Eurovision

Who I voted for:



and:



How could I not vote for Dita Von Tees strutting her stuff in rubber and three semi-naked Roman centurions in silver Spandex.

As usual the British song was dreadful and someone I didn't vote for won.

(How both these songs came to be number 17 in the running order is something that has me baffled.)

I don't normally do the viral thing but...

It had to happen.

We took Eben to hospital yesterday.  It was nothing important but when he was born a routine check wasn't done - or if it was done the results weren't written down - so yesterday we had to drive all the way across the country to spend five minutes in a dark room with a consultant Radiographer to learn our son has an 'Unremarkable' bladder.

We took the opportunity of being (almost) alone to do some grown-up shopping. My parents had the girls for the day.  So free from the constant attention grabbing of my daughters, I'm standing in Waterstone's holding Eben with one hand, and flipping through some comic books graphic novels with the other when another customer, pushing a baby in a pram, spots my darling boy.  She goes all goey and we engage in the ritual exchanges that all new parents do so well:

Her:
Isn'thelovelyHowoldishe?

Me:
Fourandahalfweeks. 

Her:
Ohhe'ssolittle!

Me:
Don'tlethismotherhearyousaythat.Hewaseightpoundsten.

Then...

Her:
He's lovely. Are you his grandfather?

Me:
(Pause. Blink. Pause)  No... I'm his father...

Her:
Mummblemummbleoops! (Exit right)

Suddenly I don't want to buy a graphic novel comic book any more.  I want to go home*.







*Nice cup of cocoa, pipe, and slippers.

My favourite Joke at the Moment

A man goes to the zoo but it's only got one animal.  A dog.  It's a shitzu.

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the 4th be with you.

Thanks for reminding me, Brian.

23 - I think it's been closed for a while now...
Originally uploaded by Daveybot

Sad little photo from pal Daveybot which gave me an excuse to test the Flickr / Blogger thing I just set up.

Duck! It's Crap Movie Time Again

April

1. The Empire Strikes Back
   - with the kids. And I didn't fall asleep! Not that I had a chance answering questions like: "Star Wars is all about Doctor Who, isn't it, Daddy?"
2. Wavelength
   - forgotten but worthwhile low budget SF film which eschews elaborate special effects and cliché to deliver a nicely acted, well thought out little movie somewhat in the Starman, E.T. line.
3. Atom Age Vampire
   - badly dubbed and edited American 1960 Italian soap operatic pre-mashup mashup of a mad scientist Jekyll and Hyde killing women to extract something from them to make his beloved beautiful again (after she is horribly disfigured during a badly staged car crash.) I've no idea what the original was like but great chunks of this version made no sense whatsoever. At one point our only slightly (but soon to be totally) deranged benevolent scientist is about to perform a vital operation when the lights go out. He descends to the cellar and abuses his dumb devoted, but slightly pissed, henchIgor for letting the generator die. Exit henchIgor whimpering as our scientist (in operating gown) flips a couple of switches. The lights go on in the operating theatre. The patient anaesthetised on the table, osiliscope flickering away, big atomic thing in the corner flashing all its lights. His other assistant, beautiful devoted female scientist (aka victim number one) turns off the hurricane lamp. Back in the cellar the Doc heads for the stairs when he notices water dribbling from the wall. He stops. Looks at it. Picks up a sledgehammer lying nearby and, for no discerable reason whatsoever, spends the next seven shots whacking a bloody big hole in a brick wall and then crawling through it. Cut to nightclub hoochie coochie dancer with feathers on her bum...
   
   
   
   
   

   
   
   
   

   Internal memo from the producer: . Hey Luigi, How's the shoot going? We still don't know how to end the cellar scene so just fill the screen full of tits will you. Ciao.

   
   

   High readings on the bewilderometer for this one. Get your free, legal CrappyQuality copy HERE!
4. X the unknown Movie
   - I watched a movie. I remember watching it. I just have no memory whatsoever of what it was... EDIT: I found it. It wasn't a real movie, it was made for TV so doesn't count. It was crap though.
   
5. Wall E
   - better than I was expecting and some of the visuals were stunning.
6. The 27th Day
   - back to the 1950s SF crap, Yipee! In this one an alien gives seven total strangers, everyday folks from around the world, a weapon of mass destruction. The aliens want to take over the world and have a moral compunction about destroying sentient life - but none about giving the sentient life a means of conveniently wiping itself out. So a promising start (marred only by the typical parading of ignorance of the basics of physics and astronomy so common in movies. Apparently if you move at the speed of light, time stops - everywhere). The abductees are returned to the Earth with the power of its destruction in their hands. Nice set up for a bit of late 50s H-bomb cold war paranoia and moral debate. And there is a bit, and it's not bad; a bit talky and worthy - but it goes totally off the rails right at the end when our wizzoo scientist pulls a plot twist out of his arse and reveals that "all forms of energy fire, electricity, nuclear fission" have a good use as well as an evil use! With an unexplained interpretation of some, hitherto unmentioned, mathematical formuli containing "some symbols I have never seen before" he unleashes the weapons - but in a good way.
   
   The cast swiftly gather round a radio - budgetary shortcomings dictate that a lot of all-out heck and mayhem is delivered via news announcers, rather than being seen on screen -

   
   
   

   "Ladies and gentlemen here it is, The bulletin we have been waiting for. Scientists believe we have been bombarded with invisible rays from outer space. Reports pouring in from all over the globe confirm sudden and unexplainable deaths. All the cases have shown the same symptoms. All heard a high pitched almost supersonic noise, accompanied by acute agony and severe shock - followed by death. I know it's unbelievable! Fantastic! But the rays appear to have killed every person throughout the world known to have been a confirmed enemy of human freedom. Yes! The entire world is united in a spiritual unity unparalleled in its history. There are those who say it can't last but let us pray it does...".

   To which our scientist breathes a heartfelt "Thank God..." (which is the sort of thing you would say after wiping out millions of people after subjecting them to unspeakable agony. Shift the blame. God made me do it.)
   
   The film plays out with a brief coda in which the aliens are invited to come and use all the 'empty' parts of the planet (ie the bits where white people don't live) and the audience ejects popcorn that got lodged up its collective noses during the radio announcers speech. Presumably the aliens' superior technology will be of use burying all the dead evil people lying about too. The end. Probably the only film ever to climax with stock footage of the UN assembly in full session.
7. The Phantom Planet (MST3K)
   - the best dire 1950s Astronaut miniaturised by local atmospheric conditions on a dirigible asteroid movie I have ever watched - twice.
8. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
   - I'm a sucker for movies with lots of punctuation in their titles, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has three exclamation marks! I mean how fucking cool is that!? and has the added benefit of being stuffed with large breasted women to distract you from the deficiencies of the 'plot' - which is: three large breasted Go-Go dancers kill a hot rodder and kidnap his bikini clad girlfriend. Driving across the desert they arrive at the ranch of a demented old wheelchair-bound, woman-hater and his two sons, one a well muscled simpleton, the other a sensitive soul. After some searching for the old man's hidden loot and some half hearted 'sex' and rape scenes the end of the movie is a Jacobean tragedy with everyone ending up dead - stabbed, or run down by speeding sports cars - apart from the girl friend and the sensitive soul. I've had the poster for this movie on my wall for years. It was good to finally see it - well, maybe not 'good' in the usual sense of the word... Here it is on Google video. The quality of the MP4 version on the 'Download video - iPod/PSP' link is pretty good, much better than the pixilated version on the main screen. The pre-credit sequence is wonderful. Pure cinema.
   
   
   
   The unmistakable smell of female.
   
   
   
9. Return of the Jedi
   
   
   
   

   
   My favourite shot in the Entire Star Wars saga.
   
