Here We Go

Here's my entry for this month's What's the Stupidist Thing you Did This Month? competition:

I went to plug in my phone to recharge it and noticed, not for the first time, that the plug on the phone end of the USB cable was broken.  The little plastic casing had just come apart.  I thought I would fix it.  So, I got some superglue and glued it back together.  Then plugged it into my phone.

An hour later...

I know it's a bit late but I just came across this:

  

The bereft inhabitants of Leeds (population of 750,700, the third largest city in the United Kingdom) turn out to share their collective grief during Thatcher's funeral.

This is horrifying. Well I find it so. Prompted by Doug Savage of Savage Chickens fame saying nice noises about my cartoons in an email to Merriol - she knows all the best people - I went and had a look at the cartoony blog. I was stunned to see that it is TWO years since I did the last cartoon there. I could have sworn it was only matter of a couple months. So I drewed a new one:

I really like the designs on Tesco's own-brand, low-budget basics 'Everyday' range. They're interesting and to me combine just the right mixture of cheapness (subtext: we're not spending a lot of money on the packages) but without being cheap (subtext: the working-class oiks most likely to buy this stuff have no design aesthetic).

 

Maybe the people at Tesco's have noticed that us oiks do have taste - or, more likely, they've noticed that  the middle-classes are broke too and are as likely to be found shopping at Lidl's and Aldi's these days. For whatever reason, they've put some thought into the new look.  Much better than their old designs which did look cheap and tatty.  A real design vacuum.  Hardly inspiring.

And I'm not the only one who likes the newer ones: introducing the Post Office's Everyday Dangerous Goods leaflet:

Not quite sure why you can't send snow through the post but I'm sure Lord MacPostOffice, or Amazon, or  whoever owns it these days have their reasons.

I got away from everything the other day.  Went on one of my round-Scotland, crappy-book-buying days out. (to be honest it's less of a round Scotland than an across Scotland: back and forth, from here to Inverness and back via both sides of  Loch Ness.)  Next time I go I'll have to find a new route as my main  stop, The Shed at Kingusie, is closing.   I loved The Shed.  The books used to be stacked in piles along one side tottering, sometimes mouldering, piles of books in front of a wall of crammed shelves.  For the last  few years used to visit once or twice a year and move the whole lot  - once coming away with 70 trash treasures.  This last trip I brought away a few Penguins for the old long-term obsessive pre-ISBN Penguin collection (currently at some 639 books) and a couple of old Pans for the more recent, and as yet less well defined, obsessive old Pan collection (pre-decimal edition certainly but I'm swithering about including pre-decimal ones with ISBNs...* )

The point of this waffling is that I was reminded, on my travels, of something that happened to me last time I went walkabout like this. I meant to blog it at the time but I never did.  It was one of those moments when I really realised why it is that I love Scotland so much.  I was in a charity shop wanting to buy a couple of very cheap books. (There's a surprise!) I'd never been in the shop before and, as it turned out, I only had a ten pound note on me.  The woman behind the counter opened her till and rummaged around for a couple of moments:

"Are ye sure don't have anything smaller?" she asked. "I'm awfy short of change here."

"No," I replied. "Sorry.  That's all I've got."

She looked at her cash drawer again as if willing a few fivers to appear.

There was an awkward pause.

"Look," I said. "Why don't I just go to the Post Office down the road and get some change?"

"Oh, that would make things easier," she said.

She reached into the drawer. "While you're there you wouldn't mind getting me some change too would you?"

And handed me, a total stranger, a ten pound note.

*Christ! I miss sex.

I love books. Tatty old paperbacks especially.  Sometimes I buy them because I like the author, sometimes because they're  'I have always meant to get round to reading it' books, but, to be honest,  I mainly but them for the lurid covers.  I mean, who wouldn't be happy knowing that their bookshelves contain masterpieces of art like these:
 

 

 

Most of my collection of mouldering pulps are Science Fiction (or what passed for it in the good old days, ferinstance: these days no publisher (in their right minds) would read  beyond page three of the  manuscript of The Master Weed  which details the thrilling adventures of a Captain Video-like space-ranger and his identical, remote-controllable simulacrum robot. In the book they thwart the evil plans of a mad scientist whose dastardly scheme to take over the planet Mars hinges upon everyone on the planet simultaneously smoking drugged cigarettes. So cunning is his plan that they all do just that! He would have got away with his cunning plot too, if it hadn't been for our meddling hero who turned up at the fateful smoke-in event as a robot and therefore immune to the doped ciggies. Even then he had to pretend to be drugged until he could rescue the token semi-naked space bimbo which he did by skewering the villain to a control panel with a casually discarded screwdriver and then electrocuting her head.

