Every Movie What I Have Watched in 2008 - Part One (of Four)

Sorry, but it's that time of the year again.

Jan

1. Cat People
   - Jacques Tourneur's lovely little 1942 chiller.
2. Dlug
   - Horribly realistic and compulsive Polish 'based on real events' crime film, with some slightly odd subtitling. Thanks M, I finally got round to watching it.
3. Zeta One
   - Abysmal late 1960s British Ultra Soft-core Porno SF exploitation shite. Total pants with no plot but lots of nekkid tits (like THESE!) bouncing about (a bit).
4. Missile to the Moon
   - second Matriarchal Space Bimbo movie of the night, with no nekkid tits this time (dammit!) but one of the most genius bits of American Desk Drawer acting ever. It's a well know fact of life that the only reason you ever open a desk drawer in an American film is to pull out a powerful (loaded) handgun. Only reason. The only thing Americans keep in the top drawers of any desk is firearms. Early on in this movie one
   of our aged scientists does just this. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out a luger which he slips into his pocket. A few minutes later his partner becomes aware of unexplained things happening out on the missile launch pad and decides to investigate - but first!... he goes
   to the desk and pulls open the top drawer. But what's this? The gun has gone! He stares into the desk drawer for a moment. No Gun? Drawer. Open. No gun? How can this be? A look of blank incomprehension registers on his face (not unlike that on William Macey repeatedly saying "Hi Honey, I'm home!" in Pleasantville and receiving no reply). He shuts the drawer - and after a moment - it's crazy but it might just work - pulls open the top drawer ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESK - and Whew! pulls out a powerful (loaded) hand gun and rushes off to investigate...
5. Empire of the Ants
   - and then there are those moments, usually at about 3:30 am like this one was, when you find yourself watching Joan Collins running round a mangrove swamp screaming at variably sized, giant, radioactive ants when you think to yourself, "Why AM I watching this shit? I really must get a grip." Bergman and Kurosawa for a bit I think...
6. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
   - okay, It's not Bergman but it's not AS trashy as giant Radioactive ants - though equally scientifically dubious (apparently the world is DOOMED to a horrible death by hotness after a spark from a passing meteorite caused the Van Allen Radiation belts to catch fire and only firing a nuclear missile into it from a
   particular angle will cause the belts to pop like a balloon and save the human race from a severe crisping) okay it is as trashy but at least Irwin Allen won an Oscar! (though, admittedly, not for this film). I'll get to the good stuff next week.
7. TXH 1138 The Directors Cut
   - This ain't the film I saw all those years ago. It's visually stunning but I wish it hadn't been fucked about with. I now need to see the original again.
8. Ed Wood
   - Lovely film. My favourite Tim Burton movie.
   
9. Bride of the Monster
   - and after a movie about Edward D Wood Jr what could be more appropriate than a movie by Edward D Wood Jr.? Starring Bela Lugosi in his next to last completed movie Bride of the Monster contains one of the greatest bits of weird acting of his career (and that's saying something). There's a moment towards the start of the film where a hapless victim wakes to find himself strapped to the Doctor's diabolical surgical table and about to be experimented upon.
   Hey, what gives! "Soon," gloats Dr Varnoff (Bela in white coat and stethoscope), "you will be asa bik as a chiant, wid the strength ov twenty men, or -- like all the others, DEAD!" He throws the lever. Lights flash. The victim convulses against the straps binding him tothe table then falls limp. Bela registers horror (or something) and steps forward. Dons the stethoscope, listens to the man's heart.
   Nothing.
   His shoulders slump another failure.... Then. In a truly inspired moment of acting genius (Bela is so in the moment here) he discerns a possible glimmer of hope and... stethoscope still in place - listens to the man's head! .. and then his wrist! ...only then does he finally give up hope.
10. Plan 9 From Outer Space
    - or another. RIP Vampira, the actress who played her, Maili Nurmi, died two days ago.
11. Frankenstein's Daughter
    - better than expected drive-in monster-movie drek from the director of the dire Missile to the Moon. Best line: "From here on in, I decide what is evil."
12. The Importance of Being Earnest
    - A dreadful 2002 remake which seems to exist only because someone lobbed some taxpayers money in the film makers direction.
    
13. Carry on up the Khyber
    - Sod all those Merchant-Ivory, Helena Bonham Carter swanning about in muslin and soft focus, picture-postcard "terribly terribly" crud. This is the way to make movies about The Raj.
14. The Doomsday Machine
    - again. Deliriously weirder on a re-watching.
15. Timechaser
    - (MST3K) a whole movie full of people who never worked again.
16. Living in Oblivion - Brilliant . I love this film.
17. Gog
    - Funniest ending to a crap movie I have seen for ages. Aged, venerable Herbert Marshall bursting into the control room of the atomic reactor waving a flame thrower to destroy the OTHER killer robot on the loose. I nearly wet myself I was laughing so much.
18. Lady in Cement
    - I gave my brain a rest from killer robots, V2s on Venus and the other
    absurdities of cheap 50s SF movies and watched Frank Sinatra sleepwalking as a private eye. Some of the worst sound I've ever heard on an American movie. The film was on the Free to Air Movies4men channel and I spent most of the running time wondering why a channel with such a butch sounding name was showing endless commercials for Dove beauty products, fabric conditioners, and 'Lite' mayonnaise. Movies4Men who shave their pits and look after themselves while watching fat old crooners running around waving guns?
19. The Abominable Dr. Phibes
    - cheesy, bizarre, camp, and very funny.
20. Dr. Phibes Rises Again
    - more of the same.
21. Scream and Scream Again
    - 1970 British horror/SF movie with some really great hand held camera-work and a plot that almost worked if you didn't think about it.
    
22. The People Vs Larry Flint
    - Mr Smith Goes to Washington - with porn.
23. Hercules Unchained
    - I attempt to watch a Steve Reeves movie without thinking of the Rocky Horror Picture Show once - and fail as I knew I must. Shot in the same quarry as every other Italian Movie of the period and stuffed full with gems of mangilated movie Inglish, hilariously camp performances, and the only stretch war chariots ever put on screen.
24. Phantom From Space
    - A masterful use of stock footage and very little plot. The highlight of the movie for me was watching a bunch of scientist and police hero types happily standing around an abandoned Alien's space suit sat on a shortish table, the top of which was about level with their nads, telling each other the suit was so radioactive that they shouldn't touch it. Clever that.

February

1. Star Wars
   - it's 10 years since I last saw Star Wars. 1998 the New Improved with Added Jabba The Hutt Special Edition came out. I was working in Leicester on an aborted feature film called Dirty British Boys with Shashi Kapoor and some bloke from Brookside, one night most of the crew piled into town to see the New Improved! Star Wars (with added Jabba!) in the cinema. I fell asleep. I fell asleep again last night. I think I may have finally grown up. Star Wars, I have finally realised, isn't a particularly good film.
2. Knight's Tale
   - The late Heath Ledger having fun. Enjoyable nonsense.
3. Beyond The Valley of the Dolls
   - right off my Whatthefuck?ometer this one. Don't know what to make of it but I laughed a lot - I think I was supposed to.
4. The Invisible Man
   - the 1933 James Whale original, not the best of Whale's films but fun.
5. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
   - More fun! What's going on? I don't watch films to have fun!
   
6. The Phantom of the Opera
   - The 1943 Claude Rains Nelson Eddy affair. The DVD transfer was lovely I loved the Technicolor. Pity the movie wasn't much cop.
7. Shrek the Third
   - bought as a Christmas pressy for the kids. I was rather disappointed. Beautiful to look at but the story was so thin.
8. Vynález zkázy
   - a rather wonderful 1958 Czech weirdness of live action and animation based on a Jules Verne novel. Any movie which contains shots of roller-skating camels is okay by me.
9. War of the Robots
   - early Al Bradly movies. (A mysteriously awful compulsion.) This one is famous for containing the longest and dullest space battle ever committed to film and certainly wins some sort of special award for reused footage. The same three shots get used over and over again - and then used again as back projection behind the "set" of the space fighter. It's one of those movies in which if you see someone going up a flight of steps, you will sure as hell see them coming down them later. Maximum use of minimal sets. There's one 'battle' late on in the movie between our heroic PVC clad crew and an neverendless supply of killer robots in wigs, that takes place in a single doorway. Zap! Next Zap! Next Zap! Next, (change the angle) Zap! Next Zap! Next...
10. Return of the Killer Tomatoes
    - The best 10p I've spent in a charity shop for a while. Crude, stupid, and funny.
11. Mighty Jack
    - Oh my dear god! Two episodes of a late 60s live-action, Thunderbirds type, Japanese Spy thriller TV series about the crew of a giant flying submarine combating international terrorists threatening the world with unmeltable ice, edited down to a totally incomprehensible movie-length mess. Off the scale on the old bewilderometer - at least 92.7 Centi-WTF?s per minute. I had absolutely NO idea what the hell was supposed to be going on. None. One IMDb reviewer hit the nail on the head when he described this film as having "all the logic of a fever dream".
12. Humanoid Woman
    - an American slashed to ribbons version of what must have been an extraordinary Russian movie called Cherez Ternii K Zvyozdam. Despite being cut from 148 minutes to 90, cropped from it's full 2.35:1 aspect ratio to a square 4:3, dubbed by second rate actors making the script up as they went along, and crappily transferred to DVD from a very dodgy tape copy (it even had drop-out at one point) enough of the poetic, lyrical qualities of the original shone through to make it one of the most interesting looking films I have seen all year. There is, apparently, a restored version out there but not yet available on DVD with English subtitles. I have a new mission: see the original and see Sandy Frank the producer who butchered it for the American market, and a quick buck, rot in hell.
13. Casshern
    - Japanese UberGrand Guignol SF real life Manga/Animé which had me enthralled for 141 bewildering minutes of incomprehensible fighting, philosophising,
    flashbacks, flash forwards, (and flash sidewayses for all I know) in which several characters died more than once, even more got to deliver portentous speeches while slowly descending stupidly wide staircases, and just about everybody had mystic revelations, including our hero who seemed to have his while in the very heart of a nuclear explosion -
    which he survives. All the way through I kept thinking I hope this design team gets to work on any movie they make from Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books. The look is perfect.

