| Tuesday, May 27, 2003 |
 | Lots of transformation narratives going on at UpsideClown at present.
George is on bildungsroman duty:
When she has about twenty pages left to read the waitress comes over and unobtrusively asks Zofie whether she's ok, whether she'd like to sit out back in the kitchens and talk to someone or have the café call her a taxi. Zofie apologises for the noise if she's disturbing other customers; the waitress insists that no, she's been quite quiet, but the staff noticed that she seemed very upset and were simply concerned about her. If she's ok then - Zofie apologises again and says she'll leave when after she finishes what she's reading.
James is making a deal:
Exactly. So I've put my up-and-coming law career to good use and devised contracts whereby people who are "pensioner-rich" i.e. you, and sell off the burden to those of us who are less interested in immediate financial gain and are starting to consider our long-term financial stability.
Jamie is facing up to some awkward possibilities:
I'm worried about going out - having to tell prospective employers what I've done and seeing the look on their face - because I've seen what people do. They're a fish out of water, like Crocodile Dundee or Mork, only without the laughs - so make that Crocodile Dundee 3.
And I've been down to the sleepy village of Usher's Well. It's like the fucking Archers:
So anyway, Timothy Wright was orphaned, and there was some talk of some family or something over east, the other side of the city, but by the time they thought even to get in touch he was over at John and Sam's house three weeks, eating at their table and sleeping in the boys' room. And that was that; they had more than enough food and more than enough money for a third child, that house, and so they did, and they were the triplets. Not a spit of difference between 'em, each from the other. Tall and sturdy as trees, and hair like straw, and never one without the other two.
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| Monday, May 26, 2003 |
| On the lighter side of the news, the weekend, insofar as that term has any meaning to the recently redundant, has been a ball. Saturday night was spent enjoying, of course, the the Eurovision Song Contest, which was helped along by the most fantastic hospitality - Maria and Toby, my hat is officially off to you. Although not as far off as it is away from Alf Poier, officially the most terrifying human being outside politics. All hail the dark lord of the new millennium!
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| Friday, May 23, 2003 |
| Pure and mighty genius - My Credit Card Details finally gives Internet users the chance to broadcast their credit card details on the web. To the Magnum P.I theme tune. It's been a long time coming....
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| You know, far be it from me to indulge in Political Correctness gone mad, being as I am the proud owner of a "keeping Political Correctness sane" scout badge (I always wonder whether those who decry the works of PC gone mad have a specific metric for determining the sanity of PC, and wholeheartedly approve of rational, sensible, entirely compos Political Correctness). However, this opening preamble to the Guardian's minute-by-minute commentary of the utterly meaningless friendly with South Africa seems a tad off to me.
Stephen Biko, Herman Charles Bosman, Louis Botha, John Michael Coetzee, Clement Martyn Doke, Ernie Els, Nadine Gordimer, F.W. de Klerk, Paul Kruger, Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, Dave Matthews, Harry Oppenheimer, Alan Paton, Gary Player, Trevor Rabin, Shaka Zulu, Charlize Theron, Desmond Tutu ... will your boys take one hell of a beating?
It's just...you know....Steve Biko did take one hell of a beating. I mean, really one hell of a beating. I imagine Nelson Mandela might have flirted with the sjambok himself, once or twice....although at least he got to meet David Beckham to make up for it.
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| I realise that this is getting a bit X-Men-centric, but there is, by the way, rather a fun official site that you have already seen if you are at all interested. On related topics, you may have asked yourself "just how much ass does Nightcrawler kick?" Well, a ballpark answer is clearly "enough to make you puke", but those of a more scientific bent will be glad to hear that a site exists to benchmark just how kickass blueboy is.
Speaking of which, asked to come up with 5 ways to improve X2, I managed:
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1) Whenever Storm says "Oh my God", everyone around her should give a visible eye-roll and hiss "for fuck's sake, woman, grow another line". Audibly.
2)After Wolverine meets Stryker for the first time, he should imprint on him and spend the rest of the film walking around behind him, calling him "mama". Well all right, maybe not.
2 again) But, when Mystique transforms into Stryker and asks Wolverine what he really wants, Wolverine should kiss Stryker. Squarrrrr on the lips. See also when Jean says goodbye to Cyclops through Professor X.
3) At some point, when asked to teleport in a manner that is extremely dangerous, e.g. into the Cerebro chamber or to rescue Jean from the torrent, Nightcrawler should stop and say, "Dudes, what is this? An entrance exam? I don't even know you people...."
