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...? )

I overheard this brief snippet of conversation between two young women browsing the DVDs in Blockbusters today:

Browser One:
"Oh! I didn't know this was a (certificate) eighteen!"

Her Friend (in a reassuring tone):
"Yes - but it's only because of the violence and torture in it."

Six or seven weeks to go till Baby Number Three is here* - our midwife, Caroline, is talking about it being time to leave her emergency kit with us** in case things happen too fast for us to get to the hospital - and we still don't have any idea of what we are going to call it - him! (or her).

Well, Merriol and I don't. Holly has very definite ideas about what she (or he) is going to be called, though the definite idea she has changes from day to day. For a while it was 'Honeysuckle', then it became, 'Stephen', 'Stephanie', or 'Henry'.

My current favourite (thanks, Caroline***) is 'Thundercats'. 'Thundercats Baldwin'. I like it! It has a really nice ring to it. Holly objects on the grounds that "It would be too difficult for a six year old to spell - she would write 'TCats' which is silly."

Daisy likes 'Thundercats' but then she thinks that 'HobNob' is a good name for a baby - she has also wanted to call it, 'Olive', 'Bindi', 'Matula', 'Noodles', 'Tissue', and 'Hair-clip' at various times over the past few weeks.

Merriol who is lumping the baby round has expressed no preferences (that I've noticed) though she has done a brilliant job of shooting down all my suggestions so far. If non-verbal disapproval was a martial art this woman is Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and Jet Li rolled into one. Brilliant ideas crumble to dust with one raised eyebrow and a slight widening of the nostril. (When she's really not liking something it's one eyebrow and one nostril - and not necessarily on the same side of her face.)

We have several weeks to go yet.

I hope her face can stand the strain.


*
Strictly speaking it's here already (at the moment it's in Glasgow shopping, having just been to an Arctic Monkeys gig.)

**
A rubber sheet and one of those sink plunger things?

***
A different Caroline.

Breakfast conversation this morning:


Me:
We're having wraps for tea tonight, is that okay?

Merriol:
Yes, sounds good.

Me:
Yeah, I found this really good recipe from Czechoslovakia - well it's from a region of Czechoslovakia really. Czechoslovakian regional cooking.

Merriol:
What is it?

Me:
We're having Bohemian wraps for tea.



I think she prefers it when I'm depressed.

If I had really had my wits about me I should have said it was West Indian regional cookery ('Bahamian wraps for tea') but I didn't think of that till just now...

No blog entry tonight - but I have done another one and a half thousand words of the novel. God, it's awful.

I have just spent the evening working out how to export multiple paths from Photoshop into Illustrator. I finally worked it out! Just in case I forget overnight - or in case you have been wondering how to do this thing - I'm filling the blog up today with a tedious How to Do Something Really Not Very Interesting In Photoshop tutorial

1. Get both the Path and Layers palettes visible at the same time and open the image (Caroline Monroe in At The Earth's Core, yum yum! - What? You think I watch all these crappy movies because Doug McClure is in them?)

Gaussian Blur and Posterize till happy (or not, it isn't essential).

2. Use Wand Tool [W] to select an area. Fill the path with the foreground colour - this is not necessary but it helps to keep track of what you've done and doesn't affect the exported paths.

Convert selection to a Temp Path using New Work Path button.

3. Convert the Work Path to a permanent Path by dragging it onto the New Path icon.



Repeat ad nausiem.

When all areas have been selected and converted into Paths, go to File > Export Paths to Illustrator

Make sure All Paths is selected in the dropdown box.



Save.

Open the .ai file you just created in Illustrator.




Well. That was three hours well spent...

All I have to now is remember quite why I wanted to do this tremendously tedious thing in the first place...

Why is it women are obsessed with the way things look?

This broad, blatantly sexist assumption is bought to you today by Merriol's long-running campaign of gentle, not so gentle, and downright blatant hints - in earlier, less enlightened days it would have been called 'nagging' - that I should get my hair cut for some baffling reason. Why? I have no idea why she wants me to get my hair cut. It doesn't need cutting - I had it cut last year - sometime - I think - and it's been doing an admirable job recently of keeping my head warm during some of the coldest weather we've had around here for years - and I do like having a warm head. Okay, I may look like a Muppet having ECT but that doesn't seem to bother anyone else. The only reason I could get out of her for why I should get my hair cut is that she thinks it would 'look nice'. I'm not sure I want to 'look nice'.

Damn! I just did a bit of fact-checking - I stuck my head around the door and asked her why I should get a haircut, just so I couldn't be accused of misquoting her - and she changed her tack:

"Because you look gorgeous with it short."

Damn! 'Gorgeous' I could live with. 'Gorgeous' is tempting. In Merriol's books 'gorgeous' Puts me up there with Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., and that bloke from ER (not George Clooney, the other one).