March

1. Back to the Future
   - Amazingly the first time I have watched this. I've seen most (if not all of it) in bits over the years but never sat and watched start to finish before. Great fun.
2. Back to the Future ll
   - ditto!
3. The 39 Steps
   - the pointless colour remake with Kenneth More proving (nice chap though he probably was) that he was no Robert Donat and vacant space that was Taina Elg (who?) was certainly no Madeleine Carroll.
4. Weird Science
   - my catchup with all those films I never actually watched during the 1980s but are now dirt cheap on video in charity shops binge continues... This one cost me 20p. Which is about what it was worth.
5. The Riddle of the Sands
   - my fascination with the not very good acting of Michael York continues; what DID people see in him?
6. Back to the Future lll
   - Ditto previous BTTF comments up there. Glad that's out of my system at last.
7. Singing in the Rain
   - never seen it all the way through before. It's Great!
8. The Mutant on the Bounty
   - again! I managed to watch this piece of drek again! I was half way through watching it before I realised I HAD seen it before - and it was shit then too. But, being too knackered to pick up the remote, I kept my eyes pointed in the general direction of the screen and hoped I would fall asleep. I didn't. It was too awful to fall asleep to.
9. She Gods of Shark Reef
   - Dear gods! that was dull.
10. The Crater Lake Monster
    - creaking, zero-budget, There's Something in the Lake Eating Tourists, rubber dinosaur movie that wasn't anything like as funny or scary as it tried to be - well it was, but not in the ways the film makers intended.

Abandoned, for a variety of reasons:

Elektra
- Comic book based flick about 'Back from the dead' female assassin with issues. I gived up after 15 minutes when I realised it wasn't going to stop looking like a car commercial. Terrence Stamp appeared in flashback as the aged martial arts master and looked bored out of his skull, if he couldn't be bothered why should I? Presumably he was getting paid to be there; I wasn't.

Cavegirl
- I can do no better than quote one of the IMDb reviews of this piece of shit: "a woefully unfunny film, with none of the 'so-bad-it's-entertaining' elements which similar films sometimes provide." Yep, that just about sums it up.

Hamlet
- Ethan Hawke in the title role and a cast of worthies totally at sea in a total fuck-up of a movie in which the director spends most of his time trying to point the camera at the BACK of
whoever is speaking's head in order to make the lousily-recorded, mumbling and whispering that they are doing totally incomprehensible.
Only Liev Schrieber (as Laertes) looked like he had a clue what his character was meant to be saying and then said it with a clarity and conviction that just made everyone else look even more lost. I lasted 30 minutes before hitting the off button.

Hairspray
- I love the original. This watered-down, fat, slick incredibly bland, mush made me want to puke. Dreadful. Which is a pity cos Mrs. JM bought it for me as a pressy and I wanted to like it so much. (In retaliation I bought her Love Actually which see had long wanted to see but had never got round to watching. She hated it; so we're even.)

From time to time I get the urge to add definitions to The Undictionary like :

Tortellini: n. Small Italian lawyers.

But then I go lay down for a bit and the temptation passes.

CD

Sorry, but this one got a bit big, get out a telescope, click on it to see a bigger version, or download this handy dandy PDF of it:






...and I just went and put that in the wrong blog... Bum!

Lights! Camera! Cut! Paste!

I won something! A couple of weeks ago I put together a poster for some tedious medical adminny thing of Merriol's. Today it came back from the conference it went to, having won first (possibly only) prize. First. Out of all the other posters and presentations put up from all over Scotland. As normal I had stuck in a load of jokes and, as it turned out, it was the only poster that had gone for the funny angle*. My prize? - a bottle of finest NHS Australian fizzy wine.

I don't drink.

---

Merriol is off work for a week. The kids are off for two. It's Easter. Hurray. Holidays! Merriol and I now get to play the great game Bed Chicken for a whole week. Bed Chicken is like regular Chicken in that it is a game of dare and bluff but, unlike the real thing, it doesn't involve souped-up motorcars, death, or Natalie Wood.

The way it is played goes like this:

Morning: the sun is up, and so are the kids. The birds are singing in the trees, and the girls are playing Pulling the Heads Off Each Other's Barbie Dolls.
Merriol and I lay in bed for as long as possible pretending to be asleep whilst willing the other to get out of bed first and deal with the increasingly noisy noises of destruction and mayhem coming from the kids' room.
The loser is the one who breaks, throws back the bed covers, and rushes, semi-naked, into the next room screaming:

"Will you two just bloody STOP it!".

The winner earns about fifteen seconds of guilt-ridden solitude before slowly climbing out to join in the melee, or make breakfast, whichever looks the safer.

---

Another of the Great Mysteries of Life

I am congenitally unable to pass a skip full of rubbish or heap of garbage without taking a look. After all you never know what you will find - actually that's a lie, you know exactly what you are going to find: a pile of garbage, but sometimes amid all that garbage you find interesting, useful, or floggable things. Dropping off one of the neighbour's kids at his house after a party the other day I noticed a skip in their driveway - by the time neighbour Mum had her darling son out of my passenger seat - I had the folding metal toolbox I found in it in the back of the car. The rest of it was just a pile of garbage.

Old tool boxes are great.

Treasure!
JM http://www.logodesignweb.com/stockphoto

I have found many of these tool boxes in the hundreds of skips I have raked through in my life. Quite often they are rusted solid after having been left neglected for many years under a bench in a damp shed but they are never empty. In everyone of them (after a liberal application of WD40 and a few well placed whacks with a hammer) I have found all sorts of weird and wonderful things - quite often things I had been desperate for the week before I find them lying
around for free - after I had been forced to go out buy some - C'est la guerre. But in every one - every single sodding one of them - I have found a golf tee.

Why? No idea. I can't think of any reason why there should be a golf tee in a toolbox amongst all the rusty nuts, screws, nails etc.
I have been making things, fixing things, bodging things (sometimes for money), for decades now and never have I thought: "I know what I really need to do this job - I need a red plastic golf tee..." Never. Maybe they USED to be useful - but no longer are. I don't know. It worries me that I may be missing something very very obvious. If you know, please tell me.











* 37 degrees.

There is is this bullshit idea out there in the world that women achieve more because they can 'Multi-task'. A statement which, whenever I encounter it, usually elicits from me the reply that men don't 'Multi-task' because we don't have to - we're organised; we finish things.

Today I found myself multi-tasking.

We have a little electric geyser thing in our kitchen. It's ancient, the sort of design any wanky interior decorating porn magazine would call "retro" - but it's too shabby to be retro, it's just ugly. But it works; it's not a design feature, or a statement, it's that unconsidered thing that sits on our kitchen wall and dispenses hot water when you turn the tap on the bottom - if you have remembered to turn it on twenty minutes beforehand - just like it has done for the sixteen years I've been living here and, for all I know, for a couple of decades before that. For a couple of weeks now it's been dripping water from the bottom. Not a disaster as it's over the sink but it was annoying. Holly went back to school this morning after having been off for a week with the generic P1 lurgi and today was first chance I had to tackle fixing anything. I got Daisy off to school in the afternoon, set to, and started unscrewing things...

It's a bit like this but much uglier.

Isn't British design wonderful?

I know bugger all about plumbing and even less about electrics and so I have a healthy fear of both. But if I was designing a piece of kit that did involve both, and was to be used anywhere where gravity might be a consideration, I think I might have the wit to make sure that the place most likely to leak water wasn't right over the little junction box where the wires are all screwed in. Opening up the casing and watching water dripping off the live wire onto my nice stainless steel sink was an alarming start. This thing is insane. Water and electric come in (and out) at the bottom. There's no way any leak isn't going to fall onto electrics. My healthy fear being what it was, I had remembered to turn the thing off, remove the fuse, and write myself a note not to switch it on again before I started.
As it turned out, what I hoped was a 'take the plate off, tighten a nut, put the plate back on again' job ended up with me having more plumbing tools than I remember owning scattered around the kitchen and the whole geyser in bits in all the spaces between.