Only in the last few years have I come to appreciate the joys of crappy books' cover art from other genres.  Here are a couple of recent buys I really like:

 

  

 I have even started looking at the 'romance' racks at the local charity shops and discovered gems like:

 

I love the cover of this one but the book is brilliant: a laugh-out-loud, tosh, Gothic romance, reworking of Jane Eyre set in contemporary America - in which a plain English girl becomes heir to a vast American fortune. She flies over to find a transported Irish castle, atop a 'mile high' mountain, owned by the mysteriously Byronic Benjamin Hollister, a tortured musical genius with 'long tapering fingers' and a secret, hidden in the locked tower (not a former wife, but mad cousin Gwenyth who is a werewolf), he also has a mute servants (tongue cut out by mob) with a pet wolf, and a Hungarian scientist working on 'secret experiments' in the laboratory. There's an incredibly convenient 'quicksand pit' destined, from its first appearance on the page in chapter three, to be the setting of the dramatic climax, and lots of disgruntled locals ready to form a convenient torch-wielding mob for the ending and enough tedious 'who married whom, and why, and when they didn't marry someone else' backstory (all related in mind-numbing detail) to keep the average soap opera busy for years. At one point our heroine is convinced she is not only in love with a mysteriously Byronic werewolf but that he is also her half-brother to boot! Oh the hand wringing!

I especially loved those moment where the author started paragraphs with sentences like, 'But alas! It was not to be...'

Basically there are whole new vistas of bad books opening up to me. (Though why people ever read more than two Westerns is still mystery.)  Yesterday, looking through the nasty plastic-coated, metal book spinner on which I found Gwenyth many moons ago, I found:

 

Swithering ensued.  It was only a quid but.... The cover didn't grab me and scream "BUY!"  It was okay but it didn't have that certain, killer something that makes me know I have to own a particular book.  (The certain something that would leave people battered and bruised if they ever came between me and a copy of this:

  

I'd never heard of Ruby M Ayers before.  I turned the book over to read the blurb. (This is, I guess, the way most people buy books.)  The blurb told me nothing about the book, but a lot about the author.  Born 1883, died 1955... 'wrote more than 160 novels'... 160! - my interest is piqued.  I have a current project to try books by once popular, prolific authors I have never read:  John Creasey, Erle Stanley Gardner, Sax Rohmer, Leslie Charteris,  people like that.  People I'd heard of but had never actually got round to reading.  Could I be bothered to extend my vague project to include authors I hadn't heard of just because they were prolific - and presumably once popular?  Tempting but if I followed that line  I would pile up thousands of authors before I got anywhere.  (Following the original course I have just realised would mean I would have to read a Barbara Cartland novel before very long - horrors!)

 I was swithering all the way until I read the final paragraph:

Her attitude to writing was entirely professional.  When questioned about her methods, she said "First I fix the price.  Then I fix the title.  Then I write the book."

Which I think is one of the most extraordinary things I have read on a blurb.  'Buy this book,' it was saying,  'This book was written by a solid professional cynical book writer.  None of your enthusiastic, amateur literature here just good old British workmanship!'

I had to buy it.

I may even read it some day.

Another Gag for the Stand-up Routine I Will Never Perform

Best Bela Lugosi voice:

"I am the hypnotist for the UK downhill bobsleigh team..."

(Makes mysterious hypnotic hand passes.)

"You are feeling slippy.... very slippy...."

I am NOT giving up my day job.

The book (what I wrote a bit of) is, apparently, the Number One best selling free book in the category:

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Science Fiction > Short Stories

Woohoo!  I'm a bit of a best-selling (free) author!*   Go and not buy it now!

Two reviewers of the book on Goodreads mention my story: one found it 'a very enjoyable read', the other thought it was 'great'. This is insanely flattering.  I can feel my head swelling as I type. What I should be doing right now, instead of reading and re-reading the only five words of favourable review I'm ever going to get  is write MORE stuff.  I have a story half-cooked at the moment but unless I sit down and start typing over there and not here it'll never get finished.

