After Hours: The Battering of Britain

Once again we go After Hours to find out why streaming TV customers are finding their ordinary lives turned into TV dramas. There’s drama in the meth lab for Dr Smith, Will and the Robot in this week’s episode of ‘Lost and Spaced’ as an experiment gets out of hand, while The-Man-in-the-Pub wades into the ‘Paul is Dead’ debate and uncovers a bizarre tale of amnesia, stolen identities and market stalls. Psychic FM’s agony uncle looks into a case of ‘Naked Possession’ and we get a preview of WNKR’s new classic comedy. Finally, the ‘Battering of Britain’ is spotlighted in an investigation of a violent new trend sweeping the country: fish battery. Do fresh fish sales need to be restricted as gangs armed with fish bring terror to Britain’s streets?

‘After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio, ChatGPT with sound effects and theme music by Freesound Community via Pixababy.com. Music: ‘Sunday Bell Shuffle’, ‘Cold Signal Burst’ and ‘Veil of Sleep’ by Cosmiczebra via Suno.com.

Listen Here: After Hours: The Battering of Britain 

Episode six!  I can't deny that this one was a bit of a trial to come up with and was completed in a rush.  For one thing, I went through something of a personal crisis of confidence amid worries over my lack of direction last month.  Even when I got past that, for the life of me, I had absolutely no idea on what the content would be, so scripting started late and recording even later.  Even then, I was still prevaricating over the running order of the segments right up to publication.  I have to say that, overall, I'm less happy about this episode than the previous couple.  I'm just not sure that the mix of items was right. Still, there are a couple of entirely original items in there, rather than just stuff reworked from The Sleaze.  I might actually give 'After Hours' a break for August, as I need time to rethink and re-jig the project, as I've had some ideas for the format of some of the individual segments.  Then again, I might not.  Watch this space.

Travelling Hopefully (Again)

I had another of those days of 'travelling hopefully'.  I thought that I'd worked out where all the roadworks were and mapped out my route to the New Forest accordingly - also taking into account how to avoid the traffic chaos generated by the presence of the New Forest Show this week.  Inevitably, of course, this being the height of summer, another set of roadworks and another diversion sprang up out of nowhere, (no warning signs until you were practically on it), frustrating me.  But, I finally got to the Forest, taking the back route across Cadnam Common to Bolderwood, in order to by-pass Lyndhurst, (which, I know from past experience, is even more chaotic than usual when the New Forest Show is on).  All well and good.  But more problems arose as I tried to get to a particular part of the forest around the back of Brockenhurst - heavier than expected traffic, (you have to cross a main road to get there), delayed me again, before finding that the car park I wanted to use had been 'temporarily' closed, so I had to use one further down, which disrupting the route of the walk I wanted to take.  Still, I did have a very pleasant walk, (my second of the day), before I did something really stupid.  Knowing that the New Forest Show had ended for the day by then, I decided to drive back via Brockenhurst, reasoning that the traffic and 'event road controls' would be absent by then, (this has worked for me before).  But no, chaos still reigned as a bunch of self-important buffoons in flourescent jackets took it upon themselves to 'direct' traffic around the two entrances/exits to the show venue. 

At one point we had a double decker bus blocking the middle of the road as it was unable to take the turn into the venue as they were directing too many cars out, blocking the turning.  After that, it was delay after delay, with traffic queuing for miles on either side of Lyndhurst, for no visible reason.  Finally, I nearly collided with a lunatic who cut straight in front of me on a roundabout outside Romsey -- quite why he felt the need to invade my lane, as both his and my lanes gave access to the Romsey turning, I have no idea.  He clearly wasn't looking as my presence seemed to surprise him when I sounded my horn and made several internationally recognised hand gestures in his direction.  Anyway, what I keep coming back to on days like this is the question of exactly why those who authorise such things think that the height of the summer holidays is the right time to put up disruptive road works everywhere?  I mean, does a committee convene in an office in mid-July every year, rub their hands gleefully as they declare 'School summer holidays?  People off with the kids to the coast?  Well, we're really going to fuck them up!'  I know the usual excuse is that they have to carry out these works while the weather is fine, but this is surely bollocks as a), they carry them out all autumn and winter too and b), with global warming, nowadays we have long runs of fine dry weather from March onwards - so there's no excuse for trying to disrupt peoples' holiday travel.  Still, I think that the therapeutic influence of being out in nature today just about outweighed the frustrations of road works and traffic disruption.  But only just.

