 27 pounds on the Lulasapphire website and now, in an interior decorating porn mag that turns up in our house from time to time it's on sale for 25 pounds from the same people. Has the bottom fallen out of the stupidly over-priced cardboard box market?

I will keep my eyes open.

I'm not sure where the interior decorating porn mag comes from (I suspect Merriol buys it) but it quickly moves into the bathroom, because any one of its identical articles (paint everything white, buy expensive furniture and don't look like you actually do anything as crass as actually live in your phoney show home) can be read in the time it takes to void your bowels in a satisfying manner.

Sometimes I sit and stare at the pictures in the thing and wonder if I would be having a happier toilet experience sitting on a 400 pound hand-carved Carrera Marble crapper with a solid extinct Nigerian hardwood seat, and then wiping with individual sheet-ettes of hand-made flax paper toilet roll subtly decorated with life-enhancing mandalas... but I doubt it.



On a wider scale of things. Tony Blair will be out of our lives in 49 days. Get out the bunting. I feel a street party coming on.

The world has gone totally mad (in a Daily Mail "Loony Lefties Ban Tuesdays" sort of way) or I have finally turned into a the grumpy old git that I have been threatening to turn into for years? (These are not incompatible states.)

In a catalogue of kids stuff that has been lying around the house for a while (we are prone to outbreaks of catalogues of kid's stuff lying around in this house) Merriol and I found...

It's a cardboard box.

You can now buy special, "eco friendly" cardboard boxes for your kids to play with. A snip at a mere twenty eight pounds*

Here's a picture from the facing page of the catalogue of two delighted kids playing with the slightly smaller version of the "eco friendly" cardboard box - priced at an even more bargainsome twenty-one pounds.

Mum? Are we having fun yet?

You can just tell that the one on the left is just so fucked off with Mum and Dad for throwing away the box that this came in can't you?

Ban Tuesdays.





*About fifty-six US Dollars

More boxes

.

First midge today. This means no one in the Highlands will be able to go outside and stand still until September.

I occurred to me today that in a few years Holly and Daisy we be able to read this blog.

Maybe you are Holly and Daisy reading this in the future, if so I have a few words I would like to say to you my darling daughters:

Holly - do your homework. Daisy - stop pestering your sister and go set the table for tea.

It's more than likely that Holly Daisy and I ate a fair proportion of a toad this afternoon.

A few days ago one of the ducks was running around the garden trying to eat a toad and making a fair go at it too.

Tonight the girls and I had pancakes made with duck eggs.

It's statistically impossible (assuming the duck that ate the toad laid at least one of the eggs) that some of the ex toad molecules weren't now egg molecules - and are now becoming Me, Daisy and Holly molecules.

I love the idea that every day we ingest hundreds (Thousands? Millions?) of atoms that have, over the years, been through hundreds of famous people. Think of the millions and millions of atoms you breath, pee, and shed, or excrete via a variety of other methods every day: we shed thousands of skin cells and hairs every day, and then there's earwax, bogeys, poo - the list isn't endless but it's long.

Wherever we go we leave trails of ourselves behind which settle to the bottom of the food chain, get eaten by microbes and slowly work their way up, getting reprocessed over and over again until somone else shoves then in their mouths, or breathes them in, and they become part of another person for a while. There are bits of me that were once bits of Cleopatra, Gengis Khan, Hitler and George Formby - all four of the Beatles, Grace Kelly, Chaucer, every King and Queen of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and (I presume) some from that bloke who used to play Albert Tatlock in Coronation Street.

Same as you.

Though I guess if you are reading this in Mongolia the chances of you having bits of Ghengis Khan in you at any one time are higher than mine, but I probably out percentage you in Shakespeare, Albert Tatlock guy - and toad.

---

At the end of last year (or the start of this one, I can't remember) I punted up here a list of every movie I had watched through the year. Some people seemed to find it an intimidatingly huge list, others were just bewildered by the sheer, and hitherto unrealised levels of, anal retentiveness I sink to when left alone for more than five minutes with anything with serial numbers, or dates on the spines - or just about anything that can be stacked neatly. Leave me alone with a stack of magazines, or a shelf full of books for more than ten minutes and I get twitchy and start wanting to neaten the piles and alphabetise them.

Like, I am so in touch with my inner Monika, yeah?

