It's like catching the train that you didn't want to take EEEOOOO!

There are some times when only the day before I would not have believed I would have written a sentence I am about to. And this is one of those times.

I saw the Jesus of coat hangers at lunch time today.

3000 welded coat hangers into the image of Christ and stuck to a ply crucifix. As the wise hair-full crone from the woods, Alanis, once sang probably, “Isn’t it Ironic, don’t you think? When you’ve got 3000 coat hangers and all you need is a nail. EEEOOOO EEEEEEOOO!”

You know what is ironic, Alanis Mmoorriissettee, that your brand of yodelling woman encouraging pop rock directed at girls to take control of their own lives, be empowered and be spunky in relationships was actually the future for a while, I even bought into it, such as it had permeated into our lives and radios. We were all Gilmour Girls together. And now look at it. Now we are here. Teenage girls all just want to be WAGS when they grow up. WAGS or paid with McDonalds Big Macs for services rendered.

Anyway…

I went over, stood next to the artist just after the unveiling and took a couple of pictures on my phone camera of the 9ft tall sculpture and it made me think. It made me think, you know what I want to do as soon as I get back to work? Make pipe cleaner dinosaurs.

That would be ace!

I could have a whole menagerie of pipe cleaner dinosaurs all on my desk by the end of the day.

But would my manager let me spend a mere 4 hours doing that – no she wouldn’t.

And possibly best not to be sat, hands busy manipulating pipe cleaners into dinosaurs under my desk… I can just imagine the discussion I would be having at Human Resources with my line manager soon thereafter: “Honest, I was simply making a pipe cleaner stegosaurus. I was being surreptitious! No, I don’t find stegosauruses particularly sexy. Certainly no more than a diplodocus. Of course I’ve thought about the girl in accounts, what’s that got to do with it?”

Sometimes I get the feeling that my job adversely constricts my artistic endeavours.

Confessions of a blogging fiend

I’ll be honest, I came here to blog (and shamelessly paraphrase from what could be the greatest film ever made) about Quincy M.E. episodes and ridicule my sector blogging nemesis, Car. D’gan and his goddamn Corner – and I’m all out of Quincy M.E. re-runs.

But, also, Car. D’gan hasn’t posted any recent articles. Damn you Car. D’gan, damn you to Hades, I see you have won again. But my time will come, I can wait all night.

As for Quincy M.E.? As a result of the global economic downturn my local television service, of which Quincy M.E. was once a staple provider of, seems can no longer afford any episodes. This is now reminiscent of the great Poirot drought of ‘99. I am reduced to watching Monk. Monk.

It is as if the worst of Jonathan Creek has been infused with the comfort of an Ally Mcbeal episode.

I watched an episode the other week where detective Monk, our jocular OCD prone protagonist, is being filmed by a documentary team in solving his 100th case [don’t get me started on how they are sure that this case will be solved, the bizarre cutaways to popular stars playing versions of themselves saying how much they love Monk, let alone the fact that the cameras as part of the documentary require to clumsily double for the “unseen” cameras to let the viewer see the murdered victims and drive the secondary plot “asides” which would surely have all been edited out in the final cut of the documentary] and it is only when watching the documentary back on the TV that Monk notices that something doesn’t quite fit. It is making him anxious. It is making him do hilarious slapstick things due to his profound mental illness. 3 of the victims involved the serial killer, who he caught (though only just after the Killer’s suicide), but the 4th and final murder was very marginally different, in that it was located north and each of the other murders were progressively located south. Quickly, using the taped recording of the show he solves the 4th murder. It had been conducted by none other than the documentary show’s presenter. He would have got away with it too if it hadn’t been for the fact that the camera had caught him not looking when he turned on the lights in the room where the final body lay, strongly suggesting that he had been there previous (and in no way taking account that light switches are almost always located at the side of doors) doing some murdering [Columbo, incidentally, shows how a plot device like this should be done in the episode "A Bird in the Hand..."]. Well, that and his breakdown and immediate confession in front of a house full of Monk’s police guests who were helping to celebrate his 100 solved crimes. Then the guests tell Monk that he can’t retire: he has now solved 101 crimes and everyone knows he has to stop on round numbers.

Simply ludicrous.

In any case weren’t there already 102 solved murders before the 4th victim? Is a serial killer committing one crime of many victims or multiple crimes? It’s very ZEN, that. I might use that when I am trying to get to sleep at night.

So this Blog is like a cheap re-rewrite of what it should have been. It is all T.J. Hooker and talking about things I ate in the 1980’s. It disgusts me, truth be told.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this for you and I. Our relationship was never meant to have a cult character called Lobos the Robot in it. Now look at it. Lobos is the best thing around here.

One day we'll all tell stories like this

I was forced to have a conversation with an old person this week. And it was one of the boring kinds of conversations that old people tend towards. Stories about people I don’t know in places I have never been proliferated with rhetoric questions.

