I know that we moan that Christmas starts earlier every year, but this year it really has, judging by the number of Christmas decorations I've seen up already. I mean, it isn't even December yet! Sure, I know that municipal decorations have been up for a while yet, but that's normal - they have to get their money's worth, not to mention try to create the atmosphere for Christmas shopping, so town centres always get decorated in November. (Here in Crapchester, despite lockdown 2.0, the German sausage stall - a staple of the festive season - has turned up. As it is, technically, a takeaway, it managed to beat the lockdown restrictions. Mind you, I'm still surprised that Nigel Farage and the Brexit brigade haven't turned up to shout: 'Nooooo! No EU sausages here - British bangers for British people!' or something similar). What is unusual are the number of domestic decorations that have gone up - when I walked down to Morrisons late this afternoon, I was struck by the number houses lit up already. You know something? While this premature celebration of the festive season usually irritates me, this time, I'm OK with it. It has been such a lousy and disrupted year that people need some cheer brought into their lives. (Not that any of this has tempted me into putting up my modest decorations, though).
Even the BBC has started its Christmas idents early this year, (they debuted yesterday). I remember the days when they waited until Christmas Eve to debut them, but over the years they commenced earlier and earlier in December, until this year, when they started in November. I have to say, after the truly shitty idents they've used over the past couple of years, (telling socially conscious stories), the current ones are a huge improvement. Featuring the Grufallo, they actually feel Christmassy. Not to mention non-preachy. After all, by its very nature, Christmas has its own built in message - it doesn't need other messages added on. Mind you, this premature seasonal celebration has served to remind me that I am totally unprepared for Christmas. It really does seem to have crept up on me this year. The problem is that the year has been so disrupted and we've spent so much time inside, doing very little, that it has been easy to lose track of the passage of time. It was the same for me this Summer - it just seemed to come out of nowhere, as if we'd skipped the Spring. Which, in effect, many of us had because we'd been in lockdown for most of it, so didn't experience it as we normally do. Still, we have to look on the bright side of this Covid Christmas: horrors like the annual office Christmas party will be well off the agenda. WE must be thankful for small mercies.
Black Friday again. It's OK, I'm not going into my yearly rant about how it is utterly meaningless in the UK because we don't have the preceding Thursday off for Thanksgiving. After all, with most shops shut due to lockdown 2.0, it was utterly meaningless regardless of whether we celebrate Thanksgiving or not. Of course, the shutting of non-essential shops is probably why my inbox was full of promotional e-mails about Black Friday deals from Argos, Amazon (both UK and US), eBay, Lenovo (I once bought a laptop from them), even the web designers I bought The Sleaze's Wordpress theme from. I didn't look at any of them, instead marking them as 'read', unopened. Perhaps for next year I should blacklist anything with 'Black Friday; in titles as spam. I'm just not interested in their supposed 'Black Friday deals' - apart from the fact that they rarely ever represent the lowest price point for the items in question, but the reality is that they only offer these 'deals' on stuff they can't sell otherwise. The fact is that online retailers, in particular, have offers and price reductions on various bits of their stock all year round - it isn't confined to just the one day. But it isn't about logic, it is about driving sales pre-Christmas - even though Christmas is cancelled this year. Yeah, I know that 'Fatso' Johnson has spent the week mumbling away about 'Christmas bubble' and five day 'ceasefires' and the like but, in effect, celebrating Christmas as usual is highly inadvisable this year.
Personally, I really don't understand this fetishisation of Christmas as some kind of ideal family gathering. The reality is that many people spend the year complaining about the prospect of a family Christmas, seeing it as an unwelcome imposition upon their time. Well, this year presents them with the opportunity to do it differently. To do it my way, in fact. For more than two decades now, I've been enjoying a peaceful solitary Christmas Day. believe me, it's great - you can eat what you want, (if you don't like turkey, fuck it, don't have turkey), you can spend all day on the sofa, drink as much as you like, watch what you want to on TV and, best of all, not be bothered by other people 'celebrating'. It was the best choice I've ever made with regard to the festive season: I actually enjoy Christmas now and look forward to my day of peace. But then, I'm a miserable, misanthropic git. Don't get me wrong - I don't begrudge people who want the other type of Christmas, (if you have children then, obviously, you are going to celebrate it differently), I just want to be left alone to do my own thing. I'm just saying that if you are one of those people who always moans about family Christmases but still goes along with them, well, this is your chance to do something different. Make something good come from this pandemic by having a scaled down, personalised, celebration. You might never get another chance.
A while ago I wrote here about the Italian science fiction film Eyes Behind the Stars (1978), in retrospect, the thing that the film most reminds me of is the Gerry Anderson TV series UFO (1969-70). Like the film, UFO features an official international organisation, part of whose job is to suppress evidence of UFO contacts and landings. Unlike 'The Silencers' that feature in Eyes Behind the Stars, the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation (SHADO) is so secret that its existence is known only to a handful of high level government officials around the world, whereas 'The Silencers' seem to be known to just about everybody in the military, police and security. All of SHADO's bases are secret - from its HQ hidden under a film studio near London, to its moonbase and fleet of submarines. Another key difference is that while 'The Silencers' suppress UFO evidence in order not just to avoid public panic but also to prevent the possibility of conflict with the technologically superior aliens, SHADO is actively engaged in a secret war against the aliens. In the world of UFO, the aliens have found that they are similar enough to humans that they can use their body parts to prolong their lives, abducting earth people in order to harvest their organs. It has to be said that UFO is one of the most relentlessly downbeat science fiction series ever screened in the UK. For all of its technological prowess, SHADO constantly seems on the back foot, always a step behind the enigmatic aliens, who themselves constantly evolve the nature of the threat they pose.
The downbeat nature of SHADO's mission is mirrored by the various sub-plots concerning the private travails of its members. Its head, Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) sacrifices his marriage to the organisation, letting his wife believe that he is having an affair rather than reveal that, rather than being a film producer, he is actually head of an ultra-secret organisation. He suffers further tragedy in losing his young son. Injured in a road accident, the boy's survival is dependent upon medical equipment which needs to be shipped from the States. Despite bending the rules to have it put on a super secret SHADO flight, he then has to divert the flight to deal with an alien threat, dooming his son. Other members of the team likewise suffer various relationship difficulties, brain washing, blackmail and burn out, with their stories rarely having a positive outcome. Although, in contrast to 'The Silencers', SHADO doesn't resort to murdering witnesses, preferring to use drugs to erase their memories of UFO incidents, it is prepared to allow crimes, including murder, by third parties to go ahead, if stopping them would expose alien activity or SHADO operations. They also take a hard line when it comes to dealing with its own members who are suspected of betraying the organisation, not afraid to use torture, blackmail and even, it is implied execution.
