Ealing Tragedy

Getting Carried Away

2007-12-10T16:21:00.000Z

Behold!

Me with a vegetable drainer on my head:

The Big Daddy monster out of Bioshock:

"Nothing ever happens here, just bowling."

2007-12-10T15:33:00.000Z

Nothing better for bringing one's journal internetif out of nigh-on-retirement than a story about a man trapped in a toilet for four days. While I certainly don't envy the poor chap, I think he's milking it a little when he attributes his eventual escape to the fact that he once went on a survival course. Presumably when he took the course he was anticipating putting his skills to use finding edible insects or sewing up his own wounds in, I don't know, the Sahara or a plane crash or a nuclear fallout or something, rather than warming his feet in the gents' WC of the Kittybrewster and Woodside Bowling Club, Aberdeen. Still, good job he didn't go for the Intermediate Spanish instead.

Also on the 'I promise I've been working all day and not just browsing various newspaper and/or videogames-based websites' front, I noticed something earlier which testifies to the power of the 'Most Read/Emailed' list. You know the ones - if you go to the Guardian or BBC News websites, for instance, they've got a little column on the front page showing what four or five stories are currently getting the most hits. As The Onion has noted before, this fascinating glimpse into what Joe and Joleen Public actually give a toss about rarely coincides with the 'important' stories, focusing instead on things like the discovery of the New Guinean Rabbit-Faced Girl or (this one's true) the driving instructor who was jailed for putting a carrot in his trousers and pretending that one of his pupil's parking maneouvres was so good it had given him an erection. Which, let's face it, we all read.

And of course it's a vicious circle, because once something's on that list it gets seen by everyone who visits the homepage, and we'd much rather read that than an extensive piece on interest rates or genocide ~~or Madeleine McCann~~ or whatever. Such stories are subject not to time but only mirth, and this might explain how a story about a man who chopped his own penis off in a restaurant on the Strand has managed to top the BBC Most Read list EIGHT MONTHS after it was originally posted.

I only know this because I read it first time round.

(UPDATE: Even as I write this, the penis-chopping story has dropped off (bad choice of words) and the man trapped in the toilet has appeared up there instead. I'm like Reuters! Only better.)

I didn't do English.

2007-10-20T16:43:00.000Z

I learnt a few things during a game of Scrabble today.

1) Just because you can fart in someone's ear doesn't mean you can enfart them.

2) Even if there is an obscure Marvel superhero called Sheero, you still can't use that word because it's a proper noun.

3) Scrabble is a stupid, unfair game.

I've also trapped a nerve in my neck, which is bloody annoying not just because it HURTS LIKE FUCK but because the best way to soothe it is to wear a big scarf, only I don't own a scarf so I've had to borrow one of m'lady's, which is actually quite a nice scarlet one which I could easily pass off in public, were it not for the fact that I have glasses and dark scruffy hair and am currently reading a Harry Potter book, so I just end up looking like an obsessive freak. Which I only am if you count the OCD.

One for the folkies now. I went to see Stewart Lee last week - just in performance you understand, we're not on friendly house-visiting terms or anything - and his support act, rather than a fellow stand-up comedian, was an obscure musical contemporary of the Fairport Convention et al. Yet when Merriman Weir took the stage, even his actually rather impressive pickin'-fingers couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen him somewhere before. (No, not there for once.)

From Outer Space

2007-10-09T19:05:00.000Z

Long time no write. Whither such absence? Divers alarums:

1) A Great Big Holiday in New York City, New York, United States of America, The World. I didn't take many pictures. (Quickly consults phone camera to make sure.) Actually I took rather a lot of pictures, but they're mainly of humourous medieval stained glass windows in the city's reconstituted monastery known as The Cloisters (you want a link? Google it yourself, you sloven). There's a great one of some monkeys doing carpentry. And an even better one of a man trying to herd sheep by sneaking up on them behind a big cardboard cut-out of a cow. Maybe that's what the monkeys were making!

No, I'm not putting the pictures up yet. Go to New York and take some pictures yourself, you sloven.

2) Work is busy. Busier than ever. Like, twelve-hour-days-are-fairly-standard busy. This kind of slavery is acceptable to dedicated and/or gullible types like bankers or lawyers, but it's a bit much for a poor little multimedia grunt, even if many of the said hours are spent playing and/or watching footage of terribly exciting videogames. I've even had to miss the pub quiz. Horrors. Well, at least that provides me with a Dark Secret, a Dreadful Sin I shall Forever Regret, which will come in handy for episode five once Earth is invaded by aliens and I'm one of only a rag-tag band of humans left struggling for survival despite all being very different characters, and everyone in the rag-tag band of surviving humans struggling for survival against the odds will wonder why I'm so pensive and quiet until episode five when it turns out I'm still haunted by my failure to go to the pub quiz just because work was a bit busy, and also because the aliens shot off my tongue.

3) That's it for now.

It's what all the cool kids have

2007-08-08T12:12:00.000Z

My DS ran out of batteries on the train this morning. Nooooooo! Now how am I supposed to level up Picharisu?

On a lighter note, we went to St. John last night. Not the saint - he was busy - but the restaurant near Smithfield. I'd love to say it was a revelation, but though HILARIOUS this would be inaccurate, since I'd already been told by numerous people (include some of my loyal readers) that it was bloody brilliant. And they were right. I'd never had roast bone marrow before, but now I vow to have it in my sandwiches every day.

Forgive me the following image. I had a pun; I had Photoshop; I had a spare ten minutes.

A Deep Regression

2007-08-07T15:47:00.001Z

I may have exaggerated in my last post (so, so long ago it feels now), and in fact I did manage to do some work on Shingles on my week off. Just a little bit, though. Enough to make it depressing that I then got addicted to Pokémon.

Pokémon's great though. Yes, it's meant for ten-year-olds. Yes, it's exactly the same game for ten-year-olds that they've been releasing and re-releasing with various different covers since 1998. But there's a reason why, when some of its original fans have now graduated from university, it still sells in buckets; and a reason why grown-up gamers are getting into it too. In part it's because you can now play it on a trendy-looking black DS Lite rather than a slightly embarrassing purple glittery Gameboy. But more importantly it's because it contains the magic formula upon which all the best games are founded, be they a ten-second blast on Asteroids or a ten-year slog of postal chess: the rules are simple, the possibilities endless.

Of course, when you try to explain to someone that you're in a dilemma over whether your level 19 Grotle (recently evolved from a Turtwig) should forget the Razor Leaf move in order to learn the Curse move, bearing in mind that Curse is really only effective for Ghost-type Pokemon, whereas Razor Leaf, being a Grass-type move, will serve him very well in the upcoming Oreburgh Mines where the wild Pokémon are mostly Ground-type and there a very few Fire-type Pokémon around, who would be very strong against him even though he's holding the Quick Claw - when you try to explain that, people don't think the rules are simple. They just step away.

And it isn't childish either. Even though Budew is very sweet. The way I see it, there are two ways to view one's participation in the world of the 'Mon:

VIEW 1
I am a Pokémon trainer! I'm on a great adventure through the magical land of Sinnoh, seeing marvellous cities, towering mountains and rolling green plains. I meet all kinds of interesting people. I gotta catch 'em all! I use Pokéballs to catch wild Pokémon, then I train them and battle with other Pokémon owners that I meet!

VIEW 2
I am a poacher. I have no fixed abode. I wander from town to town, never eating, never sleeping. I spend my days trapping wild animals, then I cram 'em into tiny spherical units and carry 'em around in my pockets. I force 'em to fight till they're nearly dead - they get burnt, bitten, poisoned, paralyzed, but anything that don't kills 'em makes 'em stronger. I breeds 'em to create better specimens, then I sets 'em loose upon other people's pets to get money and sweet, sweet potions.

I also have sex with disease-ridden whores.

VIEW 1 (addendum)
I have sex with disease-ridden whores too!

A Week of Not Much

2007-07-26T20:35:00.001Z

Every now and then I start prattling on about Monkey Island a-gain, and today's your lucky day. I just came across this Reduced Shakespeare Company-esque Flash movie of the whole first game condensed into about two minutes. It'll be enjoyed by at least one known reader who knows the game, while everyone else can appreciate the nifty Flash animation and (oh dear God forgive me for what I am about to say) 'zany' humour, lifted by-and-large straight from the game. It's a bit odd watching a parody of something which the parodiers obviously realise is very funny to start with, and even odder when the accents are all in German, but it works. It also reminds me that m'lady shares her name with Guybrush Threepwood's girl. Rock on! This is obviously a vital factor in our relationship.

I've been house-sitting this week, which has given me lots of time to spend thinking about how I should be spending it working on Shingles, instead of playing The Sims 2. I have, however, managed to force myself to do a decent amount of work today (two thirds of the way through my time here), and even managed to use my Wacom tablet for part of it, which I understand is very de rigeur for any aspiring digital artiste in these modern days. For those baffled by jargon, a Wacom tablet is one of those things which looks like a mousemat and which you draw on with a special pen/stylus thing, and what you draw comes out on the screen. It's basically an alternative to using a mouse, but it's a lot trickier to use than you'd think. It doesn't really feel like a pen or a mouse, and your brain's full of conflicting signals, especially if you're a lefty like me who uses a mouse in one hand and a pen in the other. In general, it seems to be that the pen's better for broad strokes and painting, while the mouse remains the quickest and most accurate option for, saying, clicking around icons. (Luckily, though being left-handed is in some ways a hindrance, it does mean that I can hold the pen and mouse at the same time, and use whichever's handiest for what I need to do at that moment. Makes me feel like an octopus, too.)

Mind you, Sims 2 is much cooler than I expected. The makers seem to have cottoned on to the fact that people had the most fun with the original game when ignoring the standard goals and just torturing their Sims instead - locking them in a room with no doors until they wet themselves, force-feeding them, coercing them into having sex with their mother, or - my personal favourite - building a swimming pool, letting them climb in, then taking the steps away and raising the sides. The sequel therefore pretty much encourages such voyeuristic sadism, and the house I've created has got incredibly... dark. I just typed out a paragraph of everything that's been going on in it, but then thought I should take it out again. Probably best it isn't recorded.

2007-07-18T11:54:00.001Z

Nintendo have had to recall a whole run of the Mario Party 8 game for the Wii. Not because it's rubbish (although it is), but because someone negelected to localise one of the game's little rhymes which tell the player what to do in each section. You see, it contained a word which is a perfectly honest scientific term in the States, but has become a bit of a taboo over in Blighty. Behold:

Magikoopa Magic!
Make the train spastic!
Turn this ticket tragic!

To be honest, the scanning and grammar are also pretty offensive, but you can see where the outcries are coming from.

Funnily enough, there was a much worse incident recently with the very same s-word which passed almost without comment. Ubisoft's Mind Quiz was pulled from shelves for ranking particularly low-scoring players as 'spastic'. Which seems a bit harsh. The rank that is, not pulling it.

It's Just Like Christmas

2007-07-16T21:16:00.001Z

I bought a pirate DVD yesterday.

It's a DVD-Arrrrr.

Haaaaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Swift as the Deer

2007-07-16T13:19:00.000Z

You couldn't make this up. Though I can't help thinking someone has.

"It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly." Genius.

Delaying Tactics

2007-07-14T18:10:00.000Z

M'lady's off at a festival this weekend, so I'm home alone. With no female wiles to distract me, I decided it would be a perfect time to knuckle down on artwork for Shingles. Here's what I've done so far:

Got up late.

Watched Howl's Moving Castle.

Had a leisurely fry-up, to steel me for the hard day's work ahead.

Bought some deodorant (turned out when I got back that I already had some).

Returned those CDs to the library, spent half an hour choosing some new ones.

Arranged the three hundred hours of mp3s on my hard drive, manually adding any missing album art and other information.

Accidentally deleted all the information I'd added, had to do it again.

Put great thought into choosing which mp3s I should have on my phone.

Named and dated all the photos on my camera, corrected red-eye, fixed orientation, copied to hard drive and USB stick.

Phoned my mum.

Phoned my sister.

Phoned m'lady, and told her I was doing lots of Shingles artwork.

Bought a watering can.

Played Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror.

Played Kingdom of Loathing.

Played with our new breadmaker. (Conclusion: I was not born to bake.)

Ordered a wardrobe door from Ikea.

Forgot to buy corned beef, had to go back and get it.

Drank all the apple juice m'lady had bought for cocktail mixing.

Finished the chocolate biscuits.

Wrote this post. Right then, no rest for the wicked. Back to work I go.

UPDATE 11.45pm: Cleaned the sink.

My Eight-Legged Friends

2007-07-11T12:59:00.000Z

Maybe it's the time of year. Maybe it's because our flat's on the top floor. Maybe the building work on our fire escape has awoken them from their thousand-year slumber. For whatever reason, our flat is crawling with spiders.

Big 'uns, too. With bodies the size of your thumb, and legs like two twiglets joined at the end. No, with legs like two twiglets joined side by side, and then joined to another two twiglets at the ends.

To make matters worse, it seems that only I can see them. This leads to all kinds of 'Not Now, Bernard' situations between me and m'lady, just like in all the best children's TV dramas where the child heroes see or meet something magical and important but none of the adults believe them. Such a powerful gift is both a blessing and a curse. And as a wise man once said - ironically I think it may have been Spiderman - 'With great power comes great responsibility'. Thus when my special powers permit me to encounter one of the fiends, it is my solemn duty to shriek like a girl and spend the rest of the day standing on a chair with my skirt hitched up to the knee.

Yet inevitably, by the time m'lady comes to my aid, the sneaky things are nowhere to be seen. Spiders are very good at getting away from you when they want to; but of course like all decent arachnophobes I know that their aversion to humans lasts only until the Season of Egg-Laying, whereupon they make a bee-line straight for the nearest open ear.

I should point out that it is always the Season of Egg-Laying.

Highlights have included (stop me if I've gone on about these before): the two I've found in my towel (and they said I was paranoid shaking it out before each use!); the one in the bookcase, in pursuit of whom I emptied the whole unit, moved it away from the wall, found nothing, put everything back the way it was, then saw it sitting on the one bit of skirting board my spider-catcher can't reach, wiggling its arse at me, the fruity devil, before it scampered back behind the bookcase again; and the big bastard underneath the toilet u-bend, whose continued freedom forces me to 'hold it in' until I get to work.

A money spider just appeared on the desk next to mine. They follow! They follow!

Warren Earth, Peace in Zevon

2007-07-09T10:05:00.000Z

Discovered Highgate Library at the weekend, and it's great. Unlike lesser institutions, they can text you when your requested book's in or your current one's overdue. They also, it transpires, have a fantastic CD collection. Now I haven't visited a public library for nigh-on seven years*, so for all I know they might all be like this, but instead of the racks of Beyonce, Shakira, S Club 7 et al which I was expecting, the shelves were filled with the likes of Bowie, Dylan, Springsteen, The Beatles, The Band, Johnny Cash, Hendrix and even a spot of Zevon. This made me quite happy. The Zevon album was My Ride's Here, which I believe was his last (featuring him ominously in a hearse on the front cover) and not his greatest, but I'm enjoying it, so there.

We went to Highgate Cemetery too, and saw the ENORMOUS gravestone of Karl Marx, which was way more ENORMOUS than I'd been expecting and took me quite by surprise. Much as, I'm sure, his radical doctrines took the bloated bourgeoisie by surprise. Perhaps it's deliberate. Who knows.

The rest of the cemetery, though not the most ornate or overblown of its Victorian ilk, would get ten out of ten for 'This Would Be Very Creepy In The Dark' if they made Victorian London Cemeteries Top Trumps. Unlike the big flat open one near Wanstead, Highgate's pretty much a forest where you can get completely lost in the undergrowth, surrounded by shadows and ivy and broken crosses and stone angels on all sides. The trees have grown all over a lot of the older graves, wrapping round them with tendril-esque fronds, a bit like that bit in Evil Dead II where the girl gets eaten by a tree. And there's the grave of a Secret Supreme Leader Mason too (c. 1900), which like all Masonic paraphernalia makes every effort to proclaim loudly just how secret it is.

SEE THIS?!? SEE THIS BIG TOMBSTONE?!? HERE LIES A BIG SECRET MASON!!! JUST LOOK AT THE BIG MASONIC SYMBOLS ON THE SIDE! AND IT'S AN OBELISK TOO! SSSHHH THOUGH! IT'S OUR LITTLE SECRET! NOBODY MUST KNOW HOW WE RULE OVER THEM ALL! THEY MUST ONLY KNOW THAT WE ARE VERY SEEECRET!