   
10. Mission Mars
    - Lo budget SF which uses vast amounts of NASA footage in a variety of interesting ways - none of which make a lot of sense. I spent most of the running time watching the lead, Darren McGavin, listening. I like watching people listening in movies. Sometimes when I see a part of a movie on the television and, for whatever reason, the sound is down, I always look out for listening acting. It's easier to do when the sound is down because, duh! obvious!, you don't get distracted by the dialogue. (Another way of not getting distracted by dialogue is when it has become so meaningless that you no longer care or understand what the characters are saying - or why. Happens a lot in the kind of movie I watch. Happened in this one.) Darren McGavin is another of those know the face but not the name actors. 60+ years in the business. He's a great listener. He listened the hell out of this movie.
11. Rocket Attack USA
    - (MST3K) cold war propaganda at its cheapest. The director went on to make such masterpieces as: Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico. Which could end up as contender in my top 100 bad movie titles. The top place at the moment are taken by Rock 'N Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape, followed by Blood of Ghastly Horror (aka Psycho a Go-Go) which I shall be 'enjoying' tomorrow night.
12. Blood of Ghastly Horror
    

    - Oh My God! (as the young people say these days.) I am in a state of shock. An infuckingcredible movie. As far as I can work out, the history behind this patchwork hallucination is that in 1965, director Al Adamson produced and directed a very low budget, jewellery heist gone wrong movie called Psycho A Go-Go which seems to have had a terrific central performance and a plot device stolen from Night of the Hunter, and may have been intended as a comedy. It didn't sell because there were no names in it. Years later the director shot what appeared to be two sets of additional scenes, the first with John Carradine as a misguided scientist who, years before, had implanted a electronic device into a brain dead Nam vet with the inevitable consequence that he became a homicidal hoodlum - Carradine's 'confession' of this act cues great chunks of the 1965 film in flashback. (With me so far?) The homicidal hoodlum returns to the lab (new footage with the same actor) and kills his 'creator' in a laboratory featuring that staple of cheap set design, vast swathes of blackout curtain.
    

    
    The set was so small the operating table
    had to be propped up against a wall.
    

    
    

    The movie now seems to have been called The Man with the Synthetic Brain. When this version flopped, a second set of scenes was shot. In this, a framing device is added with detectives investigating a series of on-screen alley murders committed by a Zombie. Shortly after receiving, through the post, a colleague's head in a box - a shock lessoned slightly by it being heavily flagged up way in advance during the opening credits - they get to deliver these great crap lines:
    

    
    Chief Framing Device Detective:(READING FILE)
    
    Well I'll be a son of a bitch...
    
    
    Second Framing Device Detective:
    
    What is it Lieutenant?
    
    
    Chief Framing Device Detective:
    
    Everyone involved with the Corey case,
    
    with one exception - is dead!
    
    
    Second Framing Device Detective:
    
    What?... Do we know who it is?
    
    
    

    The Chief Framing Device detective stops tipping his chair back out of the frame long enough to fill in his underling on the Corey case and we flashback to the first set of added footage involving John Carridine as the mad scientist (thus neatly making Carradine's flashback that cinematic rarity, a flashback within a flashback). Further (post flashback) investigations lead the detectives to the lair of another mad scientist who turns out to be the father of the poor sap with the brain implant. Vengeful mad daddy has a nice line in vengeful zombie creation of his own (using more 'natural' voodooistic methods). The Director's wife stops by the studio long enough to get strapped to a table and have the second half of the heist movie flashbacked at her by daddy before he injects her with zombie juice. There is a short scene of constipated rampage (one mad scientist, two zombies, and three policemen, confined to a six foot square location - I think the cameraman stood on a chair) and just about everyone ends up dead. The End.
    
    
    Here's the wonderfully OTT trailer:
    
    
    
13. Horror of the Blood Monsters*
    - I'm going to hand over to a poster over on the IMDb for a bit here, I'm still in shock

    Ya gotta love Al Adamson. Only he would (1) take footage from a 20-year-old movie about gorillas in diving helmets ("Robot Monster"), (2) combine it with clips from a 30-year-old movie about elephants with hair mats glued to their sides ("One Million B.C."), (3) throw in parts from a God-knows-how-old Filipino movie about midget cannibals, half man/half lobster monsters and beer-bellied Chinese cavemen with snakes growing out of their shoulders (all of the aforementioned footage being in black and white), (4) spend $11.43 shooting new "connecting" footage (in color, no less) with an apparently--to be charitable--confused John Carradine and a bunch of actors who have trouble remembering their lines (among them a vapid blonde who is so incompetent that all her dialogue is dubbed in by someone else and who doesn't even have the decency to make up for it by getting naked), (5) put it out under at least 10 different titles and (6) try to pass each one off as a new movie. Go, Al!

    
    This is one brilliant movie. It so far beyond bad it comes out the other side again. I am so proud of myself for retaining control of my bladder when we saw the first shot of the spaceship landing.
    
    
    
    
    ..
    
    
    
    
    And here it is preparing to take off.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    A plastic kit model airliner and two pastry cutters! - it's genius!
    
    There is also a brilliant piece of use of stock footage from (I think) The Time Travellers in which the control centre on Earth is represented by an Over the Shoulders wide shot taken from the older movie intercut with two actors (costumed to look like the original actors whose backs we see) against the obligatory, No-Budget blackout curtain. Only after a few moments it becomes painfully obvious the Over the Shoulder shot is not stock footage at all. It's a stock one twenty-fourth of a foot. Its a freeze frame!
    
    Somewhere, during the bewildering intercutting between the tinted Fillipino cavemen endlessly fighting giant bats, lobstermen, and vampires, (sometimes in flashback!), the tinted intrepid explorers almost encountering the tinted stock footage from a couple of dinosaur movies while searching the new planet (ie Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park), and, finally, the colour footage of John Carradine back at the spaceship, talking to the rest of the crew by radio because they couldn't afford to take him on location... we suddenly get a sex scene!
    
    
    
    
    

    Two people, with electrodes strapped to their heads, snogging on a bed while around them lights flash in upturned test tubes and groovy Future Art stands on plinthettes. I was waiting for the voice over:
    

    
    

    Yes! Fucking in the Future will be fun! Modern science has many marvels in store for the married couples of tomorrow. The General Electric Orgasmomometer for instance guarantees satisfaction every time! Even for the most frigid of women! - even on those 'difficult' days!

    
    
    It turns out this scene does have something to do with the movie (or at least as much as any of the others do) when it turns out the man is our old friend from the control room, whose idea of foreplay is to irradiate his bed partner with the 'Dangerous chromatic radiation' our intrepid crew are encountering out in space in order to paste a hasty explanation for all the bizarre tinting of the rest of the movie.
    
    
    
    Did I mention the first five minutes of this thing were a vampire movie, with people getting attacked in the same alley used by the zombie in Blood of Ghastly Horror?
    
    I have another Al Adamson lined up for tomorrow night, but I might watch this one again.
    
    *AKA Blood Creatures from the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Red Planet, Space Mission to the Lost Planet , Vampire Men of the Lost Planet. etc.
14. Brain of Blood
    - Sadly, an almost coherent Al Adamson movie - still not good, but not a bewildering mess like the last two.

Nerd Alert!

I read in the Sunday papers today (brilliant sorting out Holly's birthday party avoidance tactic* number 47**) that the new Star Trek movie involves all previous Star Trek TV series, movies, novels, comics and bubble-gum cards being an alternate reality. None of it 'really' happened - thus giving the creators a totally new new (ish) slate to write on. Am I the only person in the world for whom this brings back memories of the Man from Atlantis stepping out of the shower and discovering the whole Xth series of Dallas was just Pammy's nasty dream?
I loath Star Trek with a vengeance, partially because of its total self-referential, closed-loopiness which produces pointless, insultingly idiotic drek like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country but hearing that the new people trying to defibrillate the DOA corpse of the franchise have thrown it all away and started again gives me hope. I look forward to reading what Star Trek fans make of it. If they hate it, I might actually watch it. If they love it, I won't.

Later:
Okay. Nerd Alert over. It's safe to come out now. (Though if someone could convince Warner Brothers to make Tales of The Rangers go away from the B5 universe I would be very grateful.)

Holly is seven tomorrow. It's hard for me to believe that seven years ago, I wasn't a father. It seems a lot longer than that! (Rimshot and canned laughter go here, thank you.)