Just to keep Ilona from feeling too intimidated, this year I'm going to do it in 4 easy to digest, bite-sized quarterly Nugget McLists. And to keep Phoebe from thinking I'm an even bigger freak than she thinks me already I didn't put them in alphabetical order...

January.

I make a New Year's resolution to watch fewer crap movies... Three days later I watch:

1. Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD - A streetwise New York cop is, by a twist of fate at the opening night of the first kabuki production of The Odd Couple, transformed into a Crime-fighting Japanese Superhero! I have NO WILLPOWER! Things can only get better as the year goes on...
2. The Train (aka "John Frankenheimer's The Train") - a film that just gets better every time I see it.
3. Daughter of Horror - Public domain weirdness downloaded from here. Aka Dementia this has got to be the oddest movie I have seen in ages, a silent journey into madness that looks like it was shot by Ed Wood and Orson Wells on alternate days from a script idea by David Lynch - and made in 1955! The movie is most famous for being the film that was playing in the movie house in The Blob (is that 'famous'?).
4. La Morte Viene Dallo Spazio - coo! forrun fillums! The New Year's resolution taking hold? ...er ...no. The American title of this badly dubbed 1958 Franco - Italian co-production was The Day the Sky Exploded. Hides head in shame and sneaks off to watch:
5. Teenage Zombies - I need help. A Jerry Warren movie. Not as bad as some of Jerry Warren's movies - but still worse than 99.9% of all movies ever made
   
6. The Corpse Bride - A real disappointment. I am going to start avoiding movies with Danny Elfman scores.
7. Agency - I watched a Lee Majors movie‽
8. Sabotage - early sound Hitchcock, beautiful stuff.

February

1. Alien Autopsy - slight but fun little movie. Surprised to see my mate Paul as a TV exec. I'd forgotten he'd told me he'd worked on it. Harry Dean Stanton as ever was just plain brilliant. The man does less and less and just gets better and better.
2. L.A. Confidential - it would have been a but (and I feel like a total prick for saying this) Kim Bassinger was too old for her part. There was a really crappy edit that hit me in the face too - a weird little double action when Pierce's character goes to pull out his badge twice before going on to insult Lana Turner - which reminded me it was a movie - which I hate when I'm engrossed (as I was).
3. Spontaneous Combustion - laughably awful Tobe Hooper thing about people who burst into flames after nuclear experiments. So bad it was weirdly good.
4. The Saphead - (1920) which has not stood the test of time and would have easily vanished into oblivion unnoticed, if it wasn't for the sole fact it was Buster Keaton's first feature length film. Because it IS Buster Keaton's first feature length film it is available on DVD with a couple of his brilliant shorts.
5. The Apartment - one of those film I always thought I had seen but, as it turns out, hadn't. Loved it!
6. Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory - aka I Married a Werewolf. 1962 Austrian Italian werewolf movie with far less T&A than the title would suggest - well, none to be exact - Poo!
7. The Alpha Incident - Dull, low budget 'SF' the only plus side being it did contain slightly more boobage than last night's werewolf movie.
8. UFO: Target Earth - Sublimely incomprehensible awfulness that took 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Close Encounters Of the Third Kind, added a budget of nothing, and scored a massive 9 on my What-the-fuck?-o-meter.
9. The Doomsday Machine - Lurid trash SF which started filming in 1967 but was abandoned half way through shooting and shelved. Five or so years later a different director, who couldn't afford to hire any of the original cast - or anything else for that matter - 'completed' it. It's a shambles. I loved it.
10. Prisoners of the Lost Universe - The scriptwriters ran out of ideas after they came up with the title.
11. The End of the World - Killer aliens disguised as nuns!
12. Evil Brain From Outer Space - 1950s Japanese kid's Super-hero movie serial edited down to one baffling indigestible feature-length chunk.