Electoral Dissonance

It's pretty much cognitive dissonance - the ability to hold two conflicting, mutually exclusive even, beliefs simultaneously - isn't it?  The way in which our ill-informed electorate appears to think, I mean.  Or at least, the way the right-wing press seems to believe that they think, judging by their headlines.  As ever, with the arrival of a new Labour Prime Minister, the press have gone into overdrive with stories about crippling taxes to pay for his policies, etc.  They are clearly relying upon what they assume are voters' reluctance to pay taxes, to which there is an element of truth: nobody likes paying out money.  But at the same time, those self same voters are guaranteed to be in favour of cutting NHS waiting lists, building new hospitals, schools and the like.  Not to forget better mental health care provisions to keep all those dangerous nutters off of the streets that the press are always on about, more policemen to deal with those terrorists and immigrant criminals they like to try and scare their readers with, more tanks, planes and ships to see off that Russian invasion they are always scaremongering about.  Between them, the press and the public want it all.  But how do they think all of this is paid for?  The reality is that any government's main source of revenue is general taxation.  That's right, those taxes that the people who want all these services don't want to pay. 

The problem is that for decades the press and successive governments have been trying to sell us the lie that you can have both high quality public services and low taxation.  New Labour told us the shortfall could be met through Private-Public Finance Initiatives, while the Tories, once they got past their bogus 'austerity' agenda, told us it was all about simply cutting the 'unpopular' bits of public spending, (ie that targeted at the poor and minorities), to focus public finances on the 'important' stuff instead.  (A manifest lie, of course, as they also cut policing, the justice system and defence to the bone, in order to finance ever bigger tax cuts to their rich buddies).  But this 'cognitive dissonance' isn't just confined to economics.  UK voters, for instance, have consistently indicated their disdain, repugnance even, for Trump, yet, at the same time, many of them simultaneously seem prepared to vote for Nigel Fartage and his band of Reform brigands - a man who has revelled in his alleged friendship with Trump and has frequently endorsed the fat bastard's policies.  (I know he's been trying to walk this back since the disaster of Trump's war against Iran, his threatening to seize Greenland and his various disparaging anti-UK comments, but some of us don't forget).  Again, mutually exclusive positions, surely?  It's as if they have no idea what Fartage actually stands for and proposes.  Which they might well not, the British electorate seems so ill-informed (and the press seems determined to keep them that way).  Ah well, there you have it - this week's political rant

House of the Living Dead (1973)

Every so often I come across a film which has fallen into such obscurity that even I haven't heard of it.  Such was the case with Anglo-South African horror film House of the Living Dead (1973), which I recently caught up with.  Yet, despite having never seen or heard of it, the whole thing had an air of familiarity about it, reminding me, at every turn, of other low budget shockers I'd seen.  The whole business of a young woman arriving at a remote country house and finding her fiancé/husband undergoing personality changes and being suspected of various heinous crimes, along with the mad lookalike relative hidden in the attic, seems to have come straight from The Black Torment (1964), for instance.  The antagonist's experiments in capturing souls, meanwhile, is highly reminiscent of 1972' The Asphyx, while the whole voodoo-on-the-plantation business recalls I Walked With a Zombie (1943).  Despite the film's title, however, there are no zombies present, with the whole voodoo angle being a piece of misdirection, for the horrors turn out to be of the strictly pseudo-scientific kind.  The real culprit is the mad twin brother, a reclusive doctor who lurks in the attic carrying out weird experiments on the local animal population, having found a way to extract their souls and store them in large jars.  There's an equally dotty mother who opposes her other (non-mad) son's marriage to his fiancée, who is about to arrive from England, as she doesn't want to risk the insanity which runs in the family being perpetuated into another generation.  Another complication arises when an English doctor who knew the mad twin at medical college arrives at the same time as the fiancée, planning to stay with some old friends at the neighbouring farm.