Most of today was spent preparing for, and having, then clearing up after, her Birthday Party. Holly being 'a big girl now' had definite ideas about what she was going to have at her party. I was given my instructions: "make lots of sushi" (Holly loves sushi) and yesterday she and Merriol bought party food in Oban including; "those little brown sausages that are already cooked." (I would have taken this as a mortal insult, but, having burnt the last load of party sausages to charcoal, I took it as a compliment to my child rearing skills; she has learned something from me, even if it is only 'Don't trust your dad to cook small sausages'.)

Instead of games and all their attendant 'making sure everyone wins something' hassels, we did 'experiments'. Making volcanoes with baking powder, vinegar*** and washing up liquid, blowing up a balloon with baking powder and vinegar, and just plain blowing things up (Aluminium foil in hot water with washing soda = lots of hydrogen. Hydrogen + match = small bang. Un/fortunatly I didn't make the next logical step of filling a Balloon with hydrogen and having a mini-Hindenberg moment in the comfort of my own kitchen. The kids seemed to like it. The foaming messes of the 'volcanoes' went down best.







* - I have a dozen or so kids arriving in less than an hour and I'm still not sure what I'm feeding them.

** Number 48 is writing about number 47.


*** Malt not balsamic. I didn't want to appear too middle class.

Not a lot happened today. I finally got to go shopping - I had to; we've run out of food. Cooking the kids' tea last night consisted of opening three cans from the back of the long term rolling disasters and emergency food cupboard - God knows how long some of that stuff has been in there - and then warming up the contents of one of them. Actually we opened five cans but decided that tinned Guavas weren't supposed to be fizzy - or that colour - so their pudding of tinned fruit salad and evaporated milk went unenhanced.

So - nice day, lots of sunshine, went shopping, saw Dan, came home, spent the next five and a half hours getting my family to go to sleep. It's a quarter to midnight and they are all finally snoring. It's ME time! A quarter to fucking midnight. Whoop de doo... I'm going to bed - and not sleep. Just like I did last night because when I went to bed I did all the thinking I didn't have a chance to do during the day.

Here's the last thing I wrote in my bedside notebook last night:

Note for autobiography: "When in Paris we often went antique hunting on the Rue San Germaine. Once we we fined for shooting a chesterfield out of season."

Today's post is over here.

I can't get used to this.

For the past thirty years years I have been the only male in any house that I have lived in. Since my just after my post student days (and we are talking days not years) I have lived by myself or with women. For the past thirteen years it has been with Merriol for the past seven it has been Merriol, Holly, and Daisy - all female, all 'she's. Now Eben is here there's another male in the house. And it's very disconcerting. Several times a day I think people are talking about me when they're not. They're talking about him.

Since we bought him home my kitchen has been full of people. Every woman of child-bearing age, and older, within a five mile radius has called by, bringing us presents for the baby, little cards to remind us what sex he is, and staying for endless cups of tea and a cuddle of my small, hairy, very orange son and heir. "Hasn't he got a lot of hair?" they all ask, and "Oh he's a bit jaundiced isn't he?" I've been waiting for someone to say he looks like an Orang Outang for days. The jaundice is fading now and he's looking more babylike pink, so they've missed their oportunity.

I've had the same three conversations about the birth of, and relative sizes of, every baby born around here in the last 25 years and explained my shock / horror / bemusement at coping with someone else's tiny willy several hundred times. I'll be glad when we can get back to normal. Whatever that turns out to be.

Sometimes, as I'm automatically making yet another pot of tea for the assembled multidudes*, I hear Merriol say something like: "He did [whatever] this morning..." and for a moment I think "Oh no I didn't! I've never peed on the backs of my knees in my life! (Not that I remember anyway.)" It takes a moment for me to realise she is talking about my son.

After thirty years, it is very disconcerting to suddenly have to share a pronoun with someone else.


*The collective noun for a assembly of American surfers.

I did watch one more movie last month but forgot to add it to last month's list.

Spermula - Yep, you read that right, 'Spermula'.
I have no idea who (or why) the American distributors of this movie took it upon themselves to chop an original French, arty, soft porn movie into small pieces (with a blunt machete by the look of it), cut in several shots from the SF movie Silent Running, from two years earlier, and re-write the dialogue into some of the funniest stuff I have heard for ages. But I'm glad they did.

So instead of beautiful people swanning about the same rented Châteaux they shot every other French porn movie*, fucking each others brains out, and being torridly Gallic with each other over long meals, we get this:

Faced with imminent, unspecified destruction the invisible aetherial inhabitants of the planet Spermula set out to invade Earth "a tiny distant sphere, no more that a gnat's turd in the eye of god" by sending down an advance party in the form of beautiful women who wear couture dresses with necklines that stop at the navel and pout a lot - their master plan? fellate the male population of the world into impotence thus paving the way for the rest of their kind. And it's hilarious.

Part of the fun for me was trying to work out what the original was about. Whatever it was must have been weird enough before the massive re-edit involving as it did: a midget shooting down a model aeroplane with a sawn-off shotgun, a cardinal getting fellated in a swimming pool, vast quantities of rose petals shooting out of someone's bum, shoe licking, transvestites, contortionists etc. etc.

Apparently very hard to find as it has never been released on DVD - hell, it doesn't even turn up in IMDb.com's title search, unless you sneak up on it via one of the actors! - it is downloadable in Glorious CrapyQualityVision (R) from about halfway down this page if you feel so inclined.

Yet Another Short Scene From the Film Script of My Life

INT. KITCHEN. DAY.

The Baldwin family has just watched The Empire Strikes Back. Some of us for the first time.

HOLLY
Mummy, Darth Vader was Luke's dad!


DAISY
That's why they fight a lot.

I'll remember this when Eben is a teenager.

Another Short Scene From the Film Script of My Life

INT. KITCHEN DAY

HOLLY
You know those French fish
with the noses - or are they
 from Spain? The ones you have to give
 to the Queen if you catch them...?


ME
Sturgeon?


HOLLY
Well, if you get one, you have to give
it to the Queen. Drive it down to
 England and give it to her. (PAUSE)
I don't know what she does with them.


ME
Maybe she has a big fish tank.


HOLLY
Or a big cupboard.  Why are you laughing?
 It's not funny. Stop laughing or I'll
go and tell her. You shouldn't
laugh at the queen.

Oh No! I've Dropped My Castanets Down the Toilet!

I just don't get the card thing. I really don't. I suspect it's one of those women's things which, despite 100+ years of Feminism and the blurring of the gender divides, will forever baffle the average man. (And as Merriol will tell you, I'm pretty average in all sorts of ways). Women have been giving each other small pieces of cardboard according to the precepts of ever variable, and highly complex sets of rules since Jane Austen's day - and probably before that.

In Austen's time the cards were fairly small and plain and were part of an incredibly formal etiquette which determined one's standing in the pecking order of Society with a capital S; these days cards are larger, and are given as recognition of some event rather than a mere formal announcement of one's existence. They are often elaborate and expensive, and may well still form part of an incredibly formal system of etiquette; I have no idea. If there is such a system, I'm blissfully ignorant of it. I just know that getting cards seems to make Merriol happy and spending hours making them, happier still.

At the moment the house is full of elaborate and expensive cards saying "It's a Boy!".

It's a boy. This is a fact of which I am well aware, and of which I am constantly reminded by Eben's attempts to pee in my face whenever I change his nappy. It is also a fact that the fact my son is a boy is something we told the people who have given us all these cards. We know he's a boy! Why do people come round to the house, give us a small piece of cardboard in an envelope, then stand by expectantly as we open them, and then look pleased when we look pleased that they have given us a formal statement of something we told them in the first place?

This is as incomprehensible to me as the Japanese Tea Ceremony. At least you get a cuppa at the end of the Tea Ceremony. With the Card Ceremony you get a piece of cardboard which is then stuck up on a wall with Blu-tack to be totally ignored for three weeks. Why?

Here is a run down of the rules Austen's characters worked by. I wish someone would write down for me what's going on now, because I haven't got a clue.

Somehow I seem to have neglected to tell the world this year that, between waiting for Eben to arrive and watching all the crappy movies I have been watching so you don't have to, I have also, from time to time, picked up a book - and read it.

So before Eben takes up what time I have left over from making sure the girls aren't feeling left out and usurped by this small squealing thing called their brother here is what I've read over the last quarter. These may well be the last books I read for a while.