*Back in the mid-Nineties I used to spend a lot of time in Shenfield Library, while I was waiting for a lift home from the train station after school. Shenfield Library had a relatively uninspiring CD collection, consisting mainly of Ibiza Anthem Compilations Having It Large 1996 etc. But they did have the limited edition version of Terrorvision's How To Make Friends And Influence People, which I couldn't find anywhere else for love nor money. The CD itself was no different from the standard version, the sleeve notes just had a shiny foil effect on the front cover. But being an avid collector of that band's 'work' at the time, I just had to have it.

Unfortunately it wasn't worth nicking from the library (they charged well over the odds for lost CDs), so I came up with another plan instead. I bought a second copy of the standard version, hired the limited edition from the library for 70p, swapped the sleeve notes around and hoped they wouldn't notice. Tragically, though, I was unable to remove the barcode sticker and the 'Due Back On' label from the foil cover without leaving a sticky residue. And as any record collector knows, such a taint renders any item ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS. I was therefore forced to abort the mission, and to this day I still have two standard copies of How To Make Friends And Influence People and 70p less in my bank account than I should have.

An Addict is Me!

2007-07-04T16:19:00.000Z

Okay, so I'm a hare. Now leave me alone, just leave it, we don't want me turning into a butterfly again. Turn me into a butterfly, and I'll come round and... I don't know... flutter annoyingly in front of you when you're trying concentrate on something like the series finale of Doctor Who or building a scale model of St Paul's Cathedral out of matchsticks.

Kingdom of Loathing continues to absorb my attention with a totality customarily reserved for superior brands of kitchen towel. Ganny Happysachs has finally aquired his Liver of Steel, which has stopped him getting drunk so much, and he recently became a Level 9 Bullfrog Overseer. My insistence of playing without the aid of a Wiki or FAQ has prevented rapid development, but made the slow progress all the more rewarding. Just like cooking in the real world, Lihc Eye Pie is that much more fulfilling when you know you discovered the recipe yourself.

When not attacking seven-foot dwarves with a spork, we've been enjoying Cardiac Arrest, the mid-90s hospital comedy-drama which has dated rather nastily in some respects (dig those mirror shots and the freeze frames before the credits) but still retains a glorious mixture of bitterness, cynicism and gallows humour which makes it warmer and more human than most of its genre. Hark at Ealing Tragedy, student newspaper reviewer.

Finally for today, this made me laugh a lot.

Still here

2007-06-29T09:31:00.001Z

The good news is that it didn't blow up.

The bad news, which it would have made more sense to tell you before the good news, is that they found a car-bomb on Haymarket this morning. That's the Haymarket two minutes from my office, the Haymarket I walk down every day. Yeesh. Thank God for our brave boys in blue and all that.

It's been an exciting couple of days round here, actually. Yesterday Gordon Brown became PM, and he took the ride from the Treasury to Buckingham Palace along The Mall at lunchtime. Now I usually go for a walk down The Mall at lunchtime myself, so the chances of seeing this historical cavalcade were pretty high. But this is Ealing Tragedy, so of course I saw the whole thing on the plasma screen above the express tills queue in Tesco's, stood there with my scotch egg and Quavers.

Hare today...

2007-06-23T17:56:00.000Z

...five-toed sloth tomorrow?

Following the tip-off I've done like the Golden Compass website says and looked into my heart - which, to my surprise, was a series of multiple-choice questions - and my daemon has been alotted. Her name is Rhianna (like Terry Pratchett's daughter who reviews videogames for The Guardian) and to start with, she's a hare. See below! Now for the clever part: you lovely people have twelve days to click on the picture below, give your opinion of me, and see if it changes my daemon's shape. Come on now, I'm hoping for a shark or a dinosaur or a Decepticon or something. I will not be pleased if I get a hedgehog or a bush baby. Or even a human baby, that'd be awful. Your co-operation is appreciated.

UPDATE 24/6: Okay, who turned me into a vole?

UPDATE 25/6 (1): Big black spider! That's more like it. Except I'm arachnophobic, so I'd be in a state of constant panic. Makes for a good story, mind.

UPDATE 25/6 (2): A frickin' BUTTERFLY?!? Which of you b*stards gave me a butterfly? Why couldn't you just leave me in peace, on my lovely comfy web?

UPDATE 25/6 (3): Hey! Spider again. Thank you. Finally.

UPDATE 26/6: Butterfly again?!? Nooooooo!!!

UPDATE 27/6: Still a butterfly. Come on people, we can do better than this. Is this all you think of me? Do you really look at me and see a big pair of poncey translucent wings and some fluffy antennae? I bet you all call me Painted Lady behind my back.

UPDATE 28/6: Heyyy! Back to the hare. The circle is complete. Good work.

Meat etc

2007-06-18T11:27:00.000Z

Ho-kay, so it tranpires that someone who reads this is already something of a Kingdom of Loathing hardcore player themselves, and is now sending me cryptic messages as well as some useful in-game items, so ta for those. I have a prime suspect, but if it is that person then I'm surprised they haven't told me about it before. Mind you, given that they seem to have been playing for 18 months it is of course entirely possible that they've talked to me about it at great length, and I've gone and forgotten. Possibly following a sharp blow to the head, or something similar. Maybe I was hit by a bus and got amnesia. Maybe I'm actually a father of four, with a grieving family somewhere on the outskirts of Willesden Green, the front-room windows of their semi-detached three-up-two-down and surrounding telegraph poles plastered with 'Have You Seen?' posters poorly designed on Microsoft Word and photocopied down the newsagents' for 5p a sheet. Maybe I'm an elite assassin. Or a porn kingpin. The possibilities are infinite, like soft drinks at Nando's.

Coincidentally I finally did the handover of my old Ealing flat yesterday, and the last thing I did in what had been my home for three years was bend down to pick up a sack of rubbish and smartly smack my head on the electricity meter. I can't help but think the flat wanted to get rid of me.

So, out with the old and in with the new - we spent most of the weekend in IKEA. I feel terrible posting about this. I am hideously wary of logs (I refuse to call them blogs any more) being mere receptacles for the dull minutiae of one's life, and I've always striven to avoid allowing Ealing Tragedy to become such a tank of tedium. Somehow, writing about trips to IKEA seems to be the very antithesis of such a goal. Still, I've managed to string it out for a whole paragraph now so I might as well leap in with both feet:

We got a bed and a mattress and a coffee table and a dining table and four chairs and two wardrobes and two bookcases and two CD towers and a wok.

What we forgot, of course, was a hammer.

The wok is good for cooking but unwieldy for banging in nails, so now we just have a lot of loose wood lying around our flat. I've managed to construct a temporary coffee-table out of bits of chair, but the structure is unsound. I'm also haunted by the knowledge that when we eventually move again - which hopefully won't be for some time, but will one day happen with the inevitability of an ingrowing toenail - the furniture which just about came up the narrow stairwell in flat-packed form will staunchly refuse to go back down again in its full, constructed glory. Not without removing a few chunks of the original 1950's art-deco interior pebble-dashing en route. Perhaps I should just move back in with the missus in Willesden Green and have done with it.

UPDATE: Yep, it's him alright.

Diversions

2007-06-15T13:29:00.000Z

Amongst my fellows bloggers there is a long tradition of free, internet-based timewasting toys over those long, summer months when man must retreat from the harsh sun into the comfort of his darkened room and take nourishment from the cool electronic glow of his computer monitor. There was Sodaplay, which led to many an hour spent watching one's finely crafted stilt-walking robot topple to the ground and flail around like an injured seagull. There was the AI/Cloudmakers game, which I had to abort relatively early on but which led others to acquire jet lag without ever leaving terra firma. And now I have been pointed towards The Kingdom of Loathing.

The whole MMO thing has been out of my reach ever since the text-based MUDs of the mid- to late nineties - I've had neither the time, nor the money, nor the technology at my disposal. And Loathing is hardly hi-tech, being based around a very basic-looking pages of HTML text and a few hand-drawn stick figures. But it is:

- easy
- free
- quick
- very funny (the currency is meat)
- impossible to become addicted, because it limits your number of moves each day.

Perfect for playing in spare moments at the office, in other words. So sign up, and maybe we can all form a clan. My character is a level 4 Turtle Tamer called Ganny Happysachs and my familiar is a 4-pound mosquito called Perkins. Bring it on.

Posting for posting's sake

2007-06-08T12:33:00.000Z

People keep neglecting their blogs recently, owing to work and evil FB and other things, so even though I really have little to report and am starting to get a bit sick of telling everyone what I've been doing, here I am writing a post to show that Ealing Tragedy stills exists.

We were in Amsterdam at the weekend, which was quite pleasant. Naturally we spent all our time living it large in the Red Light District, hiring strippers and smoking in 'Coffee' Shops and drinking Heineken in bars which advertise 'Beer In Pints'. Actually we just walked about a bit and drank some good beer called Palm. But it was still nice. And we did sneak off the Canal Bus without paying while the conductor was distracted by some people arguing, so we lived it large just a little bit.

Tomorrow is the Big Move to Highgate. I've spent all week packing and still haven't finished; plus even after hauling all my shit across the North Circular (my dad's hiring a van, bless; I've bought him The Terminator trilogy to say thanks) I then get the joy of going back to my empty flat and cleaning the bastard. I honestly cannot believe the sheer amount of complete toot I've accumulated over the past three years; still, the skateboard stays.

Incidentally - and by telling you this plan I am probably dooming it to never, ever happen - I have a mad-cap scheme to set up a proper website soon, whither I shall relocate the blog (my old Terrorvision site had a news blog of sorts, which was easy enough to program from the bottom-up) and archives of other stuff I've written and done. Like The Awkward Pause (which I'm in the process of, well, not editing, but just getting into a printer-friendly format) and Shingles (which I've been making tracks on again recently) and the old plays, if I don't find them too cringey nowadays. Hopefully this will help with my embryonic career in designing things and being technical and stuff - got some ideas for a cool Flash template. Address will most likely be the Awkward Pause one which previously redirected to the Ketch blog, unless I think of anything else particularly stunning and available.

On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness

2007-05-26T22:39:00.000Z

There are now two trailers up for Penny Arcade's forthcoming video game, On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness: Episode One. I'm a bit excited about this, because:
(a) Tycho's writing and Gabe's art are great;
(b) there aren't, curiously, enough 1930's steam-punk games out there;
(c) Ron Gilbert has been advising them on the game's narrative. That's the Ron Gilbert, the one who made Monkey Island;
(d) it no longer appears they're making a point-and-click - which would've been ace, but made me feel guilty for reasons you all know well - but more of a squad-based tactical fighter along the lines of Freedom Force Vs The Third Reich, a game which thoroughly entertained me a couple of summers ago in a way that sunshine and Pimms just can't manage. Still, guilt aside, I would have preferred a good old point-and-click.

OMG I am so like down with the kidz

2007-05-26T16:47:00.000Z

Long-ish gap between posts, fairly standard procedure these days, caused in some part by lots of work to do and in other part by getting distracted by the horrors of Facebook. Reluctantly I've taken the King's Shilling of t'internet and am now enslaved to the idea of enlarging my friends list, not because I actually like anybody but because of course the pure NUMBER of friends you have on your list is wholly and exclusively representative of how COOL you are, how DEEP your personality reaches, and how LARGE your penis is. Plus there's that bit of me that plays RPGs - the main bit of me, in fact - which kind of equates friend-harvesting to levelling up my character. When I reach fifty friends I will gain the Transfer Mana spell and be able to equip a Fire Helm. And then nobody will fuck with me again.

I should point out I draw the line at adding my actual Face to the book. This tactic works fine until other people start flagging photos of you. Which they already have done. Damn.

My hair's a little shorter than usual today. This process started when I got it cut. The barbers at the place at which I am customarily a customer are very reliable, and I got my standard buzz-cut (number four back and sides, number five on top) with no trouble. I was a little disconcerted that I'd been given a waxy chav fringe poking down over my forehead, but put this down to the gel. Only when I got home and washed the gel out did I realise that I really did have a longer fringe than normal, which made me look like a fifteen-year-old habitue of JD Sports and didn't really go with the long black coat, goatee beard and copy of Starkey's Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. So I decided to cut it off myself, with my beard trimmer.

I now understand that the grading numbers on a beard trimmer do not correspond very accurately with those on a hair trimmer.

Further to this realisation, I now have a rather bald front of my head.

Never mind. It looks okay and at least I won't get ID'd in Tesco's.

A picture, they say, speaks a thousand words. It also saves me thinking of anything to write. So here are some nice pictures of Trafalgar Square yesterday, turfed over. With grass. For the record it was a really good idea and they should do it all year round, though it got a bit soggy underfoot with all those fountains about the place.

And finally, in a momentous day for Ealing, the local branch of BookWorld - you know, one of those shops that forever has spraypaint across its window declaring that it's about to close down NOW but never does - this BookWorld closed down. I wasn't particularly upset, given that the closest I'd ever come to buying something there was trying on an ill-fitting t-shirt that read 'EALING' in bold arcing text across the front like one of those American university sweaters. But I did like the way they used the cheap old Hallowe'en tat they had in the back room to make a little BookWorld gravestone, now displayed forlornly in their otherwise empty window.

I finally ate my big sandwich!

2007-05-18T09:43:00.000Z

You remember, the one I mentioned in yesterday's post. The big chicken and mushroom sandwich which I made for myself two days ago then forgot to bring to work. I was deeply traumatised by my error, but in the end it only made the final tasting even sweeter. In fact I was so pleased with it that I was inspired to write a song, to the tune of a certain Boston classic, which I trust you'll agree is UTTER GENIUS.

Woke up this morning, my alarm had gone
Ate my big sandwich, to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar taste
I closed my mouth and it slipped awayyyyyyy

Dooooooo-doooo-dooby-doo-dooo
Doo-doo-dooby-doo-dooooooooooooooooooo-

(See where this is going yet?)

-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-

(Seriously, you'll kick yourself)

-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-

(Sing along!)

-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

It's MORE THAN A FILLING
(More than a filling)
When I use up that old chicken I had in the fridge
Whoa whoa
Not heated, chilling
(Not heated, chilling)
Because eating re-heated chicken makes you pass awayyyyyyy

I see my Marie-Ann walking away (she is a vegetarian)

It kind of carries on like this for three minutes of unbridled mirth.

Talking of which, here are some videos which I didn't get time to post along with yesterday's photos.

First, here is a perilous attempt to open a keg of Felsgold beer in deepest Norfolk. Just think what life must have been like in medieval times, when all liquid had to be obtained in this manner!

And now for something completely different: actual footage of the ultra-rare Rasputin dance. Mobile-phone quality visuals convey the bewildering haze brought about by the fervour and frenzied movement of the occasion.

But wait! Here's an extended version, with slightly better lighting. It is said that during the height of the dance, participants enter a trance-like state equivalent to licking eight Sonoran Desert toads.

Harrowing stuff.

What I done did do upon my weekends

2007-05-17T16:36:00.000Z

Right, time for a catch-up. The tiny blank spaces in my life which I customarily use for blogging have been filled of late with preparing for the flat move, hunting for a holiday apartment in NYC, watching a spot of Life On Mars (which is amazing) and getting Minty the Etherian Knight up to Level 40 in Puzzle Quest. All of these take precedence over educating you lot, I'm afraid.

Yet here I am now with a free window in my hectic social diary, and those who have been impatient for a post will now rue the day they clamoured for one, as you shall all now be subject to a slideshow. Don't try arguing - I'm in a grump because I made myself a big sandwich for lunch then went and forgot to bring it to work. Chicken and mushroom it was. Had to make do with a scotch egg instead. So behold, three weeks in pictures:

I was patronised by a Travelodge bathroom!

I was insulted by a lamp-post in Ealing!

I went on a stag night and took a photo of a ladyboy!

The Lego Joker snuck up on Lego Batman and- heyyyy, how did this get in here?

We went to Norfolk for Rambling Thomas's stag weekend and stayed in the House of Pink! And as we all remember, in the House of Pink, let's all play ball.

See? We all played ball. Except me, because I was taking the photo. This game is called 'Try Not To Damage The Listed Building With A Football'.

I also bought a skateboard. Here is not me riding upon it.

Last of all I stumbled upon an excellent Onion film review which made me laugh out loud in the office and forget for one blissful moment the big chicken and mushroom sandwich languishing in my fridge back home.

Movin' On Up, Movin' On Out

2007-05-04T11:21:00.000Z

Listen, right, this isn't definite right now because the contracts haven't been signed yet and it depends on the references coming back okay and I didn't want to jinx it by writing about it beforehand but it's occurred to me that I'll probably end up telling a lot of people at the weekend anyway so, the relocation of this site's Tragedy is pretty much decided.