Then my phone went 'weebleweeebleweeble'.

Which meant it was time to go pick up the kids - and drive them to The Fort for their six-monthly, thirty-five second session with the dentist - and back again. We got to The Fort early and on the way to the dentists we dived into a charity shop which I knew had a huge pile of kids videos they were selling for pennies. I let them select one each to watch when they got home: "IF THEY WERE GOOD!" (the fact that they would get to watch them as soon as we got home just to keep them out of my hair for half an hour, even if they bit the nurse and set fire to the dentist, wasn't something I was going to tell them*).
An hour later as the kids crashed around upstairs destroying things while following the on-screen antics of the Barbie Dancercise Workout Video Holly had chosen (it had seemed like such a good idea at the time) I cooked a meal while simultaneously re-assembling the geyser and loading the dishwasher. The geyser worked and the food wasn't that horrible. To my eternal shame I had multi-tasked.

All of which is not disguising the fact that, during a diligent tidying up of the office the other day, I seem to have put away somewhere the notebook with all the gags I had worked up for a 10 minute play/thing I said I would write for Ilona and haven't. Yet. Another thing I haven't finished. I'll get round to it soon - and service a chainsaw at the same time.



*Dear, Future Holly and Future Daisy dudes - we lied. A lot.

I had a moment of clarity tonight about my bad movie habit. I suspect, in part, it is because like everyone else who loves movies to bits, I am secretly in my heart of hearts a wanabee film maker, a film maker manqué. Every time I watch a film a part of me is so jealous of everyone who was involved in making it. Even if it is a total stinker I find the whole process of making a movie so fascinating that I would have loved to have been there, been involved somehow. I love movies. I really do and, my short and not very brilliant career in Hollywood aside, I have come to realise I will never be involved in any shape or form in creating any meaningful contribution to the world's collective filmic experience*. Furthmore, if I ever did suddenly find myself in possession of a several sesquillion dollars and indulged my heartfelt fantasy of directing a movie - there is this deep deep fear that I will end up producing something so irredeemably, stenchingly godawful that I will go down in the history books of crap - along with the gods like Ed Wood Jr., Ray Dennis Steckler, Edward G Ulmer, W. Lee Wilder, and all the rest of the pantheon of demented underachievers who so fascinate me.

Part of me is sitting there laughing at the ineptitude and frustrated ambition on display, part of me, I now realise, is peeking from behind my internal sofa at the horror that might have been if I had actually ever been given / taken / made the chance to put my 'vision' (not that I ever had one) on the screen. Cheap, back of an envelope psychology I know, but if we are all truly fascinated by what we fear most then my deepest fear must be that I will turn into a bad film director. And I thought it was swimming pools - you live and learn.



*the film rights to this blog ARE still available...

I haven't blogged for ages. I know. My fault, but to tell you truth - and why would I lie to you?* nothing blogworthy has really happened recently. It rains, the sun comes out for five minutes and it rains again. Sometimes horizontally. Usually when it's time to take the kids to school. I tell them it's character building. They tell me it's horrible. I agree with them.

I cook. I clean. The kids eat, and make a mess. I watch a brain-dead movie and go to bed and read brain-dead SF books. Sometimes I watch the book and read the movie - but it's not as much fun.

Tonight I bashed off four cartoons to illustrate a poster / presentation the surgery has to give at some high-powered meeting somewhere detailing the benefits and implementation of waiting time reduction techniques, showing measurable outcomes and blah blah blah blahdy - yawn - blah.

They have known about this for six weeks down at the surgery and sod all had been done with it till Merriol dragged it off the desk of whoever was supposed to be dealing with it and bought it home and tried to explain it to me. She failed, but I did some doodles of rabbits wearing stethoscopes which seemed to amuse her (though it might have been hysteria) and I have trying to make sense of the notes I made to myself and work out some way of making what is essentially a stupendously dull management / admin paper-shuffling exercise fun.

I have till Thursday.








*apart for comic effect?

Smell My Chin! - or - All the Songs in Daisyland are Called 'Cheese'.

"Rats! Rats! Rats!"

The above is a slightly toned down version of what I just said - very loudly - while punching the computer - because I had just completed this great long Blog entry - when Firefox crashed and took the fucker with it. Bye bye blog entry.

Most of it was about my ramblingly unstructured TV watching. I don't watch a lot of TV these days. I just can't get into any rhythm with it. Time was I used to make dates withall sorts of shows. There were 'Must Watch' moments every week. Not any more. The last time I remember this happening to me was with the new Dr Who a few years back with Mr Eccleston. Even that didn't last beyond the first series.

Mostly my brain-dead, zomb-in-front-of-flickering-images time is spent in the company of badly dubbed Italians from Outer-Space or American teenagers fighting Astro-Zombies but occasionally I get too pooped even to go and choose a DVD from the avalanche of crud over in the corner of the room so I channel hop around the Free To Air channels that come in through the Sky dish.

The other night I came across: - wait for it...

Celebrity Near-Death Experiences.

Woohoo! The bottom of the whole Car-Crash / Reality / Celeb culture mashup Barrel!* This is the IT!. The Nadir of TV! Fortunately for my sanity it was on one of those channels which we, as principled cheapskates who refuse to give any more money to Rupert Murdoch that we have to, can't get.

Given that the show's IMDb page doesn't actually list the 'Celebs' involved, I think it would be a safe bet to say they were probably the kind of celebrity no one has ever heard of.

Scrolling down a bit more I came to my usual resting place when i'm in this kind of mood. The Free to Air Movie Channels: Film Four, Zone Horror, Zone Thriller, True Movies, Movies4Men, and Movies4Men2 (weirdly the latter two, despite their hunky, UberButch names, carry endless commercials for very girly things like Dove beauty products, fabric conditioners, and 'Lite' mayonnaise.)

About the only one of them I don't watch is the True Move Channel. The others sometimes have things of interest** (despite themselves I suspect) but the True Move Channel? Naaaaa!. It's full of the sort of thing that used to fill up Wednesday afternoon schedules when there was no sport on. Disease of the Week movies. 'One Woman's Courageous Fight Against all the odds to get Justice for her Daughter's... insert cause here... and keep her family together'. The sort of thing that starred Lindsey Wagner, and people who used to be in L A Law a lot, and usually ended with a wide shot of happy homecoming on a suburban lawn and a caption reading:

"Slimecreep Peabody was sentenced to 127 years in a maximum security prison. Three years later the Alabama State Legislature passed 'Patty-Anne JoBeth's Law' which made it Illegal to Murder People on Tuesdays with a fish."

Anyway, (the original post that Firefox ate was a lot funnier and structured than this, sorry) The True Movie channel was showing The Day After - a 1983 'graphic, disturbing film about the effects of a devastating nuclear holocaust on small-town residents of eastern Kansas'.

Did I miss something?

*Next WeeK: Celebrities' Pets Near-Death Experiences.
** 'Interest' being a word that covers a multitude of sins, including watching Joan Collins running around a Florida swamp being menaced by giant, radio-active ants.

This is just plain brilliant. The best Spam subject that got through Orange's filters this week. I didn't open it of course but it was sooooo tempting. I mean who could resist:

Re: New pornos with Avril Lavigne + 3 chinese homosexuals!

You can almost hear the circus music can't you?

Hold Onto Your Safety Twig!

Pure dead brilliant track of the week:

http://zoizoi.com/mp3/thepussycats_iwantyourlove.mp3

Okay, I wasn't specific, the week in question may well have been in 1966 - but it's still one of those perfect two minutes and sixteen seconds of pop music that time forgot. Found among many other goodies at Babette's Feast, the blog of the wonderfully named 'Mimi la twisteuse.'
For reasons that may be very obvious to someone with any more nouse than me about these things (ie everyone) it sounds a lot better saved to the hard drive and played through, in my case, Media Player (but the same seems true of RealPlayer etc. etc.) than it does playing it off the page - as it were. I guess Media Player comes with better speakers than Firefox.

Meanwhile the rain and sodden miserableness I was moaning about yesterday vanished overnight. We woke up this morning to blue skies, birds singing, bucolic peasants frolicking in the meadows - and sod all sign of either a plumber or a roof fixer-upper.

Daddy, Help! My Elbow's in Trouble.