To be more accurate, it's Eben's bottom half that is taking up my time. Merriol is in charge of filling him up (there's a bit of biological determinism going on here) and I'm in charge of making sure he gets emptied and cleaned up. I've never changed a boy baby's nappy before and, well, I'm discovering things are different. First off, when you take their nappies off, girls very rarely pee in your face, or even - spectacularly - over the top of their own heads. When little girls pee it just bubbles up like one of those stupid little 'indoor water features' that clutter up garden centres. With boys it's more like a randomly directed, very small, high-powered water pistol. - The fact that very small children, of both sexes, always wait until a perfectly dry nappy is removed from them before peeing all over the place is just one of those things that generations of parents have had to learn to live with. It's a learning curve and in the case of Eben's pee, a parabola.

Lesson one in how to deal with very small penises was given to me in the hospital by one of the midwives who had had three boys of her own. Apparently you hold the thing down with a finger and wrap it up quick before it gets a chance to move.

Lesson two was given to me by our local midwife when I bumped into her in the coffee shop this afternoon; place something absorbent over the thing as soon as you open the nappy up - I like to think I would have eventually worked this one out for myself before I had too many facefulls - apparently in America you can buy little paper cups to drop over your darling baby son's microtackle to prevent this sort of random wettage (I haven't looked but I hope they are called 'Dicksy Cups'.) I'm experimenting with making little origami hats out of tissue paper.




January

1. Consider Phlebas - Iain M Banks
2. Hostage London - Geoffrey Household. I've only read two Geoffrey Household books. This one and his first: Rogue Male. Both contain what seems to me an extraordinary amount of creeping along hedges and sneaking about in open countryside.
3. Gimlet's Oriental Quest - Capt. WE Johns. Prompted by a thread on Palimpsest, where someone asked, 'Does anyone read Biggles books any more?' I realised I had the next best thing right at my elbow. A 'Gimlet' book by the same author. I read it. It's crap. I can see why they're not read any more. Aside from the expected casual racism: "It was a typically Oriental trick." etc. The story (it's not really a story, more of a chain of events and coincidences that eventually stop) was so thin, and the pace so sluggish that kids these days would see right through it within a few pages.
4. Lightning World - Trebor Thorpe (aka Lionel Fanthorpe). An early typo-ridden work from the master of crap SF. Fanthorpe hadn't fully yet developed his style of combining maximum verbiage with minimal content but the signs are all here. No discernible characters, a clichéd story that only gets going about two chapters from the end and then suddenly stops, and, of course, Fanthorpe's uniquely wonderful air of vagueness.
   
   Quote:

   When they had all descended Tony did a couple of experimental steps. That was another factor in their favour. The gravity was about two thirds earth normal - maybe not much over fifty per cent. He felt light and strong.

5. Ten Bad Dates With De Niro - Ed. Richard T Kelly.
6. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon - Spider Robinson.

February

1. Perry Rhodan 10 - 'The Ghosts of Gol' - I read one book this month. ONE! (I console myself with the fact that it is the shortest month of the year, but even so - ONE?!) And what a piece of shit it was too.

March

1. Magic Hour - Jack Cardiff the cinematographer responsible for so much that was brilliant about Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, The African Queen etc. Highly readable cinema autobiography lite which got really interesting when it got into the technical aspects of things, which it didn't do nearly often enough. I could have done with a lot more of how to make a scene look like it's lit by one candle, when in reality there are fifty lights hanging over the actors head and a lot less of Errol Flynn's drink problem.
2. Riverworld and Other Stories - By Philip Jose Farmer. Prompted by his death (not an obvious marketing move) and the fact that the book was at eye level in my To Be Read pile (I was lying down). I had been wondering for a while why I hadn't read more of his books. I remember now. I don't like them. Even after this short collection of stories I was irritated by his obsession with early morning erections and anal sex. Farmer's first published SF story in 1953 'shocked' the SF world, won him the Hugo Award for "most promising new writer" and is critically recognized as the story that broke the taboo on sex in science fiction. (Slathering BEM perverts drooling over pert nosed, full breasted daughters of venerable professors aside.) Farmer seems to have spent a lot of the rest of his life upping the sexual ante.
3. King of Cannes - Stphen Walker. Since I seem to spend most of my free waking time watching low-no budget movies it makes sense to spend the rest of my limited, not running around after the kids time reading books about low-no budget film making. This one is a cracker - though to be accurate it's a book about the making of a movie about the making of movies. Very, very funny and I suspect, from what I have seen of the real world of no hope film makers, very accurate. I only spotted three people I have met (very briefly) in real life - one turns out to be a multi-millionaire (there's a lot of money in shit films apparently).
4. Money from Holme - Michael Innes - thin little crime novel in which the only crime is the forging, by the original artist, of some already existing paintings. Felt like a short story stretched way beyond its length, or an idea in a notebook that never really went anywhere.
5. The Carpet People - Terry Pratchett. I've been carrying this one round in an inside pocket for weeks now. Finally finished it. Time to find a new, thin, easily losable book for the jacket.
6. The Bat Tattoo - Russell Hoban. Meh. If I hadn't been stuck on a bus with nothing else to read but the labels on my clothing I doubt if I would have bothered finishing it.

Folks, meet Eben Tobias.

A few more photos here.

We're home after two days in hospital (Merriol on a ward and me in a clean and serviceable industrial NHS barracks for long distance reletives and patients) and we're suddenly realising how unprepared we were for all this (ferinstance, as we were leaving to go up to the hospital - over the other side of the country in Inverness again - Merriol had the somewhat obvious idea that it might be a good idea to take some baby clothes with us. As it turned out the bag she grabbed on the way out did contain baby clothes but mostly toys and books. Mind you, I only got the car seat we had remembered we needed out of the attic after her waters had broken.

Hang on Eben, we'll get organised. I promise.

I'm typing this on a pissy wee hospital bedside console thing. Merriol in in the bed. Eben Tobias our new minted son is sleeping in the cot the other side of her. Both are well. I am in a state of shock. I have son.

Gezzwot? It's the end of the month. And here are all the reasons I have no brain left in chronological order. You may be delighted to learn there are pictures of an elephant and Hitler's head in a jar down below.

Soultaker
-(MST3K) Dire.
Freaks
- Interesting. (Fucking hell! One word reviews are easy to write!)
The Leech Woman
- Disappointingly had nothing to do with leeches.
The Giant Mantis
- Three movie producers got drunk one night. One had a copy of script of The Thing (Something unearthly, frozen in the ice for millennia, is thawed out and goes on the rampage), another had a copy of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Prehistoric beasty wakens and trashes half of New York) and the third had a copy of Them (Giant ants). As a drunken bet one of them ripped all three scripts apart, tore the pages in half, tossed them all into the air, and picked up a third of the mess. He then went out and shot the resulting pile of waste paper in a week. There is no other explanation for the The Giant Mantis (Giant prehistoric praying mantis is thawed out in the Arctic and trashes New York). None.Timecop
- Another thud and blunder comic book mess from Peter Hyams (Outlands, 2010 etc.) I really must stop watching his movies - Capricorn One was okay, I wonder what went wrong after that?
The Science of Sleep - I really don't know what to make of this one, I'll sleep on it.
Hobgoblins
- From a costume design point of view films made in the Eighties have not worn well. (The SF, Fantasy or period pieces, or anything involving the entire cast wearing uniform excepted). Any movie made in that fashion benighted decade which attempts to portray contemporary youth just looks like total pants these days - and probably did at the time (asymmetrical haircuts, shocking pink leggings and Spandex anyone?) Hobgoblins is the skidmarks in those pants. What made skinny women wear metallic Spandex leggings? Why? A whole generation women (all right maybe only Californian women) went round for years screaming LOOK AT MY SKINNY METALLIC ASS! - Why?

