Retox the Geek In Me

I'm getting in touch with my inner geek. I know he's there and wants to come out. We're making friends.

The other day while doing non-geeky, totally girly type dusting behind the computer, I noticed that my video card seemed to have two sockets to plug monitors into. One was full (obviously) but the other was suspiciously empty and, to my untutored eye, not normal. It turns out it's something called a DVI socket. I found this out by reading through the handy envelope of gumf Dell supplied with the machine when I bought it. "Plug the Monitor into the VGA or the DVI socket," it said, "But not both."

"But not both."

I hate being told not to do things.

It doesn't, I thought, say not to plug another monitor into the other socket...

Unfortunately I had nothing to hand to plug into it. There is another monitor sat on this desk (plugged into another computer - the two are networked) but it has a VGA plug.

Five minutes later via the mighty power of eBay, (peas be up on it) and after spending the price of a cup of non-frothy coffee, I was suddenly the proud owner of a VGA to DVI converterizer thingie - the existence of which I had been totally ignorant only a few minutes before.

It arrived today. Ten minutes after I had noticed the post had landed on the hall floor, and I had nipped upstairs with the wee Jiffy Bag, tweaked settings and rebooted, I was swapping and stretching documents across both monitors, giggling with happy delight. I am either a very sad man or very easily pleased.

Merriol thinks it's on the sad end of the spectrum. Holly on the other hand was impressed, but Daisy was delighted. She thought it was the greatest thing since sliced brioche and the two of us spent ages, sat at the desk, taking it in turns to resize text documents over both screens. One of those middle-aged geek / four year old child bonding moments that will live in the memory.

Unfortunately I have now got to work out some way of connecting the monitor to both computers without unplugging and re-plugging the thing every time anyone wants to use the other computer. It's ages since I had a data switch built into my set-up but my pile of cables, switches, adaptors, and What-exactly-IS-this-thing?s turns out not to have the required combination of bits.

I may have to lash out another cup of coffee (and maybe even a Danish Pastry) and buy more.


Der OctoberFilmFest

1. Dr Doolittle
   - another 90 minutes of my life I want back - thanks kids! Best bit of this film was discovering, after the event, that it was directed by the woman who played officer Lucy Bates in Hill Street Blues. Yep, that good.
2. X Men
   - what jolly nonsense! Not seen any of the X Men series before and this was unexpectedly better than I was... er... expecting... One of the better comic book movies.
3. Killers From Space
   - A masterfully demented, fever dream of a movie directed by Billy Wilder's idiot brother.
4. Alien Nation: Body and Soul
   - Meh Buddy-Cop SF TV movie.
5. The Beast of Yucca Flats
   - I'm through the bottom! Finally after years of scraping around the bottom of the barrel of movie dross I've broken through and found out what's lurking underneath. This is a masterpiece, a real genuine masterpiece! Shot without sound (and presumably without a script) and then voiced over by the director reading a elliptical bursts of insane, portentous lines - very few of which seem to bear any relationship to the badly framed inaction on the screen (and even when they do they're just bewilderingly weird: "Boys from the city, not yet caught in the whirlwind of progress feed soda-pop to the thirsty pigs.") What does appear on screen is brilliantly encapsulated, far better than I ever could, by this on-line review:

   "We get a five-minute scenes in which a couple of people walk aimlessly and slowly through an ugly, featureless desert for mile after mile, just walking and walking, and we're lulled into a false sense of security...and then BAM! Just when you least expect it, all of the sudden they STOP WALKING AND KIND OF STAND THERE FOR A WHILE."

   That's it. That's the entire movie right there.
   
   
   
   How long y'all want me to stand here, mister Coleman?
   
   How do you pack: defecting Soviet scientists, Russian assassins, an atomic explosion, at least five on screen murders (one of which develops into an implied necrophiliac rape and may well have come from an entirely different movie it made so little sense), cops shooting at innocent fugitives from a light aeroplane, a car chase ending in a shoot out, daring feats of mountain climbing... etcetera into a 54 minute running time - and make it so boring!? It takes a tremendous talent to do that. Francis Coleman was that talent. He directed two other movies. They're now on the list. Oh God, I laughed and laughed. "Push a button; something happens".
6. Thor and the Amazon Women
   - Italian musclemen movies - you gotta love them. This one was shot in winter - you can see the breath misting as they speak for many of the scenes - which must have been very uncomfortable for the actors poncing about in skimpy loincloths but at least the goose-pimples would have stopped them slipping off. Also contains lots of gladiatorixes necroerotically stabbing each other (and themselves) with sharp pointy things in "The Triangle of Death".
7. Unearthly Stranger
   - rather effectively creepy little British SF movie with few characters, no special effects, lots of talk, some passable ideas, and some interesting camera work. All that and Warren Mitchell with a Scottish Accent.
8. Red Zone Cuba
   - (MST3K) I have now watched 2/3rds of Francis Coleman's oeuvre in one week! (Medals! I want medals!)The Beast of Yucca Flats and this. He didn't get any better and he decided to act in this one as well. ('Act' here meaning to stand in front of the camera and light cigarettes.) His co-star was the producer. Dreadful.
9. Space-Thing
   - Brilliant title for what turned out to be a 1968 soft-core porno flick. Though maybe it was a hard-core porno flick in 1968 - we saw pubes - twice! Amazingly enough it had a more coherent plot and better (looking) actors than either of the Coleman movies.
   
   
   
   I don't watch this stuffjust for the tits - honest!.
   
   
10. Thunderpants
    - Funniest thing I've seen for ages that was meant to be. - Meant to be funny I mean.
11. Oasis of the Zombies
    - dreadfully dull French movie which has 'English' students played by French actors dubbed by Americans getting eaten by Nazi Zombies somewhere in North Africa. Worse than it sounds.
12. The Time Travelers
    - delightful little cheapo early sixties American SF quickie that almost worked. (If they had managed to loose the 'comic' it would have been a lot better.) Directed by Ib Melchior who also wrote the odd Journey to the Seventh Planet and the even odder Angry Red Planet.
    
    
    
    Today's gratuitous peachy bum shot.
    
    
    
13. SST -Death Flight
    -(MST3K) 1970s made for TV disaster on a plane movie. Sometimes you have to wonder who wrote this shit. I mean really: disgruntled employee fills America's First Supersonic Jet Airliner's hydraulic system with 'corrosive' detergent (sic) which not only rots all the seals but then, when repairs are attempted, has managed to produce vast quantities of explosive fumes - which explode. Argh! No steering bits! Big hole in side of airyplane! Everyone does panic acting! Luckily the gallant crew (and Doug McClure) work out how to fly the plane without the steery bits - pitch is adjusted by getting the passengers to run up to the back of the plane when they want the nose to go up - and roll is produced by pumping the contents of one wing fuel tank to another. Hurray! Everyone is saved - all they have to do now is patch the drinking and toilet flushing water into the leaking hydraulic system... stop laughing at the back there - this is serious stuff! But what's that hospital like smell? Could it be the dangerous 'biological material' stored in formaldehyde (sic) loaded at the last minute and urgently on it's way to the Pasteur Institute in Paris has sprung a leak? Bugger me it has! Oh no! Everyone is being exposed to the deadly Senegal Flu! A dangerous new mutation of the virus with a death rate of 30% and an incubation period of less than just before the next commercial break! Oh, and there is no known cure. "'ello aeroplane of death, this is Paris air traffic control. Go away! We do not want you here - and we are turning off all the runway lights in case you try one of your sneaky American landings without asking things. By the way, everyone else don't want you neither... Go and crash in the Atlantic or somewhere. Nothing personal." Somehow 'London' is convinced to let the plane land. Just as the testosterone levels in the cockpit (fnaaaar!) couldn't get any higher, Doug suggests they fly to Senegal where the flu came from in the first place on the grounds that they might have the facilities to look after some rich Westerners. ("Look fellahs! Rich Westerners. Let's stop burying the thirty percent of our population that just died and look after them instead.) and not land in London where they might start a pandemic and kill lots of other Westerners. The passengers vote. To Senegal! They almost have just enough fuel... If only they can make it over this last... The plane crashes into a mountain just as Burgess Meredith is diverting bog flushing water into the flappy bits flapping system that meant they might have made it over the mountain. Crash! Everyone who hasn't died of Flu survives. Which is more than I did.
14. Terror in the Midnight Sun
    - More 1950s, out of copyright, SF bilge. This time from Sweden. A 'meteorite' lands in Lapland. Scientist go to investigate. They ski around a lot (mostly in silhouette because it's hard to film people on vast snowfields with a very low sun. If you stand them facing the sun you see the camera's shadow on the ground. If you have them with their backs to the sun you end up with black blobs acting away on a white background - unless you have a shitload of really big lights - which these guys obviously didn't.) Reindeer are killed. An American girl is captured by a big shaggy something.
    
    
    
    Oh Wait - I'm Supposed To Be Terrifying?
    
    
    She screams a lot. She meets three black garbed Aliens who say nothing. She screams a lot. A flaming torch wielding mob (on skis) corner The Thing and set it on fire. She stops screaming and falls sobbing into arms of ineffectual hero. The aliens leave in their spaceship - still without having said anything. The End (in Swedish).
15. Hail the Conquering Hero
    - Preston Sturges.
16. The Muppet Movie
    - Never seen it before and not as good as I was expecting - but thenThe Muppetsnever are. They're always better in the memory. I remember the TV show as being hilarious, required watching at the time, but when I actually watch an episode now (I have them all on tape) I'm always let down.
17. At The Earth's Core
    - second Doug McClure movie of the week. In this one he's an intrepid Victorian explorer who, with professor Peter Cushing, accidentally discovers a Savage Land in the centre of the earth where hypnotic Pterodactyls enslave photogenic noble savages who just happen to speak English. Not a lot of plot but lots of fighting. See Doug fight. Fight Doug fight. Doug fights a dinosaur. Doug fights another dinosaur. Doug fights a fire breathing dinosaur. Doug fights humans. Doug fights 'Hoojah the Sly One'. Doug fights 'Jubal the Ugly One'. Doug gets 'Dia the Big Knockers' all to himself. Doug unite tribes. Tribes kill hypnodactyls. Tribes happy. Doug goes home. The end.
    
