Better start saving!
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Comics Britannia: BBC Four
90 percent of me thinks this is amazingly cool and 10 percent of me thinks, fuck Lorcan, you're a fucking idiot why aren't you a go-getting academic that's on these sort of programs and be an expert and stuff. Anyway, BBC 4 are doing a Comics: Britannia strand about British comics
check this out, it's described as:
the centrepiece of BBC Four's comics season - is a new three-part series celebrating the classic comic strips of the past 70 years.
here's the run down:
1 : Concentrating on the work of comic book geniuses such as Leo Baxendale, programme one looks at the comics of the 1950s and early 1960s to explain how the anarchic humour of colourful, cheap publications like The Beano enchanted a generation. Watch a clip: "This is Switzerland" -->
2:This programme focuses on adventure comics - from Eagle characters Dan Dare, Captain Hurricane and Roy of the Rovers; to School Friend, Girl and Bunty. Includes interviews with celebrity fans such as Jacqueline Wilson. Watch a clip: "Two demented magpies" -->
3: In the 1970s and 1980s comic books became more graphic, adult and darker. This programme features interviews with writers, such as Alan Moore, who spearheaded this new wave of comics. Watch a clip: "I live and sleep eggs" -->
Argggh, and then there's this, I've been doing a paper on loneliness and Ditko for years, but suppose he has been going on about comics for years, and on national tv, and having sex with a girl...
Back in the kitchen again like a fucking mook
As both Tom Moran and Stasz pointed, this movie is a woefully inept depiction of kitchen life, look, they are smiling, there's no stains on their whites, they don't have hairnets on and well...em...they're fucking smiling, it's like making a Titantic movie where the Titantic has fucking wings and turns into a grumpy santa and gives us free drugs whenever our life turns out to be a steaming pile of shite...
Fuck it, I'm such a fucking idiot, it's like you're you're trying to be nice and helpful like how you were brought up, but where does it get you. I'm back in the kitchen again like a fucking mook. In the pub I work in the landlady took over the kitchen and I stupidly/helpfully said...'I have kitchen experience', the four most dangerous words in the English language, up there with 'I like being shot' and 'Please bollick me relentlessly'. It's the usual shit, need the money, need the shifts, next thing you know, you're in an apron, holding a perforated stainless steel spoon making a face of resigned indignity and swearing under your breath (and occasionally over).
Problem is, I'm good at it, calm under pressure, work fast do everything right, I feel like Martin Blank, I don't like doing it but I'm good at it (p.s. unlike Martin Blank, I'm not riding Minnie Driver and I'm shite at hand-to-hand combat and looking cooky in a black suit and shades...as far as I know...come at me when I have a pen in my hand--which is most of the time--and we'll find out. )
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I had the worst Sunday shift ever, Sundays are the worst (=busiest) days. I got invited to a superhero party the night before, and as I'd never been to a superhero party before*, I decided to go. It was a good party all in all, but as I am getting old, every party I go to is filled with couples, but, and here's the kicker, because we're all late twenties/early thirties, they all act single till their bodybuiding Hungarian bodyfriend turns up and your like 'hey dude thanks for that strong Hungarian moonshine stuff, have you met this girl she's totally crazy...' and he's there 'yes she is my wife' or something. The only advantage with having couples all about the place like fucking rabbits is that there's normally booze leftover. Hence being late for work.
So I'm late for sunday service, the landlady's going nuts and I'm hungover and guts gurgling all day. The only highlight is working with Tom Moran, to whom I'm making funny faces and throwing faux gang signs that I've just made up (based on the greeting hand signs that young tractor drivers give back home). Apart from the staff, pubs are full of boring idiots that have no life, so any bizarre beaviour from the staff is like front page news on whatever newspaper they 'print' by scrawling it on skinned beermats. So they're all like, 'oh, I hear you were late!' and I'm thinking in my silent indignant way (see above) 'you fucking pricks, you're never late for anything, because you have no fucking jobs beyond making your beerbellies and rednoses grow and checking out your supernaturally weak arms in the mirror while talking about Monty Python, Terry Pratchett and fucking Pink Floyd. It took me a like a day to come up with this nonwitty comeback to their snide shit:
Barfly: Have you found a proper job yet?
Me: No, how do you afford it?
Barfly: Afford what?
Me: The bodyguards...
Barfly: The bodyguards?
Me: The bodyguards you must have to employ to prevent from getting beaten up by almost everyone you talk to for more than five minutes...
Barfly: Bodyguards? I don't have bodyguards...
Me: Good, I've got a five-minute break...