It is interesting watching UFO's episodes in more or less production order, (like many TV series of its era, aside from the opening couple of episodes which set up the scenario and characters, episodes were originally shown by ITV regions in a pretty random order), as a degree of overall 'story arc'-type progression can be seen. As noted before, the alien threat effectively evolves, with them finding new techniques to circumvent just about every defensive advance that SHADO makes. Moreover, the very nature of the aliens changes as discovers more about them, with it eventually emerging that they are actually non-corporeal beings that inhabit bodies they have constructed from human parts, hence their constant need for new victims - it isn't just for organ transplants, but whole bodies as required. Their ability to change host bodies means that, eventually, SHADO realises that any body or anything, could be under their influence (we have an alien-possessed cat in one episode). As the series progresses, we find that the aliens can also place humans under their control using brain implants, brainwash and reprogramme people to be their agents and even manipulate time to 'resurrect' the recently dead and deploy them as agents.
Another fascinating aspect of watching the episodes in production order is that you gain the impression of SHADO being a large organisation, with staff constantly rotating between posts, with some characters disappearing and new faces taking their places. Some of this was intentional, with characters like new recruit Colonel Foster rotating through several postings as he familiarises himself with the organisation, for instance. Some, however, was the result of some of the original cast only being signed to short-term contracts, which either they or the producers didn't renew - original Skydiver 1 captain Peter Gordeno simply vanishes after half a dozen episodes, for example, being replaced by the moonbase's original interceptor leader. The most sweeping changes, which come around two thirds of the way through the run, were the result of a six month production hiatus, during which production moved from Elstree studio to Pinewood. Of the main cast, only Ed Bishop's Commander Straker and Micheal Billington's Paul Foster remained. George Sewall, as Straker's deputy, vanished, to be replaced by Wanda Ventham, (returning, her character having appeared in the first episode, then vanished), while Skydiver 1 now found itself under the command of an unnamed captain played by David Warbeck. (Confusingly, though, the original actors remained in the title sequence for the entire run of the series).
Something else that struck me about UFO the last time I watched it all the way through was the way in which some of the episodes, particularly in the latter stages of the series, could almost have been rewritten from unused Captain Scarlet scripts. Indeed, there are similarities with the earlier Gerry Anderson series from the outset: the implacable alien threat, the secret bases (moonbase and its interceptors could almost be Cloudbase and its interceptors, with the earth-based SHADO mobiles analogs for Spectrum's SPVs). But as the series progresses, UFO's aliens seem to become more and more like the Mysterons. It isn't just their non-corporeal nature, ability to raise the dead and use them as their agents (which is suspiciously like the Mysterons' 'retrometabolisation' of both dead humans and destroyed human machines to turn to their purposes), but also the cryptic clues that they start giving to SHADO as to what their next plan will involve. That was very much the Mysterons' modus operandi in Captain Scarlet - it was always the deciphering of these clues which led to Spectrum's victories. By the end of UFO, the main difference seems to be that their aliens prefer to remain anonymous, whereas in Captain Scarlet, the Mysterons always introduce themselves while making a threat, ('We the Mysterons...').
Of course, UFO was live action rather than using puppets, like Captain Scarlet. That, however, is one of its weaknesses: the characters are so dour that, ultimately, they lack the charisma of the Captain Scarlet puppets. (Notably, as well as playing Ed Straker in UFO, Ed Bishop had also provided the voice for Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet). Both series, though, share some excellent model and effects work - the one criticism of this aspect of the series which could be levelled at UFO was that many of the sequences were used over and over again, making them over familiar. Another weakness are the scripts, which are often over-convoluted plot-wise, frequently confused and confusing in plot terms and saddle the actors with some leaden dialogue. Many of them, particularly from late in the run, also feel overly padded out, reinforcing the suspicion that they may have originated with unused twenty five minute Captain Scarlet scripts. Perhaps the biggest handicap UFO suffers is the fact that it all feels so relentlessly downbeat, with its protagonists faced with a seemingly endless threat - there really aren't a lot of laughs in their world. It has to be said that UFO proved to be a poor predictor of the future (it was set in the then distant 1980s), in that the UK never did switch to driving on the right, let alone driving American cars, string vests never became a fashion item for men any more than purple wigs did for women and, sadly, racism wasn't eliminated.
Still, some aspects of UFO live on in current TV: the exterior of the film studios SHADO front was actually the main office building at Elstree, which these days doubles as the hospital exterior in the BBC's Holby City. Every time I see an establishing shot of the hospital, I half expect to see one of the futuristic SHADO cars parked outside. Likewise, I live in hope that one episode Mr Hansen's office might descend into the real, underground, SHADO headquarters, full of computer banks with flashing lights. A man can dream...
Bigfoot - have we ever talked about the legendary anthropoid here? I only ask because I was reading Gav Crimson's review of direct-to-DVD British Bigfoot/gangster crossover movie Wreck (2020), (while, coincidentally, half-watching a sort-of-Bigfoot movie on B-Movie TV, Demonwarp (1988), where Bigfoot turns out to be an alien), in which Gav noted the lack of a British Bigfoot history that the film makers could have drawn upon. Now, something stirred at the back of my mind: I was sure that I had read somewhere of just such a UK Bigfoot mythology. Indeed, a quick web search confirmed that it wasn't a false memory brought on by watching the likes of Konga (1960) or Trog (1970) too many times - they might not be Bigfoot, but giant apes and prehistoric troglodytes running amok in Britain are close enough - there really is something of a British Bigfoot tradition. While not as well known as those ubiquitous 'big cats' that supposedly stalk the British countryside, there nevertheless have been numerous alleged sightings of a hairy ape-man type creature known variously as The Shug-Monkey, the Beast of Bolam, the Big Grey Man, the Man-Monkey, and the Wild Man of Orfor, depending upon the locale. These locales range from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands.
Of course, one of the objections to idea of such a creature existing, undetected, in the UK is the country's lack of any equivalent to the vast forests of the North West US, or even the mountain ranges of Tibet, where its cousin the Yeti supposedly resides. Yet, the fact that modern Britain is increasingly urbanised doesn't seem to bother the British Bigfoot, which has been spotted in the likes of Kent and Sussex, both pretty densely populated counties. So, could such a creature exist in the UK? I sincerely doubt it. The same objections that undermine the existence of those 'Big Cats' apply - a lack of a suitable food supply, for one. If there really were these large predators wandering around the British countryside, then I'm pretty sure that we'd have regular reports of farmers losing large numbers of livestock. Not only that, but we just don't have the climate for Bigfoot here - just about every Bigfoot movie I've seen features buxom female teenagers hiking in US forests and taking their tops off. As far as I can make out, it is the sight of naked female breasts that attracts Bigfoot - it is the only time they attack and they always go for the exposed knockers. Let's face it, in drizzly, overcast Britain, there is no way that local woman are going to be getting their norks out in the woods on a regular basis. Personally, I suspect that British Bigfoot sightings have a lot to do with too many childhood readings of Stig of the Dump. That and an increasing number of hairy homeless people being forced to live in the woods as a result of austerity over the past ten years.
