Post Weekend Musings

I had another of those experiences over the weekend where I found myself in the middle of something I wished I'd never started.  That's the trouble with this lockdown: you find yourself encouraged to take on those projects you've been putting off - usually for a good reason.  In this case, I decided to finally do something about the fact that there was a discrepancy in the level of two of the baseboards on my model railway, which were resulting in all sorts of running problems.  It all got out of hand pretty quickly - adjusting the height of the supporting legs on one of the boards should have been simple, but wasn't.  It didn't help that my electric drill's battery ran out very quickly and took several hours to recharge.  Even after the adjustment had been made, it created a new problem in that the holes in the board frames for the coach bolt which holds the boards together were now out of alignment.  On top of that, the manipulation of the boards meant that sections of track were pulled apart.  Anyway, the job was eventually done, after a lot of sweat and swearing - reassembling the track layout at least meant that I could realign a lot of it (I've never been happy with some of it).  It also brought home how old, brittle and poor a lot of the track had become (most of it has seen service in at least two previous layouts).  So, some new, nickle silver, track sections are on order and should arrive later this week.  These will replace the last of the old steel track sections in use - nickle silver conducts electricity better and doesn't get as dirty, so, along with the track realignment, this should improve the running of trains on the layout.

While all of that seemed to take up hours of my weekend, I still managed to catch up with a few more films.  A couple of them I've been trying to get to watch for awhile - I finally watched Zombies of Mora Tau all the way through, for instance.  This tale of underwater undead turned out to be a surprisingly atmospheric little B-movie, despite its obviously limited resources.  It has that satisfying 'dead of night' feel that all good schlock movies should have.  Thanks to the magic of my Roku streaming box, I was able to catch a 1990 obscurity called Peacemaker, courtesy of B-Movie TV.  It's one of those films which doesn't have a single original idea, instead slamming together plot elements from several other films (mainly Starman and The Hidden in this case), but nevertheless succeeds in synthesising these borrowed elements into an entertaining whole.  Basically a science fiction thriller involving two aliens battling each other on contemporary earth, it also musters a pretty decent cast, including Robert Forster and Robert Davi.  Even the script is above average for this type of production, springing an interesting twist about two thirds in, which leaves the viewer questioning which alien is actually telling the truth: which is actually the cop (or 'Peacemaker') and which is the psychopathic fugitive he is hunting?  Also thanks to my Roku device, I was able to catch up with the third of Dario Argento's initial trilogy of Giallo movies: Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971).  Not, perhaps, the best of his output in this genre, it nevertheless presents an intriguing central mystery and expands upon Argento's recurring theme of never being able to believe what you see.  Or think you see.  It also features Bud Spencer playing a beatnik-type artist, which makes quite a contrast from his usual comedic antics with Terence Hill.  (Spencer is dubbed by his regular early seventies voice artist in the English language version - in later English language versions of his films the voice artist used to dub him would vary wildly from film to film).  So, all in all, despite the frustrations of biting off more than I could chew with the railway, bot too bad a weekend.