So I'm working for about four hours straight and all I can hear above the shouting and ovens is my gurgling guts, I'm dying for a shite, like, really badly, but, surprise! there's a fucking football match on, so the cubicle is always occupied. Here's the kicker, I have to keep going to the loo to see if the cubicle is occupied to have a dump, but it always is. So the landlady's sort of looking at me and thinking 'what? Is he slacking off going to the loo every half hour or so?' and I feel like going, 'look, I'm not getting to the fucking toilet, it's blocked up with fucking football idiots'. So it goes, until the end of service (cubicle still occupied) and she's bollicking me about something and I have to go 'Look! I'm really sorry, but I am actually shitting myself right now, as we speak, I am going to have go up to your loo right now'...and I boot it up to her house loo to crap and inspect the damage, thankfully, it was a quite minimal watery one, the kecks where wrapped in like three plastic bags and chucked in the bin, then I had to work commando for like an hour. It was a whole new strata of kitchen work sucking. That's how shit kicthen work is, when crapping yourself mid-bollicking is some sort of heroic rebellious act that you tell everyone about. The younger guys I work with were all, 'why would you tell some one that', and I'm thinking well, 'it was a funny story why wouldn't I tell it?', jeez, they just don't know some of the other stuff I've done, doing a wee gravy fart is the least of it.
*What , like you're surprised? do actual pimps and hoes go to 'pimps and hoes' parties? do actual perverts like The Rocky Horror Picture Show?
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Echobelly promo video for King Of The Kerb
you have a late night google talk with a certain dumb riffer to blame for this 1990s nostalgia
Bleak august thoughts made better through tv...who'd a thunk it...
Sometimes when you work a few jobs at once it can be ok beacuse whe you fuck up in one, you're doing alright in the other, but when you marginally fuck up in all of them at once it's horrible and the bleakness of this supposed August doesn't help much. Like, today I had to wear my Trespass jacket, it's warm and fucntional and all, but it makes me look like the fucking Unabomber or something.
This morning the whole place was so bleak and empty I almost convinced myself while attempting to get up and do laundry that an actual zombie attack had occurred. Not this kind of wank, but really on a psychological level if it happened. I was thinking, 'right so it's pissing rain, the zombie must work on some sort of smell basis, that and movement and visibility, perhaps, for once the rain will be my friend' 'First priority, go to Budgens and loot as much Amber Leaf, Jamesons, Diet Coke and err...maybe food...as possible' 'then, an attempt to get to the butchers, hopefully there'll be so much live meat running about that the zombies won't care about the dead meat from the butchers, so I can nip in steal all the serious knives and sharpeners nip to the hardware shop, with the big knive, get as much nails as possible board up the whole place and watch my Battlestar Galactica box set while drinking Jamesons and smoking Amber Leaf...and wait until everone in Norwich eats each other, I looked up the population it's only like 129,500 that won't take that long, time for the Firefly box set, The Prisoner and Sledge Hammer! Job done, see in all the zombie movie the fatal flaw was like moving around too much and trying to find out what's going on, doesn't matter millions of people are dying right now and there's no zombie attack and people do more or less the same thing, zombie attack, it's just one of those thing. People keep panicking about global warming, they just read/watch enough sci-fi and comics, I thought we'd all be eating Soylent Green whilst been buggered by monkey robots in spikey cars, a few hurricanes the least of it.
For every hero in a zombie movie, there's probably about 50 people just kicking back having a nice time, waiting for everone to eat each other...
This is just a summary of my reverie there was a long bit on improvised weapons constructed from belts, my weight set and the planks from under my bed....
I'm sure having an ipod that's 85 percent Frank Black at any one time can't help, have gone for some MIA, LCD Soundsystem, Half Man, Half Biscuit and Spike Jones (the first one) to lighten the mood, feck it I'm tempted to just make the ipod all Spike Jones and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and as much Buzzola cds as it can handle...in your face Blaugust
Anyway, thankfully H-Factory came round and saved the day by bringing around the Star Stories dvd and the second series episodes her mam had burnt for her and we had beer and pizzas and then I watched some lovely Fry at 50 documentaries on BBC Four, so the day ended up ok, no postapocalyptic cataclysms as of yet...but there's always tomorrow....
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Real life Caddyshack...will he do Ghostbusters next?
Was just up to the room from watching a bit of Caddyshack and then I see this on imdb:
Bill Murray Arrested for Drunk Driving in a Golf Cart
The officer claims mystery surrounds the golf cart and who owns it - although Murray isn't facing theft charges: "It was a golf cart. How it ended up in this predicament I don't know. I have done this since 1968 and I've never experienced anything like this."
P.S. can I use this post to mention a geeky trivia nugget that I share knowing with Petey B:
How Lorenzo Music voiced Peter Venkman's role in The Real Ghostbusters (and they were the real ones) and he voiced Garfield in the cartoons, but Murray voiced Garfield in those there fine movie pictures...