The new story involves Renaissance toilet paper.  I don't think people are going to like it.







*Albeit in a small way.



 

As Seen on TV

You sometimes hear people say 'Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.' An aphorism which, as far as I can find out, was coined by the author Peter De Vries. (And no, I've not read any of his books either.)

 I'm not convinced. I think nostalgia IS what it used to be: there's just that there's so much more of it these days. Which is maybe the same thing. Either way, I know I am fed up with nostalgia. These days when 'retro' is cool, and pre-teen kids have a TV show in which twenty-somethings reminisce about what it was like to be twelve, you can't bloody escape it.

Remember when nostalgia was new? Something strange? Gods, I miss those days: weren't they great? 

When I was a kid the future was cool, not the past. Space exploration.  Rockets to the moon.  Going to school by autogyro.  Food in tablets.  Domed cities populated by smiling, happy, shiny people with futuristic art on every street corner.   What happened? 

Many many years ago (yes, Eben, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth), and there were only four TV channels in Britain, it was not uncommon for products in shops* to have the words 'As Seen on TV!' slapped on them as part of the packaging. As a kid (and if I'm being honest, as an adult too) this used to confuse me - what was the point in advertising the fact that your product had been advertised somewhere else? What was it about the fact that Product X had been seen on the telly made it more important, or more real, than Product Y which hadn't been advertised on the telly, had exactly the same ingredients, and was half the price? Couldn't work it out.  It just did not compute. 

Then, one day, I got it: Christmas LPs!**  Every year, back in the days before Now That's What I Call Music cornered the market, there used to be, just before Christmas, a flood of  '20 Greatest' Albums, Party Albums, Super Hits Albums etc. etc. all plugged to death on the telly by companies like Ronco and K-Tel.  Products aimed right at the wallets of people who didn't normally didn't buy records - but had relatives who did!

"Ohhhh... I dunno what to get our Doreen, she's into all this reggie punk pop stuff - She likes music.  I know!  I'll buy her a record.  I'll buy her that Ronco's Glen Campbell 20 Golden Greats that's advertised on the telly.  She'll like that."

So. Next time Gran, who never normally goes into records shops, is in Woolworths*** she sees Glen's smiling face peeking out at her from the wire spinner of twenty-seven 20 Greatest Hits LPs and wonders.... "Ooooohhh... so much choice!"  But then she spots a golden star in the top right hand corner of the disc's cover:  'As Seen on TV!'  Hurrah!  That's the one!  'As Seen on TV'.  It was there as a reassurance.  Yes, it was saying, you are buying the product you decided you wanted from the comfort of your armchair halfway through Coronation Street.

"Gee. Thanks, Gran...."

'As Seen on TV' could appear anywhere on the label though it was usually pretty prominent.  Sometimes a big exploding splash of a star sometimes a diagonal banner across one corner.

Fast forward thirty years (Make that 'forty', ed.) and 'As Seen on TV' has escaped the narrow confines of the K-Tel 20 Party Greats LPs and Ronco Chopomatics and has become an internationally recognised logo. 

...a standardized red seal in the shape of a CRT television screen with the words "AS SEEN ON TV" in white, an intentional allusion to the logo of the ubiquitous [US] TV Guide magazine

Wikipedia

This logo is in the public domain.  Anyone can use it and anyone does:  a while back I found (and posted) this:

 As seen on TV - in some countries!  Wow!

Last week in my local garage I spotted this on a dog blanket box:

I miss K-tel albums.






*Gods! There's a concept we'll have to explain to our kids in a few years. Physical shops. Remember them? They're where you used to buy Spangles....

** 'LPs'? look it up, kids, I'm not going to explain everything. I'm an old man; I haven't got time for all this.

*** 'Woolworths'?  ---------- Ditto ----------

The Cover.

If I wish really really hard I can almost imagine it's illustrating my story.

Fanfare, Please!

Time to pass on an announcement:

Announcing the release of The End: Visions of Apocalypse, an anthology presented by SFFWorld.com. Including twelve stories that detail various depictions of the end of the world, the anthology features the work of Michael J. Sullivan, Hugh Howey, Tristis Ward, and nine other writers, all with their own apocalyptic visions. From grim destruction to tragic suffering, and even humor, no version of the Earth is safe. 