Hobgoblins is an extremely low budget (can you have a minus budget?), zero imagination rip off of Gremlins that manages to waste the entire thirty-seven cents they did scrape together on some dreadful, dreadful actors - I've only just thought of this but the actors might have been asked to pay to be in the movie - and a few glove puppets. The acting was off the scale of unconvincingly bad. Right off the scale. If this is the scale:*

Laurence Olivier| . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . |Oliver Reed| . | . | . | . | . | . | . |Porn Actor

Then this lot were over there by the bookcase ---> Not the book case near the desk that your computer is sat on, but the big bookcase in the other room with all the posh books you aren't going to read again but can't bear to get rid of.

Dreadful acting. I have seen more conviction and animation from high school kids turning up to drama club because they fancy one of the girls who comes (usually accompanying a friend who doesn't want to go alone). The direction wasn't much better - the director has made a whole series of films 'spoofing' the Police Academy series (that's right, you didn't misread, we're stirring up the real bottom feeders of the Hollywood food chain here.)

I love bad movies, I really do, but this one was painful to watch. It hurt.

* Or, if you prefer in Metric
Gérard Depardieu| . | . | . | . | . | . | . | Johnny Hallyday| . | . | . | . | . | . | . |Un Porn Acteur

Oh God! They made a sequel!

Gorgo
- Godzilla English style. See Tower Bridge smashed to a million pieces by a giant prehistoric dinosaury thingie awoked from the deep by a volcano off the coast of Ireland! See Big Ben Smashed to a Million pieces by a giant prehistoric dinosaury thingie looking for its young. See... you get the picture. A not unterrible mixture of King Kong (Find monster in exotic location - or Ireland - and ship it to heavily populated area and put it on display), Godzilla (Godzilla SMASH! Grrrrr!) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (again). Almost ruined by having a cute kid who empathises with the monster, and almost rescued again by some not bad 'Panic in the Street' sequences as the entire population of London flees the giant prehistoric dinosaury thingie by repeatedly running up and down the same street while being shot from lots of different angles. One thing British movies of the period did do better than American films of the period is the panic in the streets stuff. I suspect because no one in Britain had cars, and running away from something down a street, while being filmed with a hand held camera, is a lot more visually dynamic than hand held shots of a stream of cars on a highway driving away from disaster. British films extras of the day were also probably a lot less experienced than their US counterparts and the average Londoner of 1950s and early sixties probably had very fresh memories of what it was like to run away as buildings came crashing down round their ears. Just a thought.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
- Friday night movie with the kids is sometimes a bit of a chore. Tonight, when Holly picked this as the film she wanted, my heart sank. I never was a fan of the original, no that's a fib - I hated the original*, I'm not particularly fond of Roald Dahl's books, and I have a love / hate thing going with Tim Burton (I alternate between adoration and disgust at his films. I want that part of my memory with Mars Attacks! in it wiped when the technology arrives) Charlie, I remember from the reviews at the time, was not particularly liked by anyone. One of those 'Pointless remakes'. I loved it! I was entertained, delighted, and amused. So were the kids.

*Apart from much missed Roy Kinnear.
Terror From The Year 5000
- so incredibly fucking terrifying is the terror in Terror From The Year 5000 that I managed to fall asleep at least six times while trying to watch it. This is some sort of a record for me. I would start to watch the film - and wake up at the DVD's menu screen. Then I would convince myself I was awake and would stay awake long enough to watch it through and start the movie again, fast forward to where I last remembered being - and then wake up at the menu screen again. It got really annoying but I was determined to finish the film. I wasn't going to let it beat me. It took me three days.

Terror from the year 5000 tells the story of a maverick scientist, ably assisted by his standard issue beautiful daughter*, who is communicating, via his basement time machine, with beings from 3000 years in the future. (We know it's 3000 years in the future because in a hilariously classic piece of misguided Bad Movie science, the Carbon 14 results on an artefact brought through the machine show a negative reading.) Inevitably a being from the future comes through the machine in the guise of a beautiful woman in a (not badly done) shimmering catsuit - except she's not beautiful at all She's an UGLY mutant woman! She has just peeled the face and uniform off a passing nurse to fool them - though she strangely retains her shiny, sexy space shoes which gives our heroine a clue that SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT! So, future mutant girl needs someone to go with her to the future to father a generation of non mutant ugly women. There's a fight. Things explode. I wake up again. I think that's what happens I'm not going to try and watch it again to find out.

The movie does however have one really worthwhile moment of note. Doors in cheap movies have always held a strange fascination for me. The possibilities for continuity errors aside** - because of the piecemeal nature of movie making, it may be hours, days, or even weeks between an actor getting from one side of a doorway to another - and ignoring all the deeper meanings that doors can represent in movies "Frankly, my dear I just don't give a damn." would be a much less wonderful line if Rhett Butler hadn't been standing in a doorway when he said it - there are sometimes some very odd things to be noticed about the way doors are placed or hung in the set.

Terror From The Year 5000 contains a corker. The scene is a corridor. Two doors screen right, blank wall screen left (though this latter fact is not important). Because of the mechanics of the plot someone in the room nearest the camera has to see someone sneaking into the room furthest away from the camera without himself being seen.

To achieve this simple aim the film-makers made the odd decision to have the door to the furthest away room open as you would expect a door on a corridor to open; away from the corridor, into the room. Villain opens door. Villain enter room. The room nearest us in the corridor, the room from which the observation of this act has to happen, has the door hung so that it opens out INTO the passageway. Nobody hangs door so they open out into corridors. It's probably forbidden in every set of building regulations ever written. It's dangerous for one thing, imagine walking down a corridor when someone comes out of their room in a hurry - Whack! You run into the door. It's also ugly. It just looks wrong - yet it happens all the time in films just so that people can hide behind them and not be seen. The most famous example I can think of is in Double Indemnity.

Off the top of my head I can think of three ways of staging this shot so that it doesn't need the second door opening outwards:

1. Have one of the doors on the other side of the corridor. Villain opens one door, hero opens the other and watches him. Both are clearly visible to the audience and, as the villain has his back to the hero the assumption is easily made he is unaware that he is being watched.
2. Both doors open inward, Hero opens door, presses back to the jamb and turns profile on with a look of intense concentration. He can't actually see the villain from that angle but he's the hero ; the audience wants him to see so will suspend disbelief long enough for him to see round corners for a few seconds.
3. Inside his room the hero carefully opens the door slightly. Cut to point of view shot, framed through the half-open door, of the villain entering the other room. (Hanging a mirror on the blank wall opposite will make 3 & 4 a lot easier to shoot.)
4. Swap the rooms. Make the room the villain has to enter nearer the camera. Hero can then be in the 'upstage' room and and when he comes out, as long as the villain doesn't explicitly turn around to look at him, the hero could stand in plain sight and watch - he do squat jumps and cartwheels if he wanted...

I have now spent more time thinking about one single shot in a crappy 1958 drive-in piece of shit than I have on Kurosawa's entire output. Time to recalibrate my critical priorities I think.

*I think they get given away in universities - "Here's your Degree in Frontier Science, Professor Misguided, don't forget to pick up a daughter as you leave"...

** Admit it, we all get a cheap thrill from spotting continuity errors.

Solyaris
- Okay that's me reset. God, I love this film. I have no idea what the characters are on about half the time but I just get sucked into it each time I see it. I first saw it when I was about 16 and have been hypnotised by it ever since. Right, back to the crap...
Agent for H.A.R.M.
- (MST3K) Inept spy caper with a virtuoso performance of toe-curling smarmyness from Peter Richman - you don't know the name but you'll know the face - he's one of those 'Special Guest Star' villain of the week faces and he has been appearing on TV shows for the past fifty years.

He's been in everything from Knight Rider, Dynasty, Charlie's Angels Quincy M.E. to Beverly Hills, 90210 and beyond. He's a reliable solid working actor. I have no idea what he thought he was doing in this 1966 low-rent Secret Agent bandwagon turkey. I mean I know what he was doing appearing in the movie, he was getting paid (I hope). He was paying the rent, as jobbing actors have to do by taking whatever comes along and hoping there's something better next week. I mean I just have no idea what he was doing as an actor. It's a weirdly wrong performance. I think he was going for suave and debonaire - but missed. Spectacularly so. His character is supposed to be one of those cool, sexually magnetic, post-Bond superspy spies but because of a zero budget, zero imagination script, some oddly hung doors (see above), and some weird costuming (he wears a lemon yellow cardigan for most of the movie), he comes over as just incredibly, creepily smug. Fascinatingly hypnotically creepy. So creepy I found myself replaying bits just to watch some of his weird little mouth twitches and eyebrow movements over again just so I could enjoy the thrill of eewwww! disgust as he did it again.