Owing to our busy social diaries we decided to start looking for a flat nice and early, which meant that the many places we saw on the first day of hunting in our planned vicinity of Islington, Angel, Essex Road and Highbury were either (a) shit or (b) unwilling to wait until June for a new tenant. Fortunately the onslaught of dodgy carpets and delapidated furniture so offended m'lady's eyes that, late in the day, we replied to an advert in Loot which she believed was for a flat in Highbury, when if fact it was for a flat in Highgate, and by the time the mistake came to light we were bored of marching up and down Essex Road and decided to go view it anyway. And it turned out to be an awful lot nicer than anything else we'd seen, so we put in an offer there and then and have been sorting out the details in the days since. So that's the news: by mid-June Ealing Tragedy will, references permitting, become A Highgate Ballad.

Up near the Heath. Close to the meat.

Oh, and I had fun attending the filming of an episode of Have I Got News For You last night. Besides Hislop and Merton, the guests were Adam Buxton and Armando Iannucci and the host was Bill Bailey, so it was a rather cracking conjunction of comedy cattle. It was interesting seeing how they film it too - the previous stuff I've seen filmed has been programmes where they have to keep stopping and starting, or the actors fluff their lines and have to do the scene all over again, and it's all a bit weird and/or boring. But for HIGNFY they really do just sit five people down and get them to do the show like you see it, all in one take - the difference being that they take about two hours(!) to get through it all, and only the best half hour is used for the broadcast (bar a few minutes of retakes at the end). Which sounds like a nightmare, but the talent on show was good enough to make those two hours consistently really good, so apart from the fact that I was gagging for a pint the show really flew by. Not a bad night for zero quid.

Numpty

2007-04-27T11:47:00.000Z

This morning I was so engrossed in deep philosophising that I went and put shower gel in my hair instead of shampoo. Serendipitously it seems to have actually had a cleansing and conditioning effect that gives me volume and confidence.

I've been getting through a lot of games recently, or rather I've been trying a lot of games for a short space of time before getting bored. They're all mere unfulfilling flings, rebound romances after my whirlwind affair with Okami (finished after 59 in-game hours, 42 in-game minutes, 319 saves, two deaths, 63 stray beads found and 87% of wild animals fed). We Love Katamari is as infuriating as it is hilarious, Battles of Prince of Persia was just for completism's sake, and Gran Turismo 3 was because I've managed the miracle of having a PS2 for five years without owning it. They're also all games which excel at making me feel I'm rubbish at them.

Latest flirtation is with Puzzle Quest, giving my long-neglected DS some exercise. Penny Arcade raved about it, and though the bug has yet to really ensnare me, it's early days yet. Simply put, it's a cross between Final Fantasy and Connect Four. And when you get a line of colours, instead of them all falling out the bottom of the board, your opponent is assailed by terrible eldritch forces which rend their soul from their bones.

This made me laugh this morning - Nintendo's genius tagline for the DS adventure game Hotel Dusk: Room 215 - 'Have you checked in to mystery yet?'

I'm getting a name...

2007-04-24T15:57:00.000Z

In a bold move, the Jamaican authorities appear to be drafting in supernatural powers in their investigation into the death of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer. See:

Psychic medium, television's Derek Acorah

Deputy Police Commissioner of Jamaica, Mark Shields

Reports that hotel CCTV picked up orbs in the vicinity of Mr Woolmer's room remain unfounded.

That said, Karl whatsisname was seen running away from the crime scene with a laser pointer and set of windchimes.

Also in today's news, someone in a Serbian mine has discovered actual Kryptonite! Or at least they've discovered a chemical compound which matches the make-up of Kryptonite as described in one scene of the recent Superman Returns. Unfortunately they can't call it Kryptonite in real life - not because of copyright issues with DC Comics, but because it doesn't actually contain krypton. Which makes you wonder how the writers who made up the formula for Kryptonite decided not to put any krypton in it. Perhaps Hydroxidite was just a bit of a mouthful.

Once More Unto The Bleach

2007-04-23T13:05:00.000Z

I'm all for saving the environment - without the environment I'd have nowhere to play We Love Katamari - but Sheryl Crow's suggested solution seems a bit harsh: she's advocating a restriction on toilet paper to one square per visit.

One square?!?

Per visit?!?

I get through two squares in a single swipe! And there are many swipes to be had. Is there something wrong with me? Maybe I have condition. Maybe I shouldn't be eating so much red meat. Maybe I'm just fussier than other people - all those filthy, poo-encrusted people.

On the other hand, those who fondly remember tales of 'Spare Sleeves' will appreciate Crow's other grand scheme. Scroll down to the bottom of the BBC article above and you'll find this:

Crow has also commented on her website about how she thinks paper napkins "represent the height of wastefulness".

She has designed a clothing line with what she calls a "dining sleeve".

The sleeve is detachable and can be replaced with another "dining sleeve" after the diner has used it to wipe his or her mouth.

Genius. And then you wrap it up, take it home with you and wash it, right? Using a lot of detergent, water and electricity. And if you're going to do that, why not just use a cloth napkin? Why attach it to your bloody wrist?

Mind you, I'd be up for a combination of the two: ladies and gentleman, behold the pooping sleeve.

The Usura Game

2007-04-20T20:18:00.000Z

or:

Ezra's Mallet

Preps to Mr O for digging up the inspiration for this.

The rules of the game - best played as it was invented, late on a Friday night when you're still stuck at work waiting for the blasted important mailout to finish printing - are simple. Just take Ezra Pound's well-known anti-semitic-bile-ridden-hate-tirade-that-inconveniently-happens-to-be-a-masterpiece-of-modernist-poetry Canto XLV, and replace the first occurrence of the word 'usura' with a random word; then replace all further 'usura's with a word related to the last one you used. So, you might replace the first instance of 'usura' with 'apples', the second with 'bananas', the third with 'ape-shit' and so on.

Anyone who pauses for too long is hit with 'Ezra's Mallet' - a metaphorical device best conveyed through application of a heavy stapler to the forehead. The victim then receives a plaster, and further medical attention as required. At the end of the canto, the player with the fewest plasters/flesh wounds wins.

Here is an example game we played just now. Replacements of 'usura' are in CAPITAL ITALICS, in an effort to portray Pound's fervour.

-------

With OFFAL hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,

with CHICKEN TONGUES

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luthes
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,

with LIMP, LIFELESS MOUTHS

seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly

with INFECTED FEET, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with NASTY SOCKS the line grows thick

with NASTY PANTS is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom

WITH HORRID GASPS

wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no grain with PAINFUL RETCHES
A HERD OF FILTHY iPOD-WEARING WRETCHES is a murrain, BLOODY CRETINS
blunteth the needle in the the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning. Pietro Lombardo
came not by BLOODY CRETANS
Duccio came not by NOBLE, MANLY SPARTANS
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by GERARD BUTLER OUT OF 300
nor was "La Callunia" painted.
Came not by RUSSELL CROWE OUT OF GLADIATOR Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.

Not by A GREAT BIG LEG OF BEEF St. Trophime

Not by GAME CHIPS St. Hilaire,

BISTO rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by BERNARD MATTHEWS; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling

BERNARD HILL slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom

CONTRA NATURAM

They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of BENNY HILL.

-------

Of course, when I say 'we' played, I of course mean 'I' played. This at least means that my inevitable victory mollifies the grievous self-inflicted stapler wounds.

And so on

2007-04-19T12:13:00.000Z

Did you hear about the wealthy pianist?

He went on a Chopin spree.

...

Anyway.

I'm subscribed to Lovefilm, which is usually very good, but recently it's been going a bit screwy like that HAL computer out of 2001*. First I had a load of troubles just logging in, then yesterday instead of sending me disc four of Firefly, they sent me a copy of 2005 straight-to-video Steven Seagal offering Today You Die. Now, I like the occasional pile of action wank as much as the next man, but this was uncalled for.

* 'I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.'

'Er. My name isn't Dave.'

'Oh.'

Look to the Skies

2007-04-13T14:51:00.000Z

Spring is in the air, the weather's warming up, and along with the rosebuds and the ducklings and the baby spiders London is beseiged by a wave of tourists. For the next five months one won't be able to walk a distance equal to the length of four horses (placed nose to tail) without Johnny Foreigner asking directions. And being an Englishman who is proud to know his country's protocol in all situations, I of course reply S-L-O-W-L-Y and L-O-U-D-L-Y, with copious hand gestures. All this despite knowing full well that such measures do nothing but hinder communications during these diplomatic incidents, especially when the route I'm trying to explain is riddled with secret shortcuts, dark passageways and whispered rumours of a murderous orphan whose third victim died upon this very spot. When the foreigner appears not to understand, I do the right thing and adopt an expression of fear and impatience.

An impasse is reached. Both of us know it. With a courtly nod I turn and walk away, while the foreigner, who was looking for Nelson's Column, finds themselves in the meat produce aisle of Wembley Morrison's.

Last weekend was of course Easter, and I was with my parents back in Essex. As the skies were clear I finally got a chance to do a bit of stargazing with my dad's telescope. It's the real deal, about the size of a large bazooka and mounted on a tripod I can barely lift. The weird thing about viewing heavenly bodies at that magnification is that you can actually see them moving across the sky - you have to keep adjusting the scope's position every fifteen seconds or so, or they've moved out of range. It's worth the effort, though, when you get to see the fricking rings of Saturn live.

Unfortunately it's a bit fiddly trying to take photos - you can get special cameras for the purpose, but amateurs like me are reduced to holding their phone up to the lens and fumbling around in the dark. It's hard enough to get your naked eye in the right position, let alone a piece of technology which will start playing the Transformers theme tune if you hit the wrong button. Nevertheless, here for your viewing pleasure is the fruit of my forty minutes' labour: behold, the glorious RINGS OF SATURN!

Now, you may have to squint a bit. Maybe move your face a bit closer to the monitor, or hold a picture of Saturn in front of it. However, for the totally incredulous amongst you, here is the same picture with a handy close-up.

Here you can plainly see that the white blob is oval-shaped, and that's because of the rings going round the planet. In the telescope it was actually brilliant, you could see the rings really clearly, but for now you'll just have to believe me. Contrary to rumour I am not the Hubble Telescope.

There was a really funny one where I jogged the camera slightly and ended up with a U-shaped Saturn, but according to everyone I've shown it to you really had to be there to get it.

PS - On Monday, it's a year since The Awkward Pause finished. How time flies.

Yes, but does yours have a SEA CASTLE?!?

2007-04-07T21:22:00.000Z

God damn it. Last week I had a great idea for part an upcoming project, and then I went and saw the trailer for this week's episode of Doctor Who (which like last week's season opener I then went and missed) and I'll warrant it's dangerously close to stealing my idea. Not that close, mind. Mine was much better. And the great thing about the written word, as opposed to television, is that your budget is infinite. INFINITE, I say!

I found something else while I was poking around on Youtube, too. Last week I put up a picture of someone who has subsequently thanked me for giving him the proverbial Fame At Last. And yet this same person would appear to star in this very pop video:

Ealing Tragedy's All New Agony Column

2007-04-03T17:32:00.000Z

Dear Ealing Tragedy
Aaaargh! Ooooh! Owwww! Yoweeeee! N-n-no! No! Nooooooo! Aaaaarrrgh!
'Lloyd' from Neasden

Dear Lloyd
Saying how you truly feel can be hard, especially when you know it might hurt others. You should remember the good it will do them in the long run, and nip this in the bud before it grows into a huge, unwieldy and potentially dangerous vine, like the one that smothers Alan 'Fluff' Freeman's house and nearly kills his family in Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965).
Ealing Tragedy

-------

Dear Ealing Tragedy
Ach- eeeyyyyaaaccchhhh! Ngngnghhhrrrggghhh! Yarrrgh! Ngnyaowrmnaaaaaa!
'Neris' from Rutland

Dear Neris
You might well be asking yourself how you got yourself into this mess, but what you should really be asking yourself is how you'll get out of it. Think positive; don't be afraid to act now; just close your eyes and grasp the nettle, unless it's an offshoot of the vine that smothers Alan 'Fluff' Freeman's house and nearly kills his family in Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965).
Ealing Tragedy

-------

Dear Ealing Tragedy
Urch *dies*
'Paul' from Sevenoaks

Dear Paul
Oh grow up.
Ealing Tragedy

-------

This weekend, I went to the Tate Britain and bought a Turner.

To be more specific, I went to the Tate Britain and then I went to Morrison's in Stratford and bought a flexible plastic fish turner which is heatproof and safe to use on non-stick surfaces. But only because they were out of Constables.

I went to the Tate Britain because they've got a great Hogarth exhibition on there at the moment, and the venerable H is one of my favourite artists. I have a book of his stuff and everything, and a print of 'The Distress'd Poet' on my wall because it's about a chap who thinks of himself as a writer but actually doesn't write much and is very broke. It strikes a chord, shall we say.

What surprised me was how Hogarth's oil portraits - which are magnificent, and which, unlike most of his famous works, I hadn't seen before - are all in this curious style which conveys heaps of personality and individuality yet somehow renders everyone kind of similar. And what they remind me of most, with their roundish eyes and puggy noses, is Hogarth's own famous self-portrait. Which means that the entire portrait gallery of the exhibition is a bit like that Aphex Twin video (in fact I think there were more than one) where the artist's beardy face is digitally grafted on to loads of children, women and old people in a fashion designed to scare the shit out of people. I fear my subsequent purchase of the fish turner was little more than a desperate attempt to flee that surreal nightmare and ground myself once more in reality.

An Herculean Feat

2007-03-30T09:59:00.000Z

'Disgruntled of Clapham Village' has roundly chastised me and boxed my ears for neglecting to post the photographic evidence of his team's runaway success in the Fabulous Treasure Hunt I mentioned a few posts ago. Perhaps it's too late to make amends; some wounds never heal; nonetheless, for the sake of mine own honour and to settle my account with God, here it is:

Hey, wait a minute! That's actually a picture of the rubber chicken awarded to the team who came fourth. I reckon you could use its bottom to hang up your teatowels. Ah, here it is. Look at the fabulous trophy prize!

Darth Vader Being A Jerk

2007-03-29T14:16:00.001Z

This made me snort tea from my nostrils in the office. May it bring you equal embarrassment (speakers recommended).

Burning Child 2: Son Of Child: Grandchild

2007-03-28T14:24:00.000Z

Okay, so it's not quite so gleefully sadistic. And putting it on a t-shirt is less likely to get kitsch approval from trendy Shoreditch types than a restraining order from your local primary school. Still, one can't help but imagine an evil grin on the face of the adult as they mock the stunted infant.

"You want this? You want this? Just take it! It's right here! Come on! Stretch! No, you're not allowed to stand on a chair. Or a stack of Yellow Pages. Look, you're not trying hard enough. Either that or you are painfully short. Come on, take the box, titch!"

"Please daddy please can I have the box, it contains my insulin without which I shall surely die."

"Then you'd better grow damn fast."

CCC

2007-03-27T11:24:00.000Z

...no, not Corpus Christi College. It's Roman numerals.

Everything I've read or heard about 300 indicates that it's a spectacularly awful film, the true nadir of grandiose special effects and gory action over any attempt at plotting, dialogue or characterisation. But that hasn't stopped about half such naysayers from admitting they still really, really liked it - and it's interesting that such examples of love in spite of glaring flaws (rather like a case of domestic violence) have come from the gaming community. Indeed, Grumpy Gamer - who created Monkey Island and has therefore earned a super-opinion worth twenty-three votes in any election - points out that videogames have finally reached that long-sought-after point where their themes, screenplays and characters have equalled the emotive and artistic value of those in film. But only because films like 300 are being made.

And now Iran is getting in a tizz (as if the unpleasant situation with the UK soldiers weren't enough) because of the film's portrayal of the Persians (ancestors of the Iranians) as evil, mindless hordes. Some of the Iranian media is claiming it's part of a Western conspiracy to psyche us all up for an invasion of their country. Now, you might say they're over-reacting, and you might say that even the Greeks aren't exactly portayed as anything more than snarling lumps of muscle, but if an Iranian film came out which celebrated an ancient Persian victory over some other race (and there are many such battles to choose from), then you can imagine how something like the Daily Mail or the Express might react. Islamic jingo-ism! Glamourising Jihad!

You could also say that if the US government really wanted to brainwash us, they'd use a film whose screenplay contained a modicum of reasoning, context, empathy etc, rather than a brainless barrage of violence. Then again, perhaps the US government is canny enough to realise that violence and special effects are exactly what Joe Public likes.

Anyway, it's far easier just to ignore any potentially catastrophic international incidents and go play videogames. I've forgiven Okami now, because in retrospect it's actually rather good of a game to cram so much content into its price - value for money, and all that. Plus I took a break last night - well, I only played for an hour and a half - and that has left me refreshed, as well as giving me some time to flick through the instruction manual. It's something I rarely do these days, what with in-game tutorials being so advanced now, but in this case I found an unexpected surprise. Okami is based around ancient Japanese mythology, and at the back of the manual is a charming little glossary explaining all the references and symbology for a Western audience. How cool and considerate is that?