    
    
    You are getting sleepy... sleepy...
    I'm not hypnotising you, I'm boring you.
    
    
    The film does contain one line of sheer unadulterated moment of genius when the dottery Peter Cushing - having the time of his life hamming it up - stares a six foot rubber hypnodactyl in the face and defiantly says:
    "You can't Mesmerise me - I'm British!"
18. Doppelgänger (aka Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun)
    - I really enjoyed this. Probably the best thing Jerry Anderson ever did - I know we're starting from a low place here but trust me on this one. Not great, but not bad, not bad at all.
19. Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers: To Live and Die in Starlight Babylon 5: The Lost Tales - Voices in the Dark
    - two made for TV (or in the latter case straight to DVD) pointless, overly-punctuatedly titled (TWO colons?), and crappily disappointing additions to the glory that was Babylon 5 (may it finally rest in pieces. You blew it up, JMS! Get over it!).
20. The BFG
    - the kids liked it.
21. Strictly Ballroom
    - I have a theory that really good movies should make you come out from them moving differently. You should come away from a film responding physically to the world in a way you weren't when you went in. You should come out of an Indiana Jones Errol Flynn type adventure movie with a kind of daring-do swagger, Jackie Chan movie convinced you can jump up the side of a building and then leap onto a passing bus - I come out of Strictly Ballroom dancing.
22. The War in Space
    - After a week off from the crap SF I returned with a bang. You might not remember this, but in 1988 Earth was attacked by green-skinned aliens from their base on Venus. They would have destroyed the world if not for a valiant crew of Japanese Hero types (and a token Westerner) who saved the day by zooming around the Solar System in their super flying submarine underground drilling spaceship thingie, throwing a lot of switches in lovingly detailed close up, and blowing up just about everything in sight - including the planet Venus. Wham! Gone. Oh, and the only female member of the crew managed to get herself captured by a horny Wookiee with a big axe and a leather fetish. God I love this stuff..
    
    
    

I'm upstairs in the office. Downstairs there is the sudden scampering of urgent feet heading into the bathroom. A few moments later I hear:

"Dad!"

I ignore it.

"Daaaad!"

I'm good at this. I ignore it again.

"Daaaaaaaaad!"

I give in.

"What?"

"I'm doing the horriblest poo ever! Get the air freshener..."



.

God! I hate learning new things. Every time I do it I get convinced I have finally gone stupid.

For the last couple of nights I have been wrestling with the record player, the software that slices whatever you play on it into handy track-sized WAV bits, the software that lets me chop off stretches of silence and wipe out the worst of the pops and crackles - and then converts the WAV bits into MP3 bits, and the software that converts those MP3 bits into smaller mp3 bits without loosing too much of the full glory of the stereophonic pap I'm trying to copy. All of these pieces of the chain have a braziilion and three options to choose from (none of which I understand). The results of the process of semi randomised trial and error and a whole evening's swearing and not seeing the blindingly obvious when it is staring me in the face can be enjoyed (if that is the right word) here:
http://cheesybeats.blogspot.com/

I hope it will be a lot easier next time. I hope I actually learned something.

Mwahahaha!

Cracked it! Thanks to Gil's recommendation of Rip Vinyl on yesterday's post I seem to have managed to make my first listenable to copies of LP tracks. Took me most of the night after getting Holly asleep after one of her too-tired overly-operatic, "Nobody Loves me!", prototeenager moments and watching a pretty dire Babylon 5 spin-off movie which (you'd have though I would have learned by now) I had been looking forward to with nerdy fanboy glee ever since Len and Sue bought it for me for my birthday.

To bed.

Let me introduce you to the latest piece of semi-obsolete equipment to hang off our computers here at JunkMonkey mansions:

In addition to all the other gubbins cluttering up the desk we now have a record player! A real honest to god record player, one of those things that makes big round bits of black vinyl spin round at various speeds and give up their juicy secrets*.   So, soon, when I have worked out how to record something I play on it into an MP3 without it sounding like it is being hummed through dented kazoos by drunken meercats - sound engineering being something that is a total mystery to me - I shall bore the world with snippets from my vast collection of crap records (if only to justify their continued presence in this house to my best beloved).

Be Afraid.

*This one does 78s too. My only regret is it doesn't wind up. Somehow I would find it deeply satisfying pandering to my inner steampunk by having some clockwork attached to my loose end of the World Wide Web - Steamcyberpunk?

It's that time of the month again. Every dreadful movie I have watched this month but with fewer stills of girl's bums than last month. Sorry about that - for listing the movies I mean and the lack of pictures of peachy buttocks to make it more bearable.


September

1. Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold (1984)
   - I bought this movie thinking it was something else. I can't remember what the something else might have been now but it wasn't this unholy mixture of slapstick and Spaghetti Western sadism. It's long, it's boring, and hasn't a spark of originality about it.
   I have no idea who the producers thought the target audience for this movie might be but the pitch must have been a doozy:
   "It's a Spaghetti Western Comedy - only, and here's the twist, we have a woman hero and make it look like an old time Saturday morning children's serial to cash in on the Indiana Jones market! How can we loose?"
   Three big targets to hit - and they missed all three. The comedy is feeble - are we really supposed to find the fact that the generalissimo is a teensy bit camp funny? The serial framing device is so clumsily and laboriously done that any humour in it evaporates before it gets going. The whole point about the Saturday serials was that there was a cliffhanger at the end of each episode*, a point that seems to have been totally missed by the writers. The only one of their targets they came close to hitting was the parody/homage of the Spaghetti Western genre - but as that was a genre that was always shamelessly happy about sending itself up it's a very easy target to hit. Give anyone a week in Almeria with a few unshaven actors and they could have come up with this stuff.
   
   *Apart from the last one naturally.
2. Fiend Without A Face
   - In a rural part of Canada populated by people with weirdly variable accents, something is sucking the brains out of the locals who live round an experimental Atomic-Powered US Air Force Radar base - the variable accents came about because this film is a British pot boiler made in Walton on Thames by a poverty row studio who couldn't afford many real actors - though they did manage to scrape together enough money to hire one Jeep and one American car as props thus creating about as convincing an evocation of Canada as sticking a red telephone box in the middle of Times Square and captioning it 'Piccadilly Circus' would convince anyone that New York could double for London. It turns out that what has been sucking the locals brains was a species of 'Mental Vampire' unwittingly bought into being by a crazed old coot professor and the only way to stop them is to blow up the control room (sic) of the military's, already out of control, nuclear power plant. Just goes to show Britain could make grade-A Z movies too.
   
   
   
   
   It goes all the way to Eleven
   
3. Cars
   - The kids loved it but it bored the pants off me. What was the point? Toy Story, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles - just about all the Pixar movies I have seen - have a sustained internal logic that springs from the world they are set in. The Monsters need to gather scream energy in Monsters Inc. and the reversal of that - in the child who escapes into their world is toxic to them - and all that follows from that is delightfully worked out, Buzz Lightyear's realisation that he is indeed a toy, and can't fly is one of the great tragic moments of modern cinema. In Cars we get the tired old story about finding out that what Really Matters In Life is not necessarily what you think it is, dolloped out with animated cars as protagonists. Apart from a few puns and substitutions - tractor tipping instead of cow tipping was the best - nothing much happens that couldn't have happened in a straight movie. The Toy Story movies could only happen in the Toy Story Universe - it made sense to spend all that time and effort to animate it and make it believable. Cars could have happened anywhere - so why bother?
4. The World The Flesh and The Devil
   - loosely based on the The Purple Cloud by P M Shiel, this is one of those films that may well have lost some of its shock value over the years but is still interesting (the ending implies that the last woman in the world isn't going to choose between the two men who have been fighting over her but will in fact sleep with both of them.
   
   
   
   
   
   What would have been even more shocking to audiences in 1959 is the fact that one of the men is black. I doubt if this was shown in many cinemas in Alabama when it was released.) It's a great film on all sorts of levels. The shock value may have dissipated with the years but the issues it deals with haven't.
5. The Missionary
   - slight but amusing.
6. I Married a Monster From Outer Space
   - I have long considered this to be one of the greatest movie titles ever. I've never seen it before and it turns out to be a stupendously dull movie which sent me to sleep three times in one viewing (two of them simultaneously).
7. Ikarie XB1
   - a 1963 Czech SF movie, previously watched in a chopped down American version known as Voyage To The End of The Universe. Another of the many movies which has resonances with, and reckoned by many to have been an influence on, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - though, if you play this futile game long enough it soon becomes possible to prove that Kubrick didn't have a single creative thought during whole of the making of 2001, an absurd notion - which doesn't stop everyone playing it. Ikarie XB1 has more claim than most contenders, ending as it does with the crew of Earth's first interstellar craft looking hopefully toward the future as abstract patterns flow before their eyes and the image of newborn baby fills the screen. (The American version, for some baffling reason, cut the baby and added aerial shots of New York, thus implying the crew were aliens come to Earth). Curiously compelling with some odd choreography in a shipboard party sequence - this is a big spaceship, one of the crew has a baby grand piano in his cabin. And I want the soundtrack.
8. Jason and the Argonauts
   - I loved this as a kid and took every opportunity to watch it that I could get - which were few and far between in the pre VHS, DVD days of my youth. I remember the sequence with the 'Clashing Rocks' holding a special horrible fascination for me. I'm glad I shared it with my kids tonight, they said they enjoyed it but it doesn't half look like ropey old tosh to my jaded adult eyes. Ah well, another memory that should have been left undisturbed.
9. The Notorious Bettie Page
   - fun little bio-pic of the fifties Pin-up girl. I wasn't entirely convinced by the need for the colour sections.
10. Six Degrees of Separation
    - for a movie that hardly stops talking for a minute and rarely leaves the homes of rich urbanites holding glasses of dry white wine, this is hell of an exciting film. Far more so than any number of explosion and stunt ridden bits trash because, unlike most explosion and stunt ridden trash, I had no idea who the good guys were (if there were any) and what was going to happen next - this despite me having seen it at least twice before.
11. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl
    - I think I've finally ODd on Robert Rodriguez's kid's - sorry, 'family' films recently. My kids with their normal hyper-uncriticality loved it.
12. Cry-Baby
    - The Pope of Trash, John Water's rockabilly musical. I love it to bits; how can you not love a movie that has lines like:"You're rehabilitated. Here's three and a half dollars and a clean pair of underpants."?
13. Cosmic Princess
    - Do I count this as a film? It's a TV movie made from splicing together two episodes of that great unintentional comedy hit Space:1999. Why not? It's not as if I'm going to be watching anything more like real film tonight. Favourite lines:
    Hero (Puzzling out why the Moon has just vanished in a overly sustained crappy visual effect): "There's only one answer: they've gone through a Space Warp. They could be billions of miles away."
    Sidekick: "...and we have fuel for less than a million."
    I can't even start to list all the reasons that those lines are so stupid but the implication that spaceships just stop when they run out of fuel had me hooting with laughter - but then I am the sort of twerp that finds that sort of thing endlessly amusing.
14. The Fairy King of Ar
    - Presumably short for 'The Fairy King of Argh, Who Wrote This Shit!'. I would guess one of the dreadful things about being an actor is that you can't ever take your name off your work. Directors can hide behind pseudonyms, producers can blame the director, and everyone else can throw up their hands and blame everyone else for letting them down. The actors however are stuck there up there, on screen for all the world to see, unable to hide from the awfulness that surrounds them. And this movie is awful.
    Most of the blame lies with the direction - not that there appears to have been any, and a script that may well have been, judging from what arrives on the screen, little more than a rough outline, semi-improvised by the actors as they were shooting. The whole thing looks like it was shot in single, unrehearsed takes with no one having bothered to tell the cast and the few background artists what was going on or what they were supposed to be doing.
    In short it looks like an amateur production and I can't begin to guess at the behind the scenes events that left reliably professional jobbing actors like Corbin Bernsen*, Glynis Barber, and Malcolm McDowell so helplessly adrift; I occasionally work with youth drama groups and have seen more conviction from bored High School kids than is on display here. Still, I guess the principals all got a nice holiday in South Africa out of it (a bizarre location choice for a film set on the Isle of Man). I don't suppose anyone involved in this turd will be including any part of it in their show reels.
    Having said all that my hyper-imaginative, six year old, fairy loving daughter was hooked throughout and genuinely terrified during the 'climactic' trapped-in-the-mine sequence, and even my four year old got 'the message'.
    