Damn it - I had another of those lost weekends of watching schlock. I've been trying to cut down, but you know how it is: lockdown, nearly Winter, with the weather closing in, settling down on the sofa and watching a continuous stream of low rent movies for forty eight hours just seems the natural thing to do. There were points where I started to wonder about what I was witnessing - during a double bill of Rosalba Neri movies (Lady Frankenstein and The Devil's Wedding Night), I began to feel as if I was having an out of body experience. While the latter of the two is a frenetic tale of vampirism, with Neri as Dracula's widow, busy bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth, it was the first that really led me question my grip on reality, so surreal did it become. Here she is Frankenstein's daughter, who seeks to avenge her father's death at the hands of his own monster by creating a second monster. She does this by transplanting the brain of her older lover (and father's former assistant) into the hunky young body of the idiot stable boy. The result has brains, beauty, is a sex machine in bed and possesses superhuman strength. The first monster conveniently returns to the castle in time to be fought and dismembered by Lady Frankenstein and her monstrous lover, only for the requisite band of angry villagers with flaming torches to turn up and set fire to the place. The local police chief, played by Mickey Hargitay (one can only assume that Edmond Purdom was unavailable) and the idiot stable boy's sister turn up just in time to witness Lady Frankenstein and her monster lover (which of course has the stable boy's body) engage in a victorious shag fest amid the flames, climaxing with the monster strangling her. At which point, I thought, 'this is bloody pervy' and began to question what I'd just seen. After that, The Devil's Wedding Night, with its naked chained virgins, zombies, vampires and Mark Damon in a dual role, seem like reality TV.
I also took in one of those Italian post-apocalypse Mad Max knock off I was talking about a few posts back: Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983). Costume-wise, this one adhered pretty closely to the Mad Max formula of lots of black leather, but eschewed the usual junk yard setting of the Italian product for a sand pit in Spain. This time around, the scarce commodity everyone is after is water. The anti-hero main protagonist has the usual turbo-charged and customised car - the 'Exterminator' of the title - there are bands of badly acting brigands wandering the wastelands, sporting various extreme hair styles, not to mention the obligatory young kid who acts as sidekick/moral conscience to the main character. Of course, if we take the title at face value and the film really is set in the year 3000, then all those cars and trucks you see in it must be 1000+ years old. It must be hall getting spares - I remember the trouble I once had getting a replacement exhaust for 2010 Ford Focus, (the excuse I was given was that it was a diesel and the exhausts rarely needed replacing). Watching the film made me realise that I've seen so many dubbed Italian films now that I can even recognise the English language voice artists. It helps when the same voice artist is used consistently for individual actors. In Exterminators, for instance, Luciano Pigozzi was instantly recognisable to me, not just because of his distinctive looks, but also because he had the same English language voice I've heard him speak with in just about every film I've seen him in. (It is the same voice artist often used to dub another burly bearded Italian actor, Bud Spencer, into English, although in his films with frequent co-star Terence Hill, Spencer's English voice, rather disconcertingly, varies enormously from movie to movie). Anyway, in its own, utterly predictable, way, Exterminators of the Year 3000 is actually quite entertaining and rounded off my lost weekend of schlock quite nicely.
Watching Rudy Giuliani at another of his lunatic press conferences, with what appeared to be oil leaking down the side of his face, it suddenly became clear to me - he's a cyborg lawyer sent back in time by a future President Trump to preserve his timeline and ensure that he remains president by over-turning Biden's election victory. It is the only way to make sense of this situation: that we are currently faced by two competing, mutually exclusive, timelines. In one, Trump loses in 2020, Biden becomes president and augurs in a new era of peace and tranquility - an era which sees Trump convicted on multiple fraud and rape charges, spending the rest of his life in poky, the bitch to a convicted serial killer. The other timeline sees Trump stay in office, declare himself dictator for life and harness the US's technological might to extend his life, turn Giuliani into a cyborg and create time travel. Obviously, there are considerable differences between to the two timelines historically - that's why Robo-Giuliani became so confused and started claiming that Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro were behind the conspiracy to cheat Trump of the election. While they might have both been dead for years in our timeline, in the one he'd come back from, they are very much alive, forming a new communist axis with China and the EU to oppose the freedom loving alliance of Trump's America and Free England under Nigel Farage.
It's the same with his claims about those 'far left' manufactured voting machines deliberately changing Trump votes to Biden ballots - in his timeline, the Democrats responded to the Trump dictatorship by manufacturing their own robots - aided by those commies in Venezuela, Cuba and China - to oppose him, triggering a robo-revolt. All of which makes far more sense than the alternative: that Joe Biden had summoned Chavez and Fidel in a seance and got them to possess voting machines with their spirits in order to change votes and steal the election. Which would simply mean that Rudy is nuts and dyes his hair. Which, obviously, is ridiculous. No, I'd rather believe that he is a cyborg from an alternative future where Trump really did win by a landslide, but knows that this timeline can only exist if the alternative - our timeline - is erased. I'm guessing that the only reason that oil-leaking Robo-Rudy is here is because they've already tried sending other cyborgs back in time to stop Chavez and Fidel from dying, but have failed, leaving this as their last chance to get their timeline back on course. Indeed, for all we know, future Biden might also have access to time travel and sent his own cyborgs back in time to assassinate Chavez and Fidel in order to ensure that his timeline came into being. Damn it, we could be sitting at the centre of a time war - let's face it, it is the only way to make sense of what is unfolding before us...
Apparently, the worst thing about the post-apocalyptic world won't be the shortages of food and resources, or the breakdown of all social structures, but rather the large numbers of bad actors wandering around the wastelands. At least, that that's what I've learned from watching post-apocalyptic science fiction movies. There's always some poor, remote settlement being menaced by a local warlord, who sends out any army of henchmen to terrorise the settlers with their eye-rolling, overacting, characterised by shouty line readings, over-exaggerated facial expressions and maniacal laughing. Perhaps their inability to act is down to all the radiation or pollution in the atmosphere of their broken down world. Or, more likely, it is perhaps down to budgetary restrictions meaning that the only extras they can afford are a bunch of overweight WWE rejects, (actually, one of them in the film I've just seen was played by Big Van Vader of WCW and WWE fame), who equate acting evil with talking like a Hollywood pirate. That said, Fist of the North Star (1995) which is what I've just been watching, includes Chris Penn and Clint Howard among its henchmen, both of whom have been known to give acting performances, but clearly hadn't been paid enough to do so here. To be absolutely fair, if they had acted, it would have risked undermining the performances of the leads, which included Gary Daniels (the British martial artist who was popular in low budget action films for a while) - he's great at the fighting, but barely adequate at the acting.
Personally, I blame Mad Max, or to be accurate, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, a film described by one critic, at the time of its release, as involving lots of men in black leather acting like Marlon Brando on valium. While Fist of the North Star might have been a rather mangled live action version of a Japanese Manga (with British, American and Australian actors in the lead roles), it was clearly drawing on Mad Max as the inspiration for its costumes, judging by the number of scuffed black leather jackets on display. It was the Italian Mad Max knock offs that really went overboard for the bizarre costumes, though. Less black leather and more PVC, plastic space helmets and the like. The costumes looked like they had been assembled from components salvaged from a junk yard. Which is hardly surprising, as many of these Italian efforts look as if they were shot in a junk yard - one where the likes of Fred 'The Hammer' Williamson could be found running around toting huge guns. But at least such films give us a clue as to how to avoid this post-apocalyptic Hell: keep recycling stuff, so as to clear the junk yards. That and make out sure that when all the other institutions start failing, we at least keep the drama schools open, (the current collapse of live performances thanks to the pandemic doesn't bode well, in this respect). That way, when we inevitably find ourselves being menaced by a warlord's minions, they'll at least be able to threaten us with proper diction and convey the sub-text of their existential angst through subtle gestures and expressions, rather than by shouting and arm waving accompanied by wild-eyed stares. At least that way, we can feel that some vestige of civilised society has survived.