Damn!

Newspapers. I love them but just don't have time to read them any more. When I was younger, and didn't have kids, I took The Guardian every day, did the crosswords, and read every page top to bottom. Not only did I know what was going on in the world, but I cared about it too and had opinions about things. Now I have kids, and no time, my newspaper input is limited to the local Sundays, The Herald on Sunday and Scotland on Sunday. It takes me all week to read them in dribs and drabs as and when I get the time.

Sometimes, to save time, I manage to avoid reading articles in case whatever they happen to say gets in the way of the headline:

Some detour

Eight weeks to go and Merriol is getting bigger by the minute. For reasons best known to herself and the fashion industry she is wearing a lot of horizontal stripes at the moment. It's a bit like living with an animated Bridget Riley painting.

Merriol and Seahorse 1 (2009)

I bought some DVDs today. Blockbuster's second hand bins are four movies lighter than they were this morning. Nothing spectacularly interesting but I do now have a copy of Citizen Kane which means I can bin my ratty old VHS copy - complete with 1980s commercials.

One of the movies I bought for the princely sum of £2.50 was Atonement. I don't know what DVD cases are like in the rest of the world but UK boxes come with a little panel that gives anxious parents the opportunity to have a guess at the bits they might not want their kids to see. Warnings that the film 'Contains language' have often baffled me. Unless the film is acted only by penguins, molluscs, or people from Birmingham of course it's going to contain language, how else are the actors going to communicate? Atonement's little box promises that it

'Contains very strong
language, bloody injuries
and moderate sex.'

I am so glad that that has never happened to me.

But then again, I know better than to ask...

Just watched the TV news for the first time in a week or so. Apparently it has snowed in England for the first time for a couple of years and nobody knows what to do, this being such a rare event.

Snow?

It's headline news. Reporters wearing full Arctic gear standing in various parts of the Home Counties wittering on about 'blizzard conditions', and 'widespread disruption' while behind them a whole two inches of rapidly melting snow throws the whole infrastructure of a nation into chaos. Apparently - and I find this totally surreal - 15,000 people have phoned the emergency services over the last couple of days because people have been throwing snowballs! "Come quickly! There's a man armed with a fluid ounce of frozen water terrorizing the neighbourhood!"

It always amazes me how quickly England grinds to a halt. Rain, snow, fog, wind, sunshine, any weather conditions at all out of the ordinary and the whole fucking system just collapses.

Natasha Kerplunkski: (Fwaaaaar!)

Emergency services have been strained to breaking point by the prolonged period of slightly overcast weather. Over now to Ken Luton with the latest. Ken, start walking towards the camera... Now!...

Ken:

Thank you, Natasha. Yes, as you said, and I am now going to needlessly repeat, emergency services have indeed been strained to breaking point by the prolonged period of slightly overcast weather, and it's going to get worse; the Met Office tells me that there is the extreme possibility of slight drizzle this afternoon. Earlier today I spoke to some of those affected...

Bloke, leaning out of his car window:

Well it's diabolical innit? I mean they should do somefing. No one's doing nuffing. I think it's about time the government stepped in and sorted it.

Nice Lady, outside an office:

It's all Europe's fault. We didn't have this sort of thing happen before we joined.

Old Lady, standing outside the butcher's on the high street:

Oh it's dreadful. I'm devastated. I haven't been able to leave the house for days.

Ken:

Some classic British whining there. And with things set to get even worse as the slight drizzle sweeps across the country I put some of these points to Doctor Anne Leper of the National Institute of Easily Available Experts. Doctor Anne Leper, as an expert from the National Institute, what are the dangers of these sort of extreme weather conditions?

Anne Leper:

Speaking in my capacity as an expert I would say there is the possibility of what we experts call Passive Increased Moisture Absorption.

Ken:

And in layman's terms?

Anne Leper:

In layman's terms - and I don't want to over-simplify things here, but there is a slight danger that things left outside in the drizzle may, possibly, under some circumstances - become a bit moist.

Ken:

What sort of things might become dangerously moist in this manner?

Anne Leper:

Absorbent things mostly.

Ken:

Like pets?

Anne Leper:

Yes... pets could possibly be affected in this way... yes.

Ken:

Thank you Doctor Anne Leper. And with that dire prediction of dangerously damp pets - it's back to the studio... Natasha.

Anne Leper:

When do I get my fifty quid?

Natasha Kerplunkski: (Fwaaaaar!)

Thank you Ken. And now a round-up of the other, less important, news - Tokyo was at the receiving end of a 30 megaton atomic bomb this lunchtime as World War Three enters it's third day, the Nikkei-225 index fell 66.88 points on the news to 7972.06 points - the worst day's trading since last Tuesday when hostilities commenced...

