Shopping

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

No. She wasn't.

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

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

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

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

"Look Daisy! Feta cheese in olive oil!"

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

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

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

Off to Oban tomorrow to buy plumbing bits.

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

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

• Suitable for baby skin
• Easy to dispense

and, more importantly:

• Soluble

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

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

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

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

It's even better than my dehydrated water idea.

...

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Ignore

This

Knowing My Place In The Pecking Order Around Here

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

Today after breakfast...

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

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

Thanks Holly.

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

Phoebe, this is Stalag Luft Morag.




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



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




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

April

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

May

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

June

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

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

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

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

I will. I will. I will.

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

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

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

Stalag Luft Morag II

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

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

Stalag Luft Morag

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

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

Then we went for lunch.

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

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

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









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

Schrödinger's Carrot

Well that was fun.



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



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



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



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



A short email correspondence ensued:

Me: I'm interested.



Him: Phone me tomorrow.

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

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

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



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



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



"Here, Liam? "

"What?"

"You're a cult, you are."



But most of you know that already.









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

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

Daisy Has a Very Big Sense of Hearing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why I need to get out more.

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

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

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

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

Perk Pat never gets ticks in Second Life.

This is why I need to stay in more.







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

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

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

It's Cheese Juice!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why are you crying?"

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

"Stop listening to it."

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

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











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

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

This morning on the way to school...

Holly:

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


Me:

(Guardedly) Er... okay...


Holly:

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


Me:

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


Holly:

Yes.

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

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

(I think we are both secretly relieved).

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


No idea if this will work but...



Bugger I, it did.

Hello much neglected Blog.

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

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

Merriol finding new ways to bewilder me:

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

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

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


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


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

Merriol:
I get the message!

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

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

The other day Merriol pulled a stunner.

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

???

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

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

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

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


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

I was much relieved to listen to Feedback this afternoon and find my career as a Radio 4 raving phone-in loony pundit didn't happen. I can now breath more easily knowing I haven't become an instant hate figure for the English Middle classes. Mums in Chelsea Tractors doing the school run all over the country have been spared having my incoherent rantings shoved down their ears. My faith in the BBC is restored.

I have recently become fed up with the way this blog looks. I mean, white lettering on a black background. It's such a teenagery thing to do.

Actually, thinking about it, Writin mi Blog Like this wud B much more teenagery...

I may fiddle with the colours and other tweakeries over the next few days in lieu of anything interesting happening to me. At the moment all I seem to be doing is housework all day followed by a couple of hours in the evening woodworking at Mags and Simon's cottage - by the time I get there I am far too tired to be operating anything with sharp points, powerful electric motors, or both. After a day running around after Daisy and Holly trying to keep the peace, doing joinery is beyond me. Trying to remember which zapper does what on the TV is beyond me. I spent a very frustrating five minutes the other night trying to change channels with the DVD remote.

Today was a tough old day. Tonight for instance, at tea, Daisy was inconsolable, refused to eat anything for a good fifteen minutes and howled like I'd just shot her puppy in front of her and told her Father Christmas wasn't real - all because she couldn't get the fork she wanted. Holly was eating with it. After about ten minutes of constant crying and kicking I had managed to convince Daisy that going and asking Holly if she could have the "smiley" fork instead of just screaming "I want it! I want it! I want it!" over and over again might be a better way of getting a result. She went and asked Holly very nicely if she could have the fork. Holly said no. Daisy started screaming again. I kissed goodbye any chance of eating any hot food for the third night in a row and went and collected every possible fork I could find in the kitchen and laid them all out for Daisy. She eventually chose a blue one and started eating. thirty seconds later she was a happy smiling little girl again. The whole day seems to have been like that (it wasn't - but it felt like it). It's exhausting. It is so damn tiring having to negotiate or arbitrate about every single bloody thing, every damn minute of the day.

Merriol was home late from work after a whole load of meetings that went on longer than planned which lead on to things that needed doing on the spot, not later, and I'm afraid that when she turned up home, I just legged it out of the door .

Hello. Here's your tea. I'm off.

Off to the peace and quiet of a building site where I didn't have to spend ten minutes convincing bits of wood they wanted to be sawn up, and then having to let the saw horse choose which saw I used to saw them up because it liked the one with the yellow plastic handle better than the sharp one I was going to use. Semi-bliss.

Sorry Merriol.

---

Ilona sent me a mail today saying she has booked the hall for the panto in December and it would be good to see a copy of the first draft of the script "by June".

I don't know why I'm doing this script.

That's far funnier than anything than I've written so far...

Another Of My Fifteen Minutes Of Fame

In 1968 Andy Warhol said: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."

So far I reckon I have had about 2 of mine (acknowledging of course that the whole notion of 'fame' has become totally debased in the last 40 years. In 1968 The Beatles were famous, in 2007 whoever is presenting a repeat of a regionally produced game show broadcast at 9.30 AM on a free-to-air satellite channel is 'famous' - and has a book deal).

Another 15 seconds worth of my 15 minutes is coming up - maybe. I just got interviewed by the BBC.

Listening to Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago, I caught The Ugly American, a very funny little autobiographical play by Mike Daisey, a few days later, by total a hapenstance, I caught Feedback (a Radio 4 listeners' complaints / issues show) in which the play was attacked from all sides for daring to even mention the word 'rape' in a play broadcast during daytime hours. I wrote a mail (like I do) saying "No no no! they got it all wrong they didn't listen. It wasn't about rape, it was about the actor who was being asked to portray the act of rape on stage...."