The Giant Spider Invasion
- (MST3K) Another cheapo independent 70s drive in dross. Giant spiders from another dimension invade Wisconsin when a `miniature' black hole' that creates a `space warp' falls from the sky and sucks in mammoth alien-spiders from another dimension. Worse than it sounds, the world is eventually saved by a Something Very Scientific (but totally unexplained) dropping from a helicopter, and a flare gun fired by a portly, aged Nasa scientist.
The Creation of the Humanoids
- What a peculiar, flawed little gem! Amid all the dross I do turn up the odd odd film of weird genius. This is one such. Judged by any criterion this film shouldn't work at all. The script is insanely wordy and there is hardly action to speak of, for 75 minutes people just stand in a row across the screen and woodenly deliver screeds of expositional dialogue towards each other, often without any cuts or camera movements - sometimes, when there are cuts, the off screen dialogue is delivered by the other actor/s so straight and flat (almost as if they were just prompting) that it appears the editors either had no idea about sound editing or the director had given them nothing to edit together. The sets are minimal and flat, the costuming cheap, the score electronic 'Space Age' ooooeeeness seemingly unrelated to anything happening on screen.

So far, so what? Sounds like every other cruddy 1950s / 60s lo no budget SF movie - it even starts with a montage of stock footage nuclear explosions. But what actually arrives on screen is an odd mix of genuinely novel SF ideas (I particularly liked the Human / Robot 'marriage' idea that sees one of the characters transferring aspects of her personality to a robot and then falling in love with the refection of herself) and a stream of philosophical ponderings and anti-prejudice messages that must have been mind-blowing to a teenage drive in audience of the time (if they had managed to stay awake long enough to see them). The plot has our central anti-hero character (an anti-hero in a cheap 60s SF movie in itself is a major oddity) is one of the leaders of a quasi-militaristic, group with growing influence over the police and government, dedicated to the preservation of MAN in a world where the already tiny population of a post holocaust Earth is declining due to radiation induced mutations and sterility. The group sees the ever more sophisticated Robots as a threat and agitates against them (think Brownshirts and Jews). Our 'hero' discovers a robot disguised as a human being and suspects a plot to replace real humans with replicas, then is told his sister is living openly with a robot she is in love with. He goes to visit her to put a stop to that sort of disgusting behavior and meets a friend of hers. There is an immediate bond and the two fall in love - we discover (before they do) that both he and the girl are robot replacements implanted with false memories (this film was made in 1962, six years before Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was published), and the final shots hold out hope that the human race will allow themselves to be resurrected, one by one, in near indestructible robot form and that robots will soon have the ability to reproduce much in the same was as humans do now... cue end title...

It's all pretty woodenly done and some of the writing is dreadfully dull but there are more SF ideas thrown out, and assumptions made, in this movie than in any dozen other more mainstream SF movies of the period. The film is unsurprisingly (but amazingly) adapted from a novel by Jack Williamson (at the time - as now - it was rare for Hollywood SF movies to be based on existing works). The movies main problem is that it looks just like it. A novel filmed.

Apparently this was one of Andy Wahol's favourite films. It'll stand another watching.

Madmen of Mandoras (aka They Saved Hitler's Brain)
- hooo boy! Any film that starts with an opening shot like this...

...contains Hitler's head in a jar...

...lets tourists enjoy the marvels of South American civic pride...

(The heroine's exclamation of delighted wonder on seeing this truly shoddy bit of set building, meant to be the awe inspiring fountain in the capital city's central plaza, is a magnificent piece of acting - almost as good as the bizarre moment when an evil Nazi vents his frustration by throwing a book at a lamp shade...

And my pedantic, nitpickily joining the dots brain just loves the crappiness of the set here. Just look at that brickwork. Two sheets of brick effect cladding with a piece of wood nailed over the joint to disguise the fact they don't line up properly.

Other delights include:

Our director not even attempting to create day for night shots - so we end up with our hero squinting in direct sunlight telling his wife it's almost midnight..

A character delivering the line (with urgent seriousness): "They have the gas!" without cracking up.

An actor inadvertently giving away one of the 'secrets' of stage fighting by punching thin air, missing his intended target by a good foot.

An interminable establishing shot of a building which only by a process of deduction could be worked out to be an Airport terminal - we get plenty of time to work it out too, the shot is held for a good twelve seconds (doesn't sound long does it? but just go stare at your watch for twelve seconds...) Turns out the reason the shot was so long was to disguise the fact that the plane that is about to land is not the same plane we saw taking off a couple of shots ago. Same type, different paint job.

Did I mention it had Hitler's head in a jar?

When he was a child, this man wanted to be an actor.

Dumbo
- When I was a child the first film I ever saw was Dumbo - I was about four years old. It is still my favourite Disney movie (which is not difficult given that I loath most things that the Disney Corporation came to symbolise and produce). I keep forgetting how short it is, it seems somehow to be missing a third act. The first half of the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence is one of the most brilliantly trippy bits of animation I know. It's a pity they chickened out a bit for the second half of it.

Dreamscape
- Meh. Sometimes the search for undiscovered masterpieces amongst the dross turns up movies which are neither. This is one of them. : Christopher Plummer, Dennis Quaid, Eddie Albert, Kate Capshaw, Max Von Sydow all doing their jobs but nothing to get excited about. Worth the 25p it cost in a charity shop.

Minority Report
- Meh with a really big budget and lots of special effects disguising the fact that the film was no way as complicated as it was pretending to be (it felt it had to explain the central mystery to the audience twice, just in case we didn't get it). My OFFS ('Oh For Fuck's Sake!') button was well and truly pushed when our hero, standing in a swimming pool clutching the woman precog he is about to kidnap, escapes from his encroaching relentless pursuers by pulling the (previously unmentioned) emergency plug out of the plughole in the bottom of the pool - a plughole so large that two people can vanish down it - AND NONE OF THE RELENTLESS PURSUERS THINKS TO JUMP DOWN AFTER HIM! Coincidentally, the second Max Von Sydow film of the night.

Humanoids from the Deep - Roger Corman Tits 'n' Gore schlock with nothing to recommend it apart from the word 'Humanoid' in the title and the line: "Get off your antique manners - I'm a professional scientist!" which got an unintentional laugh. Noticeably crappy sound editing too.
War of the Colossal Beast (aka Revenge of the Colossal Man)
- Last seen falling off the Hoover Dam after being bazookad in the breadbasket, 60 foot high radiation victim Col. Glenn Manning, disfigured and unable to speak in anything other than bestial grunts and howls - thus neatly disguising the fact that he is being played by a different actor to the one shown in the vast amount of footage reused from the original, turns up in Mexico eating the contents of delivery trucks. Returned to the US he escapes twice before electrocuting himself to death in three strip Technicolor - which comes as a pleasant shock at the end of a black and white movie...

Girl:.

Well they can't keep him here as.

if he were - some sort of - cattle!.



Army Bloke:

It's just for the time being. I'm.

afraid the world doesn't think of a

sixty-foot man the way a sister does...

So that was fun.

A couple of days ago I went down to Edinburgh to meet the good people of Palimpsest.

Halfway there (as the bus was just getting into Glasgow bus station) I got a call. It was Daveybot one of the people I was on my way to meet.

"Hi, Liam - where are you?"

"I'm on a bus just coming into Glasgow bus station - why?"

"Because - er... you're two months too early. The Big Day Out is in May..."

Hysterical laughter ensued and I got strange looks from my fellow passengers all the way into the bus station and beyond.

This is what must have happened: I see the date writ large up on my computer screen. May 20th. I set off downstairs with the intention of writing it up on the family wall-planner in the kitchen (which is mostly used to keep track of which kid's turn it is to have their choice of telly before bath time but occasionally gets more important stuff written on it like: 'MOT due', 'Dentist 4.45' and 'DADDY'S BIRTHDAY!') but, somewhere en route, I get distracted by some child's toilet emergency, and when I finally arrive at the planner, I get bewildered by the dazzling array of months starting with M to choose from - and stick it the first one I come to. Mar 20th.