All manner of mayhem ensues, with brutal murders on the plantation, at first attributed to an escaped horse, a mysterious hooded figure lurking around the countryside and an increasingly frantic fiancée trying to fathom her husband-to-be's strange behaviour, clashing with his mother and attempting to find out what's going on in the attic.  In a frenzied climax, it is revealed that, sometime before the fiancée arrived, the mad brother had murdered his twin and swapped places with him, planning to extract the girl's soul and unite it with his brother's, which he is keeping in a glowing blue jar.  Inevitably, all those glowing jars get smashed when the visiting doctor turns up with the police and the evil twin finds himself attacked by all those souls, both human and animal, he had extracted.  Cue the lead actor staggering around screaming as ghostly animal noises play on the soundtrack and coloured lights play over his face, before he falls over the banister to his death, (landing next to his dead mother who had previously tossed over that same banister).  The film ends with the girl in the visiting doctor's arms - which seems a bit creepy as he's old enough to be her father.   House of the Living Dead is an entirely derivative film, with every element feeling as if it had been borrowed from another, better, film. Even the cast, headed by Shirley Ann Field, has a hand-me-down feel, with the leads all being vaguely familiar for half-remembered TV roles.  (Still, lead actor Mark Burns did win a Best Actor prize at the 1974 Stiges Film Festival, so somebody must have liked his over-the-top, scenery chewing, performance in his dual roles).   It's all directed smoothly but blandly by Ray Austin, best known for the hundreds of TV episodes he directed, first in the UK, then the US and sexploitation films like Virgin Witch (1972).  The only thing that makes the film stand out are its South African locations, which add a certain degree of sweaty exoticism to an otherwise overly familiar scenario.

(Despite never having heard of the film under the House of the Living Dead title, I later found out that it had originally been released in the UK under the title Doctor Maniac, which I vaguely recall having been referred to, in dismissive terms, in, I think, one of Alan Frank's books on horror movies.  But I hadn't seen it, even under that title). 

Holy Dementia, Fatman!

That Trump is an utterly unhinged psychopath is pretty much beyond question, (and the US electorate equally unhinged psychos for having re-elected him), but  exactly where are his delusions leading him?  Increasingly, I'm beginning to suspect that he sees himself as some kind of super-villain.  In his own head he probably sees himself as Blofeld, Thanos or Lex Luthor, but in reality, I feel that he's closer to The Penguin.  Not any of those more recent revisionist versions of the 'Batman' villain, but rather the version played by Burgess Meredith in the sixties TV series.  It sort of fits with his increasingly insane speeches and pronouncements.  I mean, when reading or listening to them, just imagine him wearing a purple top hat, monocle, clutching an umbrella and smoking a cigarette in a long holder - the image fits perfectly.  It's the same when you see him on TV, embarrassing himself and his country at some international event or other: as he waddles in front of the cameras, just imagine him in that outfit.  Again, it fits perfectly.  He even does that super-villain thing of telling us all his dastardly plans, in detail, before he tries to enact them.  Then wonders why they inevitably seem to fall flat or get foiled by NATO, Canada, the EU or even Iran.  Soon, I'm sure, he'll be sneering, just like Penguin used to do to Adam West's Batman, as he delivers his speeches.

Then there's his apparent with Barack Obama, sorry, Barack Hussein Obama as Trump insists on calling him.  Obama's been out of the White House for at least ten years, yet Trump still seems to see him as some kind of threat.  Could it be that he suspects that Barack Hussein Obama is really Batman, out to foil him at every turn?  Maybe he thinks that Joe Biden is Alfred the Butler, Bruce Wayne/Barack Hussein Obama's aged retainer?  Perhaps Obama should start dressing up as Batman and appearing, unannounced, at events Trump is hosting, just to freak him out.  I have a strong suspicion that, some day soon, Trump will appear at a press conference dressed as The Penguin and, if he doesn't like the questions he's being asked, point his umbrella at the press and release poison gas into the crowd, killing them all.  After that, it'll only be a short step to a live TV broadcast in which he has Obama dressed as Batman strapped to some infernal device and starts ranting about his latest dastardly scheme  -suitably peppered with bird puns - before sneering and departing by telling Obama how the device he's strapped to will kill him.  Even though he's left a ludicrously easy way for Batman to escape with a single bound.  We can only hope then that Obama/Batman catches up with Trump and beats him up in the style of the TV series, with words like 'Ka-pow!', 'Wham!' and 'Ooof!' appearing on the screen.

The Dying Days of SEO?