Sorry for the lack of bloggery recently. It's been raining a lot. For weeks. Raining. It has been depressing and boring. Grey miserable and wet. Going outside has not been fun. Staying indoors has been a chore. From time to time (just to keep things interesting) it has blown up horrendous gales which have kept anyone from doing any work to the house - like fixing the barge boards that blew off the prevailingly windward end of the house a few weeks ago, and fixing the holes where the rain comes in.
The day after I finally got fed up with trying to work out where the drips were going to land and placing buckets underneath (only to find the next morning that the drip had moved about overnight and dripped everywhere BUT the bucket) I gave in and dragged a ladder inside the living room, climbed up it and rigged plastic sheeting inside the gable end windows to channel all the water into the damn thing, I mean the day after I finally did all that, Craig turned up at some ungodly hour of the morning and started ripping off what remains of the old bargeboards and putting on the new ones. Because the bloke who was supposed to be helping him didn't turn up I ended up on the roof holding onto things - again. First week of February and I've already been up on my roof.
Same time as all this water was coming through our roof two of our three dehumidifiers have given up the ghost. They still make great noises, whirr away like crazy, but just when we need them the most they decide they don't want to actually dehumidify anything any more. Another half day of my life wasted as I took the big old workhorse of a machine to bits to try and fix it. I know nothing about refrigeration units* but after afternoon taking it to bits and putting it back together again I'm pretty sure that's what has gone. I mean I now know all the things that aren't wrong with it. There's nothing else left. It's got to be that. Bum. More expense.


*Dehumidifiers are basically self-defrosting fridges.

Money making idea of the week:

I want to produce an edible newspaper. Print it on rice paper, or wheat paper, or whatever with edible, flavoured inks and, when you've finished reading it, you just put it through a shredder and have it with milk for breakfast.

I'm thinking of calling it The Newsli.

I'll get my coat.

.

I love this woman

I've not been following the weirdly complicated opening rounds of the insanely complicated American Election process with any great attention despite the coverage it is getting over here. The distractions of children who do things like announce, as they did tonight, that they aren't going to have their regular ration of evening TV because they want to perform a short ballet called 'Bringing the Happiness to India', and piles of cruddy movies to be watched get in the way of following the blow by blow, handshake by handshake, money pissing competition that is happening over there but one thing has left me bewildered.

Why is Barak Obama black? He's always referred to as the 'The first black candidate for... ', or 'The first African-American to... ' etc. As I understand it his dad was Nigerian his mother an American 'Caucasian'. Which if you want to start labelling people by their skin colour makes him the proud possessor of one 'white' parent* and one 'black' one. So why whenever his colour is referred to is he always 'black'? If he had had only one Grandparent who was black would he still be 'The first black candidate'? or only one Great-grandparent? At what point does this weird notion that Blackness outweighs Whiteness in this way stop? Or maybe it doesn't. The whole notion of the 'one-drop rule' seems utterly absurd to me. Because, apart from playing the racist game of thinking the amount of melanin in your skin has got ANYTHING to do with your character or value as a person, when it comes down to it we are all descended from a bunch common ancestors who lived in Africa 140,000 years ago. Ethiopia, Kenya or Tanzania. Somewhere round there.

We're all black!

The first 'black' president of the United States was George Washington.






*I hate that word 'white'. I'm not white. 'White' people aren't white - unless you paint them. Whenever someone asks me what colour I am I reply, "a sort of dirty pink."

Another cartoon tonight. A stupid thought I had at tea time drawn, redrawn, tweaked and fiddled with, printed out and shown to Merriol who, after pointing out a previously unseen obvious physical impossibility of a part of the drawing, didn't laugh at it.

Back to the computer.

More drawing to correct the now glaringly obvious obvious physical impossibility and swithering about a hyphen in the caption - put it in, stare at the screen, take it out, ... funnier with? funnier without?... funnier with?...

Fifteen minutes later I finally convince myself it needed the hyphen (I may take it out tomorrow) and then, with great care and ceremony, I placed my handcrafted baby in its own special little niche in the Hall of Bright Cartoonings, where no human eye has ever set foot, to gather dust unseen forevermore.

I was giggling myself stupid all the time.

I am very easily amused.

Gog a go-go!

Tonight I watched Gog. Gog has been sat on my computer for months waiting for me to watch it. As part of the Let's get the computer cleaned up and backed up blitz I watched it tonight (well that was my excuse).

As you may well have gathered by reading this blog if you don't know me (or just know if you do know me) : I love bad movies. Really bad movies are often so much more rewarding and fun than a good film for many reasons. One of them that has just occurred to me in that when I enjoy something. I mean really enjoy it I just want to savour it. Enjoy it. I don't really want to start picking it to bits to find out how it worked and why I liked it so much - and to tell you the truth, if something IS good I get lost in it and my critical faculties get forgotten about till it is over.

And I like taking things to bits and seeing how they work.

Or don't


This film, like most others, has three acts. In the first act a scientist and his assistant are killed by a mysterious unseen hand, they are frozen to death. Frozen so cold in fact that their bodies shatter when they fall over which, because of budgetary constraints, they do off-screen. An undercover security officer arrives to investigate. This part isn't too badly done, a little slow maybe, but not bad for a low budget movie of the period.

For act two the security officer and his undercover girlfriend security agent take us on a guided tour of the base meeting a mixed bag of identical scientist types who lecture at great length their experiments, show us short clips of stock footage by way of illustration and then explain and why they could not have been the mysterious killer and, to tell you the truth the film almost grinds to a halt with tedium. This procession of (not too outlandish) ideas may have been pure "Gosh-wow! The future is going to be so Cooool!" at the time it was made but it all looks dated and plodding now.

Act Three. Action! - slowly segueing into hilarious ineptitude. (Paydirt!) More people get bumped off!

The chemist who was analysing some mysterious 'atomic powder' found in a suspect device is poisoned by a pot plant so radioactive that simply putting a glass dome over it cuts most of the clicking of the hero's Geiger counter.

The acrobats in their anti-gravity vests made of a 'new alloy of aluminium' are spun to death in their space-suits.

The head of base security is somethinged to death by sound waves, "Get out! Sound waves at this intensity can kill!" Actually I'm not really sure WHAT happens to him, his shirt sort of explodes while he is trying to cut the cables to a set of electric tuning forks and then he falls over.(Just why he is trying to cut the cables to a set of electric tuning forks is not really clear either, but as he was such a terrible actor I was actively willing him to die by this point, so I wouldn't have to look at him any more, and didn't care about the details).

Our hero has an idea what is going on and gets the head scientist, played by venerable ageing actor Herbert Marshall, to phone the Air Force and get them to scramble a squadron of jets, which by the mysterious power of limited stock footage, transmogrify from one type of aircraft to another in mid air (then into small models of possibly another kind of aircraft altogether). Gosh! This is all so exciting!

More action!

One of the Scientist's robots goes on the rampage in the computer room. Our hero shoots the robot with his pistol but it is invulnerable to bullets.
"Can you use a flame thrower?" asks its creator in an impenetrably thick German accent while keeping the rampaging metal monster at bay with a short stick.
"Yes!" cries our hero.
"Melt him down! It'z the only vay to stop him!" Then, in the heat of the moment, the scientist's accent goes into hyper-drive and I have absolutely NO idea what he says next. I have played that section of the movie over and over again and it still sounds like:
"Time bext zoim - in demzoim down ze hall - hurry up!"
Anyway, whatever he does say our hero understands and he rushes off - that or he'd figured the odds had just turned against him. 'Killer robot AND insane babbling German scientist? Stuff it, I'm off!'.

But no! He returns with the flame thrower. Unfortunately while he is out the room the mad German scientist has tripped over a claw hammer lying in the middle off the computer room floor and been strungled* to death by the robot.

Suddenly the alarm sounds! "The reactor!" The other killer berserk robot is in the reactor room removing the control rod.


That's right. THE control rod. This atomic pile has a control room with a little, lidded wooden box mounted on the wall. Open the lid and you can pull out THE control rod which starts a carbon arc...

(like you used to find in old cinema projectors)

...and throws the 'Nuclear Indicator' dangerously into the dark beige.



They're doomed! Unless...

Our heroes arrive, set fire to the robot with the flame thrower, and replace the rod. Whew! Saved! But! What's this? Coming through the door is killer robot number ONE who has busted out of the other lab after strungulating Dr Stranglelove and followed them down in the lift! - and the heroes' flame thrower is out of gas!

But, just when things look really bad... (for the heroes I mean, the movie has been looking really bad for ages) ...in through the doors bursts aged, venerable, head scientist, Herbert Marshall waving ANOTHER flame thrower (every nuclear power plant should have at least one). Unfortunately his flame thrower doesn't work so well. Just when... etc. The stock footage of USAF planes we saw taking off earlier shoot down a mysterious fibre-glass aircraft which has been flying about overhead eavesdropping on the supercomputer and hijacking it to commit the murders.

The End (apart from a brief love scene between radioactive hero and heroine "I feel radiant!" and an optimistic speech from Marshall how about how everything is going to be all right because America will get it's Killer Mirror Death-Ray device into orbit tomorrow morning, "When the sky is clean." Which they do by using that other bit of stock footage of a V2 rocket taking off. Movies that finale with stock footage. The mark of quality )

Scored high on the crapomoter and, because of it, may well not get deleted in the great Let's get the computer cleaned up and backed up blitz.