Be Careful What You Wish For

2007-03-26T08:40:00.000Z

At the age of eleven or twelve I went on a school trip to France. On the ferry we caught was a row of arcade games, on which to frivolously fritter our francs. One of them was some kind of scrolling beat-'em-up (ah! for the days when the likes of Final Fight, Double Dragon, Knights of the Round and The Simpsons were kings!), this particular one featuring assorted characters from the Marvel universe. And we must have pumped a fair few florins (or whatever they had in France at the time which were worth a lot of francs) into the accursed contraption before we finally fought our way to the final boss, Dr Doom. And many gilders later Dr Doom himself lay in a crumpled metal heap.

Hooray! we shouted. The game is complete, and we can go and - wait a minute - Doom's head has rolled off - there are sparking circuits inside it - Nooo! Robot Double! And so another fortune of francs is fed to the foul fiend as we clobber and thwack and shazam a path to the real Dr Doom. This time, he's in a flying saucer. The cad! Never mind, we've got lots of guineas or grotes or something. In they go! And we fight and fight and fight and finally, finally, Dr Doom is finished. We go to walk away, satisfied with a job well done, but - Nooo! Robot Double! Again!

A small child is passing by so we extort some francs from him with the promise of on-screen spectacle. Surely no-one has got this far before? Smack! Wham! Kaboom! And some undefined time later, we meet the real real Dr Doom. This time he won't fool us. This is the final showdown. The Ultimate Encounter. The battle to end all battles. The Day of - Nooo! Robot Double! Anyone got any more rupees?

At this point we were ushered off the ferry and into some medieval church in St Omer, where we drew the stained-glass windows and translated the French information leaflets (even though there was a pile of English ones next to them).

And thus, ever since that fateful day, the phrase 'Robot Double' came to be associated in our minds with anything which repeatedly promised to be nearly over, only to give you a great big chunk of not-wholly-welcome extra stuff. Cross-country running - Robot Double! The complete Wordsworth - Robot Double! School ravioli - Robot Double!

Lately I have been haunted by this spectre once again.

When I buy an RPG I expect to engrossed, I expect a nice long adventure and a nice big gameworld in which to have it. Okami, upon which I have piled paramount praise in previous posts, gives just that. But it WILL NOT END. Maybe it's an allegory for the unending fight against evil - like pushing down a lump in your carpet, crushing one source just causes the blasted stuff to pop up somewhere else, stronger than ever and with an awkward fold in it which catches on your slippers.

I actually defeated the main head enemy dude about ten days ago. It was forgivable to extend the game after this - his vanquishing so early on was a clever plot twist, and the game had given enough clues that there was much more to do afterwards. Still, it was hard not to feel a pang of injured pride at the hollow victory.

Then last night I was up till 2.30am, even though I had to be in work early, because I was sneaking into the new Baddies' Top-Secret Headquarters Island, which you might well believe would make a good location for a final showdown, and I wanted to clear things up in one go. And I was climbing up the new Boss Baddie's Fortress Stronghold, and I ended up fighting the new Super-Powerful Boss Baddie Dude on the frickin' roof, and all the major characters are either dead or saved and the plot has been tied up and I've got all the items and weapons and there is no hint of any new areas to explore, no tempting locked gateways or distant cities across gaping chasms. My game time currently stands at just over 43 hours. And with the ultimate boss dude laying broken at my feet, well whaddya know? From his corpse rises a big black cloud which nips off to some new secret land, and the game tells me my adventure is 'far from over'.

AAAAAAARGH!

I love this game but I'd quite like my life back, please! Much more of this and I may wither and perish from starvation, dehydration, exhaustion, cataracts, infected thumb calluses and quite possibly piles. And as my body falls to the floor, my head will roll off and reveal flickering circuits inside.

Nooo! Robot Double!

God dammit!

2007-03-23T10:04:00.000Z

Well, the latest generation of consoles is finally complete in Europe. PS3 went on sale at midnight last night, accompanied by the usual day-and-a-half-long queues of eager campers outside stores (one would have thought that if they have enough money for a PS3, they could at least turn up in a plush Winnebago camper van, but there you go). Weirdly, I seem to remember there being more of a hoo-hah in the press about the queues for Wii, but Sony certainly gained some fantastic PR by giving each of the first 100 people in the queue a free hi-def TV worth a tidy £2,500.

(Of course this has been done before - at a pre-launch Xbox 360 demo a couple of years ago, Microsoft gave all the audience a ticket in one of three colours. The demo was of a racing game, possibly Project Gotham Racing 3 I think, and any audience members whose ticket matched the colour of the winning car were given a big HD telly as a prize. But that was industry people and journalists rather than filthy, half-starved fanatic proles. Sony knows its market.)

The annoying thing is that if the queues were there for a day and a half, that's just 36 hours I would have had to sacrifice to get said telly (alongside investing £425 in a brilliant-but-still-a-rip-off console, naturally). Now, my game time on Okami (so my save-game file tells me) currently stands at a terrifying 34 hours and 17 minutes (and still no sign of nearing the end, I'll warrant). So all I'd have had to do is take that time, blessed as it has been, and devote it instead to queueing patiently; combine it together by cashing in a few flexi-hours and throwing a sicky on top; and make up the remaining 1 hour 43 minutes by taking a 'long lunch' and a 'toilet break' (never feel guilty about taking suitable time out for a number two during work hours). And that telly could have been mine, dammit!

But no, now I have to go home tonight, to my dull old existing big telly (cost: £100), and play the wonderful, enchanting game I already own (cost: £25), and wallow in misery at my outmoded technology. Bah.

Max Headroom

2007-03-22T11:34:00.000Z

You know how it happens... you log on to The Guardian to read the headlines; you notice the article about the lameness of Channel 4; you spot the reference in said article to mid-80s sci-fi-lite music video programme The Max Talking Headroom Show; you head over to Wikipedia and look up its almost-eponymous presenter character Max Headroom; en route your eye is caught by an entry about a fake Max Headroom involved in an infamous TV pirating incident; you follow the external links and find out it's strangely close to home, being documented on a website dedicated to Doctor Who in Chicago (as the incident's second occurrence happened during an episode of said Who); finally you watch the video:

...and then you realise you haven't done any work all morning. Congratulations!

Whither the crust?

2007-03-20T16:47:00.000Z

For many years now, I have purchased triangular pre-packed sandwiches from supermarkets, cornershops, railway station booths and roadside vendors. And yet only today did it strike me - you always get a right-angled crust. Which is odd. If you make a sandwich yourself, using standard bread, and you cut it diagonally into two triangles, you end up with one triangle with a right-angled crust, and one with a kind of crescent-shaped crust (because the top crust of a loaf of bread is rounded). So, assuming the factories and sweatshops that make these pre-packed sandwiches do not have some kind of sci-fi square bread, what on earth happens to all the crescent-crust triangles? Might I one day wander in to some far-off, secluded branch of Aldi, and encounter an entire lunch section populated by semi-circular sandwich packs?

Maybe that's what bagels are.

Oh, now while I remember: you hunt! You hunt for treasure, of course. Last weekend m'lady and I hosted a treasure hunt for our friends around the City of London, based on one hosted by a couple of our mates last year, and we were so happy with the way it turned out (as was one regular reader of this column, whose team won it) that we thought it'd be worth reproducing all the clues online for others to puzzle over.

It works like this: there are ten cryptic clues in sealed, numbered envelopes. Each one guides you to a location somewhere in or near the Square Mile, and then asks you a question about that place which you can only answer by being there. Once you've answered that location's question you can open the next numbered envelope, and proceed to the next place. There's also a hint and, if you get really stuck, an answer for each location inside its envelope, but opening these loses you points (and kudos, and honour, and my respect).

So the location clues are below - anyone who knows a bit about London and its history may enjoy solving them. Obviously it's a little redundant asking non-London readers to answer the location-specific questions, but I include them here for posterity and in case anyone feels like doing it in town some time. Also, I've only put one clue/hint/answer per page, which is a waste of paper but helps prevent accidental peaking.

Location Clues and Questions

Location Hints (in case you get stuck)

Location and Question Answers (in case you get really very stuck indeed)

Further news: 'Ealing Tragedy' may soon become a bit of a misnomer. M'lady and I are planning to seek a mutual abode together, around the time my lease expires in June. Location is yet to be confirmed, but we are both keen on being a bit nearer to town, so my W5 days are numbered. Needless to say my unbridled joy at the move is mixed with a heartfelt sigh at my departure. *sniff* And just when Tesco's had finally opened to replace Morrison's, too. Still, three months here yet. And I shan't be changing the blog name either. Rebranding can be terribly expensive, what with replacing all the headed paper.

And now, a few videos. The reason I've been lax in posting of late - other than creating a major treasure hunt - is because of the following game. It's called Okami and it's utterly, utterly beautiful - it uses some funky (yet surprisingly polygon-light) effects to appear like the whole thing's an animated watercolour, painted with bold brush-strokes and spattered with loose ink. It even lets you paint over the game yourself, and instead of killing baddies you turn them into flowers. And you play a mother sun-goddess brought to the earthly plain as the reincarnation of a she-wolf who slew an evil dragon 100 years ago. Which makes a change from gangstas.

Meanwhile, the new-generation console war has gone all topsy-turvy. PS3 is still over-priced beyond all reason, but suddenly its software is looking more inventive and appealing than anything the still-overpriced Wii (in the UK at least) has yet managed; and while its online services are still not proven against Xbox Live's might, its visuals are finally starting to really kick the 360 in the nuts. Which is heart-breaking, because (a) I really wanted Nintendo to claw their way back this time, and (b) I don't have £425 to buy a PS3. I don't even have a house I can mortgage for it. Perhaps I could mortgage my parents' house while they aren't looking. Bah.

Anyway, if you want to know why my non-violent, creative, inventive, co-operative, cutesy, tactile preferences have suddenly been wrenched from Nintendo to Sony, take a look at these two PS3 demos from the recent Game Developers' Conference. They're both from Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet, which stands to be the best thing to ever to come out of Guildford.

Now, where can I get £425.00?

Another Plague

2007-03-05T17:33:00.000Z

Just as I was about to go to bed yesterday, I saw this great big beetle on my tasteful laminate flooring. No, really this time. Am I condemned to become the boy who cried coleoptera? I should hope not.

Now, one can hardly say I have a cockroach infestation, but I did spy a couple of them being bastards in my flat late last year, and shortly after that I thought I saw a baby cockroach scuttling around. One always hears tell that cockroaches, like ants, never travel alone but with all their family, who happen to number somewhere in the hundred thousands, so I immediately repainted my entire flat with RAID, Bane of Ant, Leveller of Cockroach. No further roaches were forthcoming although the fumes did briefly cause me to see winged monkies in their place. Sainsbury's sold no handy aerosol solution for that.

So when I saw what appeared to be the first of a new generation, I did the gentlemanly thing and straight-ways took my slipper to it. I should point out that this was to squash it, and not to make it comfortable on the hard laminate flooring. With the assassination complete I began, like all professional killers, the clean-up operation. This involved a bit of toilet roll and some Dettox. But I was astounded to find that, in spite of the insect's considerable size, its mortal remains appeared rather tiny. It was almost as if I had not crushed a terrible primeval monstrosity at all, but just a little beetle which wasn't in fact anything like a cockroach. But this of course could not have been the case. Perhaps, I thought, its body had simply disappeared, elevated to a higher spiritual plane, leaving only its shattered carapace to this miserable earth. A jedi cockroach!

The thought that I might have murdered a jedi cockroach made me sad.

I am also aware that this last sentence can be read in more ways than one.

Neutral My Ass

2007-03-02T17:01:00.000Z

Perhaps this is why our man in Switzerland hasn't posted for a couple of days - he was too busy invading Lichtenstein. Maybe somebody said he should get into Wittgenstein, and he misheard.

NB Ealing Tragedy accepts no responsibility for the spelling in this post. All rights reserved.

The Sickening

2007-02-28T14:01:00.000Z

On my way home yesterday, I noticed a huge great beetle pootling along Ealing Broadway. Compulsively fascinated like the wannabe David Bellamy I am (note the beard, and the air of venerability) I bent down to examine the thuggish-looking creature more closely. A right and mighty fierce thing it was! Its carapace shone with assurance that neither stone nor beak could smash it; its legs were as thick as its head, and twice and hairy; and its sturdy antennae gave the brute the appearance of a forklift truck.

Naturally I could not resist prodding it with my finger.

Oh, damn the blind hubris of man!

Quick as Syphilis's darts the fiend turned on me, sinking some mandible or other into my soft, exposed flesh. I yelped in pain - passers-by passed by more speedily, believing me an erratic drunk - and worse, as I withdrew my hand the creature clung on with the single-minded determination only lower life-forms can exhibit.

Blast!

In desperation I dashed the blighter against some nearby architecture. Thwarted, the beetle loosened its grip, fell to the pavement with a crack, and limped off to some dank nook to ponder its many failings. I did not stop it. Its regrets would be punishment enough.

I strode home in triumph and enjoyed a good night's sleep.

But even as dawn broke and I rose, as ever, from my slumber at first light, the full horror of my situation became terrifyingly apparent. Where the insect has penerated my skin, a hideous welt had erupted under cover of the darkness of night! I fled to the doctor, all of a panic.

'Doctor! Doctor!' I wailed. 'I've been bitten by dastardly beetle!'

'Ah yes,' replied the sage physician. 'I've heard there's a nasty bug going round.'

-------

In reality, I genuinely have been taken ill. Some kind of virus has been doing the unwelcome rounds at work, rather like a YouTube clip of a man sawing his penis off, or a chain email which urges you to forward it to fifty-eight people in the next two minutes otherwise a man will come round and saw your penis off and put the footage up on YouTube.

Last night I could not sleep. I shook, I shivered, I gaggled and groaned. My upper body baked in its own skin; my lower body froze, chilled to the marrow by distant, unheard cries and half-forgotten fears.

Then the trains were fucked, which really annoyed me.

Stricken by torpour of the limbs, I am also aware of having adopted the stultified gait of a zombie*: shambling, vacant, shuffling unstoppably toward God-knows-what horrors. I would utter a plaintive "Brrraiiinsss" only I'm meant to be upping my fruit and fibre intake and cutting down on red meat. (This is true, though notice how the list of banned substances cunningly makes no mention of 'processed meat'.)

Whither can humanity turn in such turbulent times? Not to the medical profession, that's for sure. They are far too busy providing weak punchlines to old gags. No, I have no choice but to go home sick and find nourishment in an eight-hour PlayStation sesh.

*Not to be confused with the stultified gate of a zombie, which does nothing but hinder the postman.

Did You Know?

2007-02-22T12:28:00.000Z

The entire set of Emmerdale is computer-generated.

Terms and Conditions Apply

2007-02-19T10:32:00.000Z

I'm on HMV's 'Spend All Your Money On Games You Don't Really Want But Are Five Pounds Cheaper Than They Were Last Week So This Bargain Can't Be Passed Up' email list, which is as glossy a sales missive as you might expect. But it isn't infallible - eagle-eyed Wally-watchers will have fun spotting the mistake in this screenshot.

The first person to put the correct answer in the Comments section below, along with their postal address, date of birth, bank account number, account sort code, debit card pin number, mother's maiden name and first pet, may already have won a fabulous prize.

Oh, and somebody I was at Fort Clonque with has now put a few of their photos on their website. Just enough to make you dribble at the glorious sunsets; mayhaps even feel a shiver from the Channel breeze.

2007-02-12T11:51:00.000Z

I find Mitchell and Webb's adverts for Mac rather irritating (what with being a PC boy and everything), so I giggled a lot at this take on the American equalivent. One of many things which are only funny for true geeks.

No title for this one

2007-01-31T11:57:00.000Z

The following paragraph from today's Penny Arcade, explaining what happens when one's partner encounters one playing an ultra-violent videogame, rather amused me. I thought you might like it too.

I made the mistake of letting the demo reel run when Brenna was in the room, and she was not impressed with the level of depravity on display. I chose to come clean. I told her that I had kicked an old man with my bionic leg, then I picked him up and used him to beat another old man, and then I threw them both in the ocean where they would be sure to die. This did not improve things. She told me that the only time you should even touch an old man is to comfort him when he is talking about his feelings. I was not previously aware of this clause.

ECHO... ECHo... ECho... Echo... echo...

2007-01-29T11:29:00.000Z

Everyone in my known circle of bloggers appears to be keeping very quiet at the moment. Possibly because they're all incredibly busy, though more likely because they're hunting pheasant and the smallest noise could startle their quarry into flight.

Anyway, in an attempt to break the ice with as much skill and panache as arriving at a party and doing that trick with two breadsticks, here are Ealing Tragedy's Top Five Favourite Flims Of All Time. Flim is a much better word than Film.