When I was a child, I loved dinosaurs. I don't recall how I came across them originally, probably through a book, but they quickly became an obsession. I mean, a real obsession that lasted through several years of my childhood. The young me decided that it wasn't enough just to know the names of a few of them - I decided that I was going to be an expert on the subject. Back then, though, dinosaurs simply weren't as prevalent in the popular consciousness as the are now - there were far fewer books about, some plastic kits imported from the States and, on occasion, they turned up in films. There was far less known about them, even in scientific circles. The prevailing view then was that they were incredibly stupid, cold blooded and sluggish creatures, a larger version of modern reptiles, that had to spend lots of time basking in the sun. The larger ones were thought to have to spend most of their time in lakes, like hippos, in order to support their body weight. All of which now, thanks to greater research and new fossil discoveries, is considered wrong. Dinosaurs are now seen as dynamic creatures, probably warm blooded and very different from their modern day reptilian cousins. Of course, the comparisons with modern day reptiles wasn't helped by the fact that many films used photographically enlarged lizards with fake horns and the like stuck on then to represents dinosaurs. Obviously, to my budding youthful dinosaur expert, this was anathema. I treated such films with disdain. Almost as bad were those with men in bad dinosaur suits playing the monsters.
The only films I thought worth watching were those with stop-motion animated dinosaurs. Not only were they anatomically correct (according to the knowledge of the time) but also surprisingly dynamic, forever fighting each other or chasing cavemen around. Now, being an 'expert' on the subject, I obviously knew that cavemen and dinosaurs didn't co-exist: they lived tens of millions of years apart. Yet, for some reason, that didn't bother me as much as seeing dinosaurs misrepresented by lizards. So, I happily suspended my disbelief and enjoyed the likes of One Million Years BC (1966) and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969). They have been historically incorrect, but they had great stop motion dinosaurs. Then there were the 'Lost World' type films, like the original King Kong (1933), which featured a lot of dinosaurs on Skull Island, (although, for some reason, even the herbivorous ones seemed Hell-bent on killing the human cast), a film that the younger me loved when it was shown on TV during my childhood. Another favourite film of this ilk was Valley of the Gwangi (1969), which mixed dinosaurs with cowboys in a hidden valley South of the border. nowadays, of course, there are far more dinosaur movies about, with more accurate dinosaurs in them. But the funny thing is that those CGI created dinosaurs we have today, despite their accuracy and realism, just don't do it for me like the stop motion ones did. Perhaps they just look too real, taking some of the inherent magic away from them. Or maybe it is because I know that they have no actual physical existence, unlike those stop motion model dinosaurs, which were physical objects, which I knew had been lovingly and painstakingly animated by the likes of Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen or Jim Danforth. They just don't make dinosaurs like they used to - I should know, I was an 'expert', after all!
So, if we are to believe the press, Dominic Scummings left Downing Street after his relationship with the Prime Minister broke down over messages in which Johnson's fiance was referred to as 'Princess Nut Nuts'. You really can't make this stuff up can you? Or perhaps you can. As ever with this sort of thing, the press reports as to what actually happened to precipitate Scummings' departure from government are hugely contradictory according to the outlet in question's attitude toward the special advisor. If pro-Scummings, or more generally pro right-wing, then it it was all something planned in advance, a smooth transition, with the advisor's job done. If anti-Scummings, anti-Johnson or more left-wing, then there was a 'blazing row' and the advisor and his cronies ordered to leave and never darken Number Ten's door again. The spin carries on. So, what is the truth? Will we ever know? Perhaps, in the fullness of time. I suspect that, under mounting pressure from his own party, Johnson was looking for a pretext under which he could dispense with Scummings' services without losing too much face, or appearing to be caving in to his own back benchers. Having failed to act decisively over Scummings following the Barnard Castle debacle - which clearly weakened public support for the first lockdown - he really had no choice to do so now, in the face of back bench unease over Scummings' influence. Despite the efforts of this so called 'genius', the government is faring badly in the polls, with the pandemic apparently out of control and Brexit unraveling.
Whatever the real reasons behind Scummings' departure, the end of his pernicious influence can only be a good thing. If nothing else, without him, Johnson is pretty much devoid of an actual strategy and, once the pandemic is over and Brexit is done, will find himself out on his ear, courtesy of his party, which can then blame him for the mess left behind. The question then, is who would they replace him with? To me, it doesn't really matter: I think that they are all bastards. But I suppose that some are less psychopathic than others. Still, we might not have to wait for the Tories to ditch Johnson after the glorious news that he is self-isolating after being exposed to coronavirus again. Yay! Covid gets a second crack at finishing off the fat bastard! Come on you virus! I know, I know - it is very uncharitable of me to be cheering on a virus, but, believe me, I only have the welfare of the nation at heart. I mean, it isn't just the mismanagement of this epidemic due to Johnson's incompetence which is a problem, but also the accompanying corruption, with the letting of billions of pounds worth of pandemic-related contracts, without competitive tender, to companies owned by friends and relatives of Tory MPs. If nothing else, I suppose, Johnson can stand as a test case as to whether or not it is possible to catch Covid twice, or whether the first dose gives you long-standing immunity. You know, November is the month that just keeps on giving: Trump defeated, Scummings gone, not one, but two, effective Covid vaccines almost ready to roll and now Johnson possibly Covid-stricken again. And we're only half-way through the month! What other joys can it bring?
What a week - Dominic Scummings is out of Downing Street and I've managed to avoid watching any more programmes about UFOs or the paranormal on digital TV. I did manage to sit through The Best of Sex and Violence on America Horrors twice, though. I'm not sure why, but it exerts a certain fascination. The Best of Sex and Violence is a seventy five minute compilation of trailers from various seventies and eighties exploitation films (with the emphasis, strangely enough, upon sex and violence), linked together by three hundred year old John Carradine and his pipe. By this point, Carradine would do pretty much anything for money - even read from a totally lame script, as he does here. The segment which made the most impression on me was the one dealing with porn movies based on children's stories, including adult versions of Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and, of course Charles Band's Fairytales, which subverts everything from Little Bo Peep to Old King Cole. There is something mildly disturbing about seeing these beloved children's fables debased but, of course, tat is the whole point: to take something ostensibly innocent and utterly corrupt it via sex. It is the whole basis of most sexual fantasies. Nonetheless, I can't help but admire the ingenious ways in which they turn these stories into smut - Cinderella, for instance, becomes a tale of a prince who can't orgasm - until he has sex with the titular character, of course. The rest of the film concerns his search for the blessed vagina, which means that he has to shag every maiden in the Kingdom in order to find the right 'fit'.