    *Bernsen also has to suffer the indignity of most incredibly underwritten, non-specific terminal disease in the history of movies since the Production Code of the thirties prevented anyone from mentioning the clap.
15. The Fatal Flying Guillotines
    - 1977 Kung-Fu nonsense in which everyone kicks the bejeesus out of each other upon sight for no apparent reason to the sound of hyperactive Foley artists having fits in a junk yard. I'm used to movies trying to unsettle or dislocate the audience in the opening moments but this movie had a new (to me) trick: an on-screen written prologue simultaneously read aloud on the soundtrack - almost. The back story they were trying to get over was the same but the words coming out the voice-actor's mouth weren't the same as what was up there for us to read. Very disturbing. Like trying to pat your head while rubbing your tummy anticlockwise. Mind you the sequence where an ancient Shoalin Monk disables our fit young hero by giving him a double nipple twist was almost worth the pain of the rest of it.
16. Fugitive Alien
    - (MST3K) My first 'episodes of a Japanese TV show edited together to make a movie' movie for a while. Absence has not made my heart grow fonder. Though I will say one thing for the genre: they're very easy to fall asleep to. Visual sleeping pills. I suspect it's because they are so incoherent and disjointed; they jump from scene to scene in a way that defies any other sort of logic other than that which happens in dreams, that they somehow trick my body into thinking it's already asleep.
    
    
    
    
    
    

You're safe from this nonsense for another four weeks. More bums next time. I promise.

(note to self: Watch more movies with semi-naked women in.)

Holly, when her mouth is not full of food (and quite often then) can talk for Scotland. She never stops. There's a constant stream of questions, news, 'jokes', ideas and opinions spilling out of her.
Tonight at tea she was unusually quite for a few minutes.
"If you had more legs," she eventually said after some thought, " - you'd have more bottoms."

I'm having a big clear out at the moment and one of things that is going is a huge pile of home-recorded videos. Stuff I'm never going to watch again - if I ever watched them in the first place - and as I hate throwing things away that might, at some possible future date, be potentially useful it hurts. I can't just dump them in the bin. I can't. I'm a overly conciousness recycler. I sort everything: cans, bottles, plastic bottles, compost, batteries, charity shop stuff, reusable packaging for eBay... I even sort through the contents of the upstairs waste-paper baskets before it goes out. But old videocasettes? No one wants them. Charity shop wouldn't thank me for them, they have a hard job selling legit prerecorded videos at 50p each so why would they want tatty old reusable tapes?

If I lived in a big city, and not a small village like I do, I would write salacious titles like: Aussie Nympho Nurses Go Down Under 7, Big Booby Babes Do Dagenham, and The story of Q (it's a threequel to The Story of O) on the spines then leave them all in a box at the gate knowing that someone would have them away with childish glee within minutes. But I don't. So I can't.

But it would be interesting to see just who picked them up...

...and I could always leave them outside someone else's gate...

Another day's floor painting over and done with. Just filling the gaps on the floor under where the furniture currently is (and trying to un-stick the furniture from the floor to get at them) left to do. Because the kids have gone to a friends birthday party I managed to get a lot done done in daylight today which means I might get to bed before midnight. Yeeha!

Musical delights this afternoon included Bill and His Pop Guitar, a disc about which I know nothing except that the only copy for sale on the web is 60 US Dollars and it is brilliant in its trashiness: the best version of Eloise committed to vinyl and a reworking of Scarborough Fair that sounds like it came straight off a Spaghetti Western soundtrack.

And an album of 'Secret Agent Themes' played by a bunch of 'Jazz All-Stars' (some of whom actually appear to deserve the soubriquet). The themes in question being a couple of James Bond title songs, the Man From U.N.C.L.E theme, and, when the money to pay for copyrighted material ran out, bits of classical music 'Spy Themed' up including that bit of Borodin that became Stranger in Paradise and, very oddly, The Sabre Dance - maybe I missed it and it's already been done but 'Khachaturian P.I.' sounds like a great name for a TV show.

I've spent the last two nights getting semi-stoned, varnishing the living room floor. A tedious job made bearable by the fumes and by simultaneously working my way through a pile of charity shop LPs I haven't got round to listening to - and may well never listen to again. Merriol and the kids are staying at someone's house overnight while I punge the place up so I can get away with filling the house with crappy music as well as volatile hydrocarbons.

Highlights of my Listening For Pleasure marathon (so far) include Sam Cooke wanabee and one hit wonder Jewel Akens, an LP I only bought because it had a track called The Vegetable Love Song - which turned out to be far less anything than I hoped.

A rather weirdly nice Japanese album about which I know nothing, except it's Japanese, in Stereo, and copyrighted in 1964, of traditional sounding music gently supported by a western sounding string section. It could be high art or the highest camp. The oriental James Last murders favourite TV tunes? I have no idea. I have no way of knowing. I do know I like it.

Waldo De Los Rios subjecting Mozart to various indignities, most of which seem to have consisted of telling the orchestra to play everything like a Ennio Morricone love theme - and then putting Animal, the mad drummer from The Muppet Show, in front of them. But at least I know I have a copy of the music from the Horse of the Year Show if, under some bizarre set of circumstances*, I should ever need it.

So far I have resisted the temptations of Pinky and Perky's Hit Parade - but am conceiving a plan where I listen to nothing but albums with pictures of girls in bikinis on the front cover. I have enough of them.


STOP PRESS: The new highlight of the night was confirming, after an inspired bit of supposition (good stuff paint fumes), that Bosa Nova percussion sounds exactly like Drum and Bass percussion when you play it at 45 rpm.

STOP STOP PRESS: 'Delilah' - in German!

*Suggestions on a postcard please to the usual address.

Another Small Snippet From The Screen-Play of My Life

Daisy is patiently waiting at my side as I finish off a few things on the computer before she can play a game. The last thing I 'have' to do is...


"Daddy?"

"Yes, Daisy?"

"I know what those dots are for..."

"Really?"

"Yes. They're so blind people can read them."

---

Had a letter read out on the Radio today on Radio 4's PM program - it was, as you may expect, a joke. And I managed to get another cartoon done. My sense of humour transplant seems to be working at last. I'm not entirely happy with the cartoon so I may do it again tomorrow; I'm playing with some new buttons and short cuts and I'm not sure I have them tweaked right yet. I'm also trying to get away from spending hours and hours at the things: tweaking components a couple of pixels this way, then a couple of pixels that way, then back again, and then up a bit to see if that makes any difference, and then trying to decide which of the 356 million shades of blue available to me are the funniest to colour it - before deciding that the particular bit I have just spent half an hour getting right is in fact superfluous and deleting it all together.
I'm trying to get back to doing quick drawings not getting involved in the the engineering projects that some of them became.

One of the minor pet peeves in my menagerie is:

The Inverted Rainbow Graphic

The red should be on the outside. It's always on the outside. Red on the inside is just wrong. It's almost as annoyingly wrongly wrong as the wrongly used apostrophes that attack you from everywhere these days - and I came across a cracker in Oban last weekend. How on earth anyone managed to think the word 'brings' needed one is beyond comprehension. At the risk of sounding like the grumpy old man I am destined soon to become I think people should be made to pass a literacy test before being allowed to buy or operate any kind of printer capable of producing anything that is likely to be shoved up in a shop window* - or felt pens sold for writing on those pointy edged Day-Glo cards they use in Everything-For-A-Pound shops, the illiteratti do love their Day-Glo cards - sorry, their Day-Glo card's.

The other day Dai'sy and I were wandering through the village, for no other rea'son than it was almo'st a nice day and we felt like a wander, when we came around a corner and I saw a rainbow over the loch stretching acro's's, so it seemed, from one bank to the other.
"Look," I said pointing lochward, "a rainbow! I'sn't it pretty?"
She looked at it for a moment.
"Ye's," she said, "and it's the right way round too."

I love my kids.





*There should be a law requiring a limit to the number of fonts you can use too.