March

1. The Manster - Misguided Japanese scientist turns nice guy American newspaperman into two-headed homicidal fiend. Better than it sounds - but not much.
2. They (aka Invasion from Inner Earth) - Indie, no budget, no idea SF movie about Martians from the earth's core incoherently destroying the world.
3. Robot Pilot - Boring 1941 B pic.
4. Ring of Terror - Dreadful 1962 drive-in crap.
5. Frozen Alive - dull
6. Hercules in New York - Bad oh sooo bad bad bad bad bad. Best line:"He is but an impetuous youth, Zeus!" Try saying it; it's a line that fits the mouth like an old sock.
7. Octopus 2 - Jaws with a giant Octopus. In New York.
8. TC2000 - moronic 'SF' kick boxing movie. Two lines of exposition followed by five minutes of take-it-turns-to-kick-each-other-into-piles-of-things fighting followed by two lines of exposition etc.
9. Im Stahlnetz des Dr. Mabuse (The Return of Dr. Mabuse)- Gert Frobe, lots of John Alton type 'one big light' cinematography, dodgy dubbing, and Tarzan in a suit.
10. Flight to Mars - cheap 1951 SF from a company more used to making westerns.
11. The Lost World - the first 1925 silent version.
12. This Is Not A Drill - 1962 cold war no budgeter that could have been a lot better but was still better than the sum of its parts.
13. Bakterion (aka Panic) - Godawful Spanish / Italian 'horror' flick starring a Kiwi and a Swede, set in the UK and containing the dullest 'chasing a monster through a sewer' sequence ever shot. Dire.
14. Funeral In Berlin - OK-ish sequel to the staggering work of genius that is The Ipcress File.
15. Le Dernier Métro - two hours of my life spent watching other men snog Catherine Deneuve - I now officially hate Gérard Depardieu.
16. Memento - I'm sure there are holes in the plot you could drive a bus through, but interesting nevertheless.
17. The Pink Panther - sad I know, but I laughed like a drain.
18. Masters of the Universe - He-Man with a mullet? Come on!
19. The Mistress of Atlantis (1932) - weirdly hypnotic tale about two French Foreign Legionnaires discovering Atlantis in the Sahara.
20. Night Fright - 1967 Drive in shit in which Middle-aged Teenagers are terrorised (a bit) by a Gorilla-suited 'mutant'.
21. Young Einstein - a deeply stupid little movie which I love to bits for all sorts of reasons.
22. Eternal Evil - Canadian TV 'The Hunger' wannabee which was a confusing mess but had a couple of nice moments - and Karen Black. I love Karen Black.
23. The Brute Man - (MST3K remix) Not even Mike and the Bots could make this sad little film anything but a tasteless waste of time.

April

1. The Norman Rockwell Code - Funny little parody of Dan Brown's thing. See it here.
2. Gremloids - silly low-budget Star Wars spoofoid, that makes me laugh.
3. Death Race 2000 - I finally got to see it! I've been trying to get to see this movie for about 20 years on and off and there it was on some Free to Air low rent movie channel. Movies4Men 2 or some such. Dated but it still has it's moments.
4. Alien Contamination - Gory cheapo Italian Alien rip-off with an interesting solution to the famous and perennial Bad Italian Movie Dubbing Problem - gas masks.
5. How To Get Ahead in Advertising - Hmmmmmm my internal jury is still out.
6. Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell - (MST3K) - Oh I am so overwhelmed with indifference.
7. Blue Velvet - I just love the weird unearthly quality of Lynch's movies. They are like semi lucid bad dreams.
8. Memoirs of an Invisible Man - brain dead mediocrity from John Carpenter that kept my eyes occupied as I kept the sofa warm. (24 hours later the true horror of what I had done hit me. I had watched an ENTIRE Chevy Chase movie... and laughed.) Then, going from the rediculous to the sublime, the next night I watched:
9. Cyrano de Bergerac - The 1990 version with Gérard Depardieu. I was hooked from the opening shot and I was in tears by the end. A magnificent movie. Why did it take me so long to get round to watching it? Why don't I speak French? and then some. Gérard Depardieu is forgiven for snogging Catherine Deneuve. Next night, wanting to avoid any disappointment by watching anything that might suffer by comparison, I sat down to:
10. Good Against Evil - a 1977 total of a Rosemary's Baby / Exorcist clone TV pilot. I kid you not. A TV pilot about a lone wanderer and his priest sidekick/mentor seeking, week after week, his one true love who an evil sect have groomed since her birth to be the bride of the devil Astaroth. I can just see the light bulb going on over the producer's head "The Exorcist: The TV Series? How can it fail?!" Praise the lord and pass the ammunition! It did.
11. Alien Zone - A 1978 portmanteaux 'Horror' film made in Oklahoma. However bad that sounds to you the reality was worse.

May.

I make a Quarter Of The Way Through The Year resolution to watch fewer crap movies...