1) Ghostbusters

2) Batman (1989)

3) The Return of the King

4) Casablanca

5) For A Few Dollars More

Now discuss, bearing in mind that favourite does not mecessarily mean one believes it a paragon of the cinematic arts.

Beware Spoilers

2007-01-25T10:32:00.000Z

Finally completed Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars last night. It's a gorgeous point-and-click from 1996, and a classic of narrative-driven gameplay, though possibly its script is only so highly regarded because we're just not used to anything much more complex than rescuing princesses in our plots.

I mean, if the plot of Broken Sword was stolen and written as a novel, nobody would buy it. They surely wouldn't like all that business with the dashing-but-educated American chap and the demure-but-tough French girl on a globe-trotting adventure to uncover an ancient secret held by the Knights Templar for centuries and which threatens the very world as we know it. They wouldn't take to the variety of ingenious artifacts and cryptic puzzles needing to be solved. They would get no thrill from the mysterious cult trying to assassinate our heroes. They wouldn't warm to the section where the hero spends the night in a museum, or his love-hate relationship with a gruff French detective. And they certainly wouldn't like the bit where it ends in a remote Scottish church and they decide, having stopped the baddies, to never reveal the terrible secret to anyone.

Nah, it'd never sell.

Incidentally I got my first glimpse of a PS3 in action last night, at the Game On exhibition in the Science Museum (yes, I know I've been to the exhibition twice already a few years ago, but I got in free this time). I feel a bit desperate writing about it when it's already been out for two months in the rest of the world, and when the queue was too long for me to bother playing it myself, but I mention it purely because I was extremely sceptical beforehand (compare my last experience with new hardware), and I have to confess that, visually at least, it knocked me for six. Like, proper wow. That said, it was playing on a huge, sumptuous HD display, and the game being played was Motorstorm - a driving game, which is a genre that always tends to look a bit nicer than everything else. There was also some alarming slowdown at times, but perhaps it was just early code. Anyway, with the machine launching at £395 in the UK (plus £50 for games, £20 for a new controller, and £2000 for a lovely big HD telly), it's going to take something very special to get me to splash out.

Even the relatively cheap Wii is still massively inflated over here (£185 compared to the equivalent £115 in the USA and Japan), and my brief time on demo pods has failed to convince me. Particularly if Nintendo do what they're doing with the DS, and neglect to release any of the games I really want in the UK. Damn them!

All in all, glad I found the Spectrum again.

Balderdash In The Attic

2007-01-22T14:33:00.000Z

Turns out this is Ealing Tragedy's 101st post, or Post 101, so it's rather apt that I'm going to fill it with a bunch of objects which I had to decide whether to keep or chuck whilst clearing out my parents' loft the other day. My hoard included:

Michael Aspel's autograph

The Radio Times from the week Charles and Di got married.

Blood Bowl! Gotta have me some of that when I get a spare five hours.

A 1960's edition of Monopoly, on which Pall Mall is purple. (Only a select number of people will appreciate why this is an important discovery and Blow For Justice. You know who you are.)

Four volumes of Where's Wally, which are impractical on a rush-hour tube but at least the whole carriage can join in.

Steve 'Games Workshop and Fighting Fantasy' Jackson's The Tasks of Tantalon, a kids' fantasy puzzle book from 1985 which is to my knowledge pretty unique in its use of full-page paintings as visual puzzles, and which still causes people to resort to FAQs on the internet today because it's bloody hard. In fact it's rather like the AI/Cloudmakers game.

My old Spectrum 128k and all its tapes. Because I don't have enough gaming paraphernalia, obviously.

The Seaman's Handbook 1943, replete with guidlines for slinging a hammock and warnings about abusing one's tobacco ration.

A heap of my primary school creative writing projects, including Night Of The Living Bed (in which a bed comes to life when it accidentally rolls into Stonehenge during the vernal equinox, and then has to go chasing after the transdimensional demons it inadvertently releases at the same time) and Greenbeard (in which the eponymous evil pirate escapes from jail by using his razor-sharp beard to cut a hole in the wall, and is only killed when someone slices a chunk of his beard off, causing it to fly away so quickly that it goes all the way around the world and eventually comes right back round and chops Greenbeard's own head off. The epilogue explains that the beard is still in Earth's orbit to this day.).

Preps also to W in Chelmsford for the Eamonn Holmes autograph. I shall put it next to Aspel's.

Dance Fever

2007-01-16T16:01:00.000Z

Recently been pleasantly surprised by Tony Hawk's American Sk8land on the DS, which does a mighty job of translating the full-fat console experience of 'tearing it up' to the semi-skimmed environs of Nintendo's pirky little handheld. Murder on the thumbs, sadly. At least you can draw your own board design on the touchscreen (I now have a bunny rabbit) and record your skater's voice using the microphone ("Jurassic Park!").

Today, however, I've been largely distracted by this. Draw your own little person, then watch them dance to awful synthesised J-pop! Or trawl through the gallery of previous visitors' attempts, and marvel at the array of dancing phalluses*. Either way, it's a noble diversion.

*I'm not sure of the plural for this and am not about to ask the other people in the office.

A New Year, A New Lack Of Posts

2007-01-09T13:55:00.000Z

Having downsized my new bag budget from nearly-£200-lasts-a-lifetime-looks-lovely-and-will-get-nicked-before-I-set-a-foot-outside-Selfridges to £25-from-Next, I felt little guilt in going on an HMV binge the next day and getting a bunch of classic Bowie albums from the sale. It was a definite gap in my collection that needed filling, copiously. Day after that I looked the old weirdo up on the internets just to get some background info, and whaddya know? It was his sixtieth birthday that very day! WoooOOOoooOOO! Mere coincidence? Or cosmic ray-beams sent down into my brain by grooving alien beings from outer space? Tonight, you decide.

I haven't written much for a while, which is probably because it's been the highly sociable holiday season and most of my readership have therefore seen me actually in person, what with most of my readership being composed not of loyal fans but of real-life acquaintances who politely humour me and brush over the subject when I bring it up in conversation.

Anyway, I saw some of you at Yarmouth, which was nice, even if my love of quality footwear kept me a house prisoner. Still, I got some crosswords done. Plus the journey home was great fun, what with us getting confused by the police blocking off our route owing to an accident, and me making a rash, pride-fuelled decision not to turn around and take the previous exit but to take the infamous (quote-unquote) 'scenic route' through wildest Norfolk. There was a good half hour where we became convinced that there really was no way out of the village of Needham, until we realised that the blue 'V' on the map actually indicated a vehicle ferry, which was why we kept nearly driving into a river, and we had to go all the way back to where we'd started at the road accident.

Started watching Firefly on DVD the other day - for the uninitiated, it's what Joss 'Buffy, Vampire Slayer, The' Whedon did after, well, after Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I say 'did' - what this of course means is 'created', which in turn means 'thought up in a pub and mentioned to a TV exec who said "Wow! You're Joss Whedon! Of course we'll take your vague idea and turn it into a multi-million dollar TV series!"'. A multi-million dollar TV series which then got cancelled part-way through its first season (rather like The Prisoner, another cult favourite) but then built up a huge fanbase on DVD and eventually got remade as the film Serenity. Well, the show's really rather good in that kind of what-could-have-been way. Its depiction of a run-down sci-fi wild-west future feels like a decent extension of the Star Wars universe (circa A New Hope), and not having any aliens or talking computers in it makes a nice change, especially when you've been listening to too much Bowie.

Tonight, why not let all the children boogie?

Pea Super

2006-12-24T17:57:00.000Z

You know in old westerns, when there's a big fight in the saloon, and all the furnishings get smashed up? You know why they break so easily? Cowboy builders.

What did the two famous acorns do before they got married?
They signed a pre-nutshell agreement.

Anyway.

London, you may have read, has been enshrouded by 'Deadly Fog' (as the Standard puts it - though I have yet to see any ghostly pirates come stalking out from behind Natwest). Thankfully fog is of minimal impact to my main modus transporterandi, the Tube, which is accustomed to reduced-visibility working conditions. (Tube drivers in fact develop extra-large, super-sensitive eyes from the many hours spent underground; this is why they always wear sunglasses when at stations above the surface, e.g. White City or Barons Court. They also have pale, waxy skin and a taste for subterranean crawling insects.)

I haven't posted for ages because I haven't had much to say. I suppose I could now get away with Merry Christmas. And Happy New Year, that saves me posting for another week at least.

Berrrk! Get this 'orrible thing out of my boudoire!

2006-12-08T12:51:00.000Z

Whoever put the Trap Door DVD together must have spent some time watching compilations of short children's telly before: they've wisely removed the opening titles and closing credits from each episode. No matter how iconic the theme tune is, sitting through it twice every five minutes becomes rather irksome (as the complete Danger Mouse proves, not just to me, but also to the neighbours on the other side of my thin, thin walls). However, it does leave the Complete Collection in the strange position of not actually containing the opening sequence or any credits at all, unless they're hiding somewhere in the menu like the plasticine monstrosities lurking beneath the eponymous portal. (There's a great episode where Berk decides to make the trap door into a set of shelves, but more of that some other time.)

Anyway, if you were making a documentary about the human body, who would narrate it? How about:

Patrick McKnee
DuodenuMcCall
Sean Spleen
Noel Headmonds
Tony Heart
‘Mad’ Diaphragmkie Frazer
Patrick Maw
James Earlobe Jones
Bernard Heel
Spleen Bean
Des ‘Stomach’ Lining
Natalie Aortaman
Hairy Secombe
David Pimpleby
Jonathan Pimpleby
Jimmy Toenail
Spleen Spleen
John Snose
Scott Scapula
Tom Shanks
Ian Holme (as Elbow Baggins)
Capillary Clinton
Sean Bean

Oh, and I've got a new job. Wahey!

Britain's Debt Crisis: A Microcosm

2006-12-06T12:14:00.000Z

Ah, sweet impulse-buying. Having lavished too much money on DVDs whilst drunk last night (including the complete Trap Door, which I'm terribly excited about), I'm now recovering my senses after ordering some classic console top trumps. Sadly recovering one's senses doesn't equate to recovering one's money, so I hope they're as nice as they look in the photos. Of course, whether they can top my beloved old Planets, Moons and Aliens deck is something I fear can't be resolved by a mere set of statistics.

Erratum in Action

2006-12-05T16:35:00.000Z

Visited Wikipedia earlier today and noticed that their article of the day was on Down Syndrome. Having a few minutes to 'spare', I had a quick read of it and noticed that it listed one of the signs of the syndrome as a 'simian crease'. Further intrigued (you know how it is with internet links, dictionaries and atlases...) I looked up 'simian crease' and was redirected to the entry for 'single transverse palmar crease'. Apparently it's a pattern of crease across one's palm that tends to occur from hindered development, and used to be known as 'simian crease' because it resembles the pattern on a monkey's hand*. However, associating the disabled with apes has become, understandably, something of a social faux pas**, and so the term 'simian crease' is no longer used.

I wondered, then, why the original article on Down Syndrome used the un-PC term so brazenly, and I clicked 'Back' a few times only to find that they'd already updated the page to say 'single transverse palmar crease'. Wow!, thought I. My mind power has changed the interwebs! Or Wikipedia have been bombarded with angry complaints. You choose.

*In practice this line is only visible on monkeys' hands before all three wishes are made, after which time the hand becomes a clenched fist and all characters are rendered dead in nasty ways. Oh, cruel hubris!

**Much like wandering around large war memorials on Remembrance Day dressed up as a Nazi Colonel.

For ages 3 and upward

2006-12-04T16:07:00.000Z

Upon the recommendation of one reader's better half, I finally got around to watching Soylent Green last night. It's a brilliant little cult movie from 1973 starring Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson running about a dystopian vision of a future New York City (in fact it was Robinson's 101st film, so the special features tell me). Oh, and it's got Joseph Cotten (from The Third Man) in it too, who gets the fourth-biggest credit on the bill and has about five lines.

The film also features one of the earliest, and least plausible, examples of blatant product placement that I've seen. In the background of a frequently revisited apartment, and even getting its own full-screen in-action shot at one point, is one of the first ever arcade game cabinets, Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space. It's still one of the most weirdly beautiful bits of gaming memorabilia available, its specially sculpted Henry Moore-esque casing instantly recognisable, and it's worth a king's ransom to collectors today. But what amuses me is that the film-makers - in 1973 - thought the machine was so wildly futuristic that they could pass it off as cutting-edge technology in a film set fifty years later, in 2022. And thus the most chilling aspect of the film's prediction of mankind's bleak future is not the overpopulation, the food shortages, the smog, the poverty or the destruction of all wildlife, but the possibility of videogames regressing to pre-Spectrum standards.

Then again, could it in fact be a glorious return to pure gameplay over graphical bluster? Or could it be that the character who owns it is in fact a collector of videogaming antiques, and his girlfriend who is seen so engrossed in it at one point is simply not aware of the existence of Nintendogs? Who knows.

The same reader whose better half alerted me to Soylent Green also educated me and m'lady in the ways of Cheapass Games, whose board game fare really is very cheap, but not in any way ass. It turns out m'lady's housemate is also a fan, and pseudo-Cluedo-prequel Kill Doctor Lucky provided hours of back-stabbing fun on Alderney. Well, wandering around Greenwich market the other day we came across an entire shop full of weird board games, and managed to procure for ourselves the pseudo-Cluedo-prequel prequel (without peer and without equal) Save Doctor Lucky, as well as the even less sensible Devil Bunny Hates The Earth and Devil Bunny Needs A Ham. In the latter you play sous-chefs trying to scale a tall building, all the while trying to avoid the Devil Bunny, who needs a ham, and who mistakenly believes that knocking chefs off buildings will help him get one. We got some odd looks playing that one in Wetherspoons.

2006-11-27T02:00:00.001Z

Nice.

Fort For The Day (or long weekend)

2006-11-25T18:05:00.000Z

Though trifling in comparison to certain other excitement, our recent expedition to the tiny Channel Island of Alderney was an absolutely fantastic break. I'm still washing the salt out of my hair and most of the cheese we bought is still in m'lady's fridge.

The holiday started with the momentous event of my first flight in eight years, which may or may not have been helped by the fact that this flight happened to be on a plane which seated only twelve people. There was no drinks trolley; nary an aisle indeed, the entire cabin being just about wide enough for two people to sit down next to each other. You had to clamber in through a door and straight into your seat, like a tiny little car. At least having a window on either side made for good views of the ground - the far, far away ground, the very solid ground, the ground that threatened to split me apart like a water balloon should the plane decide to plummet, as it surely would, from the sky. That the plane had a smiley face painted on the front of it was small comfort. That I and all other passengers had an emergency exit directly on either side of us was much better. That the forty-minute flight still offered an in-flight magazine was somewhat irrelevant.

Oh, and I'd had two pints and a whisky before we took off, which worked wonders.

But I lived! And we landed safe and sound, and if I had been somewhat charmed by the quaint size of Southampton Airport (where the cane from my Nazi commander costume prompted the check-in staff to ask if I was a magician), Alderney was like another world entirely. The departure lounge is a portacabin; the check-in lounge a slightly larger portacabin, this time with a carpet and a range of snacks for sale. The car park has room for about a dozen vehicles, and is constantly overrun by chickens from a neighbouring farm. And when you exit the airport you're in a field.

Alderney - third-largest of the Channel Islands, but only because other than Jersey and Guernsey the rest are basically rocks - is just three miles long and has a population of 2,400. It's a tax haven, which means the house prices are fairly high, and most of its business seems to come from tourism, which means that out of season there are very few people on the island indeed. The only real town is the tiny St Anne's, which appeared to have about six shops, three of them off-licences, and all of which closed for lunch between about 12 and 3. Its pubs weren't quite the antiquated marvels I had hoped for, but were very welcoming and opened more than the shops. It's a remarkably quiet town - I rarely saw more than one person in the street at any time, and the only traffic congestion I saw (in fact the only time I saw more than one car on the road at once) was when two cars got held up by a chicken crossing the road.

But we didn't go all the way to Alderney to go shopping anyway. We went to stay in a Fort on a windswept craggy promontory! And Alderney does bleak, windswept, craggy, rocky, desolate, disused coastlines very well. There's hardly anywhere on the coast that doesn't command some fantastic vista of the churning seas, the battered rocks and the disused artifacts of the Napoleonic and Second World Wars. There are abandoned forts everywhere, literally every few hundred yards along the coast, and one is free and safe to wander around most of them (we came across one which was now a goat shed and one which was a boxing gym). It's very odd seeing the nineteenth-century British stone fortifications all misshapen by the German concrete bunkers which grow on them like cankers. Very odd to see it all just empty and overgrown but standing complete and strong like it was vacated just the other day. Reminded me of The Curse Of Fenric, but then I remembered that The Curse Of Fenric is crap and this was, in contrast, really good.