Tonight I have mainly been amusing myself by watching the (very dull) American cold war science fiction classic I Married a Monster from Outer Space with the sound turned down with the subtitles for the much better 1963 Czechoslovakian SF movie Ikarie XB 1 running underneath it. I didn't intend to this. It was a cock up on my part with the settings of a movie viewer. I'd downloaded the subtitles earlier in the day and had been attempting to get them to work properly - but forgot to turn them off when I started watching I Married a Monster. But it turned out to be oddly interesting as the dialogue on screen quite often matched, if not the mouth movements of the characters then certainly the mood of the moment, or they commented on the action in surreal ways.

This is not original. Stoned students have been playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon while watching the Wizard of Oz for years. And mashup is a well respected art form (well respected by me at least).

After realising how crappily semi-illiterate the subtitles were (words wererun together and homonyms kept razing there ugly heads hear and their), I had a poke about and found they were easily edited in any old text editor. So I tidied a few obvious ones up, saved them and - yep they still worked. So before I sit down to watch Ikarie XB 1 I'll run through and tidy up the rest of them - and resist the temptation to fiddle and make the actors say ridiculous things. The very strong temptation...


[Captain Kirk Mode]

Must...

fight!...

resist!...

A new cartoon over on the Cartoonery place. The first one for weeks, I've been bad. But the house is looking a lot less messy and cleaner these days!

I shouldn't laugh.

Many years ago, after a prolonged period of happy unemployment, the government prodded me with a financially pointed stick and made me a filing clerk with the NHS for a while. I spent my days microfilming the medical records of everyone in Hull who hadn't been to hospital for ten years and shoving the microfiche of people's freshly miniaturised medical records around in very small draws. It was a very dull job only occasionally livened up by the discovery of a real cracker of an odd name among the files: 'Robert Gentleman Sword Small' and 'Tina Salmon' being the only ones I remember after all these years.

Tina Salmon, I don't know who you are, or anything about you and I hope you have had a long, fruitful, and happy life but if you ever read this then I'd just like you to know your name has, from time to time over the last twenty plus years, kept me mildly amused.

But you have been replaced in my affections...

A few weeks ago I was starting to read an article on symmetry in the New Scientist when I discovered that King Harold of Norway had just presented a prize to a noted French mathematician who gloried in the name of - Jacques Tits.

I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't. It's puerile and stupid but the thought that there is someone in the world called 'Jacques Tits' cheers me up no end.

Try this for size: Stand confidently before a full length mirror, imagine yourself dressed in black tie and tux, look suavely into the mirror with come-to-bed eyes, smooth an eyebrow with a dampened finger tip and then, in your best Charles Boyer voice, murmur: "Je m'appel Tits - Jacques Tits."

I know I shouldn't laugh but I do - every time.

I used to be able to draw. It was one of the few things I felt was really any good at. I haven't done a lot over the last few years. The other day I bought a graphics tablet. Woo-hoo! It was a cheap tablet (£30 from Aldi) but even so I thought it would make drawing the cartons (of which you may have noticed a spectacular dearth recently) a lot, lot easier.

I was wrong.

I make my cartoons in an ancient version of Adobe Illustrator and I just can't get the hang of using the tablet with it. The tablet works. There's no problem with the hardware it's just the chair / input-device interface that's the fucking problem. I can't just draw in Illustrator with it. I can use it in Photoshop, no problem - though it was initially a bit odd seeing what I was drawing with my hand down there ---> appearing on a screen up there ^ - but after a few minutes I got it. It is, after all, no different from the relationship between the mouse and the cursor or pointer. (Even Daisy made that jump of dislocation within a couple of hours playing.) It's no problem in Photoshop. I just can't get the bits of my brain to join whatever dots need joining up to let me get it to work in Illustrator.

Most of the problem is, I suspect, that I have taught myself how to use Illustrator by crashing around fining buttons that do interesting things with one click long after I have worked out laborious ways of doing the same thing using every other tool in the box. I don't so much draw my cartoons, as build them by putting layers of shapes on top of one another, reshaping and merging them and doing stuff that is more like the 'techie drawing' I learned at high school than drawing. It's more like collage and CAD than anything else. (I should have bought a book, it would have saved me a lot of heartache. But been a lot less fun) Whatever it is I'm doing, it isn't drawing. So I have now have to unlearn a lot of these laboriously self-taught techniques or invent some other new ones (or buy a book).

Another reason for the lack of cartoons is the unusually heavy load of high quality crap movies that have consumed my waking (and not so waking) hours this month




August

1. Escape To Victory
   -I was tired; it was on the box. I have no excuse.
2. Born Romantic
   - semi-decent Chick Flick.
3. TRON
   - a watching (as if I needed an excuse) prompted by the news that some fuckwits are making a sequel, and the presence of a house-guest who wasn't allowed to see it when he was six and has never had the opportunity since. Act One gets crappier every time I watch it. Acts Two and Three just get better and better.
4. The Incredibles
   - Because I haven't seen Wall-E yet I can still say this is the best thing Pixar have done. This week's Kid's Pizza Night movie.
5. Silver Bears
   - Dull predictable Michael Caine movie that had 'International Co-Production' stamped alll over it. Apparently it was a comedy.
6. Attack of the Puppet People
   - brilliant title; dull film in which a psychotic doll maker shrinkifies people and puts them into glass jars to take out and play with when he's lonely. Very set-bound and not a lot happens. Most of the 'enjoyment' to be got from this was admiring some OK (for the
   budget) model work and some really lousy back projection and spotting the joins. Not a lot of attacking goes on either.
7. The Giant Claw
   - again. I told you I would watch this one again and again. Tonight we have a couple of French Couchsurfers staying with us. They are both, totally unbeknownst to Mrs JM who invited them, afflicted with the same Real Bad Movie bug as I am. I introduced them to The Giant Claw. We laughed like drains in two different languages.
8. The Incredible Melting Man
   - (MST3K) I also introduced them to Mystery Science Theatre 3000. See, travel does broaden the mind; come to Scotland and discover crappy American movies!
9. Robot Monster
   - aka 'Is that the one with the Gorilla Suit wearing a diving helmet?' - apparently the director knew a guy with a Gorilla Suit who wasn't working that week and just bunged a helmet on him. Mercifully short at 62 minutes, this is one of the most incomprehensibly awful SF movies of the period. Really. It makes no sense whatsoever - and then turns out
   to have been a dream all along, which might explain some of it but not why our Gorilla-suited Robot Monster falls in weird, bondage-crazed lust for the last nubile human girl on earth, or where the dinosaurs suddenly come from (answer: from One Million Years BC starring Victor Mature), or why the Destroyer of Mankind (the human population of the earth is down to eight at the startof the action) is hanging around Bronson Canyon with his Intergalactic Communicator Thingy sat on a rickety wooden table alongside the world's first automatic bubble machine (it even gets a pre-title credit). It makes Plan 9 From outer Space look classy. Shot in 4 days for $16,000, it somehow managed to take something like a million dollars at the box office its first year - making it a most, commercially, successful bit of ulra-crap. It must have been great being a cheapo movie maker in the 50s.
10. The 4D Man
    - once more scientists meddle with things 'Man was not meant to know' and once again one of them turns into a rampaging monster who needs to kill to live. But this time it actually nearly worked because of some cracking acting and some halfway decent scripting. (And Lee Merriweather - hubba hubba!) Terrible score though. Randomly placed chunks of loud attacking Crash Jazz does not make for tension, mystery or romance.
11. Spy Kids 2
    - disappointing sequel to an adequate piece of nonsense.
12. Young Einstein
    - again, it always makes me laugh.
13. King Dinosaur
    - (MST3K) A masterful combination of hundreds of feet of stock footage of everything from wildlife footage from several continents, the obligatory V2 taking off, the obligatory Atom Bomb explosions, and about seven thousand four hundred and thirty two individual shots of people flipping switches, inter-cut with four actors walking past the camera a lot, pretending to hide from Very Small Lizards shot in Very Close Up. And one of the best bad lines from a movie in ages:
    

    "I brought the Atomic Bomb, I think this would be a good time to use it."
    

    A delight. Another moment of genius was having one of our scientist explorers peering into a microscope while wearing a giant space helmet.
    The second Bert I Gordon movie of the month (he was also 'responsible' for Attack of the Puppet People) - and the second to use footage reused from 'One Million BC' (it cropped up in Robot Monster as well) - two of either would be enough, but two of both is starting to hurt.
14. Labyrinth
    - better than I remember but I could have done without the bloody songs. Still the kids liked it.
15. Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) -
    Vastly disappointed. This was the first time I have seen the film and I was bewildered by the crappy, hurried and clumsy editing. It robbed the movie of the magic I remember loving in the book. Turns out the version I have is 30+ minutes short of the original Mexican release (but longer than the US version). I'd love to see the full thing but I doubt if it would live up to the book. Even allowing for the crappy hatchet job there were real problems with the direction.
    
    
    
    Mind you, for some strange reason,
    I really liked this scene
    
    
16. The Lost Continent
    - (MST3K) Dreadful 1951 SF yarn in which a revolutionary prototype atomic rocket (ie the same old stock footage of a V2) crashes on a radio-active island populated by dinosaurs and has to be rescued by Cesar Romero and various other chainsmoking military scientist chappies one of whom, the obligatory Brooklynesque comic relief, has a very weirdly disturbing sexual thing for aeroplanes. Very odd. Unfortunately also very dull.
17. Howard The Duck
    - I finally got round to seeing Howard the Duck. It took me thirty years and was not as hideously dreadful an experience as I had feared. Despite some really dire music, John Barry at his most syrupy livened up with a couple of Thomas Dolby songs, an opening act which should have killed any movie stone dead (this film cost a fortune and bombed at the cinemas) and some dreadful, dreadful writing- I ended up almost liking bits of it.
    
    
    
    Bits like this.
    