And those are just the ones I got to the end of. Titles in groovy clicko-text will take you to my fuller reviews on the IMDb

More in four months time.

Here! Søren, Done Any Good Philosophing Recently?

New cartoon tonight. Since no one got my hilarious Renaissance Dance Craze funny last week I thought I would go back to cute animals. Be warned though, I've got some cracking jokes about Kierkegaard and some other Danish philosophers lined up. While I was looking up Kierkegaard just now to make sure I'd spelled his name correctly, I read on Wikipedia that Mr K was a "prolific 19th century Danish philosopher". A prolific philosopher. What a weird concept. Prolific songwriters, poets, and musicians I had come across, but a prolific philosopher?

Int. Day. A Coffee Shop in Copenhagen sometime in the 19th Century.

Sven:

Hello Sven, I see you're reading Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. How're you getting on with it?

Another Sven:

Not bad, he's having a good old go at Hegel ain't he?

Sven:

Yeah. I really enjoyed it. I won't spoil the ending for you but let's just say the Hegelian claim that "The Rational is the Real and the Real is the Rational" gets a right bashing. Read Dialectical Result of a Literary Police Action yet?

Another Sven:

Nah, I'll wait for the movie, but I've heard it's not as good as The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. Now that was a good bit of philosophy that was. Had me thinking all night that one did. I woke the missus up I was thinking so much. She said: "what you doing?" I said "thinking", she said "well stop it".

As usual I find I am making very little sense and I have no idea what I'm on about. Therefore I am going to bed.

Rant Rant Rant!

I'm in huge fucking rant mode so forgive me.

There is nothing the Scottish people (me included) enjoy more than a good spectacular fuck up. Just look at our record in The World Cup for example. We take a perverse Calvanistic national delight in a kind of weird masochistic, own-goal, Self-Schadenfruende - I'm sure there's a German word for this, there is after all a German word for everything (sitzpinkle!), but I'm too lazy to look it up.

We had an election in Scotland yesterday and somehow - god knows how - somehow we seem to have fucked it up. Elections in this country are simple. You get a piece of paper with a list on it. You stick a cross next to the name of the least objectionable of the arsesholes lying for your attention. You then shove the list in a box and walk away with a vague feeling you have had some say in the way the country is run for the next couple of years. You don't even have to take your own pencil, pencils are provided.

This time it was a little bit more complicated. We were given two pieces of paper!

Panic!

This is what the the pieces of paper looked like:

Every house in Scotland should have received a leaflet telling you how to fill in the papers - I know we did. There were instructions in the press and in the polling stations and actually on top of the papers. They were not complicated instructions. Put an X next to the people you wanted to vote for on the coloured piece of paper. Only put one cross on the peach list, only put one cross on the purple list. On the other bit of paper it says:

"Instead of a cross, number the candidates in the order of your choice.

Put the number 1 next to the name of the candidate who is your first choice, 2 next to your second choice, 3 next to your third choice, 4 next to your fourth choice and so on

You can mark as many or as few choices as you like."

Amazingly some 100,000 people managed to fuck it up. Some huge % of the population who bothered to vote in the first place couldn't work out how to do something slightly less complicated than opening a tin of beans.

How? How can you fuck up something so simple? I have seen Kinder Egg toys with more complicated instructions!

Just to prove how simple this is I drew up a play ballot paper with a choice of teas for the kids and asked Holly to put a cross next to the one she wanted: Sausage And Chips, Spaghetti, or Cous-cous - and then asked her to put a bunch of LazyTown characters in the order she liked them best by writing numbers next to them.* No problem. A five year old girl can do this!

And Robby Rotten for First Minister? Makes sense to me.

The People's Choice

OK, The cock-ups wasn't all 'the people's' fault. It didn't help that the machines employed to count the votes couldn't cope with folded, damp, upside-down, or smudged ballots, or those torn to pieces by golf club wielding lunatics and glued back together with tape, and it couldn't be helped that the helicopters needed to shift papers from the more remote islands to the place of counting were fog bound. This sort of thing happens to the best regulated elections anywhere in the world, especially those countries where bananas are major part of the export market. Well, maybe not the golf club wielding nutter. A very peculiarly Scottish dangerous weapon is a golf club.

What makes the whole thing ultra laughable is serious grown up pundits like The BBC's Political Editor Nick Robinson are saying things like:

"...confusing ballot papers robbed tens of thousands of people of their chance to vote."