Google's long campaign to wreck its search engine and basically destroy organic search results has, of course, culminated in its current attempt to impose 'AI overviews' on searchers rather than traditional results.  Which means, obviously, that individual websites are getting even less traffic from Google than before (and it has been in terminal decline for more than ten years).  This, in turn, has meant that the entire 'Search Engine Optimisation' (SEO) sector has been left high and dry as it is now patently obvious to everyone that their various tricks and 'strategies' can no longer 'game' search in order to promote traffic to client sites.  So they are desperately turning to other means to try and get us site owners to pay them.  Judging by the emails I've been getting of late, at least.  I've always had emails from SEO 'experts' telling me that, for a small fee, naturally, they can boost my traffic, but I've always known just enough about how the web works that it is largely snake oil that's being sold.  Of late, though, the emails have been coming from people who are promising the same boosts to traffic, but via various 'publicity' methods.  I've had two just this week from an outfit telling me how they can get my stuff onto Roku and various other platforms.  Now, bearing in mind that they do correctly identify The Sleaze as a satire site, it should be pretty obvious that a streaming TV platform is hardly the best fit for a site publishing text stories.  (Besides, if I wanted to set up a channel on Roku, I could do it myself - it isn't that difficult in principle).  

In their latest missive they even tell me how The Sleaze's traffic is up 60% so it would be great time to take up their offer.  Which seems counter-intuitive as it clearly indicates that I can grow traffic without anybody's help.  (How they know what my traffic is, I have no idea - the only reliable guide these days are server logs - to which only I have access - as I've found that the various services I use can't accurately discern bots from real visitors and one (a very well known web stats service) apparently can't process top-level VPNs - so it just ignores traffic using them).  But this particular outfit is just one of many claiming that they can get me across more platforms - none of it is anything I can't do for myself, but don't, because I've already tried and found out that it doesn't work.  I was also contacted, out of the blue, by a service concerning The Sleaze's associated podcast, 'After Hours'.  They were asking me to send a link to what I considered my best episode so that they could listen to it.  Which seemed an odd request as they had clearly scraped the email address I use for 'After Hours' from one of the services it is hosted on (most probably Spotify), in which case they know where it is and can listen to any and every episode!  Anyway, after some research, I found that they are a legit service - they apparently match up guests for podcasts.  Of course if they had listened to 'After Hours' or even read the show descriptions, they'd have known that it doesn't use guests, it isn't that kind of podcast.  In fact, I quite literally manufacture my own 'guests' for 'After Hours'.   That said, there are a lot of podcasters out there who have used their services and seem happy with them, so good luck to them.  But I still think that their method of approach was more than a little odd.

Political Puppets

So, where is Mitch McConnell, the right-wing US Republican Senator and Trump enabler?  You know the guy - he's about three hundred years old and looks like a startled turtle that just been evicted from its shell.  Well, he hasn't been seen in an age - he's allegedly in hospital recovering from a fall, but, increasingly, people are suspecting that he's actually dead and has been for some time.  Some people claim to have spoken to him on the phone and his family has released some highly dubious 'proof-of-life' photos of him in hospital.  But with modern AI, that sort of thing can easily be faked.  Assuming that he is brown bread, why is everyone so reluctant to admit it?  Personally, I think that they are stalling in the hope that they can, in some way, resurrect him in order to keep up the Republican numbers in the Senate.  What form such a resurrection could take is the question, though.  Obviously, conventional medical attempts must already have failed - there's only so many times you can put thirty thousand volts through someone's heart without response before you have to concede that they are stone cold dead.  So, it is clear that unconventional measures will have to be employed.  They could, of course, go down the Frankenstein route and try massive multiple organ transplants to get him going again.  The problem with that lies in the sourcing of the organs as rejection is always a possibility.  They've doubtless learned from that fiasco with the late right-wing talkshow host Rush Limbaugh - there was an attempt to bring him back from the dead through simultaneous multiple organ transplants shortly after his demise.  The only fresh organs they could come up with at short notice were from a recently deceased young black man.  Limbaugh survived the operation and even revived, but he just seemed to know that he had the organs of a black person inside of him and rejected them in spectacular fashion - he literally exploded!