    
    Mostly it was the performances of a (very young) Tim Robbins, and a (very sexy) Lea Thompson (Who? I hear you saying. Trust me - she was hot!) and a virtuoso display of scene stealing from Jeffrey Jones as an Evil Overlord of the Universe. When those three were on screen there was some real fun being had. For some reason the script got better
    during the second act. The plodding punning of the first act gave way to some genuinely funny gags in the second. I actually laughed. Still, it's not an experience I will ever want to repeat. The strange sexual relationship between Howard (a three foot two Alien Duck and Beverley, tall sexy white girl) was present in the comics but had been toned down for the movie. By toning it down (instead of eliminating it) they made it even more disturbing than I remember it being on the page. In the comics Howard and Beverley were just boyfriend and girlfriend who happened to be different species. In the movie it verged into the pervily bestial.
Journey to the Seventh Planet
- written and directed by the wonderfully named Sid Pink (who also produced the deliriously weird Angry Red Planet which I watched last month) is a strange Danish American co-production vaguely reminiscent of Lem's Solyaris and Ray Bradbury story The Third Expedition from The Martian Chronicles. Pink may not have been the best director in the world but the man was trying to do - above and beyond the run-of-the-mill Hollywood dross of the day.There were ideas in both these movies that deserved better. More time would have helped for one thing; this film was shot in a week. I'm off now to track down some of his other SF movies: Reptilicus (1961) sounds good.
Looking through the IMDB.com reviews of his movies the word that seems to crop up more often than any other is 'odd'. I like odd. Odd is good.
18. Spy Kids 3
    - A rarity; a threquel that was better than its predecessor. The kids liked it too but I suspect they missed the Tron gags.
19. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    
- Wow! Doc Savage on acid. One of those films that three minutes into it you realise you haven't got a clue what's going on and four minutes later you realise you probably still won't have a clue at the end - so you might as well just lay back and enjoy it. A film so stuffed full of oddities (like Rastafarian aliens, The strange presence of watermelons in engineering labs, a whole planet whose entire population is called John) and so many throwaway jokes that I suspect it will stand several repeat viewings - if only for the scene where John Lithgow attaches electrodes to his tongue for no other reason than to cue a flashback.

It's tourist time around here. Loadsa dosh for the Bed and Breakfasts, Hotels, and Tartan Tat shops. Endless frustration and bewilderment for the locals as total strangers drive around at 35 miles an hour in a blind panic at the twistiness of the roads.

This year, for some reason, I seem to have become stuck behind more than my fair share of people huffing their way along on bikes. Brave people. There's no way you'd get me out one one of these roads on a pushbike. Not the way the tourists drive around here (or the locals come to that). But having been a cyclist, and having the wits scared out of me by people in cars just missing my elbow at speed, I do try to give them as much room as possible. At this time of year this quite often means slowing down behind them to a plodding five or six miles an hour till there is an opportunity to safely get past them without colliding head-on with some lunatic busy gawping at the scenery (Do I have time to tell the story about the guy Mike saw driving from Fort William while looking through the viewfinder of his camcorder? Probably not).

So, after a few minutes trudge watching this sweating loon's Lycra clad backside heaving away, the moment comes. The road is straight and clear. Check behind. Indicate. Drop down a gear - fuck! we're in second to start with - okay, welly the accelerator - and get past him. Back onto the right side of the road, up a gear and just round the corner is the bugger's friend; same panniers, same brand of Lycra shorts and just before the really twisty bit with all the solid white lines down the center of the road that mean I can't overtake him safely anyway.

Why don't they stick together so we can get past all of them in one go? Why is one always a hundred yards ahead round the next bend ready to slow up all the traffic again?

So eventually you get past the second one - and you don't know if there's another one lurking just ahead. Cyclists, please just stick together in bunches or, if you can't do that, wear something that tells us how many of you to expect. Like a delivery that comes in many parcels, have a sticker that says "One of Three", or however many, plastered on your offside buttock so we can see what we're in for.

Best Unopened Spams in My Inbox of the day:

J'ai Un Enorme Gulliver Dans Mon Pantalon!

and

Step into a fast-moving industry. Train as a Radiologist.

I've Done It!

I've done it! I have managed to completely miss The Olympics.

I didn't see a second of it on the telly. The biggest, best televised sporting event in the history of everything and I managed to completely avoid it. Yah me! (I want a medal!) Well almost. I did inadvertently hear the odd mention of it on the radio news, mostly on the weirdly named PM's Olympic Desk of Sport (I'm sure PM is being edited by Chris Morris these days) in which we were treated to a series of gaspy interviews with members of 'Team GB' all of whom had microphones shoved up their noses within three seconds of winning some sort of gong*, saying : "I can't believe it, - gasp - I'm really - gasp - proud of - gasp- myself. I knew I could -gasp- win and went out there - gasp - and enjoyed myself - gasp - and gave it my best shot." (Maybe they were given this speech by 'Team GB's' PR people, or maybe the TV people were given a pre-recorded "Gasp! I'm so proud!" speech and just played it like a jingle between races. Who knows? Who cares? I know I don't.)

So I'm glad it's over and we can get down to the serious business of watching all these 'Golden' girls and boys fail spectacularly in anything else they attempt under the prurient and gleeful gaze of the tabloid press. A whole new crop of instant 'heroes' to dissect and denigrate. At this very moment The Sun is warming up its "Olympic Golden Girl In Five In A Bed Romp With Insert Wannabee TV Star's Name Here!" headline.


As for me, I'm in training for four years time when Britain... sorry... England - I think Scotland got the contract for cleaning up after the horses - hosts the damn things. Avoiding the Olympics when it is being held in the same time zone is going to be a bit of a challenge but I've got four years to prepare, I know I'm going to do it, I'm going to go out there - and enjoy myself - and give it my best shot.

Gasp.






*There is some sort of medal for this awarded in secret after the events by the Press corp. "And Gold goes to Martin Hack of Sky News who set a new world record by interviewing Chestless McGinnery** within 2.4 seconds of her winning her race."

**(AKA the New Golden Girl of British Sport and all time British Heroine for the week, winner of the 400m Running a Bit Faster Than a Lot of Other Chestless Women race.)

It Must Be Boring Being a Spoon

Feeling a bit bewildered that it is a whole week since I last blogged. What happens to my time? I'm sure I get my fair share: 24 hours per day, standard issue but it just goes so fast. By 'eck, they don't make time like they used to. When I were a nipper an hour would last you all week and you'd still have some left over for a game of football.

This week Holly has been enjoying herself climbing walls at the wall climbing place in Kinlochleven and making things, and learning how to do other things. She's been away most of the day and had a great time and Daisy and I have played round the house and down at the swing park and generally doing not a lot and somehow the week has vanished - again.

I'll try and take more notes in future.

Things That Make Me Shout at the Radio - Number 56. Weather Forecasters Who Go to Creative Writing Classes.

Merriol and the kids are away down to Sheffield for the day. Back on Sunday night. It's Sue's 60th Birthday. This gives me the whole weekend to do big messy jobs that would be impossible with the kids around. Today I am painting the stairwell which has been unpainted (and un-sanded) since I built the thing six years ago. It's an up a ladder, messy job. Lots of dust, dust-sheets, and planks balanced between ladders so I can stand on them to get up at the awkward corners. Definitely the sort of job you want your kids to 'help' you with. It's also a chance to have the radio on without the kids whining that they're bored with the news and wanting me to play the fucking Tweenies CD again.

At at one of my lunchtimes today (I plan on having at least three teatimes.) I was listening to the Weather when I heard the weather forecaster describe the weather as 'untidy'. "The weather picture today - is 'untidy'."

Untidy? Oh, my God! the weather's untidy!

I would like to think that's what he was going on to say:

"Small bits of shabbiness and clutter will passing over the west coast while the east has an uninterrupted day of moderate neatness. Over the Midlands there will be scattered dainty outbreaks - Orkney will remain natty.

...but I was too busy incoherently shouting at the radio to actually hear what he really said.






I'm worried about the way I talk to the radio when I'm alone.

I'm working. I'm spending my days this week helping Ilona enthuse small (and not so small) children into making up, and performing, a mini play in a stinkingly hot school hall as part of the Highland Council's 'Let's pretend we care about the arts and out of school groups at the same time!' policy.
So all day I try to strike that fine balance of control vs enthusiasm that will encourage the inert blobs in the group to do - anything, while simultaneously trying to keep the lid on the kids who fire off a million ideas a minute (some of them are genuinely funny silly ideas too) without stffling them. Luckily Ilona actually knows what she is doing; I'm glad one of us does. So what with doing that, and house-working, and trying to cobble the million and one stupid ideas from the kids that did get through into some sort of coherent form on the computer for the next day, there hasn't been a lot of time for Blogging - or movie watching.

Which brings me too this month's roster of Italian Space Bimbos, Swedish lesbians, and Gerry Stiller.

July Movie list (Groan! Moan!)
1. Aladdin - Awful Disney tripe. My tolerance for even the smallest amounts of Robin Williams has almost vanished.
2. Mr Wong The Detective -
3. Mysteries of Mr Wong - Starring Boris Karloff. Only in Hollywood - could a tall, well-spoken, English actor with a lisp be cast as a Chinese Detective! Soporific poverty row pot boilers.
4. Zombie Nightmare - (MST3K) All I can really remember of this, less than three weeks later, is that it had Adam West in it. I think the director must have won a couple of days work from him in a game of poker.
5. Last of the Wild Horses - (MST3K)
6. Jack Frost - (MST3K) This year's obligatory Finnish movie.
7. The Hellcats - (MST3K) I sneaked a couple of Mystery Science Theater 3000 disks into the luggage when we went on holiday.
8. The Queen of Outer Space - This has long been on my Must Watch List (it's Zsa Zsa Gabor's only starring role!) and I wasn't disappointed. Total full Technicolor, cardboard pants from end to end - though weirdly deja-vu inducing. I have never seen this film before but knew what was going to happen every single frame. This is possibly because this movie, even more than the usual for cheap SF movies of the period, was assembled from bits left over from other, better films. The costumes were left over from Forbidden Planet, the script was Cat-Women of the Moon (again) and a lot of the sets, special effects shots and the obligatory giant spider (a staple part of any late 50s space adventure) were from World Without End - which I only watched last month.
9. War of the Satellites - another quality product from Roger Corman. At least it was short: 66 minutes of low-grade tosh.
10. Flatliners - for years, in my head, I have managed to confuse this with Lifeforce (AKA Space Vampires) and was disappointed last night to find I bought the wrong movie. Not terrible and it was fun watching a young Oliver Platt working out his moves.
11. Flushed Away - Very funny - and the kids liked it too.
12. Angry Red Planet - The first expedition to Mars encounters a very weird post-production effect called 'Cinemagic'. A process invented by a man who went on to become a story editor on the Scooby-Do show a process which, as far as I can tell (after an intensive three minutes on Google), was never used again. Cinemagic, which was expensive and complicated, gave the entire screen a deep red tint with cartoony dark lines around our actors, sets, and props, and strange, luminous glows in areas of shadow. It was all very odd and if the script had been at all competent would have made for a good, eerie little movie. As it was what we got was a bad, almost eerie movie with the usual copious amounts of stock footage* of military stuff, ranks of scientists doing nothing but tell each other things they want the audience to hear, and the oddest 1950s giant movie spider ever filmed: '40 foot tall', with the face of a bat, the tail of a rat, and huge lobster claws. But even that was not as weird as the main monster of the movie - a giant amphibious amoeba with eyes that rotated like radar antennae. Odd. Very odd.