Fort Clonque itself defied all my expectations. We'd been so excited about it that I was all geared up to be disappointed, but it was actually even better than I'd imagined. It really is inaccessible at high tide, and daring a slippery dash across the causeway just before that time, with the sea spray whipping at you from both sides, is incredibly exhilarating. On several occassions we had to plan our days purely on the basis of when we'd be able to leave and/or return without being stranded for an hour. It's not like we could just pop back to the pub - the nearest one was a good half-hour away. This also made shopping trips something of a military operation, although the main shop's staff were very willing to deliver large orders by van, making our lives much easier.

They really get you into the military spirit too, with rooms like The Upper Magazine, The Officers Quarters and The Bunker. The fort even has its own flagpole, complete with a Union Flag to fly at first light and take down at sunset, and a bugle with which to annoy the hell out of your housemates. The piano and Noel Coward songbook next to the open fireplace were less of a standard issue, but welcome nonetheless.

Outside the buildings, in the courtyard of the fort, several sides were completely open (save for a low wall) to the crashing waves, and at night it was completely pitch black. Standing in the complete darkness, able to hear but not see the wrath of the English Channel, is bloody scary. Oh yes.

Right, I've prattled on plenty long enough. I've probably forgotten some things here and there but you don't want to hear every detail of the holiday and in any case you get the gist of it:

FORT CLONQUE = BRILLIANT
ALDERNEY = SMALL
BUGLE = LOUD
PLANES = EEK!
CHICKENS = TRAFFIC JAM

Nasty, Nasty, Nasty

2006-11-15T00:06:00.000Z

I have to get up at 6.30am tomorrow, yet it's gone midnight and I'm still at my computer idly surfing. It's freezing cold outside, but I'm sat with all my windows open and a fan on full blast in the background. Why?

As some of you may be aware, my block of flats (or 'bloc' I suppose, given the large East European contingent in W5) has a communal washing machine because most of the flats are too small to house their own. Since this rather noisy machine is situated close to some people's flats, there's a polite notice on it asking tenants not to start any washes after 9pm. So far so fair dinkum.

This means that there's a narrow window between getting home from work - say, 7.30pm - and the 9pm curfew, and if someone else is using the washer in that time, then you just have to turn your pants inside out until the next day. Again, fair enough.

Unfortunately, lingerie-inversion is not always a sensible option. Say, if one is imminently going on holiday, as yours truly happens to be. Still, if someone else is using the machine, I'm willing to do a really really early wash the next day. First-come-first-served and all that.

But what's unacceptable, as I'm sure you'll agree, is when somebody's washing is finished and they don't take it out of the machine. For ages. And so you're trudging in and out of your flat, up and down the stairs to the main house, confronted time and again by the full but inactive washing machine, with 9pm drawing ever nearer. And what if 9pm suddenly arrives, and the somebody else's washing is still occupying the machine, even though it's been finished for nearly an hour? What then, dear lord?

Now, there's a school of thought that says you can take their stuff out of the machine and put it in their laundry bag, or if no laundry bag is present, put it on top of a bin bag (not in a bin bag, which makes it fester). Now, I've always hesitated at doing this as I don't like fumbling around with others' pants and don't like them fumbling around with mine. Nevertheless, it is not considered a faux pas and can only be expected by the sedentary clothes' owner, as several people have insisted when I've moaned about this sort of thing in the past.

So determined not to be such a wuss, I took one of my own bin bags - not just some cheap bin liner mind, but an expensive tie-handle one - gently removed the other person's washing (which turned out not to be pants at all, but a couple of fleeces) and placed it in a nearby sink. The sink is a bit grimy but I was careful to line it with the bin bag so as not to soil the clothes. Then in went my own laundry, in too went my money (it's £1 per wash) and I buggered off, feeling a bit guilty but also feeling guilty for feeling guilty, and telling myself not to fear reprisals because this was a perfectly acceptable thing to do and I worry too much.

I therefore felt somewhat vindicated when, an hour or so later, I popped back up to collect my washing and found that the other clothes' owner had stopped the machine mid-cycle, removed all my sopping clothes and strewn them callously across the dusty floorboards. Somewhat vindicated, you understand. Mostly, I was reviled.

They hadn't even put their own clothes back in the machine. It wasn't inconsiderateness, it was vengeance: pure and simple, cold and wet.

So I had to wash the whole bunch again, though as it was very late by then I phoned my landlord to explain in case he got any phone calls from tenants I was keeping awake with my spin cycles. He was very understanding. Although I do hope I woke up the bastard responsible. In fact I hope the vibrations from the machine caused their Morphy Richards steam iron to fall from a shelf and land in their eye, pointy end down.

Serendipitously, my clothes actually smell extra-fresh now, what with being washed twice in a row. But in consideration of other tenants who aren't bastards and whose eyes I do not wish to gouge, I didn't have the heart to run the tumble-dryer gone midnight. Which is why all my stuff is now hanging from a clothes horse, 'drying' in a room that's too damp to have any effect without opening all the windows and turning a fan on, and of course I can't very well go to sleep on the ground floor with my windows open, which is why I'm sat here typing this up when I really should be in bed.

Moral of the tale? I invite suggestions.

Something of a Faux Pas

2006-11-12T22:49:00.000Z

As I've been waxing lyrical for the best part of eight months now, m'lady and I are due to descend on the fantastic Fort Clonque next week, where if all goes according to our dark and devious plan we shall gorge upon enough cheese and port to work ourselves up into a Yarg-fuelled frenzy, place flaming torches around the battlements and declare our independence. And as HM Royal Navy close in for the siege, and we ready the pots of boiling oil (which double up for the fondue session), we shall entertain ourselves with the murder mystery game we bought last week. As you do in these kind of situations.

This morning it struck us that today was our last weekend day before we left, and so after a satisfying Stilton toastie we scampered off to Spitalfields market in a desperate bid to find ourselves some fitting costumes for the murder mystery. The game is set in World War II and my character - as chosen by m'lady, who is a remarkable judge of these things and at least didn't allot me one of the female roles - is that of a fanatical German officer. M'lady knows, you see, that I already possess the long black coat, black boots and pistol required for the role (I would have liked an opportunity to use my flintlock pistol too, and maybe a lightsabre, but WWII wasn't known for its Jedi highwaymen), so all we had to do was find a monocle and a cane (or 'whacking stick' as I have come to call it affectionately). To our combined alarm, these were easily located in Spitalfields market between a hot dog stand and a stall selling books like The Right Said Fred Annual 1991.

I was of course very happy with my new whacking stick, and proceeded to find all kinds of novel uses for it (mainly involving whacking) as we spent the rest of the afternoon on a nice walk into the City. It's particularly good for whacking people while screaming 'SILENCE!'. Trust me, this is consistently hilarious and never grows wearisome. M'lady will testify to this. Although if she does try to testify I shall have to scream 'SILENCE!' and whack her with the whacking stick, again.

Alack, such daring and originality can get one into a right pickle. At one point I was very much getting into the swing of things - let us call it method acting, in preparation for my character in the game - marching along in my big black coat, screaming loudly in a German accent and whacking things left right and centre, when suddenly I realised that I was right outside the very large Trinity Square war memorial, on Remembrance Sunday, impersonating a Gestapo officer.

Fearing reprisals from an angry mob, we ran and hid in the Eat beside the ticket machines for the Tower of London. Actually this an exaggeration, we sat outside and had a coffee and a chocolate fudge cake, but the mood was definitely uneasy. I'm sure an old man in a beret scowled at me at one point. So tomorrow I shall make up for my indiscretion by buying a poppy. After all, they're always cheaper the next day. You should see all the witch hats I got last week. Bargain!

Master of Disguise

2006-11-06T13:19:00.000Z

A recent and excellent Duncan lookalike selection has brought me out all self-indulgent again, so here is who myheritage.com's celebrity lookalike machine thinks I resemble. I think you'll agree it's uncanny, particularly that one out of Sex And The City. And the Dalai Llama. No sign of Ed Norton, strangely.

I did try this with the Ketch head at the top of this blog, but the machine could find nobody who looked like him! Not even Chekov. Pah.

Film 2007

2006-11-01T12:15:00.000Z

Nothing is ever as bad as people say it is, and nothing is ever as good. The human capacity for exaggeration and generalisation - be it in the words of the reviewer, or in the mind of the recipient - is devilishly understated, blithely bunging complex things into the 'good' box and 'bad' box.

That is about as profound as Ealing Tragedy has been for some time, and I'm surprised to find it prompted not by an afternoon in heated conversation with the ghost of Macchiavelli, nor a month spent in ascetic seclusion on the island of Lindisfarne with only a copy of Boethius's Consolations of Philosphy to keep me company, but by Disc 1 (feature/commentary/subtitles) of Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes remake (2001). Which is bad, but not as bad as people say it is.

Maybe it's the fact that the vicious reviews I'd read or been given were either by disappointed Burton fans or by professional critics who don't rate anything if it's not in Hungarian. Maybe it's the fact that the 1968 original is lookng a bit ropey these days. Maybe it was the beer. For whatever reason, I didn't find myself hurling my worldly possessions at the screen, as I had expected to.

I should qualify this, however, with the fact that this is the highest praise I have for the movie. Burton's never been particularly good at action, which is all this movie has for the most part - look at Batman or Sleepy Hollow, which might appear at first glance to be action films but spend surprisingly little time doing so, and when they do it's all about the art direction rather than the action itself. Devoid of a striking backdrop (making do with a desert) or striking character design (in a fast-moving shot, the apes might as well be armoured humans), the messy direction was left as exposed as a baboon's bottom.

Besides, action isn't what Planet Of The Apes is about. The original is all about suspense - when Heston and crew first land on the planet, and are being stalked - and reversal of society - none of the humans in the original can speak or use tools, they really are savages. When Heston turns up and tells an ape to get his filthy paws off him, it's not just a bother for the apes, it's a philosophical conundrum that shakes the foundation of their whole society. The apes even have their own internal politics and race relations - chimps are the underclass, gorillas the warriors, orangutans the greedy ruling class - which creates a range of different reactions to Heston's presence.

All this is gone in the 2001 version. It loses all suspense by hurling Wahlberg straight into captivity the second he crashes, then making the rest of the movie a straight cat-and-mouse chase. Wahlberg isn't any different to the other humans (who speak, like him, in an American accent), which means that instead of being a revelation to the apes, he's just a 'feisty' human. And the ape society itself is barely touched upon, let alone fleshed out. They all hate humans, that's all we know (except Helena Bonham Carter, whose character has turned from 1968's self-righteous political activist into a whiney sidekick).

At least the apes got all the good lines. The humans, including Wahlberg, were utter non-characters. Perhaps this was an intentional reversal of how we ourselves view apes. Perhaps it was because they couldn't act. Who knows? Still, it's a shame that even the best ape lines were in-jokes from the original film (generally Charlton Heston's human lines now spoken by apes; indeed, Heston's own uncredited cameo as a particularly human-hating ape was enormous fun). How Tim Roth must lament turning down the role of Snape in the Potters for this. At least Deep Roy - who plays a little girl ape - went on to redeem himself as the Oompa Loompas (all of them), and will forever be Mr Sin in our hearts.

To avoid spoilers I won't talk about the twists. Suffice to say that while the 2001 version is closer to the novel which inspired it, 1968's is far better.

Should do some work now.

A Bit More

2006-10-27T14:45:00.000Z

Oh yes... I meant to mention in the last post that Ketch is now shaded too. A small addition, but given that one spends most of the game staring blankly at him, a significant one.

Progress Of Sorts

2006-10-24T14:14:00.000Z

Well, some didn't believe me, but I really did take all of last week off work just to work on Shingles, and I'm rather chuffed with myself for putting in the kind of hours I haven't put in since playing The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Problem is, I can now see why it's taken so bloody long already. Hours were spent shading in the roots of a tree (not even a particularly gnarled tree, just a silver birch). An entire afternoon was spent crafting the chintzy wallpaper for one screen. And it was a long, cold night that I spent animating a windfarm swaying precariously in the blusterous estuary breeeze.

Still, these were all hours that needed to be spent, and the results, if meagre in terms of size, are at least usable. And I've now broken the back of the background art - only St Eadric's-In-The-Way and most of Vine Hall remain - and that's the most time-consuming bit, so there's light at the end of the tunnel. For the non-believers, here is a smidgen of last week's efforts - blood, sweat and tears congealed and lovingly crafted into four shades of suburbia: the dock keeper's cottage and St Eadric's Marvellous Mobile Monastery. And now you must forget them so that they're brilliant again when you played the finished product. Aged 53.

In between getting RSI in my mouse hand I also managed, at long last, to rip my CD collection on to my laptop, providing an eclectic background noise to proceedings when placed on shuffle. I take a certain perverse pride in not only owning fifteen CDs too many to fit on my hard drive, but also possessing 1.5 gigabytes of Terrorvision. Who'd have thought it.

Boom! Just Kidding

2006-10-10T13:34:00.000Z

Nasty business with North Korea. Still, looking on the bright side, it did give The Sun a chance to use the headline HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA? Which is possibly my favourite for a long time, and was accompanied by a picture of the Kim Jong-Il puppet from Team America. Yay The Sun, bringing international politics to the masses.

Yet none of the broadsheets, or the tabloids, or the local papers or even the staff noticeboard of the primary school at the end of my road, are covering the vital topic of Shingles (see link on the right, I really can't be bothered to look it up). Those few hardy stragglers waiting with bated breath (as opposed to baited breath, which smells of worms, like you get first thing in the morning (after you've had worm flakes for breakfast)) for an update should know only this: I am now halfway through the background art, which if the demo is anything go by, is the most time-consuming bit. And I've got tomorrow and all of next week off, solely to knuckle down on it. We thank you for your patience.

In other news:

Rambling Thomas - if you do get a dog, you must get it a Scurvy Dog Bowl (and take time to enjoy the other piratical pottery on that site (and not call your dog Guybrush, which is what I'm going to do (when I get a dog, in, like, ten years' time))).

Harry - tomorrow you will receive a Morrisons carrier bag in an envelope. Do not throw it away! Lego Joker keyring is ensconsed within.

Apologies

2006-10-05T11:03:00.000Z

Did you hear they're making a movie about a newspaper covered in a succulent marinade?

Apparently, it's baste on a true story.

2006-10-04T16:49:00.000Z

Ah, Boris.

Hallelujah

2006-09-29T11:43:00.000Z

Proof that religion works:

We take immorality.

We take religion, symbolised by the sacred cross, and place it deep in the heart, the very centre of this immorality.

What do we get?

Immortality.

Well, it almost works.

I get all my best ideas on the loo.

Grind That

2006-09-25T18:59:00.000Z

The return of RT to internet blogging is most welcome, even if it does entail him being in Chicago (and hello to any newfound Windy City readers it transpires I have). However, he's not the only person to have located a pithy and relevant quotation of late. This month's EDGE contains an interview with a developer of mid-1980s videogames who has since turned his hand to, well primarily avionics, but also a spot of poetry. Asked if there are any similarities between developing a game and writing, he decides that "apart from the opportunites to nurture pretentiousness and egotism, it's hard to think of anything." Ladies and gentlemen, I stand accused.

It is therefore for this reason, and this reason alone, and not at all laziness or bone-idleness or absent-mindedness or the HMV games sale, that I have staunchly refused to do much work on the game this week. It is pure, unlucky coincidence that I happen to have dived headlong into that second-hand copy of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and completed the game twice in a row in one sitting, including with the character of David Crosby we created so long ago, when men were men, and tuppence bought you a whole pig, and there was a great big hole in our kitchen ceiling.

Actually I have been doing a bit on the game. For security reasons I can reveal little. Know only that it involves a manky shower, Rodin's The Thinker, and a mirror crack'd from side to side. Or at least crude, pixellated renditions thereof.

On the plus side, my box set of the complete Danger Mouse has arrived.

Someone Else's Writing Again

2006-09-19T18:01:00.000Z

This will be tremendous fun for anyone familiar with RPGs or the City of Bath - and I know at least two readers who fit both these criteria. The 'lessons learnt' bit in the middle is very funny. Sounds like the kind of thing we should get Drewsie (Mr) to do at some point.

As I Walk Through The Valley Of The Shadows' Greatest Hits

2006-09-18T12:18:00.000Z

My Dad has a copy of The Shadows' Greatest Hits, which is fabulous for three reasons:

Reason the First - The Shadows are great, and under-rated by our generation, even if they did start off as Cliff Richards' backing band. Actually I was considering using their music in the Shingles game but would probably get sued, not that anyone important will ever notice it, but still.

Reason the Second - The CD has 32 tracks, but these are in fact just 16 tracks played twice, first in mono then in stereo. Saves having to press the 'repeat' button, provided you're willing to shift your position in relation to the speakers after the first run.