"Ho, ho – let me tell you, well, Stuart [don’t know him], he’s been a friend of mine ever since we met on that coach trip, oh, it must be… what 20 years? [no idea] Now, wait, when did I go on that coach trip? [Haven’t a clue] it was 1987, I believe, so what’s that? [20 years is close, but then you could have said 50 years at the start, I’d have gone with it] This is 2010 and so 1987… to 1990… then add the 10 and… 23 years! So - ho, ho, - I was out with Stuart and, you know, Jimmy Smith [no], at the railway club [never heard of it], up in Fort William [never been], I think, anyway, and we drank vodka and coke. I couldn’t remember what happened that night when I got up in the morning! [That’s it? That’s the story? Really, about 2 people I don’t know and you in a place I have never been, having a drink with no memorable action. When even was this?] Well that must have been, what do you think? [how would I know?] Oh, 6 or 7 years ago [Great]."

The story he told after, however, was different:

"My friend Peter, you know, [no] he’s in an old folks care home these days. They found him wandering down trying to reach the coast. He lost a bit of his mental faculty. He recognizes faces but can’t place them in time or events in his life [is “Peter” you?]. Actually, he was in the local paper the other day, did you see it? [no] There was a picture of him. The care nurses had put him on a space hopper. They got the paper along to take a picture. He looked really happy."

This story made me a bit sad. I bet 3 years ago Peter would never have thought he would be in the local paper pictured bouncing around on a Space Hopper. The only reason he is happy is because he lives his life in some sort of frameless time limbo and possibly thinks himself a form of non-contextual future pensioner of Neptune. What a shame. The nurses probably only slapped him on it out of some sick humour.

So I thought that I would use this blog for once, to make a stand:

Don’t humiliate old timers with dementia by placing them on Space Hoppers.

Or at the very least fix deeley boppers on their heads to make it a bit more mainstream funny.

A personal history of the speed of modems: Greville’s journey to Broadband.

I only very recently got broadband. Not recently got wireless broadband. Though it is. I mean that up until this year I was on a dial-up connection. As long as I told people not to e-mail me with attachments but post me them instead on a 3.5in diskette, I could quite happily tootle on with my 33.6 kbps online life, the comforting noise of computer static, bell and chirp speak reassuring me that I was connected to the most vast information source the world has ever known. Unable to make of receive landline calls. But I can now say I am a convert. Broadband is the business.

The reason for upgrading was two-fold. Of course a main factor was this blog along with the development of online networking, both of which, I decided, meant acquiring the ability to connect to the internet more conveniently would be advantageous. On dial-up you find you really have to want to social network.

The other reason was a friend, who works for BT Internet. He actually, properly, fell off the stool at the bar when I told him I retained a dial-up connection in 2009. Apparently not many in the Western world still were. He said that I was essentially keeping an office running at BT HQ where 3 female operators with bake-o-lite headsets sit in front of a switchboard and when I click on my home PC to connect to the Web: one of them says Greville wants to use the internet and the 2nd plugs in the appropriate copper and brown nylon cable to make a cloudy glass valve light up on a cabinet. I didn’t ask what the 3rd one does – I suspect my friend was being facetious – or I figure she is the backup server – but I think more that he was being facetious – though I can’t discount the back-up server theory.

I wasn’t always behind the times. There was a period where I blazed a trail in this area. No, really.

It was a teacher at school who first introduced me to the internet. No one had really heard about it at my school and certainly computers were far from being something the majority of kids were interested with [in fact this was still at the stage that going out and making your way in the world en route to becoming a man was viable and more attractive an option than staring indoors and jobless at the World Wide Web]. But the teacher was enthusiastic and a few of us went to see what all the fuss was about.

Of course back then the internet was on a 14.4 kbps modem launched through CompuServe on the one Macintosh IIci in the school Library, so it wasn’t exactly great and we didn’t appear to be able to take over control of the nuclear armament of the USA with it, but we quickly believed we were pioneers and preferred to call what was basically looking at screeds of straight edged font, word processed documents about geographical facts and having to wait for 8 minutes to download a Panini sticker sized picture of Gillian Anderson: Surfing the E-Wave.

We would say to each other: “Are you able to surf the E-Wave after school?” “Yeah, I’ll be surfing the E-wave”. Still, not even this attempt to bond computers with the mental image of cool and sun burnished surfing dudes persuaded any honeys to join our exclusive club (or, more accurately, sit, cramped, on hard blue plastic chairs around the Library computer, moving only when your time using the mouse on the ROTA came up, for an hour and talk about Street Fighter combos while another Gillian Anderson picture slowly revealed itself, line by line) though.

I got a pen friend out of that. From Japan. I wonder what happened to her. I’d forgotten about her ‘till now. It turns out that even in the electronic age pen friends go out of fashion.