*Even the trailer is stuffed with it!
13. Zoolander - A rare thing: a film actually improved by having commercial breaks in it.
14. The Independent - Bit of a a Stiller family double bill tonight. Gerry Stiller and Anne Meara and their son Ben Stiller appearing in both. And both movies also having impressive rosters of people appearing as 'Themselves'. Though nothing in either movie was quite as impressive as these six - three!

What Planet is This? (Oh My God, It's Earth!)

15. The Wizard of Oz - Watched with the kids. Friday night is Pizza and Movie night. It's been many many years since I watched this but what a great film. The story maybe simple and childish but I sat there for the whole thing just blown away by the set design and costumes.
16. Star Crash - See previous waffle.
17. Moontrap - years ago, before they deemed them obsolete, Blockbusters had this big bin of 'Pre-Viewed' Videotapes at one pound fifty each or three for three pounds. I used to buy a lot of never to be released on DVD movies from this bin; stuff that went straight to video and was destined to stay there. The best bit of the deal was that Blockbuster would buy videos to shove in this bin for 50p each. Any videos. So I got into the habit of buying, watching and returning them. It worked out a cheap way of renting movies I would never otherwise get to see. Sometimes I would buy tapes from charity shops, flog them to blockbuster and make a profit. I didn't keep a tally but I probably came out financially carbon neutral. One of the films I remember getting and flogging back to them was Moontrap starring Walter 'I'm not Chekov from Star Trek' Koenig. Today I found it (quite possibly the same tape) in a charity shop for 50p. I bought it. It's still shit.
18. Silent Running - I was slightly disappointed (though not surprised) to find the DVD didn't have an option to watch this film without the hideous Joan Baez songs that batter you round the earballs in what otherwise is a small, but wonderfully made bit of SF moviedom.
19. Xanadu - Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly and some bloke who never made it big enough to get his name on the DVD cover* in a WTFkly awful movie that, after an hour something (boredom?) made me click the 'Display' button on the DVD remote - only to find that I had only been watching it for a mere twenty minutes. Towards the end of the movie I had the 'Time Remaining' up in the left hand corner of the screen. Occasionally I would look up at it and think: 'There's no way this can go on for another twenty, eleven, eight (or whatever) minutes!' But it did. Time was going very slowly in my living room this evening. Not bad enough to be good. Just boring.
*His later IMDB credits include: Diagnosis Murder and Murder She Wrote.
20. Fucking Åmål - aka Show Me Love - low budget teen lesbian movie. A sort of Gay, Swedish Gregory's Girl but with fewer laughs. Not great, but gently inspiring.
21. Spy Kids - I like Spy Kids, I think it's fun, and so did the girls as we pigged out on pizza and flopped on the sofa.

After weeks of masterful inactivity (most of it spent watching dreadful Italian SF movies) I have finally got my finger out and done a new cartoon: Hurrah! Don't all rush over to see it at once; the web will get heavy on one side and fall over.

So, back to the thing I'm really interested in at the moment: Bad 1970s Italian SF movies with scantily clad, large-breasted women running around in leather bikinis. I really can't understand why these movies aren't more highly regarded. What's not to like? Take last night's magnum opus ferristance:

Star Crash

Star Crash is a stunning movie (as in the thing they do to cows just before they shoot them). It's a 1978 Italian, jump on the Star Wars band-wagon, entry which has Caroline Munro in a variety of leather bikinis and thigh-high boots, a police robot that looks like a walking dildo, no discernible plot - and so much more: chiefly David Hasselhoff being spectacularly wooden as 'Prince Simon', and Christopher Plummer as his silver caped father, the Emperor of the Known Universe, delivering his lines - Two words - At a - Time. Because - That's the - Way everyone - Talks in - Italian movies - Even if - They are - Talking in - Their own - Language, that or he was doing his William Shatner impression*: You could almost hear his thought processes as he got to grips with the part (probably in the taxi on the way to the studio) "Science Fiction is it? Right, I'll play it like that Captain Kirk fellow. That's what Science Fiction Acting is all about."

What the movie was really all about...**

I think I am glad to say I had no idea what the hell was going on at all. I suspect I missed some of the finer plot points because I was laughing so much (usually at the direction and the dialogue - though some of the special effects are outrageously funny at times). I don't know why I had no idea what was going on in the film; I had no excuse, all the characters did was tell each other what they were doing or just about to do:

"We must go to the Planet of Certain Doom! Calculate a course allowing for solar driftage!"

"I am calculating a course for the Planet of Certain Doom and have entered it into the ship's computer brain. We we'll be at the planet in twenty seven point thirty-twoty seconds of standard Earth time."

"Look! (Points at view screen - I gave up counting the number of times in this movie people pointed at viewscreens and said "LOOK!") We have arrived at the Planet of Certain Doom.".

"Good. We'll park in that canyon over there."

The trouble was no one ever explained WHY they were going to the fucking Planet of Certain Doom in the first place. The whole script boiled down to a seemingly endless repetition of: "Let's go over there and get attacked!" Biff! Bash! Whallop! Help! Whallop! "Aha! You arrived from nowhere just in the nick of time to rescue us! Hurrah! Let's go over there and get attacked." Biff! Bash! Whallop! etc. (But in Italian. Maybe it made more sense in Italian. I doubt it.)

Towards the end of the film, with our central characters acting as bait in the evil count's fiendish trap, one character (who has totally and mysteriously and inexplicably developed the powers to see into the future and telepathically control any machines he comes across - apart from badly animated killer robots) seems to know what is going on because he starts waffling on about 'destiny' a lot. He tells his two companions to be patient as he will explain everything very soon - then almost immediately gets himself severely killed and evaporates! without explaining anything.
At this point the Emperor of the entire Universe, and for all we know a few other places, arrives, walking into the trap as the evil counts hoped he would:

Prince Simon:
Father! We must leave at once.

Stella Star:
Forty-eight seconds left till the explosion. We've got to get out of here.

Prince Simon:
It's true father the count has mined the planet with nuclear charges - we're all about to die!

Emperor:
You know something my boy, I wouldn't be Emperor if I didn't have some powers at my command... (He steps forward slowly and lets his cape settle. He addresses the empty air as if playing Mark Anthony addressing his army.) Imperial Battle Ship! Halt!... The Flow of Time!

Green ray shoots out of golden spaceship hovering off to the right of the planet - and they all escape.

I'm not sure what happened next I was laughing too much but pretty soon Imperial storm-troopers are being fired in golden torpedoes through the huge Gothic windows of the count's battle cruiser (That's what they were there for!) and our heroine gets at least three more costume changes (at least one of them apparently whilst wearing a space suit) before the end of the film. I shall be watching this one again and again.

* As my mate Mike has pointed out both Shatner and Plummer are Canadian, so maybe it's a Canadian SF acting thing. They went to the same class. Somewhere in Manitoba there's an acting teacher - Who talks - Just like - This.
**Though I mainly watch this kind of movie for the explosions - honest!

Verb of the Day

Holly:
Daddy, what do ninjas do?

Me:
They ninj things.

We spent a short while ninjing things - then they played hairdressers, though Daisy did like the idea of Ninja hairdressers who gave people haircuts without them noticing.

Further, Week-old Holiday Ramblings 3 - Strangers on a Tram

Wednesday:

We spent today wandering around Sheffield with four semi-naked children. (That's the equivalent of two full clothed children and two totally naked ones). We had gone in to meet up with Gaenor, Merriol's sister, and her family. The second stop on our shortened itinerary was the funky fountains at the Peace Gardens. The fountains there are set into a very well drained, shallow, bowl-like depression in the square. They are the most walkable-into fountains in the world; it's just pavement with water shooting up out of it.
The kids wanted to play - "Just round the edge!". We managed to get their shoes and socks off before they dived in but within minutes both sets of kids: Holly and Daisy, Thomas and Jacob were drenched to the skin. We did manage to get Daisy's dungarees off her before they were too wet, and Holly's jumper but otherwise they were fully clothed. They had a great time and within minutes had gone from splashing around the edges to standing, sitting and lying on the individual water jets.

And we had nothing to dry them with.

Then I had the only creative thought I've had all week and went into a charity shop over the road and bought some towels at 50p each. According to the women behind the counter they sell a lot of towels in that shop.

Later were coming back from town on the tram. Holly was keeping up her usual non-stop stream of impossible questions - What's this? what's that? why don't? etc.
Sitting across the aisle in the chairs opposite a middle aged-man watched us with barely disguised amusement. The tram slowed into a stop and he got up to disembark. As the doors opened he asked Holly: "Why don't you ask your Dad some hard ones, they've all been easy questions so far."

Without blinking Holly answered: "My Dad isn't that clever."

Next time, she can go buy the sodding towels.

Further, Week-old Holiday Ramblings 2

Sunday:

Another lazy day. (I could get used to this.) About the most energetic thing I did today was visit to the only charity shop I have ever encountered that opens on a Sunday. Bliss! LPs! Boxes and boxes of LPs - all 10p each! I was very restrained; I only bought a dozen - which (dammit!) I will have to wait till I get back home to listen to. The anticipation is not exactly killing me but it is very enjoyable.