Reason the Third - The final track (and by Reason the Second, also the track in the middle) is called 'Quartermaster's Stores', only some sci-fi fanatic designing the CD sleeve has spelt it as 'Quatermasster's Stores'. Alack, no theremin is present.

A Series of Really Quite Inept Events

2006-09-17T21:33:00.000Z

I've been back in Essex for the weekend, which has given me plenty of opportunity to have f*** all to do but to think about what I can put in a blog entry. Oh cruel irony, who dost only give me free internet on the occasions when I have very little to report.

Up here in the green belt just outside the M25 it appears to be Daddy Long-Legs season - by which I mean crane flies of the Family tipulidae and the Order diptera, and not Daddy Long Legs the founding member of rock-rap group Bloodhound Gang, who is seldom to be encountered battering himself senselessly against the spotlights in Mum and Dad's kitchen. I've never had a problem with the insectoid variety of DLLs before, but the warm, moist weather this year - the very same which has caused Britain's spiders, of whom am I so utterly unenamoured, to grow big and strong and vicious of mandible - has also allowed the crane flies to swell to mammoth proportions, and when five of them are fluttering round your head waving their legs in the air in a menacing fashion, they do a very good impression of flying spiders!

It has therefore become something of a tradition in these parts, during the Daddy Long-Legs season, to run around and scream like a girl. I am happy to partake in this noble custom.

Noticed an old newspaper lying around with an article headed 'Diana Death Probe Re-opened'. I have little or no interest in the subject, save for the wonderful phrase 'Diana Death Probe' which sounds like some terrifying machine out of The Matrix, maybe an endoscope with a big drill on the end and poison spikes all along it, which wears a blonde wig and visits terminally ill children in hospital.

What else was there? There was something else I was going to yammer about. Did I mention I finally got hold of Nintendogs for my DS? I currently have a Yorkshire Terrier called Pimms, who is adorable though her diminuitive stature is precluding her from performing well enough in the frisbee-catching championships to earn me the money to buy my next two planned pups: Boswell the Beagle and Guybrush the Golden Retriever. I shall simply have to keep her locked in the cupboard as a punishment.

There was definitely something else. Never mind.

Ooh! Ooh! I know! I was outside just now, setting up my Mum's new bluetooth hands-free thingy for the car, which runs off the cigarette lighter in the dashboard. Well, it all went okay but I'd never used the actual cigarette lighter doodad before, so out of curiosity I decided to push it into the socket for just a few seconds then see how hot it had got by pressing my thumb against it.

And that is why I'm typing this with one hand.

Merritt and Snicket

2006-09-15T08:46:00.000Z

Have yet to read this fully, but the sheer fantasmic potential in combination with my dark, hidden extrovert compels me to shout it from the rooftops immediately. Here is some wonderfully presented news of Stephin Merritt's new album, and more intriguingly the theme.

Now, to Waterstones!

UPDATE: I've read it now and am very excited, though I hear mixed reviews of Mr Snicket's works. Now all I have to do is wait until everybody else goes home and I am left alone in the office, and can play those samples at the end...

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oooh! Very good. Someone's been listening to Shockheaded Peter, methinks. What a marvellous conjunction.

Bloody Back Seat Drivers

2006-09-11T16:28:00.000Z

For lack of anything especially newsworthy in my own neck of the woods, or even just in my own neck, here is somebody else's which is very funny indeed.

Clarification required

2006-09-04T15:43:00.000Z

Now then, the phrase 'I've gone through it with a fine tooth comb'.

I'd always assumed this was comparing one's meticulousness to a comb whose teeth were extremely close together, therefore very thin, i.e. fine. A comb with fine teeth. A fine-toothed comb, if you will. Yet people often seem to place the stress on the 'tooth', and indeed place a hyphen between that word and 'comb', so you end up instead with 'I've gone through it with a fine tooth-comb'.

Could someone please tell me what where I can obtain one of these marvellous 'tooth-comb' devices? My teeth are all ruffled up and I really need to comb them into place. In fact one side of my mouth has no teeth at all, so it'd be great if I give myself a dental combover. I don't want none of those shoddy cheap-ass Taiwanese tooth-combs, mind; it has to be fine.

That said, I've just been looking up The Band lyrics and noticed the line from The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down which goes 'By May the tenth, Richmond had fell'. Until today, I had believed this was 'I made a tent in Richmond; it fell'.

Oh Dear

2006-09-01T11:22:00.000Z

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

Which just goes to show you can't put a price on wit. However, you can tamper with HTML.

My blog is worth $1,000,003.36.
How much is your blog worth?

Five Brilliant And Entirely True Things I Learnt From Other Children At Primary School

2006-08-31T10:08:00.000Z

- When someone's been naughty and you go 'Ummmmmmm!' then if you do that for too long then your lips will go white forever.

- The Hobbit is for older children because it's about a lady who has sex with a dragon.

- When we knocked that little kid off the bench and he hit his head on the ground you could see his brain falling out.

- Condoms are perfume for donkeys.

- When you go to Little Chef and you have a Coke-and-Tizer cocktail and it comes with a little plastic monkey toy hanging from the little umbrella in it then if you take the plastic monkey home and keep it in your room then when you're asleep in the night it'll crack open to reveal a real monkey made of stone who will come to life and kill you.

Bern Tragedy

2006-08-22T18:20:00.000Z

Can't talk now - I'm in Bern! Chez Dr and Mrs Omission, who are being excellent hosts and showing us all the sights.

Highlights thus far include:

Going to the Jungfrau region of the Alps and clambering about exciting waterfalls.

Scaling the Gurten, or at least the steps up to the cable car, climbing up a further tower at the top which looked curiously like Isengard made of wood, then getting attacked by vertigo and wasps at once.

M'lady asking what Snakes On A Plane is about.

Tea-flavoured chocolate.

Playing Kill Doctor Lucky, the precursor to Cluedo in which the aim is not to solve the murder but commit it. Richard won by smashing the good doctor's head in with a duck decoy.

Microbreweries and macrobreweries and weissbier and lager and wein.

The air. The views. The cobbles.

The way you ask for something in German and the shop assistant immediately replies in English.

Convincing m'lady that the word 'book' is derived from the Latin word 'bookus'.

Discovering that my favourite t-shirt, which I wore around town all yesterday and which features several exciting stencilled designs including what I believed to be some random German words, actually reads 'Best Wishes For The New Year!'

A Bold New Direction

2006-08-18T16:21:00.000Z

I decided to diverge artistically into a new medium.

This can be viewed with Microsoft PowerPoint, or of course its able paraphrase, Smallgentle PotencyNib.

To Excess

2006-08-15T10:10:00.000Z

Currently suffering from RGHI. And as if further proof were needed that Guitar Hero is better than alcohol, I've discovered that if you stay up with it till three a.m. without drinking any water, you wake up the next day with a cracking hangover. Good news is that More Than A Feeling really is the best-designed song in the game, actually encouraging you to activate a bonus booster by physically tilting your 'axe' into a rock salute at the start of each chorus and the solo. I wept, Sally, I wept.

What else has been happening in this small self-indulgent corner of the world? There was Drewsie's stag do on Saturday, of which I kind of only caught the middle section but still have photographic evidence of the man dressed up as a referee and covered in red spraypaint. Saw Miami Vice at the weekend, which is worth seeing simply for the hard-rock-rap rendition of Phil Collins's I Can Feel It Coming In The Air Tonight over the closing credits. And saw Blue Man Group last night, which is utterly amazing, like the best street performance ever. I feel my career as a theatre critic may be blighted by my tendency to call everything I see 'fantastic' or 'amazing' or 'terrific', but the producers love me.

Carnally.

And at midnight last night I finally admitted to myself that I can't cut cheese to save my life.

"And now, Mr Ketch, you must cut zis Vensleydale... or DIE! Yes, zat is right. Take ze knife. It iz sharp, no? Zere is no reazon for you to cut ze cheese badly. So please, carry on!

HA!

Vhat an appalling display! You 'ave cut ze cheese viz such cack-'anded imprecizion zat it 'as crumbled all over ze recently cleaned work surfaze! And for zis... you vill be zrown into ze spiky poison furnace chasm of boiling nasty doom! HA HA HA HA! Heil Dein Gruyere! Prepare to zcream, you wretched British cheese-molesting filthy son of-

Vhat!?!"

"Hey, Gorgonzola. I hate to Roquefort your boat, and I sure as hell don't wanna Monterey Jack your party, but I don't give Edam about your Munster-ous schemes for world domination. How dare you Camembert arms against us on our home turf? You've Gloucester your marbles. No, worse - you've Double Gloucester them. Your sort should be in Emmental home, bashing your Cheddar-gainst a padded wall. Why, I oughta cut off your Pecorino. Now sit back, take a Brie-ther and kiss your sorry ass Gouda-bye."

"But zat- zat is- you 'ave achieved ze impozzible!"

"That's right. This is no random crumble of Wensleydale flakes. I've carved this mutha into a friggin' tank."

"NOOOOOOO-"

&tc.

Le Weekend

2006-08-09T11:33:00.000Z

Friday evening: Walked from Piccadilly Circus to Westminster Bridge then along the Thames path to Limehouse. Best in walk in ages. Worked off the Beer Festival hangover to the extent that I managed to eat my first thing all day (a Cornetto). Washed it down later with some excellent tapas - under what other circumstances can one consume crab and rabbit in the same mouthful?

Saturday: Turned 26. Possibly now older than the cast in the first series of Friends, yet no sign as yet of giant apartment, crazy fountain antics or Paul the Wine Guy. Derek the Port Chap doesn't count. Existential agony and possible mid-life crisis averted by m'Lady's cunning plan to ferry me away on a day-trip to a secret location, which she managed to keep miraculously undisclosed right up until we got on the train and the Tannoy announced that this was the 12:36 to Hampton Court. Still, the ex-Royal Palace formed the basis of a wonderfully relaxing day, even down to the 25 minutes we spent getting deliberately lost in the maze, throughout which hidden speakers now croak creepy out-of-key nursery rhymes in an apparent effort to mentally scar small children forever. Can't blame them.

M'lady also made me a birthday cake which was approximately 72% brandy. I don't recall that ever turning up in 'Central Perk'.

Sunday: Chilled.

Monday: Washed up.

Tue- oh, I forgot something that happened on Sunday! The death of Morrisons has been, it transpires, not a tragedy but a sacrifice, the enactment of which has forced me to look further afield (or perhaps further aBroadway) and discover the large range of excellent delis of which Ealing is blessed. From the Polish one we got some kind of spicy filled gnocchi which were damn cheap and excellent; from Carluccio's I got some first-class parma ham; in the organic shop we tried all manner of cheeses and got some superb Fentiman's pops; and from the posh kitchen utensils shop I got a wooden spoon with a special protrusion for scraping the bottom of saucepans.

Tuesday: Bought Guitar Hero. Achieved Nirvana.

GREAT! BRITISH! BEER! FESTIVAL!

2006-08-04T13:43:00.000Z

CASK MARQUES (Good things):

The fetching Greene King trilbys, which were actually black, and which sadly ran out shortly before I got there.

The CAMRA members-only lounge, reached by taking an escalator to the second floor, rising up above the hoipolois like the Emperor Claudius undergoing apotheosis. The members lounge consisted of a small fenced-off area containing some slightly more comfy chairs and some trestle-tables with tablecloths.

Whitesnake cover band!

Freddie Flintoff's quote on the front of The Good Beer Guide: 'The perfect book for when you're Out!'

James finding a brown paper bag on the table we were sitting at; James peering inside to discover the discarded remains of some African-style cured meat; James eating said leftover meat. (I tried to stop him, although was very funny.)

The Good Beard Guide.

Pork and stilton pies. Mmmmmmmmm.

Scotch eggs. Mmmmmmmmm.

Pork scratchings. Mmmmmmmmm. So salty that I'm inclined to think they slaughter their pigs by over-exerting them on a treadmill, so that when the poor animals finally die of exhaustion they're covered in a succulent layer of saline sweat.

CHEAP LAGERS (Bad things):

25-minute queue for the cashpoint; a conga of the ill-prepared. (Still, gave me a chance to play a bit of Electroplankton.)

45-minute queue to buy tickets, even for CAMRA members. Luckily I managed to jump it by being sneaky, cheeky and in the heat slightly reeky.

A grand saving of £2 from the ticket price for all CAMRA members.

The Cask Marque advert - which I'm having trouble tracking down online but is an absolute corker. Like most real ale adverts it purports to be 'attracting the female market' by bunging sexy semi-clad nymphettes on a poster, only this time there's also a trendy bloke with a saxophone and a nifty hat and a sharp shirt unbuttoned to his nipples.

Auto-pilot, leading me to ask for a pint of 8.0% cider.

The Hangover this morning. The Hangover this lunchtime. The Hangover this afternoon. This evening looks bleak.

Big Boots to Fill

2006-08-03T16:11:00.000Z

Do you ever find that whatever book you're reading at the moment, you keep making reference to it in conversations because it seems to be extremely relevant? Like when I was reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it suddenly seemed wholly appropriate to mention that the character of Mr Norrell lived on Grosvenor Square every blasted time I went near Oxford Street, and when I was reading John Crompton's The Life of the Spider I would repeatedly tell everyone I met how their shoes/new job/flat/relationship put me in mind of the subtle weaving techniques of the genus Aranea.

At the moment I'm reading a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci - an intellectual antidote to the dreaded Code, you might say, such as one might otherwise achieve by reading it in German when one can't speak German. And it takes a very patient girlfriend to keep telling me that I am not the great maestro's reincarnation, much as I keep spotting similarities between us. When I point out that Leo and I share a fastidious eye for domestic tidiness, a deep love for the animal kingdom and an insatiable hunger to try our hand at a vast range of skills, studies and projects - plus of course strikingly good looks - I am reproved with the theory that:

1) It is not impossible for more than one man in the history of civilisation to be obsessive compulsive, easily distracted and prone to speaking like a retard when in the presence of cute fwuffy doggly wogglies;

2) I have a face like an arse;

3) Leonardo's myriad works encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, civic engineering, military engineering, anatomy, zoology, botany, mathematics, geometry, philosophy, astrology, verse and prose. Mine encompass genre fiction, comic books, videogames and crosswords;

4) Leonardo was gay.

(Not that I have any problems with the gays. But I'm not gay.)

Overall I fear we are not about to enter a second Renaissance.

UPDATE: The Sakrileg link above is incorrect - turns out there's more than one blog dedicated to the German Das Vinci Code. I actually noticed this before it was pointed out to me, but found the erroneous site so funny that I kept it up. In the interests of fairness, though, a genuinely British attempt at deciphering Sakrileg, in Switzerland, can be found at Project Sakrileg. (If only embryonically at present.)

Mixed Shenanigans

2006-08-01T11:06:00.000Z

In all the trauma of Morrison's closing I quite forgot the other exciting stuff I did at the weekend.

Friday

I went to the filming of Mitchell 'Peep' and 'Show' Webb's new sketch show at the BBC. Eventually. Initially we got there an hour early but were told that enough people had already turned up, so we were now on 'stand by'. We got special yellow 'STAND BY' stickers and everything, marking us out as the lower caste to be shunned by The Elect with their gleaming white tickets. We were then shepherded into the 'Audience Lounge' where we had to 'stand by' the corner drinking warm bottles of Budwesier at £2.90 each. To make matters worse there was a merchandise stand near us with lots of Doctor Who stuff for sale - why, if they hadn't closed when they did then I might have gone home several pennies the worse for wear but better off to the tune of one Cyberman standee.

In time The Elect formed an orderly queue and were elevated up to their seats, leaving us dregs of humanity to finish our warm Budweiser and wonder what was on telly tonight and whether there were any good pubs nearby. And then - just as we were about to leave - someone in a headset came in to the bar and asked all the Stand Byers to queue up by the door! Now, this was some time after The Elect had risen up to the auditorium, so we were nothing if not sceptical. Surely they can't be letting us in now? A few people at the front of the queue are ushered through some doors, and are gone into the night. Perhaps they're making us queue to leave. What if we're not near the front? Will we be put on 'stand by' again, not allowed to go home unless some of the people in front pull out of leaving at the last minute? Or - I cast a fearful glance at the Cyberman standee in the corner - are we being shuttled towards some giant mincing machine where our bodies will be pulped and shredded and our central nervous systems bound to a steel exo-skeleton, deprived of all emotion, never again to feel the soothing warmth of love?

We were taken to some spare seats at the back.