A woman with a drop-dead gorgeous voice from Feedback phoned last night and asked if I would say all that into a microphone being one of the handful of people who came to the play's defence. I said yes. About half an hour ago they recorded my burblings and spleen venting down the phone. Don't know if they will use it but I'm now terrified that if they do I will come over as a raging pervert who wants to fill the nation's earwaves with pornographic radio plays.

One of my not very said out loud new year's resolutions was that I was going to write more this year. I was going to start / finish 'the novel' - whatever it was about. (Probably a plotless ramble about a middle-aged man with an unhealthy fascination with cheap bad science fiction movies which he watches endlessly instead of doing something constructive).

I have never wanted 'To Write' (in a capital letters, reading A S Byatt sort of way) but I enjoy it. Apart from anything else, it makes me appreciate what bloody hard work it is to get clarity on the page, and how difficult it is slide things into a story without waving a big red flag with LOOK! HERE'S A PLOT POINT! written all over it. There's nothing quite like trying to do something for yourself to make you appreciate the skill and hard work that goes into making something look easy.

poof!

That was the sound of my brain collapsing as I listened to Ella Fitzgerald singing Cream's Sunshine of Your Love. It's about 15 minutes in on this archived program of MFWU's Incorrect Music show if you want to suffer a similar short term synaptic short out.

Good god!

I now have absolutely no idea at all what I was going to say.

I'll come back to this.

You Can Get More Smells Up Your Nose Because You Have Bigger Nostrils

Another cartoon today - and I broke my world land speed record. Today was the shortest time I have had between getting the annoying little idea and getting it onto neatly arranged piles of pixels. About an hour from the stupid idea to the moment I was happy with the picture. And that wasn't a solid hour sat in front of the pooter, it was done just grabbing a few moments each time as I was passing. I love 'cut' and 'paste'. I mean one sheep looks pretty much like another after all.

---

I am afflicted with a terrible disease. I can't stop reading. All my life I have been an avid reader, ever since the age of four or so I have read anything and everything that passes in front of me. As a child I remember being told to stop reading while I was eating and put my book down. I have an abiding childhood memory of munching breakfast reading the backs of the only thing with words that were allowed on the table - cereal packets. I'm sure I could have recited the Kellogg's Corn Flake added vitamin list at the drop of a hat.

Even these days I still read packets and instructions without noticing I'm doing it - until something stupid about them sits up and hits me. The other day I noticed a packet of Scottish Blend tea bags had this helpful health factoid written on the side:

'Tea is a good source of fluids'

Wow! I never knew that. Did you know that? Tea, a product that is 99.9+% water, is a good source of fluids! What will they think of next? Why do they put this patronising crap on the sides of packets?

Today I noticed this on a pack of Daisy's nappies:

Huggies Little Walkers
Nappy Pants

All the absorbency of a nappy,
with all the freedom of a pant.

Simple comme une culotte,
super absorbante comme une couche.

'All the freedom of a pant'? What does that mean? What the hell is A pant?

The odd thing is that the French appears to be as weirdly meaningless as well. I have very little French but had always understood the word culottes was a plural. Wikipedia (peace be upon it) says:.

..the term "culottes" in French is now used to describe womens panties, an article of clothing that has little or no relation to true culottes*.

'Une culotte' is French for 'a pant'.

Annoying as I found this irritating bit of meaningless puff on a product I had already bought, I consoled myself with the thought that it must be very annoying to Canadians.










*I was going to remove the link in this quote but I didn't just in case anyone was tempted to look up panties, I know I am from time to time - but don't tell Merriol.

And if you are asking yourself just how much lower will this man stoop to make a cheap joke? I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't have an answer for you right now.

I can't work out which disturbs me the most about this: the fact that I understand it, that I thought of it in the first place, that I find it funny, or that I spent an hour with Illustrator drawing it.

Which or whatever you find the most disturbing, they are all sure and certain signs that I need to get out and mix with people more...




Oh my GOD! - Real people are in 3D!





.

Can Ducks Kiss?

No more sighting of The Box to report, dammit! but I have been busy this week shopping, and watching Eurovision round at Mike and Morag's - at last! proof that there are more lesbians in Europe who know how to operate a telephone than gay blokes.

Go watch The Ukraine's (2nd place) and Serbia's (first).

Just to point out these are videos from the semi-finals. The guys from The Ukraine really camped it up for the final, and the Serbian dancers got a whole touchy-feely, uniformed lipstick lesbian thing going. I'm sure you could find their performances on the final on You Tube if you went looking.

The UK Entry (as usual) was pretty fucking dreadful - when will we learn that camp heterosexuality doesn't work. We came second last out of a field of lots.


Actually, if you can be bothered adding yet another plug-in to your over burdened browser you can watch the whole final here if you should wish.

That was Saturday taken care of.

Sunday, the most constructive thing I did was spend an hour or so fixing Mike and Morag's cooker door. One of the hinges had collapsed. With a lot of swearing, and a carefully crafted piece from an old Spam tin I got it fixed again. Hurray me! I love fixing things...

...and watching a couple of dreadful movies. One of them, Future War, was about a Belgian kick-boxer from outer-space who teams up with a novice, ex-hooker nun to defeat pursuing alien android overlords and their self-destructing, variably-sized, trained, killer dinosaurs.

It must have looked soooo good on paper...

A bit like the UK's Eurovision entry.

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.