While I was riffling through the boxes I had one of those wonderful 'OMG! I hope the LP in this sleeve is the LP that should be in the sleeve....!" moments followed immediately by a "...and I hope it's at least halfway playable...!" moment. I love moments like that. It makes up for wading through all the boxes which contain nothing but the collected albums of Jim Reeves, Peters and Lee, and copies of Pickwick Records Presents Highlights from The Best Loved Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas. I hate boxes like those. They're so dull, a real slog to wade through. It's hard work getting excited over a Geoff Love Orchestra Plays Great Movie Themes LP* which, quite often, is the most interesting thing you'll find in them.

It's worth it though for the OMG! moments. Sometimes you find interesting looking LPs only to suffer the instant disappointment of finding the sleeve is either empty - Fuck! - or contains a completely different record - doublefuck! (you then have to go back through the whole box trying to find the cover for THAT record - in the always vain hope that the two have been swapped), or the correct record is there, but looks like it has been used to test Black and Decker power tools on. Oh, Triplefuck with spinkles! - this last one is the worst because at least with the other two there is a vague chance that someone, somewhere is enjoying the sounds of Elvis' greatest hits played on the Gamalan, or 'The Trorchy Male Voice Choir sings The Bee Gees', or whatever - but with the record that has been reduced to an unplayable circular mat of scratch, no one is ever going to listen to that particular disc ever again. And this stuff needs listening to; it's part of our heritage! (admittedly a particularly painful and never fashionable part) but it needs to be nurtured, reevaluated and preserved. Why? For the same reason that we should maintain biodiversity. We don't know what undiscovered usefulnesses there are out there in the Rain Forests, who knows what future generations will consider musical masterpieces? I mean Vivaldi wasn't played for several centuries, dismissed as he was by received wisdom as being a near worthless second-rater. Received wisdom was wrong about him, it may (possibly) be wrong about The Barron Knights, James Last, or Daniel O'Donnell. Who knows?

Today's strike of discarded vinyl wasn't exactly a Klondike of future Vivaldis but was a good seam. I'll not bore you with all my purchases but they did include: an album of Miklos Roska conducting some of his movie themes. Roska was a movie music genius responsible for scoring all sorts of great movies but I mainly bought it because the first track on the album is called:

'The Love Theme From Sodom and Gomorrah'

I remember seeing Sodom and Gomorrah once. It was one of those sword and sandal Biblical epics that used to crop up on Sunday afternoons on BBC2 when Wimbledon or the cricket got rained off. I remember nothing about it at all apart from one gloriously wonderful, all time brilliant, Hall of Fame, bad movie moment. As I recall it, our hero type (possibly a young John Derrick) is leading his bunch of Gomorrahn** foot soldiers on a daring raid behind enemy lines. At one point he turns and cautions them to extra vigilance with the immortal line:

"Be careful - and watch out for Sodomite patrols."

So, there I was, working my way through a far more interesting than usual pile of dreck, selecting and making a neat pile of all the early Herb Alperts and late 60s Spanish pop music LPs when I had my moment of riffling joy. I held in my hand a battered sleeve emblazoned with the words: 'Toddlers Au Go-Go, Nursery Rhymes Played with the Teen Rhythms of Today'. Paydirt! Could this be it? - Genuine shit? ***

For a moment I was Schliemann at Troy, I was Cortez gazing at the Pacific, I was Madame Curie holding the first vial of Radium. I slid the disc out from the sleeve - it looked playable! - no great cracks or scratc\hes. The label? Did it? - it did! - it matched the sleeve! I breathed again. I had done it! I had discovered a brand new isotope of crap!

And it's a whole week till I can play it and find out what I have got.

And Merriol wants the car decontaminated when we get back.











* Especially when you already own a copy.
** Can this possibly be right?
*** The bizarre 'Au' in the title was enough for me.

Further, Week-old Holiday Ramblings 1

Saturday: a day's lazy slobbing about at Len and Sue's after spending the night in a sleeping bag on their living room floor; we started out sleeping on a camping mattress but it deflated during the night. I half woke in the early hours incredably uncomfortable and convinced Merriol had shoved me off the mattress and onto the floor, so I sort of shoved back, and found that the floor just kept on going, before falling asleep again. I don't think either of us had a great night.

Tonight we are at the B & B we will be staying at for the next few nights. Big old stone farmhouse with some of the scariest wiring: the TV in our room is plugged into a socket which is, in turn, plugged into another socket via a length of 1.5mm core lighting cable, the flex for my bedside light just disappears into the wall - or possibly through the floor, I haven't peeled back the carpet to find out - though I am tempted.
The place is full of really nice antique furniture, the obligatory tea making facilities - and no coasters. Soon after getting into the room Merriol made me a cuppa and I spent three minutes wandering around the bedroom trying to work out how to safely put it down without leaving a ring on any of the posh wood. Luckily I spotted a shelf of Country Lifes, and chinsy interior decorating porn, and posh celebrity mags. I finally found a good use for a copy of Hello.

The kids are in the room next door with a big single bed each. Holly was delighted to find they had a television in the room and in the space of a few moments went from happy delighted six year old: "I've got a telly in my room! I got a telly in my room!" to her horribly accurate grumpy teenager impression when I pointed out there were only five channels - none of which were likely to be The Cartoon Network, Cebeebies, or Nickleodeon.

So we ended up watching the ITV News together.

Only five channels? When I were a lad...

[long pointless ramble about there only being two televion channels, which only came on in the afternoons and evenings - and were in black and white excised here].

The True and Thrilling Adventures of Liam on Holiday With His Family - Copiously Illlustrated With Full Colour Pictures of the Author's Own Devising

2008 holidays. - so far (the 'Copious Illustrations' will be added later.)

Friday:

We're staying for the week in a village in the North of Yorkshlandshire. We've rented a minute (the whole footprint of the building is smaller than our kitchen) self-catering cottage built in the early part of the 18th century and recently refurbished in a style that can only be described as Early 21st Century Tat. MDF Fireplace, squarish plates, black wraughtish iron curtain poles, and some of the most amateur woodworking I have seen for a while; some of it has actually made me laugh. I would estimate that the rent we have paid on this place for the week has paid for most of the fixtures and fittings - and if the owners' have any sort of B&Q loyalty card I guess they must in profit. We're only here for the week. I think I can cope - unless many more things fall off the wall due to inadequate fixings. Maybe next year they could afford a toilet roll holder.

We passed a supermarket on the way into the village and shortly after we arrived I went there to buy some milk. Maybe it's a product of my gentle lifestyle and my living in an even tinyer tiny village in the middle of nowhere but I didn't realise they actually posted ASBO notices up in public. At the supermarket checkout there was a board with all the usual community notices pinned to it, including a full colour A3 poster (with photo) informing the world that: 'Stig (aka 'Stig') McMoron had been banned from the following streets (shaded area on map) and that between the hours of...' etc. etc.
Next to it, slightly to the right of Stig's Neanderthal mugshot, was another poster pointing out that having guns and shooting things is against the law. Oh Happy holidays.

---

Days was, when you packed up for the summer hols, you packed some clothes, a good thick book (usually with a swastika or the words 'Jilly Cooper' on the front cover), and your bucket and spade. Packing for this trip (or rather watching Merriol pack) I was struck by the vast amounts of electronics we seemed to need to take with us - to wit:

2 Mobile phones
1 MP3 Player
2 MP4 players
1 Little radio transmitter thing that plugs into the MP3 Player, the MP4 players, and one of the phones which allows you to play your music without the hassle of taking CDs out of their cases or rewiring the car.
1 Juicebox (Holly's weird little toy MP3 / video player)
3 Digital Cameras (Merriol's and the kids' - this not including the cameras on the phones.)
2 Gameboys (Merriol's and the kids')
1 Portable DVD player
1 Laptop
All the cables, adapters, chargers, USB sticks etc. neeeded to plug all these slighty obsolete electronic devices into each other, the car, or ourselves*.

I also bought a good thick book No swastikas or hanky panky in the home counties but 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy' by Laurence Sterne, a book I have never finished starting several times over the years. This time I intend to get a good way into it before the inevitable charity shop purchases start whining for my attention.

I also brought a crappy SF novel and a frothy piece of chick lit called 'Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging' just in case I don't.


*Headphones

---

Saturday:

"I want to go to a museum, I'm not bothered what kind; I just want to go to a museum."

Port Mulgrove: A path down a sloping cliffside (I know what I mean) between high bracken, and gorse, and the usual mixture of wayside flowering British wild plants I should know the names of but don't. Half way down the sometimes steep decent, Holly found half a slow-worm in the middle of the path. The back half. It was still moving. We had obviously interupted something's lunch. The walk down to the beach was like every childhood summer holiday memory I have rolled up into one. I had deja-vu all the way down to sea level. The summer holidays I remember were taken in Cornwall and we're in North Yorks, diagonally the other side of England, but I guess clifftop paths are pretty much the same where ever you go. No midges. The beach when we got to it was initially a bit of a diappointment: a few tin shacks on a beach of industrial rubbish from an ancient ironstone mine - the bricked-up mouth of which, half overgrown with generic undergrowth, was still visible in the cliff face. An internet aquantance had recomended it as a place to take the kids fossil hunting. We wandered around - the kids were happy, it was a beach after all, even if it did have more that the usual number of bulldozers sitting on it - and after a while picking up interesting pebbles, and then discarding them a few minutes later when an even better looking pebble presented itself, I found a rock with some lumps sticking out of it. Fossils! Look kids! Vague lumps that could be fossils! A few moment later Merriol turned up half an ammonite in a freshly cracked rock that still shimmered with nacre. XtyX million year old Mother of Pearl. After that, we had our eye in and every pebble and piece of shale had flattened critters in them. It was great fun.