*Strungled v. To simulate the act of strangulation by clutching the stranglator to your own throat, while pretending to struggle to be free. An act commonly seen performed in any cheap movie containing a giant octopus.

Danger! Danger!

M&M's computer is back on its feet again after a large quantity of money were thrown in the general direction of India this morning and someone talked him through the re-installation we singularly failed to get anywhere with yesterday. Last I heard all pictures and other irreplaceable stuff was still in place. Huzzah!. Mike has been burning discs all afternoon.

Another cartoon this evening as a respite from the dire movie watching marathon.

Mike and Morag's computer has thrown a complete wobbly. Won't boot won't do anything except go round in small circles. Won't even let us reinstall XP. Last time this happened they ended up paying people to get the thing back on its feet and working. Luckily most, if not all, of their unbacked up stuff was still there when it was bought back to life. Mighty oaths were sworn about backing up EVERYTHING before it happened again.

It's happened again - and they'd never got round to doing it.

Last time this happened to Mike and Morag's computer Merriol and I swore mighty oaths that we would immediately go home and start backing up all the photos of the kids and all the other never-to-be-lost stuff on our computer. We've never got round to it either.

We've started tonight

Finally! The true difference between the sexes is found!

(...and I finded it!)

Boy DNA:

Girl DNA:

'nuff said.

Holly is suffering from the Dreaded Lurgi at the moment - or rather, as we established tonight after a trip to the doctor's - a cocktail of them and, in addition to the mountain of creams and potions we have been given for her, one of the things Dr C has suggested we do is to pour a few drops of warm olive oil in her lughole twice a day to deal with a horribly clogged-up with earwax ear.
As I was doing dripping oil into her ear tonight I had this huge rush of Deja Vu by proxy. I suddenly, for a moment, knew exactly what Holly was feeling, because I remember having the exact same thing done to me as a child when I had earache.
When I was a kid olive oil went in your ear. That's what it was for. The only place you could get olive oil was in the chemists. Small glass bottles full of this thin clear yellow stuff (none of your Premier Cru First Cold Pressing Virgin, dark-green sludge at the bottom, shake the bottle before use stuff, just industrially filtered yellow oil with a medical label). Merriol who is 11 years younger than me had never heard of the practice. Somewhere between me growing up and her growing up a decade later, olive oil had stopped being a medicine, and had become a food.

All I have to do is remember to pick up the right bottle and not fill Holly's ear full of salad dressing.

I am turning into a total housewife. The other day I was in the Co-op looking for suet. I had run out and was wanting to have dumplings to go with the stew I was making for tea. I was standing there on the aisle staring at the place on the shelves where logic dictated the suet should be - but plainly wasn't - doing that odd, pointless thing that perfectly rational adults do in those circumstances. I was saying "Suet?... suet?... suet?..." over and over again in the vain hope that it was going to get fed up and yell

"I'm over here!"

from wherever it was hiding, when a friend, a woman, passed by.
"X," I said, "any idea where they keep the suet in this place?"
"What do you want suet for?"
"Dumplings."
"No idea," she said "I just buy them frozen."
What? Probably the second easiest thing on the entire planet to cook and she buys them frozen!
I was, I realized, scandalised. Oohhh I was proper shocked I was, you cold have knocked me down with a feather...


- actually her name really is 'X', her parents were spies, or maths teachers, or both. Actually, now I come to think of it I suspect all maths teachers are spies. It would explain some of the weirder problems I got at school:

1. If it takes 15 men three days to dig a hole three furlongs wide and eight furlongs deep - how many men does M have in the field?
2. If a train travels west at 65 mph with a following wind of 25 mph then how fast does the goose flying east this winter?

Perfect sense. They weren't maths problems at all, they were passwords. My maths homework book was being used as a dead letter drop by KGB agents. It would also explain a note on my 5th year school report that confused me at the time:

Liam is a diligent and attentive pupil and a hero in the prolotarian class struggle against the imperialist oligarchy.

Mind you, it was the 70s - so maybe that sort of thing was normal.

Following this train of thought makes me suspect that the famous German Enigma Code of WWII wasn't broken by the boffins at Bletchley Park at all - but really cracked by hundreds of spotty Molesworths in prep schools up and down the country, each working on a tiny bit of the problem on ink-splattered jotters like some prehistoric version of Seti@home as any fule kno.


Waffling.


Bed.



.

To continue my love letter to all the enthusiasts of the world that litter the web with their obsessions, may I introduce you to: The War of the Worlds Book Cover Collection a site which the owner describes like this:

The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells, has been continuously in print for over 100 years. Collected here are the covers of many of those editions, submitted by generous fans from around the world.

All lovingly cross indexed by publisher, date, design elements and no end of other criteria. All sorts of wonders. It's a labour of love and I spent ages browsing it.

My slide into total domestic oblivion is complete. The other day was sitting flipping through a copy of Prima (a particularly vacuous 'Women's' magazine with no article longer than 150 words of less than three sylables) when I saw a recipe for a sticky apple cake thing.
'Mmmmm, I thought, 'That looks yummy.' So I made it for tea.

And it was yummy.

I'm such a girl.

---

I spend far too much of my time poking about the web finding, listening too, and watching long-forgotten crud that would have (should have) happily slid into oblivion if it hadn't been for the dedicated enthusiasts that litter this planet.
This is one of the reasons I love the web so much. The world is full of nutters and the web gives them their space to say, "Look at all this amazing crap I find so fascinating. Isn't it great?"
A lot of the time it isn't that amazing or great, but for every spotty nerk who is building a working model of The Starship enterprise (Third Series) out of matchsticks, or frame-capturing every time Milla Jovovich blinks in every one of her movies, there is another dedicated weirdo slogging away posting obsure Canadian disco tracks, complete spoken word records* or peppy little bits of Yé-yé music like this: Ann Christine - Odota en.
I love this bit of music. It is the most perfect bit of 1960s Finnish pop music - and I just can't stop playing it.







* Spoken word records are particularly weird 'must buy on sight' compulsion of mine. I have loads, not that I see than many in the charity shops of Fort William, but over the last couple of years I have added the speeches of Winston Churchill and Basil Rathbone reading Edgar Allen Poe to the albums I never listen too. I bought an LP of TS Elliot reading The Wasteland the other week for no other reason than it was a spoken word record and Merriol wasn't looking. I'll never listen to it either. But I had to buy it.

Another cartoon! Jings! Crivvens! Help ma boab! Two cartoons in a week!

It was windy last night. Very windy. I was woken up at 4 by the roof creaking and groaning. We have a big roof with a wooden plank ceiling nailed to the underneath of it. In high winds it moves and creaks and groans and sounds like the effects soundtrack of a fifties Pirate movie. Last night about 5am there was a gust that hit the roof like a solid wall of something a lot more solid than mere air. The house shook. I don't suppose the stupidly thick granite walls shook but the roof and upstairs floor shhok. Most of my sphincters tightened. Your bed isn't supposed to move if you are just lying there being terrified. I've only ever experienced a couple of minor earthquakes when I stayed in LA but that's what it felt like. One or two on the Richter scale.
Holly woke up scared and climbed into bed with us.

This morning we woke up to find a couple of trees down in my mum and dad's garden, chunks missing off our barge boards and our shared satellite dish pointing at Norway instead of somewhere above the equator.
Getting my priorities right I ignored everything else and phoned the nearest TV satellite dish repair person. I could get to the dish all right, it's not that high up, but I would have no idea where to point it when I got there. The sky is an awfully big thing.
I'm not expecting the bloke to turn up any time soon, or even call me back until the evening but he turns up at 4ish in the afternoon and takes a look. I point out we have ladders to hand so he doesn't even need to get his off the top of his van. He gets his tools. Shins up the ladder, fiddles for about 5 minutes comes back down, signal restored, and says he'll send his bill. I ask him how much it will be.

£65!

Sixty-five fucking quid for five minutes work PLUS VAT!

When I'm up there in a few days fixing the bargeboards I am going to do some serious measuring and marking of angles on that thing. I'll fix some fucking guy ropes to it too. Sixty-five quid. Needless to say that is the last time we will be using him and I am so tempted to send him a bill for the hire of my ladders.


Later:

Fuck. I need to go to bed. I am loosing it. I'm sitting here at the computer writing jokes for my new never to be finished screenplay when I think, 'I know I'll listen to some music'. Not wanting to disturb Merriol who is asleep in the room next door I find the headphones in the tangle of cables down the side of the desk. I pick them up, realise they aren't plugged in and trace the cable till I find the plug...

...and shove it in my ear.

I'm sitting there with the headphone in my hand and a jack-plug stuck in the side of my head.

You might want to do the same after enjoying this: The Laurence Whelk Orchestra plays The Velvet Underground.