So I went over anyway and we met for lunch.

After I had managed to get lost on Princes Street - which I would have thought was impossible given that it is dead straight and only has buildings down one side, but there you go, it was one of those days - I finally met up with Dave (and were joined by PaddyJoe who also lives in Edinburgh) and had what Dave described as a 'bad (REALLY bad) sandwich'. (It was supposed to be beef - it could have been some part of a cow I suppose, though they did a good job of cutting the the lace holes off my slice.)
I would have described it as 'inedible' but I did manage to eat it - but only after doing that excruciatingly embarrassing thing where you take a good hearty bite into a sandwich and suddenly find the filling is a lot more solid than you expected just as you pull your hand away.
Your teeth have neatly bitten through the bread but encountered sudden unexpected resistance too late to stop your hands from continuing with the simple automatic action of 'lift sandwich to mouth, let mouth take bite, put sandwich down on plate'
As your autopilot hands pull the rest of the sandwich away from your face, the rubbery ,unbitten contents, clenched between your teeth are pulled out from between the two halves of the roll till there's nothing holding it up and then it flaps down moistly onto your chin like a Mauri's tongue during a haka.
Embarrassing at the best of times in the presence of someone you have only just met -but doubly so having just spent the past two hours proving yourself a total idiot to him and then screwing up his lunchtime by ending up on the wrong end of a pretty long street...

Dave and Paddyjoe had to get back to work so I took a wander over to a National Gallery on the pretence of looking at art (when all I really wanted to do was look at the best statue of girls' arses in the world).

This is what it looks like from the front apparently.

Then a stroll down the Royal Mile to the parliament building which (Sorry, Dave) totally underwhelmed me, then back up the hill, train, Glasgow, bus, home - the bus journey was interminable. Two rows behind me on the other side of the aisle, a ski bum, just returned from three months on the piste, bumped into a female someone he vaguely knew and then didn't stop talking about himself (VERY LOUDLY!) for two and a half hours. Two and a half hours! I'm surprised there was any room for the rest of us on the bus his ego was taking up so much space - no, that's a fib. He did stop talking once, right in the middle of a sentence when his friend's mobile rang, she answered it, she talked, she said goodbye, and ran off - and he carried on exactly where he had left off. It was almost as if she had pressed a pause button on him.

Yeah and like there was this fancy dress party but we didn't have any costumes so we dressed up as women... it was quite funny, and Klaus dressed up as one of the instructors and that was quite funny and then this other dud he was called John he got really drunk and that was quite funny and he did a strip and that was quite funny...

He said, "That was quite funny" a lot.

I wanted to kill him. That would have been quite funny.

So what have I learned from all this?

Answer: Don't order a 'Beef' sandwich at The Bad Ass Bar, Bistro and Grill 167 Rose Street Edinburgh, EH2 4LS ; they're crap.

The rest of it could happen to anyone.

Two weeks-ish to go till the arrival of His Imminence and we still have no ideas about what to call him. Or rather, I have no idea what to call him - and Merriol has a list as long as her arm of things we are NOT going to call him (or her). Most of the names on M's list are suggestions of mine that seemed brilliantly, obviously exactly what he was going to be called for at least - oh, four or five seconds?

I am starting to get desperate. I think about this a lot. What is this kid called? I read credits of movies and the small print on album liner notes as a matter of course (I have no idea why, I never remember any of them). Recently I have been paying extra special attention to them, and anything else, containing names, looking for possible candidates. The other day, after reading an article about whether King Canute was a Viking or not, and how his name was really spelt, I decided that Cnut was it! Canute? or Cnut? Cnut definitely. Brilliant name. Cnut. A King's name! and a good king too. Ancient, noble, strong. I like it!

Untill it was pointed out that if the makers of the FCUK brand were ever going to launch another line it would almost certainly be called CNUT.

Any conversation with Merriol at the moment soon degenerates into a cross between Mornington Crescent And I - Spy

Me: Ethelred?

Merriol: No

Me: Egbert?

Merriol: No!

Me: Xavier?

Merriol: Definitely not!

Me: No, I mean as a middle name.... Something X Baldwin. Thundercats X Baldwin. I think it would be great having an X for a middle name. How about just 'X'? Like Harry S Truman? The S didn't stand for anything...

Merriol: No child of mine is going to be called X.


Long pause.


Me: Akira?

Merriol: No.

Me: Toshiro?

Merriol: No.

Me: Ennio?

Merriolv:What?

Me: Ennio!

Merriol: Ennio??

Me: Like Ennio Morricone. The guy who wrote the music for all Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns and Danger Diabolik...

Merriol: No.


Long pause.


Me: I like really like Toshiro... Toshiro X Thundercats Baldwin.

Merriol: NO!

etc.

I'm off to Edinburgh tomorrow to meet some people I only know via the web. Grown up people who read books and have proper jobs. Once a year for the past five years the denizens of Palimpsest.org.uk have met up for a Big Day Out. This year it's in Edinburgh and as I have vague memories of being one of those who ranted a couple of years ago about there being a distinct Southern bias in the venues, I can't not go to this one practically on my doorstep.

I'll be off in the morning and back in the night. It's going to be strange and interesting meeting people I only know from chuntering to them in a forum and occasional pics on Flickr or the newspapers.

I'm not really happy to be so far away from Merriol this close to D Day. But she wants me to go.

Apart from anything else she is quite capable of giving birth and and getting the baby to the Registry Office and called 'Milly Molly Mandy Baldwin' or something equally soppy before I've worked out the time of the next bus back.

This Month's Movie Roundup - Yaaaay! I know, I know, it's the only reason you bother reading the blog. I've cannibalised a letter to Phoebe for one of them (so if you get an attack of the Dejas, P. That's why.)


February

1. Blade Runner
- The Director's Cut, though perversely, I now have a yen to see the original released version.
2. Kentucky Fried Movie
- Another of those films that didn't stand the test of time. In 1977 it must have been hilarious. Rude, crude and very funny. Now it just looks rude and crude. I did laugh a couple of times but it wasn't the yok-fest many (whose opinions up until now I had valued) had lead me to believe. I guess you had to have been there at the time. On the up side, Uschi Digard's rather impressive tits were quite nice to watch.
3. The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy
- Another of those films that would have been a lot better directed by Terry Gilliam. It seemed very thin somehow given that just about every version of this story is different and has new layers of jokes added. To have the story pared back and the jokes so reduced in number to make room for all the CGI was a bit of a disappointment. The Book seemed particularly underused but then again I suspect the target audience was running it's favourite gags in it's collective head as the movie played and were just enjoying the visuals - which were very good, very Gilliamish.
4. L'Amant (or The Lover - once I had finally found the English version on the DVD menus which were in French)
- Full-on, historical bonking set in the Viet-Nam of the 'Twerties' - that strange vague indeterminate time that happened in the movies between WW1 and WW2.

"Eh, Henri, do you think zey will get ze oh-so very clever
subtle phallic Gallic symbolism? Do you?"

Five hours (it felt like) of French people talking in Subtitle English - that strangely enigmatic, not quite colloquial, (but you can't put your finger on exactly what is wrong) manner that turns up in subtitles all the time. I thought it was the subtitlers fault but it's true! French people really do talk like that - well, in movies at least.
Given the chance to make a film in English, French film makers make everything sound so portentous...
"My love for you is expired. Now I am dead."
Loads of sex though. Loads and loads of sex. God! it got boring. Halfway through I started willing the Japanese to attack. Or a hurricane to hit, or something. Anything but more sex. Please! I prayed, don't have even more sex and then lie around languidly having yet another elliptical post-coital conversation. Please!
All very pretty and slow and ravishingly shot. Imagine, if you will, a porno movie made by Merchant-Ivory - but then that immediately brings to mind the thought of a heaving, sweatily naked Helena Bonham-Carter and there are some fantasies best not shared. She's MINE! - get off!
5. Stuart Little 2
- Dear god! At least I didn't puke. The kids loved it.
6. Citizen Kane
- Five Stars with a cherry on top. I needed that after Stuart Puke 2.
7. Jésus de Montréal
- As a card-carrying atheist I don't often get emotionally involved with the overtly religious in movies I just don't care most of the time when characters undergo a 'crisis of faith' or renounce all that they believe in because, being a life-long non-believer, I have no concept of what the 'agonies' these people are supposed to be going through is all about. More often than not their 'anguish' comes over to me as self-pitying, self-indulgent, self-deluding wallowing but this one - oh boy, this one had had me in tears at the end of it. It's very funny too.
8. Prehistoric Women

"Wonga wonga gabba gab pooma boong" etc.