Now available through Smashwords. Coming soon to Amazon, and other online e-book retailers

I'm passing on the announcement because a story I wrote a while back is included. One of my stories in a book alongside stories by real published, actually got paid for their books, writers.  Woohoo!  The Story is called Silver Sky.  It's not the best story I wrote this year. But it's not dreadful.  Some of the other stories in there are pretty good.  At least one I would go so fas as to say is excellent.

Go get it.  It's free from Smashwords in a variety of interesting electronic formats. 

Yet Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of My Life

INT: DAY: THE KIDS' BEDROOM

Eben and I are playing with his wooden train set.  I've just set out the track and Eben is placing the carriages on the track as I hand them to him.  I pull another engine out of the box.  It is painted black.

ME:

...and here's a black one.

EBEN:

That's means it's evil - it's a BAD train!

ME: 

(Pulling out a blue carriage.)

So this must be the goods train....

He didn't laugh either.




Daughter Number one has a blog:

http://jacksonishot.edublogs.org/

I don't understand it but it probably makes more sense than mine...




.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's this game I play at the checkouts at Morrison's supermarket. Morrison's, unlike the only other supermarket I use with any regularity (Tesco's), has, near its checkouts, racks of Celeb and Gossip magazines.   During the inevitable tedious delay as the three people in front of me in the queue, in turn, pack their bags, put their bags in their trolley, and THEN start to look for their wallets with which to pay... (after long and detailed analysis during the years I have spent in supermarket checkout queues I can, without fear of contradiction, state that most women do this. Most men on the other hand have their card in their hand as soon as the goods are on the conveyor belt and can't wait to get out of the hideous places.)

The game I play goes like this:  I look at the racks of magazines: Hello, Chat, Now, Heat, and so on and I try to see if I recognise anybody.  That's it.  All these magazines with 'famous' 'celebrities' on the front cover - quite often accompanied by their names in large yellow letters, "Keri dumps Rowan after Fiona fight!", "Louise Holiday Snap Cellulite Shock!" - and I see if I know any of them.  Hundreds of pictures of 'celebs' and I haven't got a scooby who 90% of them are.  Even with their names printed next to them and large arrows pointing at their paparazzi-snapped, bikini-clad buttocks. One of these days I will succeed in not recognising anyone.  This is my aim.  If I don't recognise anyone at all I will give myself a prize.  Buy a packet of chewing gum or something else from the impulse-buy, small child pacifying rack of sweeties next to the magazines. 

Most of the time I am let down by the fact that I recognise the skinny one from the Spice Girls who married a footballer, and the woman with all the teeth who married some royal bloke last year (or was it this year?).  If it wasn't for them I would have won lots of times.  I'm starting to get bored with this game,  Skinny and Teeth appear far to often to make it fun any more, so I'm thinking of starting a new game based on a chance discovery I made in Lidl's.

Lidl's sell magazines too and quite often on a Thursday the Woman Who Brings the New Magazines will leave the old stock in a pile by the door for people to help themselves. They're usually shit, breathy, carcrash "Pervy Husband Made Me Eat My Own Underpants as my Dog Watched!" type crap.  Last week the only one left when I did my shopping was last week's copy of Inside Soap.  For some stupid reason Inside Soap really appealed to me.  I can't find this particular issue on the web and I couldn't be arsed to scan it but it's a bit like this recent copy: (Actually this IS the copy I have.  My mind's going.)

It's a real mess of a cover.  They all are.  Magazine cover design is just hyperactive crap these days. But I was struck by the number of exclamation marks on the front of this one.  There are thirteen of the buggers.  'Carla & Peter Shock Split!', 'Cain Loses it!', 'I'll Kill You!', 'Wedding Day Carnage!' etc. etc.. The only things that don't seem to have a ! behind it are the barcode and the price.  The main headline gets two! 'Alfie's Revenge! He dumps cheating Kat for ROXY!'

Wow!

The new game is to find the magazine in Morrison with most exclamation marks! Every Week! Beats Not Recognising People!   Beats Throwing Rocks at the numbskulls in front of me who only wake up the fact they have to pay for their shopping after they have packed it!

I haven't dared open the magazine.  God knows what the inside is like.

 

 http://www.insidesoap.co.uk/

Dad! Buzz's Head's Got Stuck up Mr. Potato Head's Bottom...