Stuff me! I managed to get a cartoon done. It's not very funny (probably even less funny if you know what the hell it's about), and it took my all bloody night but it was nice to get playing with Illustrator again. Amazing how much I had forgotten in the couple of weeks since I last played with it.
The kids are back at school after the Christmas holidays, the house is slowly, descending into the normal realms of chaos (which is same realm of chaos as we've been living in for the past couple of weeks but with less tinsel) which threatens to get deeper by the minute as we rearrange everything to make enough space to get the upstairs toilet built. By this time next week the plumbers will be in! Knocking holes in our walls, digging up the garden, and drinking vast amounts of tea. A week after that I will be building walls and cupboards and doing all sorts of woodworky things to hide all the pipes again. It's so long since I built anything I hope my hands remember what to do because my brain sure as hell doesn't. All the bits of my brain that used to be able to work things out, and measure things semi-accurately and then make something vaguely like I intended, are now totally occupied with, getting the kids to school, and wondering what we are going to have for tea, and packing school dinners, and hoovering etc. etc. (actually that part, the hoovering part, used to be devoted to thinking about nuclear fission and schemes for global Domination. I don't do a lot of hoovering - but when I do, I get some really dangerously great ideas about how to make the hoover suck more powerfully). I hope the knack will just come back to me like the Illustrator skills did after a while. We'll find out. If I post pictures in a couple of weeks with I MADE THIS! written all over it, you'll know it did. If I don't, you'll know it didn't. And if this post vanishes you'll know I really fucked it up and had to get someone else in to fix it all.

Hey look! There's Phoebe and Tyler sitting on their porch!
http://maps.google.com. Wave to Big Brother, Phoebe and Tyler!
I can't work out if this is really really really scary - or very very very cool.

Happy New year!

Post 404

As promised. The (shamefully) shorter than last night Everything I have read for the past 3 months anal retentive compulsive list thing:


October

1. Spies - Michael Frayn.
2. Time to Come - not very good aged SF in a copy that was crumbling to dust as I read it. I didn't use a bookmark, I just turned the page I was on sideways.
3. The 1972 Annual World's Best SF - ... Jesus wept! if this was the best!... etc.

November

1. Indoctrinaire - Christopher Priest. The first two thirds were weirdly wonderful. The last third was an utter let down
   
2. Hollywood a Go-Go - Monumentally dull cut and paste about the bewildering rise of the Cannon film group. You could almost smell the Cellotape as great chunks of Variety and year end financial reports were glued together. Had the desired effect of sending me to sleep within a pages for a few nights.
3. Why Don't Penguin's Feet Freeze? -
4. The Long Result - John Brunner
5. Possible Tomorrows - a not very Good SF collection
6. The Wind From Nowhere - J G Ballard
7. The Drowned World - J G Ballard
8. The Drought - J G Ballard (That's me Ballarded for a bit.)
   
9. The Alien Ones - Leo Brett (R A Fanthorpe). Not as abysmal as some of his stuff but still incredibly dreadful.
10. The Chrysalids - John Wyndham.
    
11. Seize The Day - Saul Bellow

December

1. Man Plus - Frederick Pohl
2. Starcross - Phillip Reeve. The rather jolly good ripping yard follow up to Larklight. Ripping good fun.

Abandoned for a variety of reason: The Blue-eyed Salaryman - Niall Murtach (Bored the pants off me. Hardly 'Hilarious' Daily Mail). Rock 'N' Roll Babes From Outer Space - Linda Laivin. Great title, fucking awful book, Sean Wright would like it. Also described as 'hilarious' on the back cover. Farewell to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood. Collected Stories of Franz Kafka, The Tactics of Mistake - Gordon R Dickson.

(Phoebe you can come out of the shower now)

Sorry, but it is that time of year again:

So, every movie I have watched in the last three months: The usual mixed bag of crap, real crap, and utter crap with the odd staggering work of genius thrown in for good measure. 159 movies watched this year (one of them in a real cinema!) Did I keep my last year's New Year's Resolution to 'Watch less crap' this year? Did I? Did I fuck! I started the year watching Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD and it went down hill from there.

As an added bonus this time there is also a list of all those movies I abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they totally stink: (Phoebe, it's okay, it will be over soon.)


October

1. Creature
   - Dire Alien clone with Klaus Kinski, who was obviously a bit short of the readies that week. The Something Unexpected But Inevitable (SUBI) event 15 minutes in: After a seemingly safe landing, the heroes' Space ship crashes through the moon's shallow crust and is buggered beyond repair.
2. Colussus and the Amazon Queen
   - Dear god! (15 minute SUBI: Our hero meets our heroine and discovers his companions have been taken captive by buxom Ponygirl Amazon Women with insane, first series Star Trek hair dos).
3. Danger!! Death Ray
   - (MST3K) One of the more weirdly punctuated titled bad movies I have watched recently. Pretty shit.
4. L'Effrontee (An Impudent Girl)
   - Delightful French awkward adolescence movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg was wonderful. She had to be - she was on screen for 95% of the time. The only wrong notes were the spelling mistakes in the subtitles.
5. The Giant Gila Monster - Public Domain rubbish, a dead cheap, dead crap, monster movie (get it here!) that I have been wanting to tick off my list for a while now. (That's not a real list, Phoebe, it's just an expression - I'm not that sad.)
6. La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento
   - Well that's two hours of my life I want back. Two hours of watching rich French people telling each other life was unbearable in incomplete sentences. The subtitles for this movie had more ellipses that any other movie I have seen. I am so glad I didn't suffer the four hour version.
7. Little Miss Sunshine - not as good as was expecting given all the good reviews and word of mouth but an agreeable way to spend an hour and a half.
8. Silence of the Hams - I have been told I posses an almost inhuman tolerance for bad movies. This piece of garbage strained it beyond belief. Total and utter crap.
   
9. Repo Man - I love Repo Man.
10. Straight To Hell - Straight to eBay.
    
11. Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter
    -"Igor, go to your room!". What a piece of crap! I now want to see the other half of this 1966 drive in double bill - Billy the Kid versus Dracula.
12. The Amazing Colossal Man
    - (MST3K)
13. The Brothers Grimm
    - I tried so hard to like this movie. I mean really really hard - I failed.

November

1. Amazon Women on The Moon
   - if you ever find yourself in possession of this DVD skip the movie and watch a lovely little deleted scene called The Unknown Soldier.
2. The Wolf Man
   - The 1941 Universal version with Lon Chaney Jr.
3. The Vindicator
   - Canadian 80s SF shite. But even worse than that, DULL Canadian 80s SF shite.
4. Werewolf of London
   - Universal's first (1935) bash at a werewolf movie and not bad at that.
5. Battle of the Worlds
   - Delirious dreadful 1960s Italian SF (another one of those movies that made less sense the second time I saw it).
   
6. Asignment: Outer Space
   - Ditto
7. Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon -
   
8. They Came From beyond Space -
   
9. Bedazzled
   - Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore's 1968 masterpiece
10. Bedazzled
    - The Brendan Fraser and Liz Hurley pointless remake.
11. The Lady From Shanghai
    - Never seen it before. Loved every frame.
12. Gold Diggers of 1933 - I am besotted with Joan Blondell, have been for years. The Forgotten Man number at the climax of this movie gives me the shivers.

December

1. Bride of Frankenstein
   - Universal Studio's greatest movie of the 30s.
2. The 39 Steps - (Hitchcock's version)
3. My Dear Secretary
   - dreadful Kirk Douglas screwball 'comedy'.
4. Strange Days
   - Overlong (thirty minutes of material stretched to two and half hours by throwing a shitload of money at it) this bombed when released. It deserved to.
5. The Quiet Earth
   - What a great little film!
6. 2 Days in Paris
   - which I enjoyed more than it deserved because it was the first time I had seen a real movie in a real movie theatre for about two years.
7. Tron
   - I love Tron. Well, I love it after our hero gets sucked into the computer and the fun really starts the first act - the live action, 'let's dump a lot of exposition and then put ourselves in peril' bit - is a stinker. Saw it for the first time (since seeing it when it first came out) in widescreen. Not squished up, panned and scanned, ropey old video.
   
8. George of the Jungle
   - It's Christmas...
9. Taxi
   - bof!
10. The Big Lebowski
    - I Laughed like a drain.
    

Abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they REALLY stink:

1. Terror at Red Wolf Something-or-other
   - 1970's girls alone in big scary house crap.
2. The Phantom Creeps
   - 265 minute (12 episode) Bela Lugosi serial edited down to an incomprehensible mess of a 78 minute feature film.
3. Shadow of Chinatown
   - 300 minutes of garbage 1936 Bela Lugosi serial cut down to 65 minutes! Even more incoherently crappy than the last one.
4. Laser Mission
   - Brandon Lee action crap. I lasted 15 minutes after adding Brandon Lee to my 'Dying Young Was A Good Career Move'' list.
5. Equilibrium
   - Christian Bale, Emily Watson - and I turned off after 3 minutes. Some films you can just taste the shit coming from so far off. Set in a future where all emotions are illegal - ie no acting required for at least the first act - it was Fahrenheit 451, with added 1984, and tons of Matrix type ultra-violence slopped over - Balls to that.
6. Werewolf Woman
   - no one expects much from Italian horror movies but this plot free mix of soft-core tits 'n' ass and gory violence bored me stupid. Abandoned after 45 minutes, 7 murders and more on-screen pubic hair than was good for any movie that doesn't involve a hunk coming round to fix the blonde bimbo's washing machine.
   