Whitby: It's ages since I've been to Whitby - 20 years maybe? I was warned the place would be full of Goths which makes me regret not having packed my black kilt but I was sadly disappointed - our fault for arriving on a hot Saturday afternoon - the place wasn't full of weird and wonderfully dressed blackhaired teens* but heaving with the usual fat, sweaty, tattooed, and doddering British daytrippers. Just like us. After a cafe lunch Holly announced she wanted to: "Go to a museum, I'm not bothered what kind; I just want to go to a museum." So we found her the Whitby Museum. And it's BRILIIANT. A small, privatly-owned treasure stuffed with glass cases stuffed with - things (many of them stuffed). All sorts of things. Fossils, Roman pottery, stuffed birds, unstuffed birds, eighteenth century shoes, Victorian school books, Georgian Dolls house... everything, all in one room and all wonderfully labled in a variety of styles and degrees of detail. Not 'interpreted' - labelled, names and dates, and then who presented whatever it is to the museum, in ancient handwiting, faded typing, and modern office printing. The labels themselves tell you more about the history of the museum than any carefully curated display could. It is a wonderful place. It's what museums should be: eclectic, interesting, varied, fascinating, and serendipidous. How can you not love a place that has a mummified human hand on display next to a 1970s Teddy Bear? - not because they were juxtaposed as some post-modernistic cultural commentary, but because the Whitby Hand of Glory (found in an attic) is displayed in a box next to the case with museum's latest aquisitions, which happen, this week, to include a 1970s givaway advertising sloganized Teddy. It's everything the Kelvin Hall used to be before it got fucked over and modernised. On the way out I praised the place to the staff at the entrance. Apparently most of the people who comment tell them not to touch a thing and mess it up. I am not alone.

Daisy and Holly loved it too. Darting from one case to the next, noses pressed against glass: "What's this, Daddy? What's that? Mummy, come and look at this? Oooooh! can we have one of them?" Museum curaters of the world take note, you don't need to fill your building with flashy gimmicks and interactivness. Just stuff them full of wonders and let us explore.


* Goths must be, to my mind, a vast improvement on the vast numbers of singing, hairy, Real Ale Drinkers and Morris Dancing teams that I remember from one of my previous visits. One of the scariest things I think I have ever heard happened in Whitby. It was during the Annual Folk Festival - I have no memory of why I was there, though drugs may well have played a part in the proceedings - I remember sitting having a fish and chip lunch when a whole procession of Northern English Morris Dancing teams went by, most of them seemingly made up of vast, rectangular women in huge, steel tipped clogs. As they reached the cafe, they all stopped in the middle of the road and started prancing about doing energetic folky stuff, leaping about in wooden shoes on narrow cobbled streets, whacking each other with sticks. It was deafening. I think there were accordians involved too.

---

Monday:

Fewer fat people in Whitby today but by Christ, aren't there a lot of steps in East Yorkshire? Getting from anywhere to anywhere in a town around here seems to involve plodding up endless stone staircases built into hillsides. The most famous set of steps I would guess being the 199 that lead up to the Abbey - except they aren't the Abbey Steps at all, they are I found out today, the steps up to the wonderfully weird St. bMary's. The Abbey just happens to be behind it.

St Mary's is a working church and has been for a very long time. It's a building that looks like it has been partially rebuilt several times. It's had windows hacked into it, while other have been bricked up, it's had extensions added - and demolished, had extensions added to previous extensions (sometimes on top of them). The roof is nowhere near as tall as the original or, at least, a previous one was. (If the east gable end and the lines where the old roof used to sit against tower are anything to by.) It is a building that has, for several centuries at least, been used, abused, remade, attacked, demolished, restored, neglected and endlessly remodled with whatever came to hand by whoever was in charge in the prevailing style of the time. It is, in short, one of the most gloriously unplanned buildings I have seen for a long time, far more interesting than the Abbey. That's one of the things I appreciate about the places we have visited over the last few days. The old towns (ie the touristy bits) of places like Whitby, Staithes, and Robin Hood's Bay were all built in the days before Planners and Planning Laws and Building Regulations and Health and Safety conciderations. They were built by the people who lived and worked in them for their own particular needs. They weren't built to meet some national plan and didn't have to conform to any pan-European minimum requirements. They are very real human environments. Probably absolute Hell to live in at the time. I don't think I could have done it. For one thing I like having a sewage system that doesn't end at my property's boundry, and the thought of having 300 of my close reletives within spitting distance makes me feel positvly ill - but looking at these tightly packed, individualistic buildings all shoed-horned higgledy piggeldy, one on top of another and then, as we drive away, at the well-spaced, des res, and instantly boring monocultures of 'housing developments' around the outsides of these towns, I can't help thinking something has gone seriously wrong with the way we live these days, which is not an original thought, or, indeed, an uncommon one.

---

Tuesday:

The morning was spent being the only four people on a guided tour of The Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum in the village of Skinningrove, which had the kids (and us) enthralled for an hour. The staff were great. Very friendly helpful and genuinely interesting. Holly was especially chuffed when she got to light the fuse for the explosive charge that blew a new section of rock (a neat piece of theatre which involved lighting the fuse, then retiring to the 'safety' of the Deputee's hut with the sound of a large explosion played over hidden speakers. The Guide then left us for a moment to 'make sure everything was safe' and, while out of our sight, whipped away a false wall to reveal a 'newly blasted' pile of ore. Smoke and convincing gunpowder smells came from somewhere too. Holly is convinced she 'exploded a mine' and has a wee certificate to prove it.
Lunch was had at the delightful Staithes Tea Shop. Which got our custom purely because it was the first place we came to with two hungry and slightly fractious kids on our hands. Like many things over the last few days it reminded me so much of places I remember from my childhood summers. It's a small, cosy little place with great (genuinely) homemade cakes, relays of locals popping in for tea and a chat and keeping up a never-ending conversation and friendly helpful people running it. The kids were incredibly impressed that the one toilet had flowery wallpaper and purple curtains.

Tristram Shandy is turning out to be a Good Read. I loose the thread from time to time. My classical education being somewhat non existant I don't get half of the allusions and references I notice, let alone all the ones I don't even see because I don't recognise them as being references or allusions, but there is enough slapstick and knob jokes to make me laugh out loud and keep turning the pages. I am, so far, managing to ignore the siren calls of all the books I have bought over the last few days. I don't know how I aquire so many books in so short a time. One of my few genuine talents is the ability to find second hands books for sale in the middle of nowhere*.

Wednesday:

...as was proved by our visit to Saltburn today. We'd promised the kids a playing on the sand, buckets and spades, seaside day and, more by luck than any kind of concidered judgement, ended up at the huge sandy expance of Saltburn by the Sea while the tide was out. For the past few days we have been arriving at seaside places at full tide, leaving the kids disappointedl, staring at dead things bobbing about and sluggishly slopping against the bottom of cobbled slipways. Look kids - the sea!
Today we got it right: sun, sand, water all the way over there on the horizon, and a pier to boot. We did the whole British seaside thing but without any of the tons of kit (folding chairs, windbreaks, towels, Thermos flasks full of tepid tea etc. etc. that people usually take). The kids were soon covered in factor 60 sunblock - I think it works by being so tacky that a thick layer of sand sticks to them forming an opaque carapace - and spent the next couple of hours making a whole village for an imaginary ladybird called 'Tulip' (including both primary and secondary schools, and two swimming pools).
After a while I was dispatched/volenteered/ran away, up the usual hillside of a million and one stone steps, to buy some sandwhiches for lunch. The first shop I came to was... a second-hand bookshop, where I squandered a whole pound on a collection of Eric Frank Russell stories I had never heard of before. Merriol was not impressed - or suprised.

*In fishing villages, RNLI lifeboat stations are always a good bet.

---

Thursday:

Somewhere along the way over the last few years I, or (more likely) Merriol and the kids have developed some element of a Scotttish accent. Twice over the past few days people have identified us as coming from north of the border before asking us where exactly we come from. To be entirely accurate it's three, but the third person recognised our 'Save the Belford' car sticker whan we parked next to her in the middle of nowhere so doesn't count.

To be honest after only a week away I'm getting homesick. It's nice here, Merriol was right we did need a holiday, and she and the the kids seem to be having a good time but I'm getting fed up with the endless procession of shaven headed men wearing white Umbro England shirts and dark blue tracky botttoms with three stripes down the side. Everywhere you look. It's like a national costume. "For Harry, England, and Saint Chav!" - Maybe it's only this area but that's all men under the age of forty seem to wear. (Mind you we are a periliously close to Middlesborough, so that might explain it). To complete the picture most of them accesorise with white trainers, tattoos, and an asthmatic, short-legged, fighting dog on a lead.

---

Friday:

Things not to do while on holiday, number 137:

Start to fill your car with unleaded petrol - when it's got a deisel engine.

This act of stupidity came at the end of a long, sticky, sweaty day which involved me doing a lot of driving, the kids getting hot, bored, but suprisingly unwhiney, and Merriol getting fed up with me for asking her directions at inconvenient moments. Immediately after putting a quarter of a tank of the wrong sort of fuel in the car, then filling it up to the top with the right sort of fuel (hoping I had dilluted the wrong sort enough for the engine not to blown up, seize up, or whatever five miles down the road) we drove out to rejoin the motorway only to find the recovery vehicles I had been dimly aware of as we came off the motorway were in fact recovering some sort of fallen over tanker and before we knwe it we were diverted back the way we had come. "Oh great!" I said, "We're on our way back to Hull!" Holly burst into tears. That's the sort of reaction I have about the place and I lived there for 10 years. She'd only been there for the afternoon.

Highlight of the day was The Deep, a huge multi-storey aquarium located in Hull. As I said, I used to live in Hull, it's not a place I ever really wanted to go back to, but it was half way between where we were and where we were going, and I thought the kids would enjoy looking at the fish. Just after we started our walk through what is indeed a spectacular place, Merriol's camera started rattling - and stopped taking pictures.

In the obligatory shop on the way out I spotted an expensive looking, lavishly illustrated book: A Portrait of Hull. I picked it up and flipped through it wondering what a photographic journey round what I remember being, for the most part, a godforsaken dump would look like. The third picture was of a car park.

The Internet! Wonderful thing! I've missed it over the last week.
The True and Thrilling Adventures of Liam on Holiday With His Family - Copiously Illlustrated With Full Colour Pictures of the Author's Own Devising will be published shortly but for the moment I have to go through and delete the million and one French penis extension adverts that have clogged up my inbox over the last few days.

Why anyone thinks I have a French penis is beyond me, but there we go.