I also managed to catch up with Killdozer (1974), a TV movie I hadn't seen in decades. I remember that when I saw it as a kid it impressed me greatly, mainly because it involves lots of heavy plant, like steam shovels, graders and, of course, bulldozers. Like most kids, such things greatly interested me - not only was there a lot of construction work going on back then, so I saw lots of similar heavy plant, but I also had the Tonka Toys versions. The film was based on a 1944 Theodore Strugeon novella, which involved a group of construction workers building an airstrip on a Pacific island finding one of their bulldozers being possessed by an alien presence and running amok. In the story, the alien force is released when an ancient temple is demolished by the bulldozer - we learn that it is itself a weapon left over from an aeons ago interstellar war between alien races, designed to take over enemy war machines and turn them against their users. For the film, made thirty years after the story, the setting moves to an island off of Africa, which a small crew is preparing for an oil exploration team. Unfortunately, the whole explanation for the alien force is absent: here, it falls to earth in a meteor, which the bulldozer's blade hits. Without the original story's background explanation, the film simply becomes a monster-on-the-rampage movie, with the possessed bulldozer having no apparent motivation for killing the construction crew one-by-one. That said, by the standards of seventies TV movies, it is quite effectively done - the driverless bulldozer is extremely menacing, snorting and growling like some primeval beast. Best of all, at just under seventy five minutes, it moves along at a decent pace and doesn't have time to outstay its welcome.
It isn't just the UFOs though, is it? Digital TV 'factual' channels also seem to be full of stuff about the paranormal and unexplained. Not that any of it is unexplained - there is one programme called, I think, NASA's Unexplained Files, supposedly about anomalies and weird shit going down on recordings taken by NASA astronauts and the like. The trouble is though, that every time I've seen an episode, by the end, they've always explained it all away in scientific terms, thereby obviating the title. Mind you, this is taking us back to the UFO shows, while I really wanted to talk about their paranormal equivalents. The problem with the paranormal programmes is their lack of any supposed visual evidence to show us - while the UFO shows have their grainy mobile phone footage of fuzzy looking lights, the paranormal programmes have no equivalent footage of ghosts, for instance. About the best I've ever seen is supposed CCTV footage of poltergeist activity: chairs moving around, cupboard doors opening and shutting, accompanied by knocking noises. The trouble is that this sort of stuff can so easily be faked with something as simple as fine threads attached to door handles and chair legs and being pulled from off screen. I know that they always claim to have had this stuff 'analysed' by 'experts' who claim they can detect no fakery, but the fact is that you can't see the fakery in the tricks performed by stage magicians, so this is hardly conclusive.
This, though, is the big problem with paranormal phenomena - the lack of evidence in the form of photos or videos. Back in the day, there was always the excuse that cameras, particularly film or video cameras, were expensive and uncommon, making it unlikely that anyone encountering such phenomena would be unlikely to have such equipment. Today, however, just about every smart phone has a video camera and just about everyone has a smart phone. So, where are the videos of ghosts and apparitions? This is so problematic that, when writing his 'Rivers of London' novels, Ben Aaronovich felt it necessary to furnish a fictional explanation of 'magic', by its action, destroying microchips, thereby preventing the videoing of ghosts, etc. But in the real world, there are no such constraints - simply falling back on stuff like 'ghosts can't be photographed', won't wash without a proper explanation. Not if these paranormal investigators want to be taken seriously, that is. Anyway, possibly my favourite type of these paranormal shows are the self-made ones featuring ghost hunters. You can find loads of them on You Tube and there is a series of them which show regularly on the American Horrors channel on Roku.
They always feature a group of these self-styled investigators visiting some old building, or graveyard, by night, hoping to record paranormal phenomena. Inevitably, they never do. Instead, all they seem to do is to try and scare themselves by suddenly exclaiming 'Did you hear that?', then playing back an audio recording, to which I reply, 'Yes. I heard that - it is typical, normal, nocturnal noise, probably made by the wind, local nocturnal fauna or just the building's components contracting as the temperature drops'. In one episode I saw, even a car horn sounding was taken as 'evidence' of something spooky going on: 'We're miles from any busy roads', they exclaimed. Yes, but there are, nonetheless, roads there - you drove down one to reach this location, not to mention the fact that sound carries remarkably long distances at night. Apart from trying to hype up normal sounds as something sinister, these ghost hunters are always carrying various devices with meters on them which register, well, I don't really know and, in truth, neither do they. At best, they might register electromagnetic fluxes, but these don't provide evidence of anything, let alone the supernatural. There seems to be a cottage industry out there knocking out these 'ghost detectors', one not actually backed by any science. In the final analysis, though, if forced to make a choice of viewing one or the other, I think that I prefer these paranormal show. If nothing else, the people involved seem less fanatical and don't engage in wild conspiracy theories. That said, it is still all bollocks.
Have you noticed that various of the supposedly 'factual' digital TV channels are currently chock full of series about UFOs and aliens? OK, I know that many of them have always carried such stuff, but of late Blaze TV seems to have nothing but such programming on and Quest is beginning to go the same way. Look, I tune into these channels to watch stuff like repeats of Shed and Buried, Wheeler Dealers (when it was still good and had Edd China on it) and Storage Wars. What I don't want to see is a bunch of cranks showing us fuzzy video shot on a cheap phone and claiming that it constitutes incontrovertible proof of alien visitations. While I usually avoid such TV shows like the plague, I did recently watch a couple, just to check whether they had improved and actually involved any facts these days. Jesus, that was a mistake! Absolute bollocks! I wouldn't mind, but regardless of the title or channel it is showing on, every episode seems to involve the exact same 'experts' spouting the exact same fantasies. In particular, Nick Pope seems to turn up on every one of them. Now, while I never crossed paths with him, (I was in Metropole House and late Old War Office Building, while he was in Main Building), he and I were both in the MoD in Whitehall in the late eighties/early nineties - he claimed that he manned the 'UFO desk' there and had access to all sorts of classified stuff about alien visitations to the UK. If we are to believe him, it was like the UK equivalent of the X-Files, with investigations going on left, right and centre. Interestingly, I was once on a training course with his successor at said desk, who told me that, in reality, UFO sightings were only a small part of the work and all that they did was to respond to letters from the public with a form letter stating that, unless it could be shown that UFOs presented a threat to the UK, the MoD wasn't interested in the phenomena.