The thing is, no one knows how to deal any more with weather that stops them driving their cars from their centrally-heated houses to their air-conditioned offices, with maybe a short visit to the enclosed shopping mall on the way home.
People just don't know how to read the weather any more. Even the weather forecasts on radio and TV are all about how the weather will affect 'driving conditions', not what it will be like to stand in the stuff and how wet and cold you will get. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I live out in the country and in a part of the world that has very variable and interesting weather - two miles up the road from my house there are snow gates on the road, gates that get closed when the road is impassable just to stop idiot tourists who can't understand that thick snow is a bitch to drive in 'going for it', not making it, and freezing to death in their cars (and then moaning that no one came to rescue them afterwards).

North of the border, every time England grinds to a stop like this everyone just raises an amused but despairing eyebrow, takes the day off work, and mutters 'Fucking t shirt weather that - southern poufters.'

I'm going to play Six degrees of Kevin Bacon with all my films this year. I'm not going necessarily to choose them because they have a connection with the previously watched but I intend to forge some sort of connection between them all no matter how tenuous. (This notice will self-destruct sometime in mid February like all other New Year resolutions.)

January

1. I Walked With a Zombie - This is turning into an annual event. I started last year by watching a Val Lewton / Jacques Tourneur RKO B-movie too. Screenplay by Curt Siodmak who also wrote the story for:
2. Earth Vs The Flying Saucers -
3. Nosferatu - Three movies into my 'Six degrees of Kevin Bacon with all my films this year' thing and I have bowled myself a real googly. How do I get from a crappy 50s invasion paranoia movie to a German art-house reworking of the Dracula story? My first attempt: Morris Ankrum who played the heroine father in Earth Vs appeared in an episode of the Bat Masterson Western TV series and Dracula could turn himself into a bat! Ta-dah!... I know. I'll have another go tomorrow. But Nosferatu starred Klaus Kinski who made a lot of movies. Several of them, like For a Few Dollars More, with music by Ennio Morricone - who composed the most amazingly trashy score for:
   
4. Danger: Diabolik - Brilliant piece of cinematic comic book nonsense.
   
5. Spacehunter - Molly Ringwald in 3D! God she was annoying enough in two. Note to self: if ever I find myself casting a moviethat need to be watched wearing polarised cardboard glasses, watch this again - then go cast an actress with actual breasts that might work in 3D.
   
6. Matilda -
   
7. Dark Planet - A stupid stupid SF movie set in a far distant future where space fascists blast away at everything in sight with late twentieth century automatic rifles while trying to survive some of the shoddiest special effects since the opening credits of Blake's Seven. All of which must mark some sort of low point in Michael York's career. The sort of movie even Malcolm McDowell would have turned down.
   
8. A Night at the Roxbury - Stupid stupid movie which made me laugh.
   
9. Flight to Mars -
   
10. Bugsy Malone - One of Mrs JM's favourite movies.
    
11. Glen or Glenda - Like Bugsy Malone the first feature for the director. The director in this case being the great Edward Wood Jr. A truly heartfelt, unique and utterly demented movie.
12. Jail Bait - Ed Wood's most mainstream and least idiosyncratic movie which means that it still retains many of Wood's hallmarks, like the odd cutting, the long long pointless takes where people cross rooms back and forth for no real reason, the stilted dialogue, and wooden acting - but looses most of the weird shoddiness that is so appealing in his work. It's boring. The most noticeable thing about Wood's 'style' in this film is the total lack of cutaways - those essential little insert shots that show the audience in close up what the under-rehearsed actor is interminably fiddling with on the other side of the room. An actor opens a desk drawer - cut to a shot down into the drawer to show the gun in the drawer and a hand taking it out. Cut back to the wider shot and the actor puts something into his pocket. The presumption is made that the actor has put the gun in his pocket. Don't do a cutaway and the actor has to wave the gun around in an unnatural way to let the audience see what it is he is doing..
    
    
    
    
    
    A not very good actor getting into an uncomfortable
    position to show the audience something.
    
    
    Cutaways like this also have the advantage of letting you cut between different takes of the same long shot (presuming you have more than one take which in this case looks doubtful) so you can cheat the action (ie cut out most of the interminable fiddling.) Wood never seemed to learn about these very useful shots. Or, for that matter, about cheating time. In Jail Bait we see several shots of people arriving at buildings and then entering them to visit people we have already met in the narration - there's nothing essential happening here, the director is just filling a bit of time and getting two characters into a room to have a conversation, he's not introducing a new character or place. It's simple movie mechanics. Standard operating procedure at the time for this sort of set-up would be to show the car driving up the house and stopping, then a cut to inside the house where the character to be visited would hear a door bell ring, and answer the door. There is no way, in real time, that the actor in the car could have got to the door but the audience accepts the jump in time without noticing. Wood on the other hand has to show every plodding step. In one long take, he shows the car coming down the road, drawing up to the house then stopping, the actor driving the car is then shown getting out, shutting the car door, walking slowly up the steps and then ringing the doorbell, THEN Wood cuts to the inside shot at a point where any competent director would be half way through the dialogue that is to follow. All this comes after having just watched the character driving the car tell someone in the previous scene that this was where he was going and this is who he was going to see! Boring and redundant! I may not learn a lot watching crap, but at least I learn a lot more than Wood did watching the good stuff.
    