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
'Ah little Colin, when will we ever learn eh'....
Anyway, any descriptions I can burb out don't do justice to the likes of 'The Ballad of Britiney Jean", see below, 'cooooeeeee look's like ah dun maxxed my meal!'
Jimmny Homunculikes...
The mysterious Badbrute is of the opinion I look like this guy, Newton Emerson, editor of the The Portadown News, BBC story here.
and this:
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Monday, August 13, 2007
Frank Black's Bluefinger
Hooray for the 'king of shouting'
Liner notes to Bluefinger from Frank Black.net
Do I like Frank Black, well yeah maybe just a little, or more close to the truth, the guy's never off my ipod. If you meet me in the street and I'm shouting along with my ipod, chances are it's a Frank Black luric, or I've just lost it. Kinda like the people who think They Might Be Giants only released Bird House in your Soul, the people who think Black has done nothing since the Pixies do my nut. He has been hugely prolific in the last few years. The glut of outtakes/compliation like stuff albums blinded me to the fact that he is about to release a kick ass rock album Bluefinger. I had all the tracks on this bar 'threshold aprehension' (with the class line: 'Talk to man just get a little work/talk to the hand just get a little jerk' ), I figured it was a one off single, but there is a whole album of this rock out shit! excellent.
List of previous Jimmny Frank Black love ins here
ah, the Jimmny, seldom happier than when he is clutching a new Frank Black release....
Some Photos from my sisters Wedding and the surrounding area....
out the back garden
some attempts to get dad into action figures
Petey B and Labhaoise looking relaxed
Morning of the wedding, jimmny in Chef apperal grates some cheese as lighting speed, too much practise perhaps?....
Puffball? Puffball!! Puffball, handbastards and the rainbow gang....
Ah, well here I am back to broadband land and the batcave, ah the homely batcave with it's amber leaf, diet coke, and carling, with three phrases ringing the noggin.
1. Puffball
2. Hand Bastard
3. The Rainbow Gang
I will try and explain as quick as I can some the meaning of these phrases, although only those who were in the rainbow gang can ever know the real meaning of the rainbow gang.
During a week and a half of being at home in Rockcorry, I think the earliest I got to bed was like 3am, think of that ye cyberbottlesquatters, about 14 days of 5am drunken Irish madness to celebrate my sister's wedding, in attendence the Badbrute and Petey B we watched DOA an almost spiritual 'undercracker' (to use the 'brute's phrase) experience...'do me up'...a screen grab, or should that be 'screen grub', review of that particular piece of celluloid brilliance in due course.
Puffball is, apparently, a bad auld film set in rural England but filmed in good ole Monaghan that my sister and her friend knew about, but we couldn't get our heads around the name, we were like 'a film called Puffball?, with Donald Sutherland? directed by Nicholas Roeg?, filmed in Monagahan? we were there just going 'puffball??? puffball!! paffball'. I thought this was a demented fabrication on behalf of my beloved young sibling, but no, and lo and behold, and see below, a painfully transcribed entry in the local paper The Northern Standard, telling the whole story.
The day after the wedding, which was basically about 48 hours of continous drunkeness the only thing the brute, my wee sister and her friend could concentrate on at 6 am was one of those terrible cash call quiz shows, the clue was "hand" something the answer that we repeatedly shouted at the screen was of course "hand...job" but as that didn't win, we resorted to shouting "hand...bastard" over and over, little did we know you have to ring in to win and then I fell for the schoolboy error of drinking baileys and lime and then the brute flipped me like Fenster and I went to bed in the huff.
I was probably emotional after a a prolonged regaling to the 'brute telling the tale of 'The Rainbow Gang'. In a nutshell, when I was at school if you didn't play football you were nothing.I joined a rag tag band of nonfootballers who spent every lunchtime for like five years walking around our school aimlessly, some of use talked comics, the rest of the class called us 'The Rainbow Gang', I'm sure there was some gay implication, but I am hereby reclaiming 'The Rainbow Gang' as 'the coolest kids on campus'. In years hence potbellied bank manager GAA fuckers will be approached by breathless hip journalists and be asked 'you're from Monaghan, were you one of the 'Rainbow Gang'?, were you part of that vibrant and hip precoursor to our current geek orthodoxy?' and they will have to dolefully anser 'no I spent every lunchtime trying to grab the pants of other men while using a sphere of inflated air as an excuse, try hollywood, london, new york, or I dunno, norwich, you might find some of them there....'
What took so long to tell the story was not adolscent indignance but one of the most fondly remembered conversations of my school days were where myself and John Clerkin and Christopher McAree discussed Transformer comics in the Marvel UK universe when Doctor Who shrunk Death's Head down to human size, then when Death's Head II turned up in Marvel UK anthology comic Overkill, he met most of the 1990s Marvel Universe, thus making The Transformers, Doctor Who and all of the Marvel superheroes de facto all part of the same universe, kinda like that autistic kid in St. Elsewhere, bite on that fanboys.