To be clear, I'm not saying that such reports weren't investigated somewhere in the MoD, (I'm assuming that the RAF would have run their own investigations as a matter of routine), but they weren't going on in Main Building. Nor am I saying that Pope is a liar, but I have read one of his books and it was utter shite. In my opinion, obviously. But to get back to these programmes, what Pope and the other experts do on them is pounce on some alleged UFO sighting then weave some complex narrative around it, a narrative that has no factual basis other than some unsubstantiated 'eyewitness' accounts. These narratives, having been established as 'fact' are them used to drag all manner of other stuff into their conspiracy. In one episode I saw, for instance, they managed to conclude that a now defunct RAF establishment, based around an old country house, was somehow the epicentre of the British 'Area 51'. 'The house is now abandoned by the RAF, so why can't we access it? Why are there security fences around it?' Well, probably because it is still a valuable piece of Crown Estate and they don't want it vandalised. The fact that it was once the HQ of the RAF's 'Provost and Security' organisation was held up by Pope (yes, he was inevitably involved) as 'proof' that it must have been used for secret and sinister purposes. Really? I would have thought that, as a former MoD employee, he would be well aware that this was simply the official name for the RAF Police, the Air Force's equivalent to the Military Police who are simply responsible for the security of RAF bases, investigating criminal activity by RAF personnel and arresting drunken air men. They then tried to link it with the 'CCC' an underground government complex several miles away, which was also, apparently, the home some kind of sinister government organisation. ('CCC' actually stands for 'Corsham Computer Centre', which apparently processes data in connection with the Royal Navy - it is perhaps significant that the Navy's design offices are based in nearby Bath).
Many of these programmes focus on particular UFO sightings and try to 'prove' that they can't be explained in any terms other than alien visitation. Once again, their 'evidence' relies entirely upon those unverified and, to be honest, unverifiable, 'eyewitness' accounts. I know from personal experience of having twice (in separate incidents) had to provide the police with witness statements. I like to think that I have a pretty good memory (it got me through enough exams back in the day), yet I was surprised by how, only a short time (less than hour in both cases), many of the details had become vague in my memory. The exact order of some of the events, for instance, were suddenly unclear. It taught me that memory cannot be relied upon, at least not for details. Now, if my memories can become so vague in such a short period of time, asking people to recall events that took place years, decades even, earlier is going to be problematic. What doesn't help these shows is that also always seem to focus on the same few incidents - if I hear anything more about Rendlesham Forest, for instance, I think that I'm going to go mad. In one of the episodes I saw, though, they did highlight a case I wasn't familiar with - an alleged encounter between RAF night fighters and a UFO in the 1950s. Even the most cursory research on my part revealed another problem with the approach these programmes take: the exclusion of witness statements and other evidence which contradicts their narrative. In this particular case, it turns out that the crews of the two aircraft involved have given accounts in which they deny that they made any contact with anything anomalous that night. But that never gets mention by Pope (yes, him again) in the show. it would undermine the UFO guys' ability to delude themselves and construct their complex alternative reality. Worryingly, their thought processes and 'logic' are pretty much the same as those of people who believe in really dangerous stuff like the 'Q Anon' cobblers, or that Joe Biden didn't really beat Trump, despite evidence to the contrary. The world is in danger of drowning in these conspiracy theories.
To state the obvious first: there are no Vikings in this film. The title has misled many over the years. I suspect that the word 'Viking' is only in there for the purposes of box office - more people internationally would have known what a 'Viking' was rather than a 'Celt' or a 'Briton'. What The Viking Queen actually is, is a highly fictionalised retelling of the Boudicca story. As can be seen from the trailer, all the ingredients are there: proud warrior Queen out for revenge after being humiliated by the Romans, the Iceni tribe, chariots with blades on their wheels, druids, uprisings against the Romans, human sacrifices. The main innovation is that in this version, Queen Salina (rather than Boudicca), not only gets on the wrong side of the Romans, but also that of the druids, when she agrees to co-rule her kingdom with a Roman, In true Hammer style, there are also added whippings, depravities and skimpy costumes, not to mention a cast list that reads like a who's who of British supporting actors. That said, the film is headed by two imports: US actor Don Murray as the Roman lover and Carita in the title role. Carita was actually Finnish model and sometime actress Carita Jarvinen, who appeared in only three films.
Viking Queen was one of three films that Don Chaffey directed for Hammer, being preceded by One Million Years BC in 1965 and followed by Creatures the World Forgot in 1971. Despite directing a number of hit movies, including the aforementioned One Million Years BC and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Chaffey's career never quite hit the big time, with his career petering out in a welter of underwhelming lower budgeted movies in the seventies. (A late career highlight was Pete's Dragon (1977) for Disney, not to mention a superior sexploitation piece in he form of 1971's Sex Clinic). Shot in Ireland, the trailer illustrates the relatively high production values enjoyed by The Viking Queen. Hammer undoubtedly had high hopes for the film, having enjoyed success with a string of similar fantasy/historical themed films, like One Million Years BC, Devil Ship Pirates, Stranglers of Bombay and Sword of Sherwood Forest, for instance. The Viking Queen, however, proved to be a major disappointment at the box office. These days, it is little seen on TV, although available on DVD. One claim to fame the film does have is that, while working on it, Patrick Troughton (something of a regular for Hammer), was offered the role of The Doctor in Dr Who.
That's right, you can kiss my hairy arse! (I hasten to add that that isn't my hairy arse above, merely a surrogate). And yes, I'm targeting Trump's supporters here, as much as the fat boy himself - I have grown so sick of their smug sanctimoniousness over the past four years. Always trying to take the moral high ground, despite being morally bankrupt themselves. How well I remember their recent demands that the rest of us utterly condemn all that alleged Antifa and Black Lives Matter violence for being the unconstitutional attempts to undermine democracy that they were. Strangely though, I've heard nothing from them condemning Trump for his baseless allegations of electoral fraud for being unconstitutional attempts to undermine the integrity of the US democratic system that they undoubtedly are. I'm still waiting to see my social media feeds fill up with their condemnations, yet they remain silent.
But hey, who cares? The Trumpster is in the Dumpster. America has heeded the call to 'Dump the Trump'. Biden has given him a hidin'. You know, when I thought up all of those potential campaign slogans, I thought that I was on fire - it was just unfortunate that I devised them after election day, so couldn't sell them to the Biden campaign. I know that they always say that you shouldn't descend to level of your adversary, but you know what, I'm more than happy to come down to Trump's level of childish name calling. It is highly satisfying after having to witness four years of this psychopath trampling all over decent behavioural norms, insulting people, lying, cheating, being racist,trashing all that is good about the US and just generally being a boorish oaf, while his supporters all cheered him on, taking their cue from him to be utterly obnoxious pricks.
But, I hear those Trumpists ask,what the fuck has it to do with some guy in the UK? Well, the occupant of the Oval Office, I'm afraid, impacts the whole world. So when we have a neo-fascist arsehole like Trump there, we all suffer. We are all in danger. The US president, more often than not, sets the tone for international discourse and, for the past four years, that tone has been ignorant, bigoted, confrontational and angry. Let's hope that under Biden, we can get back to some decency and constructive diplomacy, with the US offering some proper global leadership in areas like climate change. Beyond these concerns, his fall is hugely symbolic - hopefully, it represents the a turning point in the fight against the blight of right-wing populism. Perhaps Bolsanaro in Brazil might be the next to go, or perhaps Johnson here in the UK? I live in hope.