Actually that's is a pretty dynamic shot from this movie. Non start action all the way through...

- Another of my public service movies - I watch them so you don't have to - so noble of me. This one concerned a bunch of prehistoric women and their pet panthers who wander around being sexually frustrated - or at least as sexually frustrated as you could get in a 1950 drive-in movie with no dialogue - until they bump into a bunch of men who discover fire, use it to set fire to "Karoch, scourge of the skies" (a hapless duck with some rubber bits stuck on the back of it's head then tossed in the air in the general direction of the camera) that has been terrifying them for years, and 'Guadi the Giant' ditto. No dialogue but every on-screen action repeated in great detail in a solemnly intoned narration - like a 1950s equivalent of a Movies For the Blind Audiodescription. Dreadful.
9. Girl in Gold Boots
- (MST3K) Trashy piece of late 60s junk with some unforgettable (and, I suspect near undeliverable) dialogue:.

Michele :

"Leo says I'm really going places.
Just because he deals in dope, that
doesn't tarnish me."

Critter:

"Oh, that's what you think, baby.
Tarnish isn't a strong enough word
for what he'll do to you
- try "corrode" for size..."

And the unforgettable lament of all drugged-up, washed-out, has-been Go-go dancers the world over:

Joanie :

"I had a pretty mind! Oh God, I wish
I had my pretty mind back."

It's Beyond The Valley of The Dolls Without a Clue. The producer went on the make The Astro-Zombies and The Corpse Grinders (and its sequel, the imaginatively named, The Corpse Grinders 2). One of the leads was once married to Judy Garland (and was, incidentally, totally and comprehensively out-acted by a couple ceiling tiles behind his head at one point).
After that, I settled down to watch Assault of the Killer Bimbos but my heart wasn't in it and I gave up after ten uninspiring minutes. I was still fretting about something. The most disturbing thing about Girl in the Gold Boots, even more disturbing than the dancing, the dialogue and the acting was the title - Girl in the Gold Boots. Why wasn't it The Girl in the Gold Boots? That missing 'The' worried me. Both The Astro-Zombies and The Corpse Grinders have got 'The's why not Girl in The Gold Boots?

Twenty minutes after finishing this I went out and bought a copy of Astro-Zombies on eBay. There is no hope for me.
10. The Goonies
- I don't think I have actively hated a movie as quickly and as comprehensively as I hated this one. By the second reel I wanted every character in it to die. Especially our 'heroes'. Horrible little brats every one of them.
11. Warlords of Atlantis
- another 99p well spent on eBay. Doug McClure in full Edgar Rice Burroughs' journey to the centre of somewhere with fucking big rubber monsters mode.

Wet women with guns - it's what
the cinema was made for...

12. The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension - again
13. The Land Before Time
- The first movie I've seen for ages containing dinosaurs that didn't have Doug McClure in it. I missed him.
14. The Arrival
- What a cracking wee movie! Nothing particularly original that we haven't seen done before - we are talking about the Aliens ARE AMONGST US! school here (The Invaders, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, It Came From Outer Space, I Married a Monster From Outer Space etc. etc. but done with genuine suspense and creepiness. I am now off to hunt up some of the writer/director's other movies... Damn! He directed Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick - looks like I might actually have to watch a Vin Deisel movie or two.
15. Chandu the Magician
- Bela Lugosi is out to take over the world with a Death Ray if only he can persuade the scientist inventor to give him the secret of its operation. His methods of persuasion consist of getting his minions to kidnap various parts of the Scientist's family and threaten them with fates worse than death while he skulks in his lair in an ancient Egyptian temple. All his plans are thwarted with monotonous regularity by another member of the family who has been off becoming a 'Yogi' with mystical powers for the past few years (which means he gets to wear a turban when everyone else wears pith helmets) who can hypnotise whole rooms full of people with a single twitch of an eyebrow.
My favourite bit of dialogue came when the swarthy Arab baddy sidekick is pawing the beautiful captive Princess in her dungeon*.

Him:

I've wanted you for years
- and now... I have you!!!


Her:

You beast!

Why don't they write lines like that any more?

*Actually it's his dungeon - she's just chained to a wall in it.
16. The Astro Zombies
- There is a new star in my firmament of crap directors and his name is Ted V Mikels. On the strength (or weakness) of this movie alone he deserves to be ranked up there with Coleman Francis and Ed Wood. I don't think he directed this movie, I think he just found it in trash cans around Hollywood and glued it together with industrial strength wallpaper paste.
A mad scientist and his mute, wall-eyed assistant, beautiful girls slaughtered and mutilated, semi-naked girls strapped to operating tables, solar-powered killer robot zombies, CIA agents, Chinese spies, Russian spies, Mexican spies! gratuitous semi-naked nightclub dancer scene, beheading, terrible, terrible Foley work and establishing shots which defy any kind of comprehension - an establishing shot is supposed to do what its name implies, establish something in the audience's mind. A character. A place. A character arriving in a place. Look, here's a shot of a well lit street, a neon light flashes 'The Kit Kat Club', aha! the audience thinks, The Kit Kat Club wasn't that the name on the match cover the detective found under the body? Yes, look there he is walking through the door... Cut to interior of the club, the scene continues and everyone knows who is where and what is going on. In this pudding of bewilderments we have establishing shots that go on forever and often, at the end of them, we still have no idea who or what we were supposed to be looking at - and all in one utterly incomprehensible 90 minute mess.
The climax of the movie comes as our solar-powered, killer astro zombie returns to the mad prof's lab (powered only by the CIA agent's flash light it is holding against its forehead, having lost it batteries in a scuffle) and seizes the machete the prof just happens to have sitting on top of the fusebox - and goes on the rampage.
Here's the trailer (which makes it look a lot more competent and interesting than it is.

17. The Bed Sitting Room
- One of the great forgotten - or if not forgotten then just bloody hard to find - films of British cinema. A masterpiece of the absurdist tradition with a hell of a cast, some great design and why it hasn't been released on DVD is a mystery and a crime.
18. Pumaman - (MST3K) "Poomaman!". I have formulated a new law of bad movies. Just like the one that states that if you ever see a swimming pool in a movie there will, inevitably, sooner rather than later, come a moment when someone will be pushed into it (or be found floating dead face down in it, depending on the genre) there is a law which states that any S-type jag seen in any movie of the seventies and eighties will, inevitably, be tangled wreckage by the closing credits. Often the wrecking process will involve a cliff or quarry.
19. The Thing That Couldn't Die
- (MST3K) Another rule of thumb: B-movies with the word 'Thing' in the title are always worth a watch. Unfortunately The Thing That Couldn't Die only seems to be available as a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode. I suspect I would have enjoyed this one more without Mike and the Bots.
20. Help! I'm a Fish
- thin story with some nice background painting. A couple of good jokes (I particularly liked the soldier crab marching in six time) but it's got Alan Rickman in it. I could listen to Alan Rickman reading the Ikea catalogue and come away spiritually uplifted.

Erratum

I have been informed by my youngers and betters that Thundercats Hobnob Baldwin was not at a Arctic Monkeys' 'jig', as stated in my post a few days ago. 
He (or she) was in fact attending a performance by those excellent proponents of the popular music form known as The Snow Patrol (or did she say Herman's Hermits?  I don't know - I'm getting old, all these popular beat combos just sound the same to me these days.)

Apologies for any confusion or distress. (Or did she say 'Brotherhood of Man' - 'Save all your kisses for me...' That was quite jolly... quite liked that one...  Where's my pipe...? )