The filming itself is an odd experience because they inevitably fluff lines etc and so have to keep stopping and doing the same bits over and over, but rather than becoming repetitive this is actually very funny in itself. It's like Auntie's Bloomers Live or something, which sounds horrendous but is curiously engrossing like Most Haunted or Takeshi's Castle. Of course, true professionals get it right first time and so duly win a director's chair, a Ghostbusters video and the Prince soundtrack to Batman on vinyl. But long story short, the studio sketches were funny, the location sketches (which they had already filmed and showed us on giant screens) were also funny, but I'll wait until the post-production is complete and the series airs in September to judge whether it can top the mighty Peep Show.

Saturday

I saw some people in a pub and foolishly let slip my best idea ever, Scotch Kinder Eggs, only for them to steal it from me and treacherously display it unripe to the world like Prometheus on the rock, naked and humiliated, and had a pint of Ayingerbrau.

Sunday

We went to the Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Sundae on Clapham Common, which was like a teeny tiny festival with some bands I hadn't heard of but FREE ICE CREAM ALL DAY!!! And cans of Grolsch for £3 each but never mind. There was even an appearance live on stage by the Jerry himself, although I only heard him and couldn't see him because I was in a portaloo at the time and he didn't hang around long. Actually I did know one of the bands, The Wonder Stuff - I loved them as a kid so seeing them live at last was great fun and they provided a nice (loud) nostalgic buzz on a glorious Sunday afternoon. The weather is now turning again, so this may also mark the last time my shins are exposed to the world (much like a Scotch Kinder Egg) beneath a pair of shorts. Until last month I hadn't worn shorts since 2001, so it's been a liberating experience.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Frozen Haddock Fillets In Batter

2006-07-31T10:44:00.000Z

Shopping List 29/07/2006
Pasta Sauce
Pork Pie
Wensleydale
French Stick
Peas

Fifty minutes later, it was gone forever.

Farewell, Morrisons Ealing Broadway branch.

A Rustic Upbringing

2006-07-21T15:40:00.000Z

With all this talk of pink smoothies, I got to thinking about picking strawberries, and raspberries, and blackberries, and how nobody seems to go doing this any more; a summer pastime which appears to have fallen from grace of late. Why, when I were a lad - oooh, four score and twenty years ago now, give or take four score - it was quite the thing to go tearing through the shrubs in our velcro trainers and Transformers t-shirts, ripping the juicy specimens from their leafy fortifications with utterly gay abandon. One could barely drive a hundred yards (or even four score yards) along the A127 between May and August without encountering a dusty, hand-painted sign advertising fruit-picking vacancies in the fields. Ahh, life was so simple back then.

Not that I ever went picking strawberries, of course. Being mortally afraid of thorns, and wasps, and spiders, and indeed strawberries, the whole exercise was rendered - oh heavens - fruitless. Much better to stay indoors with the Spectrum. Or better still, go round my mate's house and play on his NES while he stood outside and kicked the football at the garage door.

Following at least six words of encouragement after yesterday's tank, presented here for your delectation is another detail from the same part of the game. The one on the left is an elk, though I promise not to do the obvious.

PS London is very cold at the moment. Brrr.

It's A Slow Afternoon

2006-07-20T14:35:00.000Z

Ever my source of afternoon amusement, today's Evening Standard headline screams 'TUBE CRIME SOARS'. A tiny little part of me wants to read 'tube crime' as one would read 'knife crime' or 'gun crime', and so assume that there's been a sharp increase in the number of people being attacked by muggers with cardboard tubes - which, as we all know, can be lethal in trained hands.

My favourite Standard 'news' was a few weeks back when it proclaimed 'OFFICIAL: DROUGHTS CAUSED BY WATER CHIEFS'. Not by pointless garden swimming pools and hideously extravangant flower beds, not at all (how dare Blair suggest we cut back on these summer essentials!). And not by global warming exacerbated by our 4x4s in which we transport little Tarquin to the school 200 yards away, heavens no - after all, he couldn't walk there, the streets are dangerous these days, even in Chelsea, he might catch all kinds of drugs. And he needs all that room in the car to fit in his polo equipment. And I need to be able to be on a level above the common cars at all other times, to maintain my superiority complex.

Incidentally, why do they make pink smoothies? People only ever buy the orange ones, so the orange ones are always out of stock and there are shelves and shelves of pink smoothies going out of date and looking all forlorn. Just a thought.

I'm coming to realise that there is a fine art - more painstaking almost than drawing a videogame one pixel at a time - in revealing screenshots and details of said game before its release with enough regularity to maintain public interest, but not so much that you spoil all the surprises. By 'public' I of course mean the three readers of this blog. So I realise it's been a while since I gave an update, and lest I lose your rapt attention - some of you may already have moved away from the edge of your seat and back into a more comfortable position - here is what I drew last night.

What I drew last night.

Sorry for the external link, unfortunately Blogger's 'insert picture' function doesn't work from my decrepit office PC.

More Monkey Music

2006-07-16T00:09:00.000Z

Further to the other day's post, here's a crowd-pleaser in more than one way: Monkey Island on a Mandolin. With a link to a whole site of Monkey Island tablature!

Good Lord, and following that last link has just led me on a merry dance to the glorious (and sadly erroneous, I suspect) rumour that Tim Burton might be directing a stop-motion film of Grim Fandango! That's the self-same Grim Fandango which comes in my Top Three Games Of All Time. (For the record, the other game in my list is Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time; the final slot is reserved, like the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, for a worthy contender as yet undiscovered - the eternally unattainable Perfect Game.)

(Actually it might be Tony Hawk's 3.)

A Surfeit Of Whelming

2006-07-15T20:13:00.000Z

When Googling your own name starts to lose its appeal - which is rare, but assured - I've discovered that it can be vaguely worthwhile, not to mention educational, to look up one's home town on Wikipedia. I've just been looking at Brentwood's entry and have learnt the following useful facts:

At over 500 years old, the White Hart was one of the oldest pubs in Brentwood until it was turned into the 'Sugarhut Village' in 2004.

There was once a common phrase, 'Gone To Brentwood', meaning to have gone insane. Because we used to have a big old sinister Victorian red-brick asylum on top of a sinister hill, connected to the railway station by a secret tunnel!

It has now been converted into flats.

Alan Sugar's company Amstrad is based in Brentwood, but the makers of The Apprentice created an office for him in London as they didn't want to film the show in Brentwood. "This has since become a subject of ridicule for Amstrad who appear ashamed to be placed in Brentwood."

Brentwood was once the trampolining capital of Britain. The trampoline factory has now closed, but there is still 'a thriving trampolining community'.

Brentwood was briefly accused of being The Most Boring Town in Britain by several newspaper articles in the mid-90s. This is of course libelous and the papers concerned were quickly alerted to the Sugarhut Village, secret tunnel, trampolines, Alan Sugar etc., in light of which they changed their minds. It is entirely coincidental that Brentwood is an anagram of 'Bored Town'.

But as readers may know, I don't really come from the bustling metropolis of Brentwood. More accurately I come from the neighbouring village of Ingrave, a village mentioned in the Domesday Book and steeped in folklore and history. Here is the whole of its Wikipedia entry:

Ingrave is a village in south Essex. It is situated just south of Brentwood.

I Call It 'Research'

2006-07-12T10:55:00.000Z

I've been playing Simon The Sorcerer of late, an old point-and-click with a twelve-year-old lead character voiced by Chris 'Rimmer' Barry of all people. On the one hand it's given my ongoing adventure opus some much-needed inspiration - being pretty much conceived, designed, drawn, produced and programmed by one man - but on the other hand it's Val Halla'd me something rotten, with a couple of my favourite puzzles from Shingles popping up in it in slightly different forms. Meh. It got the lead on me by twelve years or so, it can live.

Meanwhile, Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert continues to paint a big X over the interweb's most interesting pirate-adventure-related material: anyone who's played the MI games and secretly jigged along to the excellent theme tune (once used, I hear tell, as the background music to a certain bar scene in a certain play) will appreciate this.

And I fixed the new profile picture to be bigger. That was taken from real life, you know.

To The Dogs

2006-07-10T17:02:00.000Z

Ealing's going downhill. First of all my favourite caff put their breakfast prices up by a quid; then later that day I noticed Morrison's is closing down. Neither of which may sound like a true Ealing Tragedy, but when the very good, cheap supermarket on your doorstep shuts down and leaves you with only the smaller, more expensive one that's always out of stock (Sainsbury's Local), life becomes surprisingly inconvenient. And now I can't even afford to drown my sorrows in black pudding.

Culinary adventures at the weekend - utilising Morrison's range of produce before it is consumed by oblivion - included a Nigel Slater recipe which looked really nice but involved two lamb shanks and a couple of hours' roasting time, neither of which were to hand at the time, so we swapped the lamb for pork (which worked surprisingly well) and swapped the cooked aubergines for slightly undercooked ones (which was less of a success). Yesterday I did the World's Best Mash with parsley and asparagus, plus some further bastardised aubergine. All stirred with the wooden spoon which I like to pretend I won after coming last by a quite spectacular margin in spiritofthetin's Fantasy World Cup. But actually I paid 79p for it.

Boohoo!

2006-06-26T11:34:00.000Z

Boohoo! My DS has a broken pixel. Which means there's a glowing green dot in the middle of one of the screens. Which is annoying and means I need to get it replaced. Which means waiting until there's a new shipment because everywhere's out of stock.

Boohoo!

Woohoo!

2006-06-23T16:52:00.000Z

Woohoo! I finally have a DS Lite! The most gorgeous piece of handheld gaming ever and it is mine, mine, mine!

I've never before bought a console on the day it was launched. I am imbued with a feeling of tremendous eldritch power. Possibly it was a mistake to start charging the battery (4 hours the first time you use it) in the office at 5pm on a Friday. Meh, how the hell else was I going to spend my Friday evening?

Woohoo! I saw Avenue Q yesterday and it's fab. Even if you know the songs already. The puppeteers actually act and sing in tandem with the puppets they're operating - a feat of physical multi-tasking akin to rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time. Fantastic.

Woohoo! It's Friday!

Oh yeah, DS battery. Meh.

Woohoo! England vs Ecuador! If England win I get national pride; if Ecuador win I get a good laugh. Everyone's a winner, or at least I am.

There was a point to this post. It has deserted me.

PS Woohoo! I hosted the Academy quiz on Monday to an audience of over 130 people. Went very well. Bit too hard, bit too long, but we can adjust that for next time. Next time...

A Change Has Come Upon Me

2006-06-19T10:13:00.000Z

Once again, the vogue in Corpus Blogland is that it's all about the dinner. But guess what? I'm not about to hi-lariously compare everybody else's superb culinary efforts with my own diet of microwave meals. You know why?

Because I sat down this morning and had a think (which made me late for work) and I really believe that in the last twelve months I've eaten no more than a dozen microwave meals. Oh sure, I've used a microwave - it's a quick and surprisingly efficacious way to do peas, which I find go with anything, like a little black skirt. It's also true that much of my replacement diet has been things that you only need to heat in an oven - quiches, pies, frozen fish-in-batter and the odd kiev when I can avoid the flashbacks.

But - and it is a big but - I've been making a genuine effort to do some genuine cooking, and even some improvisation. To this I owe a great debt of gratitude to m'lady, whose disdain for microwave mash knows no bounds, and also to the might Nigel Slater, whose Real Food has become something of a Bible to me. Though I do find it amusing that for all his insistence that food should be simple, he's rather dictatorial about his pans. I don't have a griddle pan, a sautee pan or heavy-based shallow pan. I have a £14.99 set from Argos and dodgy electric hobs.

But still, I've found some wonderful stuff. So far (bangers and mash aside, which was one of two things I could do already, the other being the Best Dippy Eggs In The World) I've acceptably fried salmon, concocted a pasta/stir fry hybrid with beef, made a fantastic double-cream and parmesan pasta sauce, boiled God-knows how many vegetables including corn on the cob, and deboned then chargrilled some chicken thighs with a creme fraiche sauce and oily lemon courgettes. All of which were very simple, but given my overall ignorance in the kitchen I'm quite proud.

Right, I'm off to Euro Cafe.

Quicky

2006-06-16T17:26:00.000Z

This is very funny.

DIE! DIE! DIE!

2006-06-13T09:34:00.000Z

...and no, that title isn't me practising my German ("THE! THE! THE!"). Nor am I impatient for the D20 in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. But these are two of the excuses I may shortly be required to give my neighbours, having garnered a copy of PS2 light-gun Uzi-fest Crisis Zone for a fiver. Bear in mind that a previous instalment in the Time Crisis series became known by someone who used to live in the room beneath mine as the 'bang-bang-reload-reload-FUCK' game. There may be, in summary, some invective sprayed around with all those 9mm bullets.

This now means I have all the Time Crisis games available for PS2, which is kind of special and kind of tragic at the same time, like being killed by a meteor. The game has admittedly lost something in translation from the arcade - where one wielded an actual-size plastic sub-machine gun, complete with juddering recoil and rat-a-tat-tat soundbox - to the home console, where one uses Sony's own-brand 'Gun-Con' which feels rather like it came out of a Christmas cracker. However, such diminiutive, almost invisible hardware, combined with the fact that you only have to hold the trigger down rather than frantically pull it like an epileptic child, does have the unexpected upshot of giving the sensation that one is killing enemies merely by pointing at them. This confers a tremendous sense of power. Yes, you know what I mean. It is like wielding the very Hand of God. Which leads me to wonder whether God, like me, after a prolonged bout of smiting heathen, gets a terrible cramp in his palm.

Meanwhile good pal Tom in Chelmsford has excelled himself and obtained an original Game Boy and Game Boy Colour for me at bargain prices, plus a selection of games. God damn I've got retro chic on the tube now. Just a shame I don't have an AA battery recharger. Never mind, it'll tide me over until Nintendo's latest handheld, the DS Lite, is released in Britain next week. Then the world shall truly know my wrath! Through the medium of Nintendogs, naturally.

Best Trailer Ever (or: The Number Of The Yeast)

2006-06-12T15:54:00.000Z

House Interior, Upstairs Landing. Night. Low lighting. Camera follows Damien's mother, Glenda, as she walks hesitantly towards her four-year-old son's closed bedroom door.
Glenda: Damien?
There is no reply.
Glenda: Damien, it's mommy. Damien? Damien, what are you doing in there?
Still no reply. Glenda reaches for the handle and slowly opens the door as the incidental music builds to a screeching crescendo.
Glenda: Damien, you've been hours, what on earth are you-
She screams, a terrible blood-curdling scream. Camera pans down to the floor. It is covered in soil, patiently furrowed, with neat rows of barley running up and down. Damien stands over it proudly with a little hoe, a genial smile upon his chubby face and a piece of straw between his teeth.

SOMETIMES WE REAP...

Detective Grymm: Sweet merciful Christ. Is that what I think it is?
Lieutenant Dash: I'm afraid it is, Detective. The first incidence of it since 1683.
Detective Grymm: Lord help us. He's enclosed his landed tenure.

...WHAT WE SOW.

Detective Grymm: And what happened to this guy, Lieutenant?
Lieutenant Dash: I dunno how to say this, Detective... but it looks like he's been put into indentured serfdom.

THIS AUTUMN...

Glenda: You mean there's nothing you can do?
Detective Grymm: Lady, this is beyond the police now. I'm not a religious man, but all I can think of is: you need to call in a minister.
Cut to a shot of an imposing figure entering the room. It is the Minister of Agriculture.

THERE WILL BE...

Minister of Agriculture: And so it has come to pass, just as it was prophesied. We must seek instruction from the good book.
Glenda: Wait, I'm sure I have a Bible round here somewhere...
Minister of Agriculture: I don't mean the Bible. I mean the Countryfile Almanac 1993.

NO TRESPASSERS.

Minister of Agriculture: You must think back, madam. Remember hard. Did you sleep with anyone else around the time of Damien's conception? Anyone other than your late husband?
Glenda: There... there was one other man. He told me he was an investment banker, but there was something about his eyes...
Minister of Agriculture: His eyes? What about them?
Glenda: I know this sounds silly, but it just felt like I was looking into the eyes of... of...
Minister of Agriculture: Of what, Glenda?
Glenda: A... a gentleman farmer.

COMING SOON...

THE YEOMAN

Eight Legged Freaks!

2006-06-07T16:41:00.000Z

So I get home from Essex to find my flat full of spiders. Well, not full full, just full. Thus far I have encountered:

1 in the kitchen;
1 under the dining table;
1 on the sofa;
1 in the wardrobe, which dropped in front of my face;
2 by the toilet rolls;
1 under the loo;
1 in my bath towel (my bath towel for heaven's sake);
7 in the porch, apparently working together to build a web across the front door and trap the postman.

Those concerned for my safety (as you all surely are) may find solace in the fact that my uneventful week in Essex garnered me plenty of time to work on Shingles. I now have a map screen, a darkened office, Brother Harry Morgan and Yurt World added to my list of completed artwork. But now I'm home and have access to a Gamecube again so this brief spurt of productivity might, just might, start to falter. We shall see.