No they didn't. The thousands of people had the chance to vote. They did vote - and they wasted it. They fucked up.

These are the same morons who regularly pick Bonus Ball numbers for the insanely complicated National Lottery, spend hours filling out Pools Coupons and "Are You A Nagging Friend" questionnaires in 'Women's' magazines and phone in votes by their million for Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor, The Eurovision Song Contest and god knows what else.

What was so difficult?

Nearly everything that is advertised in this country is sold by 'cute' cartoon characters. From Churchill Insurance's nodding dog, to the Post Office's little red ants, it seems like these days we have become so imbecilic and childish we are unable to comprehend anything without having cartoon characters telling us what to do and how to do it. Maybe this is where the election fell over. Maybe the Government should have invested all their money in some cuddly elephant with a pencil in its hand showing us how to vote. Mind you, carry this to its logical conclusion and we'll get Prime Minister's Questions being done with glove puppets.

What's that, Secretary of Defence?
Saddam Hussein has weapons of Mass destruction?
He's been a naughty boy and hidden them? Naughty Saddam.
Do you think we should invade Iraq boys and girls?

Who am I kidding? Politics will never get that dumbed down and stupid - will it?

Rant over. Normal 'mildly amusing burblings about my kids' service will be resumed as soon as possible.



*Actually the bit about making up a toy ballot paper for Holly is a total lie - but I will do it tomorrow. That's a pledge and a priority - but not a manifesto commitment.

My Brain Is Filling Up With Custard And My Neurons Are Swimming About In It Help! Help!

I twatted my back today. I got fed up walking round the three quarters of a ton of sand that has been sitting in a bag in my front garden since... hasty search of the blog later... since Tuesday, April 18, 2006. Which is over a year. Long enough to have been walking around anything. Today, with a little help from my mum, and an even littler help from Daisy, I moved it.

Half-way through shovelling the sand into a wheel barrow I felt my back go 'twang'. My own stupid fault. I know how to shovel stuff. I know how to lift stuff. I have spent enough of my life lifting and shovelling stuff. I have been paid to lift and shovel stuff.

As William Macy said in his role as the superhero The Shoveller in Mystery Men:

"God's given me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well."

Today I didn't.

---

Talking of mysteries, the mystery card senders have been identified. My mum's sister's grand daughter and family. I didn't know I had a mum's sister's grand daughter and my brain just can't work out what the relationship between them and my kids would be called: 'Cousins removed to the Nth degree' or somesuch.

---

Any doubts I had about Daisy being any less weird a child than Holly were dispelled the other day when she stated doing a little dance pointing vigorously at her crotch while singing:

I'm pointing at my bum, I'm pointing at my bum, I'm pointing at my bum!

Me:
Why are you pointing at your bum?

Daisy:
Because I want to.

Google is Like eBay - But it Starts With a 'G'!

Holly was five on Friday - her birthday has been going on for 3 days now. This afternoon we had friends over for a bit of a party; lots of silly games like 'Pinning The Tail On The Mermaid', 'Musical Angels', and 'Taking All Your Clothes Off And Sitting In Mud'. The sitting in mud game took less time to set up and explain than anything else - and lasted longer.

Life lesson of the week, learned today while tidying up after the partyish.

You cannot sweep custard

I tried, it can't be done.

Jelly, I discovered, you can sweep, just, if you are careful.

Mystery of the week is the birthday card that arrived on Saturday. Thank you Abi, Sam, Tom and Ben for the lovely card. We are totally baffled as to who Abi, Sam, Tom and Ben are and especially why they think it's Daisy's birthday. We don't know. We want to but we don't. Who are you? We have been racking our brains all day over this. Whoever Abi, Sam, Tom and Ben are they live in or around Bath or Bristol. This is so annoying. I have this horrible idea that I'm going to be waking up in the early hours of the morning having remembered - unless this another long lost family of Merriol's that we haven't heard about - yet.

Not, I suspect, that I will be waking up in the early hours of tomorrow morning having stupidly been up till 3 am last night doing this cartoon. I realised last night it had been a whole week since I had put the Tale of the Old West toon up and I needed to have something ready for today. The things I do to make Debs' Mondays brighter - though I found out today the ungrateful baggage hasn't even bothered to look at last week's yet...

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.


.

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.





.

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.