The day after my sisters wedding I had an hour to kill, the hotel it was in was beside my Alcatraz like school, and it was a bank holiday so I decided to have a wander around it and recreated a lone rainbow gang route, then there was a downpour and I took refuge in a delirect sports room, smoking amber leaf and listening to Frank Black's Threshold Aprehension and found an old handball which I retrieved and now carry round as a improvised stress ball and to launch at the heads of those who give me grief.
So beware, I now have in my possession a hand bastard rainbow gang puffball which contains multiverses.....watch your heads....
Panned Puffball to preview in Monaghan, The Northern Standard, Thursday August 9th, 2007
The Nicholas Roeg film Puffball, which was partially filmed in the Monaghan area last year, will be previewed in the Diamond Screen Complex in Monaghan Town on Thursday night next, August 16.
The preview attendence is being confined in the main to invited guests and those from the locality who participated in the film. A limited number of other tickets will be available from the Market House in Monaghan.
Prospective viewers are being asked to take note of the film's strong adult content. Based on a novel by Fay Weldon, Puffball is a supernatural thriller which embraces themes that will be familiar to those who have seen the earlier film of its director, such as Performance, Don't Look Now and Bad Timing, and includes similarily frank depcitions of sexual activity and violence.
Initial critical reaction to the fillm has been extremely negative, and it has not yet been assigned an official release date in either the Uk or the United States.
"...the worst kind of unadulterated nonsense I have seen for a long time..." is one of the choicer comments from a review submitted to the IMDb internet movie database. It adds: "It's a complete mess of a film, highly insulting tp its audience's intelligence..."
A Romanian contributor to the same site, who says they have seen Puffball at the Transylvania Film Festival, is kinder:"It strongly relays on Don't Look Know's and Straw Dog's flavors (intellectual young couple in a new, strange place), but with more psychedelic and sometimes thriller elements. And it's got a really hot sex scene in it. It's old paced and sometimes quite nostalgic, but it's a treat for the eyes."
The professional cinema critics who have viewed Puffball at festival screenings such as that it received at the Galway Film Fleadh have tended towards the unkinder assessment above, an a "So bad it's good!" reputation is already building for the film.
It should be bourne in mind, however, that Nicholas Roeg is a very highly regarded director whose earlier films were often critically disapraged on their initial release only to attain elevated status in retrospect.
Notable for having its three leading roles played by women-Kelly Reilly, Miranda Richardson and the veteran British actress Rita Tushingham-Puffball tells the story of a couple building a home in an isolated rural location in the English countryside whose unborn child becomes the focus of superstition-fuelled enmity among the local community. The main role is taken by Donald Sutherland, reuniting with director Roeg to explore again the supernatural territory they entered in Don't Look Now.
Local actor Pat Deery plays the prominent role of Dr Holmes, while Declan Reynolds is cast in the supporting role of an estate agent. A substantial number of people from the local community feature in the general cast of the film.
Next Thursday's preview takes place at 8.30pm.
Be Kind Rewind (Trailer) (New)
listen to the ironic angst as a hundred thousand film studies students see this and this, ballbags, why didn't I think of this first!...can't wait...
now, that is delightful
Regular readers of this blog, if there are any will know of my love, respect, nay, mancrush on the man genius Graham Linehan, his livejournal blog has now moved to wordpress with this great page
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Bye for a bit...
Howdy all, will be away from broadband land for a while, going home for my sister's wedding, here she is on the left, Brianan, with my other younger sisters, Caitrin and Labhaoise (L-R), a certain gurning fool in the background.
She's marrying this fella, Paddy
By family concensus my amazing spider-man tie is *not* invited to the wedding so I ordered these fine pewter bat cufflinks from Amazon I will be an usher and am doing a reading, it has to be from the bible I think, I can't make up my own:'From Frank Miller, a letter to Batfans, year one: 'and lo the swat team ascended and the batman scowled 'neath the building surrounded by a billowing cape, and lo he declared 'I'm the best at what I do, I love being Batman' or and 'lo in Book 1 of Watchmen, Rorschach declared: "got hungry waiting. Helped myself to some beans. Hope you don't mind". Oh, I also have to cook a fryup the morning of the wedding so I'm bringing my chef's outfit and newly found cooking 'skills' as short order chef (that's it's technical term, although it's mostly glowering silently while getting bollocked for things outside of your control), I can make great onion rings though....
Spider-tie, spider-tie, does whatever a spider-tie can
Batman Cufflinks
I'll probably be also:
Congratuations Brianan and Paddy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