7. Beast of the Yellow Night
   - Filipino horror movie took too long to go nowhere not very interestingly. I jumped ship after 15 minutes.
8. Piranha
   - I didn't get past the first real edit in the movie. Seriously. The first edit of the film was so inept I left. A record for me. Still didn't stop me being rude about it on the IMDb though.
9. Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules
   - I fell asleep (halfway through the title).
10. Carnosaur
    - I gave up at the point where the traditional 'couple making out in the car about to be attacked by the monster on the loose' - were attacked by a glove puppet of a dinosaur. It looked like they were being savaged by an oven mitt.
    
    

Most bewilderedly trance state inducing movies of the year so far:
UFO: Target Earth, Dünyayi kurtaran adam, The Fury Of The Wolfman.


Tomorrow: Every book I have read for the past 3 months - don't go away now!

Chapter 34

In which our hero suspects he has Middle-class children.

We bought white bread the other day. It was reduced to next to nothing in Tescos. We don't normally buy white bread but this was so cheap it would have been a criminal frivolity not to have bought it. It went on the table last night along with a huge vat of Veg Soup, some of it diced and fried for croutons, the rest of it piled on a plate for dunking. Daisy, who doesn't encounter the stuff that often, and only then out in cafes in the guise of toasties, picked up a slice and looked at it.

She turned it around and looked at the other side.

"Mummy?", she said eventually. "Is this brioche?"


.

I must stop asking myself questions. I really must. Today for example, after cleaning out Merriol's shed I found myself stuffing couple of grubby cushions, filled with those little white polystyrene beanbaggy ball things, into the washing machine. As I pushed them in I heard myself saying, "I wonder what would happen if one of these things burst while it was inside here?"

When will I ever learn? I mean when? Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway) Murphy, Finagle, God, or whoever is in charge of these things let me find out.

The answer to the question is that you end up hoovering the inside of your washing machine. Which is, I think, one of the weirder things I have done this week.

---

Another short scene from the screenplay of my life:


Int. Kitchen - Day.

Merriol has become fed up with being subtle about wanting to get me out of the house for some Christmas-related, secret wrapping reason known only to herself.

Merriol:

Look... Why don't you just go
out for a bit?


Me:

No. It's wet.

Merriol looks out the kitchen window at the sun shining on the surrounding hills from a cloudlessly clear blue sky.

Merriol:

No it isn't!


Me:

Yes it is. Two thirds of the planet
is covered in water - take a running
jump at random and you stand a two
in three chance of drowning. I'm not
going out there - it's dangerous.


Merriol:
I hate you.





.

Boxing Day,

More eating playing with toys, dealing with the debris of yesterday, reading Mr Men books,(currently scoring high on my unreadable bilge scale - especially the new ones, the illustrations for which have none of the innocent, crude felt-penned charm of some of the earlier ones and look like they have been done on an ancient DTP package, cruddy rainbow gradients and all. They really are some of the worst illustrations I have seen in a kids book for quite a while.) and wondering quite why I bought so much cheese. We have a mountain of cheese in the Fridge, Camenbert, Brie, Stilton, Port Salut etc etc. Loads of it. A whole stink of cheese (or whatever the collective noun for cheeses is). I rarely go on cheese buying splurges - mainly because I seem to loose what little willpower I posses when presented with a choice and end up buying great wodges of everything. I always buy tons of the stuff. This time I bought so much of it some of it may actually be ripe by the time I eat it.

Luckily for my sanity Most (if not all) of the links off this site have expired. After my listening to 60 odd versions of Popcorn in one session nearly drove my whole family insane for weeks, maybe it is a good thing that I am not abusing my cheese soaked brain with 40 different versions of Nancy Sinatra's These Boots are Made For Walking...

Wooohoooo!

It's Christmas.

My first coherent thought of the day after "yerwha...whathefuktimeisit?" and "gnugh...whatarethekidsdoingupat-thistimeofthemorning...?" was "Aha! It's Christmas Day. I won't have to listen to the fucking Disney Princesses Christmas Album again for at least another 48 weeks. Hurray!"

The rest of the day was much. I love being a Dad. It's now relatively early in the evening (for me) but I am going to collapse into bed and watch Tron. Best pressy of the day for me? 48 pairs of black socks. All the same. 48 pairs of identical black socks. 96 socks each indistinguishable from any of the others. Sock pairing is a thing of the past! I love my wife.

Christmas is coming (in 18 minutes) and the goose is getting fat (or, in our case, leaking all over the fridge - but at least that means it has finally defrosted).

Here for all our friends and relations is this year's Family Christmas card:



For all our other friends and relations (you know who you are) here is our other Family Christmas card:

He knows when you've been sleeping,
He knows when you're awake,
He knows when you've been good or bad...

...welcome to Grotto 101

Merry Christmas folks!



And here (if you have the patience to dowload it) is the first 89 seconds (some of the opening titles) of the movie I'm not going to make this year - despite the extravagant promises I will be making myself in a week's time. 89 seconds. That's one sixtieth of a feature film. Apart from a few visual gags which probably aren't worth the effort I have no idea where (if ever) I'm going to go with this but I did wake up at 4 am the other night with this stunningly hillarious sequence in my head. I grabbed my bedside notebook and spent the next 20 minutes laboriously storyboarding the whole thing out in minute detail, giggling myself stupid as I did so.
When I looked at it the next morning I couldn't understand any of it. Not a word. Three pages of meaningless squiggles with the odd gnomic phrase written sideways in the margin. I just keeping telling myself Orson Welles had nights like that too.

Wooohoooo!

I got a phone call this morning. It was Tyler. In bed in Portland, He'd just bought for tickets to see the Mighty Boosh live. He'd stayed up till way past his bedtime (his words) to do it as the tickets went on sale, on-line this morning. The show is on Phoebe's Birthday end of November next year.

The show is in Glasgow.

Phoebe and Tyler are coming to stay! Phoebe and Tyler are coming to stay! Woohooo!

...and we're going to see The Boosh!

I need to start sorting out a babysitter...

For some reason I was taken with this bit of an Amazon page I just came across: (you may have to click it to make it a bit bigger in order to read it properly)

This Penguin is Jesus

Hello, much neglected Blog.
Between the Panto, recovering from the Panto (i.e. doing all the housework that had piled up while we were doing it) I haven't had a lot of time to sit and think and have a good old blog. ...and going shopping for a couple of days in the teeming metropolis of Inverness. ...and doing all the housework that piled up while we were away. We stayed overnight in Inverness - something like 36 hours without the kids. Amazing! We did all sorts of grown up things: like eat whole meals without cutting anything up for anybody else, or telling them to stop wriggling or picking their nose. We got to see a movie in a real cinema too! The new revamped Eden Court has two small cinemas in the basement. The choice was between David Cronenberg's latest offering and something else - and since Merriol hates David Cronenberg's movies on principle it wasn't really much of a choice. It was only when we were sat in the seats that I let her into the secret that the movie we were about to watch - had subtitles.

"Man Beaten to Pulp in Cinema by Wife!"

Luckily 2 Days in Paris, didn't have too many subtitles and was a bit funny, and didn't have body parts flying around the screen, big boobed bimbos in space, or anything that looked like it has oozed out of the Cronenberg film playing next door to upset Merriol, so I survived the experience. The film was okay. I enjoyed it more than I would have done if I had watched it at home purely, I suspect, because it was the first movie I had seen in the cinema for two years. On the way back to the B&B we had chips and curry.

Sheer fucking luxury!. I find it hard to grasp that most of the population of the UK would think this was perfectly normal Saturday night thing to do. It felt so exotic, the sort of thiing you do on holiday. To hell with that, it used to be a normal thing for me to do on a Saturday night. Living out here in the boonies you forget the simple pleasures of life: a French movie, followed by a bag of chips and curry sauce as you step over the drunks and pools of vomit on the way home. I miss it. But not that much

Further to my 'fish wearing wigs' post the other day, the counter now tells me if you type 'smell my bum game' into Google.com - this blog is top! It's not only me. Other people need to get out more too. But then again whoever it was lived in Portsmouth former home to Europe's ugliest building so I don't blame them. Hmmm, it transpires that in a fit of madness it has now sadly demolished. We need to keep these things standing as warnings to future generations. I only saw it in the flesh (as it were) once - I've only ever been to Portsmouth once. It truly was an abysmal experience - the shopping centre not the town. Don't remember anything about the town apart from the fact it possesed the ugliest building I have ever seen, and there seemed to be an awful lot of abandoned submarines just lying around.