I have to say, the US election this year has had me transfixed. I've spent what feels like every waking hour over the past few days in front of TV news channels, or poring over political websites. It has been a real roller coaster ride. Despite taking on board the warning from pollsters like Nate Silver that, due to the unprecedented level of postal voting by Democrats, things might, initially, look as if they were going Trump's way, but once the postal votes were counted, it would swing decisively to Biden, I confess that I lost faith for a while. I had a long dark night of the soul that first night of ballot counting. But I should have listened - as the days moved on, so those swing states gradually turned blue for Biden. An observation here - as pointed out by various commentators, the idea that the election became a horse race of sorts, with Biden 'catching up' with Trump in states like Pennsylvania was entirely illusory - an illusion created by the way in which the ballots were counted, with the predominantly Democratic postal votes left to last. These votes didn't just 'appear' (as Trump would have you believe), they had been there since polling day. They just hadn't been counted. The reality, of course, is that Biden had actually won the election by close of play on election day, it just took time to count the ballots. Anyway, this has all been tremendously exciting for me - I used to teach US politics (and might again in the foreseeable future), so I felt something of a connection.
Some random musings to wrap up with - just how satisfying was it to see Trump buddy Nigel Farage make an utter arse of himself with his prediction of a Trump win during his fawning on stage appearance with Orange Man? Even better, he allegedly had a £10,000 bet riding on a Trump triumph! Ha! That'll teach the fucker! Then there was that British 'banker' who put £5 million on Trump to win. Again - ha! You know, normally I take no pleasure in seeing somebody brought low, humiliated by defeat - I've been there myself, so I know how it feels to have your world kicked out from under you. But, for Trump, I make an exception. He has demeaned the office of President, bringing it into disrepute with his conduct - conduct which also has encouraged and enabled an army of bigots and thugs to believe that they had free reign to terrorise minorities. While Joe Biden wouldn't have been my first choice to carry the anti-Trump flag into battle, he has prevailed and I sincerely hope that he can bring some integrity, decency and tolerance back to the White House.
By the way, has anyone told Putin yet that his bitch is toast?
I'm still holding off on commenting on the US election. Trust me, I've got plenty to say - four years of pent up frustration with Trump - but I want to be absolutely sure that Biden has got those last electoral college votes in the bag before I let rip. So, back to moaning about stuff that niggles me. I'm seriously thinking of blocking anybody I currently follow on Twitter who tweets or retweets another supposedly 'inspirational' quote from someone. For fuck's sake, not only are such things invariably utterly trite, but they are also meaningless generalisations completely inapplicable to any set of circumstances other than those they were originally made under. Believe me, coming out with some fucking aphorism concocted by some dead dude has never resolved any real world problem. I mean, do you honestly think that we'd have climate change, Boris Johnson or international terrorism if they could be cured by the deployment of an appropriate quote? But then that's social media for you, isn't it? People seem to feel the obligation to keep posting stuff, so when they run out of anything of their own to say, they just start quoting somebody else - probably in the hope that if they tweet a quote from somebody famous, it will make them look more intelligent.
Changing tack, I've been struck by the way the media have chosen to characterise recent events in the Labour Party, specifically the suspension of former leader Jeremy Corbyn for his continued attempts to play down the anti-Semitism allegations which plagued the party under his leadership. The media seem to be relishing the poosibility that this could herald another bout of internal strife for the party, just as it seemed to be regaining public trust after its change of leadership. What they don't seem to grasp is that, in reality, the average rank-and-file Labour member and, more importantly, the average potential Labour voter, welcome this development which, hopefully, will finally see us draw a line under the Corbyn era. The fact is that he was a poor leaser who surrounded himself with a coterie of insular apparatchiks who were too wrapped up in their quest for 'ideological purity' that they couldn't grasp the need to appeal to a wider electorate. Indeed, despite the dire predictions of the press, Labour now seems to be opening up a clear poll lead over the Tories. Sure, there are still rumbles of discontent from the Corbyn loyalists, but all they do is spend their time getting hashtags like #starmermustgo to trend, thinking that this somehow achieves something. It is typical of the student-level of politics they operate in - anybody can get anything to trend on Twitter, but it achieves nothing in the real world. (See, we're back to Twitter). Winning elections isn't achieved by connecting with the like minded on social media and assuming that this is somehow a microcosm of reality. Instead, it involves going out on the streets and trying to connect with real voters, real working class people and convincing them that Labour can address their real world problems. So, the sooner they fuck off out of Labour and get back to playing their games in the SWP, the better. Maybe then we can focus on winning elections and helping people.
So, as I'm trying to catch up with the stuff I didn't comment on last week, while I was engaged in my Halloween week movie marathon posts, I thought that it was high time we looked back at that incident a couple of weeks ago when a group of stowaways 'hijacked' an oil tanker of off the Isle of Wight. I know, in the light of day it sounds like a joke but, the captain of an oil tanker which had sailed from Nigeria, bound for Fawley, became sufficiently worried about the aggressive conduct of some stowaways discovered on his ship, that he called the British authorities for assistance. Eventually, military special forces soldiers (presumably from the SBS, which is based in nearby Poole, boarded the vessel and detained the stowaways. What interested me about te story was the way in which it unfolded on social media. As soon as it looked as if special forces were going to deployed, all the keyboard warriors went into overdrive, relishing the prospect of a bunch of stowaways (probably refugees and asylum seekers) being beaten up - and possibly killed - by a group of highly trained elite soldiers. I've encountered these sort of military groupies before - show them a uniform and they go weak at the knees. They are fond of basically ejaculating all over their tablets whenever the military go into action, but, very rarely, have they ever served themselves. The imagined macho exploits of their hard man heroes are, one has to assume, a proxy for their own frustrated inability to take action over anything. At the first sign of real conflict, these guys will most likely turn the other cheek, before turning away altogether and running for cover.
Now, I hate to disillusion them about their heroes, but, in a previous job, a long time ago, I used to have contact with real life serving SAS and SBS guys. Obviously, I can't go into details, but although my contacts were limited and the guys I actually dealt with face-to-face were armourers and the like - and therefore might be atypical for these units - I was always struck by just how non-macho these guys were. Instead, they were intelligent professionals who knew their fields of expertise and, funnily enough, always came over as pretty nice guys. Certainly not the type of macho morons you'd expect if your only impression of them had come from TV series like Ultimate Force or films like Who Dares Wins. They for sure didn't come over as blood thirsty killers spoiling for a fight. Quite the opposite. Indeed, Ultimate Force, in particular, dds the SAS a real disservice, portraying them as a bunch of ill disciplined borderline psychopaths, (not to mention, in Ross Kemp's case, overweight and out of shape). But, unfortunately, this is probably where those keyboard warriors get most of their impressions of special forces. The reality is that SAS and SBS members are selected as much for intelligence as they are physical ability, (significantly, the SAS had its origins in the Artists Rifles, a regiment that recruited from the arts). After all, the last thing you want from soldiers who have to operate undercover, behind enemy lines on covert missions, are a bunch of morons going around shooting everyone in sight. The ability to act on their own initiative is a far more valuable attribute under these circumstances.