I like stuff.   I like charity shops because they are full of stuff.  Sometimes the stuff in charity shops has to become my stuff.  Stuff transference happened today.  The piece of stuff was this:

 The Official Halley's Comet Society Theme 7" single

This is educational stuff.  Not only did I discover there is (was) such a thing as the Halley's Comet Society but that it had an 'Official' Theme tune too!  Huzzah!  I had to have it.  There can't be that many 7" vinyl singles endorsed by the European Space Agency.

Actually, what really sold me on buying this was the photo of the composer on the back.  In years to come when my kids get on at me for my bad dress sense and weird facial hair I'll threaten the little buggers with this photo and cow them into silence.

Thank you Paul Hart.  Whoever you are.  I may actually get round to listening to your single one day.

A Thing I didn't Know Existed Yesterday - But Now NEED

WARNING.  This Post's Geeky Fan Boy Nerd Rating is High

I have long loved the wonderfully dreadful Italian, post Star Wars, Barbarella-lite, film StarCrash for all sorts of reasons. Though, if I'm honest, mostly because it has teenage crush Caroline Munro running around in a see-through space suit. 

 It is a bewilderingly bad film that leaps about all over the place, doesn't make much sense when it gets anywhere, but manages to be vastly entertaining all the same.

I have over the last few years come to appreciate the novels of A E van Vogt which often induce a similar sense of bewilderment in me. I'm sure a lot of his books made a lot of sense to him when he dreamed them up (literally) but they leave me deliciously baffled.

It was no surprise then to discover that the writer of StarCrash, Luigi Cozzi, was a fan of  van Vogt and had 'use[d] novels of A.E. Van Vogt as a model...'*.  It shows. The film has a very Vogtian jumpy, pulling rabbits out of thin air, WTF?ery feel.

What was a surprise, and a delight, however was to discover that van Vogt wrote the script for an unmade sequel to StarCrash called Star Riders**

WHICH I HAVE TO READ - RIGHT NOW!


Does anyone have a copy?


*http://www.devildead.com/luigicozzi/...ozzi-uk-2.php3
**http://www.golobthehumanoid.com/star...ar-riders.html

Though Star Riders never got made there is a film that purports to be a sequel. Giochi erotici nella 3a galassia (aka Escape From Galaxy 3 , StarCrash 2, Space Trap 1981)  I watched it last week. It has very little to do with the original other than  ALL of the special effects shots from it come from StarCrash. The film makes very little sense, not that anyone was really trying, and eventually dissolves into the softest softcore porn film ever made. Right at the end our heroes pull some hitherto unmentioned shooting lightbeams out of their eyes superpowers out of thin air, dissolve the bad guy and get naked again. Cheap, boring, and not worth a second viewing.

Trying to kickstart my blogging habit.

I realised it has been MONTHs since I did one of my tedious-to-everyone-but-me, every-film-I-have-watched posts.  To spare you a case of terminal scrollfinger while looking for the vaguely-funny-things-my-kids-say posts, the Tedious Film Lists are now to be tucked away over on a spare blog:

Every Film I Watched in June:

Every Film I Watched in July:

Every Film I Watched in August:

Snappy titles huh?

Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of My Life

Monday:
Daisy has a day off school. She's 'not well' - my diagnosis is General Non-specific Duvet Lurgitis.  As an occasional sufferer myself I recognised it instantly and knew the cure; a day in bed watching crap on the telly works wonders.

Thursday:
Driving the girls into the Fort to their drama class I hear the following snippet of conversation from the back seat:

Daisy: 

What happened in school on Monday?

Holly: (Gleefully)

Didn't anyone tell you? Johnny Depp
came and filmed a bit for his latest
 film and then he had his photo taken
 with everybody. It was awesome!

Daisy:

What was for lunch?





.

Hello, much neglected Blog.  Just to prove to the world I am still alive here's a picture of a bit of packaging.  Merriol bought a tomato planter recently and this is part of  the box it came in:


 

Zoom!  Enhance!



Some Countries! Wow!  Mostly, I suspect, Albania... late at night... on a shopping channel.

Daisy and Eben were having a raspberry blowing contest.  The one who made the longest loudest rude noise would win.  Holly didn't take part.  She watched them at it for a bit and said, "Oh survival of the fartest," and walked off.

Not a bad gag for a 10 year old.

Made me laugh anyway.

This, Apparently, is What I look like When I'm Shouting

'Daddy Shouting' by Holly