Fish wearing wigs. In Germany if you type 'Fish wearing wigs' into Google this blog comes first in the rankings. Woohoo! I need to get out more.

Well that's that over with . Ballachulish village panto is done and dusted for at least another year. Though we will never do another matinée. We did two shows on Saturday, one in the afternoon for the kids and those who didn't / couldn't come out late at night, and one in the evening. As the show was some three hours long (even though we trimmed it a bit as we went along for the afternoon show, it was a long hard day) but Jesus! the racket those kids made in the afternoon. It was just impossible.

We're not putting ourselves through that ever again.

The evening show on the other hand went like shit off a shovel. It was just wonderful. I enjoyed every moment of it, as I suspect did everyone else. It was such a pity we live in such a small town. A couple more nights and we would have really started to nail it. I don't think we short changed anybody, everyone who has commented has said they thought it was funnier than the last show two years ago (less plot, more jokes, and genuine comedy underpants this time round) but it would have been nice to do a couple more performances to get some of the timings of the jokes worked out a bit better.

For instance, it was only on the last show I realised that I was standing up wrongly at one point. If, instead of just slowly standing up facing the audience, I stood up with my head bowed and THEN raised my face - the fact that I was suddenly wearing the beard I had donned while supposedly unconscious in a trunk was an awful lot funnier. Things like that are great to work out in front of an audience.

I just like getting the laughs. Getting an audience to laugh at something you have written is just a great feeling.

Merriol (and everyone else) took a brazzilion photos - and I'm nowhere to be seen in any of them because I was always on the stage either out in front of the punters, or pacing and fretting around behind the curtains trying to work out what was going to go wrong next and trying to fix it. The scariest moment of the night for me was waiting on the side of the stage hearing the fanfare that was Lucy's (the princess) cue to enter through the closed main curtains (Another short give-the-guys-a-chance-to-wrestle-scenery scene in front of the Main Curtains). She was on first, had a couple of lines, then I was to enter and the scene was to follow. I heard the fanfare and looked over to where she should have been and saw - only Andy the Stage Manager frantically mouthing and waving down the corridor. Nothing happened. The fanfare sounded again. Still no princess. I rushed over to Andy's side of the stage.
Me: (Shouted whisper) "Where the fuck is she?"
Andy:(Shouted whisper) "She's gone for a pee!"
Me:(Loud shouted whisper)"You Are Fucking Kidding Me!?" (As it happened she hadn't, she had forgotten the scene before was so short and was just in the wrong place, blissfully ignorant of the fact she was supposed to be on stage).

I dive out of the curtain stage right.

"Has anyone seen the Princess? I have been looking all over the palace for her. Hmmmm. maybe she is over there... "

I cross stage and exit behind the curtains again - and rush round to Andy. Still no sign of her!

I step out onto the stage again to keep up my hunting the Princess improv going and wonder how long I can keep this up before people will start to notice that something is going wrong. I'm just about to speak when I hear Andy hiss "She's here!"

Me: (as if noticing audience for the first time) "Ah! I seem to have already looked down this corridor. I shall go back!"

Fanfare

Enter princess.

Well the first performance went pretty well - for a village panto that has had precious little rehearsal and no technical run through. My most anxious moment happened was the moment I realised I had forgotten a Vital Prop. I was under the stage waiting to make my appearance through a trapdoor on the small thrust stage in front of the main curtain. I discovered that I didn't have the prop in plenty of time to get it so I worked my way back towards one of the other two trapdoors under the main stage to get some one to fetch it for me. Just to paint the picture a little more clearly for you here: Ballachulish Village Hall's stage is not good. The under-stage space I am crawling around in is just about high enough to stoop in and is full of junk. To get up through one of the three tiny trapdoors that have been hacked into it over the years with any kind of grace is next to impossible. I realise I cannot use the trapdoor in the wings the usual way of getting under and up out of there without the audience seeing you because last time I had looked there was a pile of props sat on top of it. The only other trapdoor is in the centre of the stage but - as good luck would have it - the scene that is being played is happening in front of the main curtains. (We deliberately write in scenes that can take place in front of the main curtains to give time for the sets to be changed. Closing the curtains between changes and expecting the audience to stare at a couple of big bits of red cloth while trying to puzzle out whether the crashes and thuds and muted swearing that come out from behind them is part of the show or not is just no fun for anyone. So we try to disguise the fact that people are doing frustrated wrestling with scenery by doing short scenes out front to cover the noise.) I was under the stage waiting to join in one of these short scenes so I figured it would be safe to nip up through the trap in the centre of the stage (the one without a pile of stuff on it) and get my prop. Wrong. Someone had misunderstood a cue and had opened the main curtains. My head popped up in the middle of the stage like some demented bewigged gopher. I don't think too many people saw me before I managed to duck down again (I didn't hear a laugh) but I felt pretty bloody stupid. By the time I made it to the trap in the wings the pile of stuff on top of it had been cleared and I managed to get my missing prop in time.

As a technical rehearsal it was great. Pity we had to do it in front of punters but there you go. The audience seemed to enjoy it. Laughed a lot. And at the jokes too.

I got a spam today.

'If your warrior of love is too small, you may lose this war.'

'Warrior of Love'? I'm well used to getting thousands of spam offering to increase the size of my todger but none has ever used such a Victorian turn of phrase before. I'd guess the ISPs of the world's filters are getting pretty good at wheeking out anything with any of the million deliberate misspellings of 'Dick' that used to fill my inbox (ooh err missus!). D!ck, D|ck, Dic|<, etc. The people sending this stuff out are starting to have to resort to even more bizarre synonyms. I look forward to getting Viagra adverts in Latin very soon

Meanwhile the panto lurches towards its opening. We had a dress rehearsal last night which depressed the hell out of me and several other people. Everything took for ever and wasn't funny, nobody knew where or what was going on and we were having to guess where the scenery was supposed to be if it ever gets made. Very like the dress rehearsal last time we did a panto. Tonight was better. We had a fixing of things and worked out many new and interesting ways of shoving small children into tight places.
One bright spot of the evening was me realising - I DIDN'T HAVE TO SING! -The world has been spared my singing for another year - a bastardised unaccompanied semi-spoken version of 'I Remember It Well' from Gigi doesn't count as singing. But I do get to do a sort of Tango with a big hairy bloke in a frock, beaten up by a fourteen year old girl (including a knee in the knackers - oh the comedy), and I get absorb Noel Edmund's superpowers. The things I do for fun.


A joke I came up with today that will NOT be appearing in the next panto:

'Would an anatomically correct Barbie doll have a glitoris?'

I'll get my coat...

Three days till I am on stage and I still don't know my lines. Very little blogging for the foreseeable future.

Last week sometime, some bozo in a government office somewhere in the north of England gave a couple of CDs to a courier who happened to be wandering past his office, and asked him to drop it off at another office somewhere else, "If he happened to be going that way, and it wasn't too much bother, thanks awfully. Bye, - Right. Now back to work. Three down... five letter word starting with M ending with N, middle letter possibly R, meaning less than brilliant in the thinking department... Hmmmm, it's being a bit tricky today...."

The discs never arrived at wherever they were supposed to be going and no one has a scooby where they are. Nobody has a scooby if they were sent to the right place as whoever sent them didn't even bother to send them by any traceable method - or even get a proof that he had even sent them at all. The discs held the names, addresses, dates of birth, and national insurance numbers of millions of people. Anyone who had anything to do with the insanely complex Child Tax Credit Scheme. Mine and Merriol's included. We know this because yesterday we got a letter from the Government's official apologisers (Formerly the Department of Public Cock-up Ameliorations, now outsourced and re-branded as 'Whoops 24') saying: "Gosh, sorry about this but we may have inadvertently lost a copy of all your details and they may be now be possibly in the hands of the Russian Mafia, The Reader's Digest, international paedophile terrorists, or the Little Green Men from Betelgeuse VI. Honestly it's a real mystery, your guess is as good as ours - but don't worry, there's no need to panic, we'll sort it all out - - - somehow." (I'm paraphrasing).

I heard on the news that there were details of something like 25 million names on the missing discs*. If everyone of them gets a letter like we did, that means the Government has just spent some five million quid apologising to us all for handing all our personal details (and those of our kids) to Betelgeusian terrorist perverts (I'm assuming 20p a letter - I hope they negotiated a price discount for bulk. Though it wouldn't surprise me if they managed to forget).

Personally I would have at least tried offering whoever has the bloody things a Million quid, no questions asked, used notes in a plain brown envelope behind a radiator in Victoria Station, before clogging up the postal service. Could have saved millions.








* If they are lost at all, because, as there is no way of knowing what the bozo wrote on the envelope in the first place, the discs may well be sitting in the in-tray of the third deputy under-secretary for the standardisation of fish intestines on one of the smaller Scottish islands for all we know. He'll come back from his fact-finding mission to the Falklands next week, take one look at the staggering pile of paperwork that accumulated in his absence and throw half of it in the bin unopened.