13. The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. - a touching documentary of a man whose boundless enthusiasm coupled with a matchless lack of talent made him a hero.
14. Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The 'Plan 9' Companion - A second documentary on Wood. (if the words 'Box Set' crossed your mind sometime in the last few minutes, award yourself a coconut). The documentary pretty much repeats most of the things said in The Haunted World of. There are, after all, only a limited number of people left alive who worked with Wood and some of the stories were repeated - as they must have been for many years - almost word for word. A little over long too.
    
    
    

    
    
    

    No matter what time of day you watch Plan 9 From Outer Space - it always feels like three in the morning.

    
    
15. Plan 9 From Outer Space - By god, they're right! It's only half past ten and it feels like 3am!
16. CQ - As a sneakily cheap six degrees - there was a visual reference to Danger: Diabolik very early on (John Philip Law also appeared in the film) which via the links I will (one day) forge between that, Spacehunter, Matilda, etc. brings us back to Plan 9 From Outer Space - I really am starting to think this was a very silly idea... CQ was directed by Roman Coppola whose father, Francis, produced George Lucas' first film THX 1138. Lucas directed -
    
17. The Empire Strikes Back - and I fell asleep.
    
18. Star Wars - My Kids see the original Star Wars for the first time. And I didn't fall asleep! This is the first time I've watched Star Wars in the past 10 years without waking up half way through and having to rewind rewind the bugger.
    
19. Ong-Bak - Bought on eBay for 99p (including postage) because I was intrigued by the title, knew nothing about it (there was no description or picture in the auction) - and it was only 99p. Ong-Bak it turns out is a 2003 Thai martial arts movie with a paper thin plot but lots of fighting - lots and lots of fighting - apart from the occasional burst of exposition or watching people setting things up to be destroyed, most of the 105 minutes running time was spent watching our hero getting kicked in the face while he finds new and interesting ways of hitting people on the head with his elbows - in slow motion, from three different angles, like a sports instant replay. (Paul Whitehouse voice please:) "Let's see that again Geoff - Yes, you can really see how he kicks the little guy in the groin from this angle, and look at the sweat flying off his face in slo-mo here... marvellous."
    
    It is on it's way back to eBay. (Bugger knows how I'm going to get from Star Wars to this - or from this to anything else...)
20. Bride of the Monster - A rewatch of another Ed Wood 'masterpiece'.
21. Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle of Death - Attack of the Killer Tomatoes meets Apocalypse Now. With a bit more money (I think Killer Tomatoes had a bigger budget) and/or a a better director this could have been a funny little movie. As it was, it was an almost funny little movie. Any film that can make Shere Hite jokes in the middle of a sword fight has to have something going for it. I have totally given up on the Six Degrees thing.
    
22. Year of the Dog - What promised to be a quirky little amusing movie turned into a tedious, woolly-minded, anti-vivisection trudge which wandered about all over the place not making it's shallow points very well or exploring any of the screamingly obvious issues it raised. Why, for instance, does our protagonist Vegan heroine, so incensed about the rights of chickens, cows, and goats to have happy natural lives, buy shelves full of dog food to feed her 15 dogs without apparently realising they are made from meat? Stupid and shallow. For a while I amused myself by counting the number of times our 'heroine' sighed meaningfully - but soon gave that up when I got into three figures. Avoid.
23. Madagascar - Better than expected Friday night with the kids movie during which I laughed several times - to the bemusement of the kids who didn't get the jokes.

Shopping in Oban today, fuelled by one of my Damn The Torpedoes! Full Cholesterol Ahead! It's The Weekend! breakfasts* I came across this wonderful piece of packaging. (I get irony migraines from this sort of thing.)


Interior: Overly-designed Office: Day

Client:

How do we make a deep fat fryer
look wholesome and healthy?


Advertising Wanker:

How about we put happy white people eating Pasta
on the box. Spaghetti maybe, or possibly linguine .


Client:

Deep fried spaghetti?


Advertising Wanker:

Could be deep fried, could be...
I'll get a focus group together...

*Eggy bread fried in butter topped with crispy grilled bacon drowned in a shitload of maple syrup - the kids loved it.)