4) Much praise has been laid on Chris Claremont recently on Barbelith, and equally much joy has been expressed that the films are Claremonty. In order to continue this encouraging trend, the soundtrack should be remastered so that every utterance contains a phrase in the character's native language and a brief description of their powers. Thus, the lame and pointless:
Piotr: I can help you.
Wolverine: Help them!
Becomes the far more satisfying:
Piotr: Bozhe moy, tovarisch! I, with my ability to transform my body into nigh-invulnerable "organic steel", can help you.
Wolverine: Help them! My healin' factor and adamantium skeleton are all the help I need, bub.
Do you see?
All right, maybe not.
4 again) Just because he doesn't have access to his telepathy, Charles X is not a drooling moron. More conversations of this ilk:
"Find the mutants..."
"Righty-ho."
"Find all the mutants."
"Yes, yes, just give me a minute. This is harder than it looks, you know."
"Concentrate!"
"Right you are."
"Harder!"
"Oh, no. Wouldn't want to do that. That would almost certainly lead me to accidentally killing somebody. Maybe all of mutantkind."
"Harder. Find the mutants. I'm scared."
"*You're* scared? I've got tiny David Bowie trying to get me to wipe out all mutants. In fact, fuck this noise. I don't even recognise you. Are you at my school? The only person I knew at my school with eyes like that was.....hang on a second."
"Bollocks. Busted. Do you have a cigarette? I know they're bad for the lungs, but I can unplug them and give them a good shake."
5) And perhaps most of all, when Wolverine tells Cyclops that Jean G. made a choice, and that it was Cyclops, rather than doing the wobbly lip of torment, Scotty could perhaps have redeemed his character with something along the lines of:
Shit, no, really? You see, I kind of thought that that might have been made clear AT OUR WEDDING, but hearing it from you is so much more important to me than HAVING OUR LOVE CONSECRATED IN THE EYES OF GOD. I mean, you're a borderline psychopath who's been on a mission to get into her knickers every time you've spoken to her. Which is what? Five days in toto? In her entire life? Wow. With a deep knowledge of her like that, I am compelled once again to nominate you as far more to be listened to here than, say, JEAN HERSELF WITH HER DYING WORDS WHICH I DON'T RECALL BEING DIRECTED TO YOU, FUCKNUTS.
But thanks, man. Thanks for intimating that you and she had some kind of thing going on as a result of which she had to make a choice. Thanks for going the extra mile to reassure me that THE WOMAN I MARRIED, WHO DIED WITH HER LOVE FO RME IN HER HEART AND MY RING ON HER FINGER chose me, and most of all thanks for assuming that a few days after the WOMAN I LOVED has perished as a result of the actions of a man who would have been dead if you hadn't gone all "Are you my daddy?" at the mansion, that the most important thing in my head, and certainly the one thing that being reassured about would return the skies to blue and the sun to full-on shine, is WHETHER SHE TOOK YOUR VEINY BANGSTICK in the ONE EVENING THAT YOU TWO HAVE SPENT TOGETHER WITHOUT ME AROUND EVER.
Cheers, Logan. That took a lot for you to say, I can tell.
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| Wednesday, May 21, 2003 |
| Tom by the way, has speculated that a badger scaled up to human size could in fact probably beat up Wolverine something rotten. This may be true, but he could never love Brian Cox the same way, so we'll call it evens.
Meanwhile - I've just received a copy of NewNovelist, primarily to satisfy my interest in how exactly one takes the mess and fuss out of writing the novel. I'm hoping that it will be full of handy little flashing notes like "your characters should shag here, yes?". Possibly with a quill instead of the Microsoft Office paperclip. This sounds about the right level to be aiming at.
Two interesting things about it before even beginning. First, the tagline of this product is "releasing the creative genius in us all".
This is quite patently bollocks. If there were a creative genius in us all, then we would all be sketching birds and dying of starvation. A more honest title might be "some of you will still be unable to write for shit. Sorry. But you've got a spreadsheet program now".
Second up, their site is hilarious. A more perfect collection of regrettable locutions is hardly likely to be found outside Red Dwarf fanfiction. Particularly loving this quote from Jason Pierce, who became a published writer using NewNovelist and as such has been able to give up his soul-crushing day job as the lead singer of Spiritualised.
I want to thank you very much for sending the disk, and I will tell everyone, about newnovelist! It is due to the ease of the program that I, a new writer, was able to publish my first novel. Without it, I think I may have never attempted it. But due to newnovelist, I am published ! ! !
Clearly, there isn't a "dude, commas" button. Or a "calm the fuck down" function. This is all good to know.