One last observation about this story - it seems that it was easy for social media to see that the SBS were about to be deployed through the movements of military helicopters. Apparently their flight plans (which seem to include the identity of the specific aircraft) are all logged on a public database. While I know that this is peacetime and it is undoubtedly a CAA requirement that aircraft movements through UK airspace, particularly over land, are all registered, it is hardly reassuring from a security perspective that the movements of military aircraft can so easily be traced, in real time. Because, you know, I'm sure that the Russians and all those other beastly foreigners the government likes to warn us about, can see this data too...
Hell, as nobody is allowed to read anything about US politics because of the election (see previous post for details), let's indulge in some fake news of our own. I mean, what harm can it possibly do? The polls must be closing, anyway. So, the other day this bloke from Preston contacted me - apparently he runs a computer repair shop and he reckons that he's got Rudy Guiliani's old laptop. Yeah, really. He told me that the former New York mayor and personal attorney to President Trump, had come to his shop, in Lancashire, and sold him this second hand laptop. Yeah, I know Guiliani in Preston? In the middle of a pandemic, with Tier Three restrictions likely to be applied there at any moment? Obviously I had doubts, but the guy assured me that it was definitely him - not only did the laptop have Rudy's initials -RG - burned into its plastic casing, but he described the guy who sold it to him as 'this bald American guy with a really yappy voice'. I still wasn't convinced - I mean, just why would he go all the way to Preston to sell an old laptop? Surely they must have second hand computer stores in New York? But the guy said that maybe Guiliani had just been worried that if he sold it in New York, it might fall into the wrong hands and be used for political purposes - just look at what had happened to Hunter Biden's alleged old laptop.
Well, that was enough to convince me that maybe he was on to something. Anyway, he went on to tell me that he was contacting me because he knew that, a minor league purveyor of smut and slander, I might br interested in the contents of the hard drive. This he claimed, was just chock full of gay porn - big naked guys with muscles, all oiled up and performing various acts. Now, there's nothing illegal about owning gay pornography, of course. After all, it's not like he had kiddie porn all over it - he's not a Tory MP, for God's sake - but nonetheless, it did seem odd for someone in his position to have a hard drive full of. The computer guy said that his first thought that was maybe these guys were prominent Democrat politicians that Rudy had been collecting dirt on, but on closer examination, they all seemed to be rent boys. Obviously, I was intrigued and, in exchange for an appropriate remuneration he agreed to send me the hard drive. Except that it still hasn't arrived. I've contacted the computer guy again and he assures me that he posted it - obviously it has been lost in the post. Still, I'm sure that, like those Hunter Biden documents that Fox News lost in the post, it will turn up - we'll just have to wait for the Post Office to sort themselves out...
I might as well just have shut up shop today as far as the web is concerned - traffic has been completely choked off by Google and the main social media sites. Why? Well, because it is election day in the States and they are all running scared of Trump and his bullies and the possibility that they might accuse the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google of bias if they allow people to see what could be perceived of as articles and posts critical of Trump. Believe me, this isn't paranoia on my part - it has been happening to sites across the web for the past month, or so, culminating in today's complete shutdown. News sites, political commentary blogs, social media posts about US politics have all seen massive reductions in traffic - those of us with satire sites publishing stuff parodying Trump, well, we've all but vanished from view as far as the casual browser is concerned. There has been a manipulation of web traffic on a massive scale - internet suppression, if you will. It really is quite terrifying that anyone can intimidate search engines, social media and the like, to the extent that they effectively close down free speech and fair comment. Satire is suddenly lumped in with 'fake news' and seen as seditious. An absolutely ridiculous situation.
So, what can be done about this situation? Well, we can hope that the US electorate consign Trump and his cronies to the dustbin of history today. But I've learned not to bank on such things - there are a depressingly large number of people still prepared to vote for the fat fraud. The thing that we can do as individuals, though, is to break the power of the craven internet giants. Simply stop using them - believe me, there are plenty of other search engines out there which deliver better results than Google, (DuckDuckGo, Startpage or even Bing, to name but a few) - they also tend to carry far fewer and less obtrusive ads. As for social media, well, it is something I have little time for, other than trying to generate traffic for my sites (although, in reality, despite it being much vaunted as a driver of traffic, Facebook has never really delivered and, since their election jitters, have basically stopped showing my stories to followers - again, I'm not the only one experiencing this). Besides, everyone should surely know by now that all Facebook is interested in is harvesting your personal data for profit, selling it to advertisers or worse. Twitter isn't quite as bad on this front, but tends to be full of bots getting spurious (usually right-wing propaganda) hashtags trending. Boycotting these sites, or at the very least, using them more sparingly, might not seem like much, but if enough people do, then real change can be effected and maybe, just maybe, we can change the web from being the corporate cess pool it increasingly feels like and start steering it back to the sort of community it used to be.
Back to normal. Posting wise, that is - we're far from back to normal in any other sense. After a Halloween week of solid film reviews. I can finally get back to to writing about the usual old bollocks I talk about here. Don't misunderstand me, I enjoy writing about the various films of dubious quality that I watch, but writing about nothing else for a week gets to feel very restrictive. There were so many other things going on in the world last week that I was just itching to write about, but I'd committed myself to writing up those films. Besides, they also formed the basis for the most recent podcast I've got up over at the Overnightscape Underground, (a podcast I only remembered that I was meant to be delivering on Saturday, giving me a few hours to record and edit it in). So, now we're back to normal, (although there are still plenty of film write ups imminent), what's been going on that's worthy of comment? Well, just as I predicted, we're heading into another national lockdown, (not that you had to have powers of clairvoyance to predict that). Thanks to our government's usual inability to make the difficult decisions until everything is on the verge of spiraling out of control, instead of a couple of weeks in September or October, by way of a 'firebreak', we're getting the whole of November locked down. Which is bloody inconvenient for me, as I was planning to get my car serviced and MoT'd this month -the service is long overdue and the extended MoT expires at the end of December). As I'm assuming that garages will have to close, this means I now can't do anything before next month.
Then there's the US presidential election. I find it incredible that there are still Americans out there prepared to vote for the fat boy still. If nothing else, can't they see the way in which he is trying to derail the democratic process, with his threats to try and have postal votes discounted, not to mention his threats of legal action if he doesn't win? This is the only President in history who has refused, unequivocally, to commit to accepting the election's result if he loses. Then there's the intimidation by his supporters - be it trying to run Biden campaign bosses off of the road in Texas, or blocking roads to polling places in California. This alone, regardless of all the other bigotry, cheating, corruption and incompetence that his administration has been responsible for, should be enough for any decent, intelligent person to vote Biden or, at the very least, abstain. But apparently not. There are still alarming numbers of Trump voters out there, particularly in the so called 'swing states'. I'd really like to be confident, this close to the election, that Trump was down and out - but 'm not and the prospect of another four years of Trump are terrifying, not just for the US, but for the rest of the world as well. Still, on a brighter note, I have finally started rewiring the railway which, so far, has resulted in me burning my fingers with a soldering iron, (I blame my friend for keep sending me texts, thereby distracting me and making me pick it up from the wrong end).