It was only a matter of time before a school chum was to get onto the Electronic Superhighway. So after talking to Japanese girls online in the school library, by the end of the term I was down at my friend’s attic conversion bedroom having my mind blown by the speed of his external 28.8 kbps modem on his Mac Performa. That was 50% faster than what we had been used to. Or to put it another, laddish, way: 4 minutes per Gillian Anderson pic.

We spent many a happy summer’s eve clicking on things then going off to play International Superstar Soccer while the page downloaded before coming back to see what text had appeared. Mainly we used the internet to find song lyrics and sheet music. Not that we ever formed a pub duet band – though looking back, to all intents and purposes that was what we were in effect inexorably an inexplicably preparing for.

It was also here where I made my first and last foray into the dark, seedy Black Forest Gateau side of the internet. Sex chat. I didn’t initiate. The whole thing was rather thrust into my (virtual) lap as an online dialogue with a girl from New York suddenly took a left turn.

There we were discussing REM lyrics when the girl wrote:
#I am leaning over you#
I don’t know what this means. She patently is not leaning over me. I should wait. Say nothing. See if she explains this.

Then half a minute later:
#I am removing my top#

Right, still not sure where she is headed with this, it seems very off topic from wondering what Losing My Religion meant just moments before, but she seems to be furrowing a path somewhere, so best to wait to see if she is going to write something else.

She did:
#My pendulous breasts are free and swinging in front of your face#

Ah! We are indulging in cyber-sex. Ok, I need to write something back, clearly. Something encouraging, but not too overbearing and keen. Jesus, this is difficult – it was bad enough for an adolescent without the internet to get by in these sorts of things.

Luckily, being at my friend’s house, we could confer, she wouldn’t know [that’s the best thing about virtual intercourse, I always find] and get the tone of reply just right:

#Magic!#

Nailed it! But we would never find out if our approved by committee smooth line would have prompted any more anodyne “erotic” text from her as my friend’s Dad came into the room with diluting juice and crisps and the modem was quickly jacked from the socket. That there, incidentally, is a more sexy line than that American girl, I believe, could ever have written.

A few years later I hooked my own PC up to the internet and there it stayed sending and receiving as many as 3 e-mails overnight while I slept. Then somehow I was left behind. Not even when I got a new PC with an internal 56kbps modem could I keep up. The internet had moved on faster than my dial-up could catch it – blogs, online forums, streaming video content, shopping, video calling, news, games, all the Paul McCartney is dead theories, State taxation and pension information. It’s all there.

I didn’t realize until I finally had broadband installed for myself just how good it is: Sorry ladies in the BT Dial-up Exchange (I am sure he was being facetious although maybe the 3rd one takes the photos?), but I am not going back and you should definitely look into getting broadband like me. The E-wave really is quite rad these days.

Judging a Book by It’s Cover – no. 2

Here is the 2nd Judging a Book by It’s Cover blog. Once again – no voodoo or demonology is employed. This is purely an earthly skill I have honed in my spare time. In a mysterious monastery half-way up a mountain that no one can find.

Right, so let's see what we have this time!


Looking at the little guy on the cover I would say… too many red cola and vodka shots the night before round at his mate’s house? Yep. He’s a wee bam alright.

Trying to impress peers and fair ladies – a fatal combination often leading to vomitous results.

Of course there are many, many things that can make you vomit. You could think the list is endless. I think that this book says you are wrong for thinking so, you fool ! There are a definitive number of reasons and this book gives you them in a handy 479 page, fully referenced, pocket book list of things which can make a human vomit.

Judging a Book by It’s Cover – no. 1.

Welcome to the new semi-regular blog feature where I will try to judge a book’s contents only through the clues of its title and cover. I should say now that I do not have any supernatural gift or special powers nor do I claim to have them. So don’t be scared by the accuracy, remember, what I am about to do is merely a parlour trick.


Bloody war! Despite its jaunty font and boys own rendered picture it seems to me that it is likely a grim fictional work based on an extremely little known fact that bears were commonly utilized by many Communist armies on the battle field as Grade-A munitions handlers. Only they would have, surely, had wooden crates of bullets and rockets strapped to their backs rather than the bears being made to stand on their hind legs and carry one warhead at a time as depicted here, otherwise the concept just wouldn’t be nearly as practical. Thankfully the gritty themed and adult worded content written by Morgan and Lasocki aimed squarely at the war and military forces enthusiast compensates for this shamefully marketable and erroneous cover art.

SPOLIER: My spirit guide says the last line is very probably: The Commanding Officer takes a glance down to the rich pelt of Soldier Bear and tells the Private to get out, that the debriefing is now over and that old, brave, Soldier Bear was dead, gutted and on his office floor there when he found it – of course his fingerprints were on the spade, he had been gardening earlier in the day.