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| Monday, May 19, 2003 |
| Of course, there is also the possibility that one of the badgers may have an adamantium skeleton and a healing factor. Known as "Weapon B". The "b" standing both for badger and blaireau, since he is Canadian and as such has to be signposted bilingually.
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| While not updating my weblog I have been hiding from badgers, who are, it turns out, not just truculent and a little brusque but also vicious fuckers of the first water. I remember being told about a nature documentary which pointed out the various combat enhancements possessed by you average renegade cyborg badger. These apparently involve jaws that lock irrevocably upon biting. Also, the badger's is possessed of skin so loose that it can turn around inside therein if grasped by the neck, the better to attack its captor.
This strikes me as hardly surprising if the badger's mouth, once closed, can never be opened. The poor thing must be starving.
Anyway, the payoff of this doco, as two badgers battled in the wild, was that "when badger fights badger, it has truly met its match".
Well, the fuck of course it has. What a phenomenally asinine statement. Goat meets its match in goat, tortoise in tortoise, badger in badger. Unless badger A has studied Kung Fu, or badger B has a luger, I don't see how it can be otherwise.
How would you shade the odds, were you a badger on the brink of a duel? Tell me.
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| Saturday, May 17, 2003 |
| Criminy - a "Lindsey Anderson" has just emailed me to tell me that deeper penetration is required now. I mean, I loved If...., but there's a limit, no? Especially with the dead thing...
Something else I have been doing while not updating my weblog has been watching, in small doses much as the ninja of old treated themselves with small doses of poison in order to develop a resistance, MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis. It is fantastic, if by that you mean an enormous pile of shit with Brian Blessed in. Which, as it happens, we do. Short of actually placing Indiana Jones in a gimp suit, you can't get much more sub-Indiana Jones.
This delve into the shameful recesses of the career of Richard Dean Anderson, a man with the power, lest we forget, to heal the King's Ague with the touch of his hand, raises more questions than it answers. He must basically have known that the game was up, and that short of fortuitously being cast in an equally shit sci-fi series a decade later reprising MacGyver was the only way he'd be able to avoid the infomercial circuit for a few precious months, but what exactly were Sophie Ward and Brian Blessed thinking? Surely there wasn't enough money in the production to tempt them for purely venal reasons, since the "platinum pages" appear to be made of Bacofoil. No, they must have believed that they were participating in the creation of something important and beautiful.
Speaking of important and beautiful, it warms the heart to see angry commentators pointing out the rank madness of a "Young MacGyver" series featuring the nephew of the Mac, not on the grounds that it is the single worst fucking idea in the history of creation, but rather because MacGyver is canonically an only child. Well, of course.
Fuck me - apparently there's a movie in production as well. IMDB is a dangerous and terrifying place. Surely we should have more A-Team, Thundercats and Transformers nostalgia before we start scraping the MacGyver barrel? Using, of course, a scraper cunningly fashioned from a tree branch, a hot water bottle and a fire extinguisher.
It's a scraping MacGyver. Oh yes.
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| Remember how the first film had all that Story (= for gays) in the first part, and you were like, “How ‘bout some ass-kicking already?” and then finally they got to it? Not this one. It’s like okay, there’s the credits, and now here’s the ass-kicking and it starts and doesn’t stop and you’re all like, “Pants, meet shit”.
One thing I have done while I was not updating my weblog was to see X-Men 2, a review of which provides the quote above. Adn it was glorious. Glorious because the fundamentally useless Cyclops had almost nothing to do. Glorious because Haille Berry, if such a thing is possible, got to say "Oh my God" even more than in the first film, which is going some. Glorious, most obviously, because Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen's battle for the soul of mutantkind and thus by extension the fate of humanity supports the Blake's Seven model by which all good futurologists should steer, it stating that at some point between now and the distant future an apocalyptic struggle wipes out amost the entire human population, leaving only the plummy English and a couple of comedy cockneys.
But really. Despite the somewhat silly ending, the underutilisation of Brian Cox, and the brave attempt to cram three decades of characters into two hours, this film provided me with more gleefully grinning and squeezing the hands of my co-viewers moments than anything since Jules and Jim et le Matrix. When blue Alan Cumming went hardcore on the West Wing. When "John" went Colombine. When Colossus kicked booty in the mansion. And, sad and obvious though it may be, when Wolverine killed the Hell out of absolutely goddamn everyone.
Hugh Jackman impaling people is the closest I have come to sex in a cinema when I haven't actually been having sex in a cinema.
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