But what are the other options for brining McConnell back from the dead?  Well, there's always that old favourite, the Voodoo route.  Now, strictly speaking, this wouldn't bring him back to life, but rather see him raised from the dead as a zombie.  Which could have its advantages, from a political point of view, as a zombie McConnell would be completely compliant to the orders of his master.  Just the sort of Republican congressman that Trump likes.  Of course, there are those who might worry about the idea of a zombie McConnell, fearing that he'd start rampaging through congress, cracking open colleagues' heads and feasting on their brains, (although, some would argue, he'd probably starve if relied solely upon congress for his diet).  But it's only movie zombies that do that sort of stuff - traditional zombies created through Haitian Voodoo rites are compliant, slow-moving and rarely violent.  So, who knows, perhaps even now there are a bunch of Voodoo priests dancing around his hospital room, performing all sorts of arcane occult rites.  After all, if we're to believe Trump and Vance, the US is already infested with pet-eating Haitians, so by the law of averages, some of them would have to be well versed in Voodoo.  Personally, though, I think that they are going to go for the puppet option.  That's right, they're going to turn McConnell's dead body into a life size puppet.  That's why the delay and all the secrecy - they have to embalm him first, then replace his skeleton with a jointed metal framework, then work on attaching the strings, so that he can be manipulated like a puppet in a sixties Gerry Anderson TV series.  It wouldn't be the first time, although previous attempts have been somewhat less sophisticated - they apparently kept the Queen Mother going for several years as a simple puppet, with a stick up her arse operating her head and mouth, and a couple of sticks operating her hands, Muppet-style - she was always seen standing behind a balcony so they didn't have to worry about making her walk.  

Now, I know what you are going to say: 'Why didn't they do the same thing with Senator Graham instead of annoincing his death?'  Which is a fair question.  But there's an obvious answer: Graham's death was sudden, coming out of the blue, without a lengthy hospital stay to use as cover.  The same sort of thing happened with Princess Diana - there was just so much press attention surrounding her sudden death in a car crash that the authorities were forced to admit that she was dead almost immediately.  Believe me, if they'd had the chance of engineering a long hospital stay, then she'd still be with us today, jerkily wandering around on walkabouts, an embalmed smile permanently on her face, but posing no threat of embarassment to the Royal Family as she'd at last be completely under official control.

The Loreley's Grasp (1973)

As I've oft noted here, thanks to a combination of illegal uploads to the likes of YouTube and streaming TV's insatiable appetite for content, you can be sure that even the most obscure of low budget exploitation movies will eventually become available.  So it was that I was recently able to finally catch up with Spanish seventies horror film I recalled reading about when I was a kid, but which had remained elusive for decades.  The Loreley's Grasp (1973) is of interest for a couple of reasons: it represented an attempt to create a new movie monster, drawing from Germanic mythology for a change, plus it was written and directed by Amando D. Ossorio, best known for his 'Blind Dead' series of horror films.  Looking at its production and release dates, The Loreley's Grasp would seem to represent an attempt to follow up on the success of the first 'Blind Dead' film, introducing another, all-new, monster.  As Ossorio's presence suggests, the film is Spanish made, although set in West Germany - despite various establishing shots of German locations, it is pretty obviously shot in Spain, with a mainly Spanish cast, although the two leads are Italian and German.  The plot centres on the legendary siren of the Rhine, Loreley (or Lorelei, even), who is traditionally depicted as a beautiful woman who sits on her namesake rock in the Rhine, her song luring the crews of passing boats to their doom on nearby rocks.  Here, however, she becomes a water nymph who, during the full moon, transforms into a scaly reptilian creature that rips the hearts from her victims, in order to eat them and transform back again.  What this ensures, of course, is that the film has a pretty high gore quotient, with some pretty graphic, for the early seventies, heart rippings out, (with young women as frequent victims in order to justify some bared breasts).

Like many continental horror films of the era, despite having a contemporary setting, The Loreley's Grasp frequently slips back into the genre tropes of the forties, with a cast of characters who might have wandered in from one of Universal's classic horror movies.  The Burgomeister of the small town where most of the action takes place, the blind musician, the handsome hunter brought in to kill the monster, they're all present, along with the eccentric and mysterious savant/scientist who turns out to be an expert on the beast, the plucky lady teacher and even the Loreley's ancient and loyal retainer.  Add to all these stock characters the fact that, when in human form, Loreley travels around in a horse drawn coach, (she frequently turns up at the funerals of her victims), and the film ends up having a weird, time-warped feel about it.  The plot ultimately breaks down into following the various killings carried out by Loreley, with the hunter always one step behind.  Eventually, these murders go beyond being fuelled by her need for human hearts, with the killings increasingly intended to eliminate those who seem to know too much about her.  In order to pad out the plot and add some depth to the story, the script ultimately has to mash together the legend of the Loreley with that of Siegfried and the Rheingold - which means that Loreley is revealed to be Wotan's daughter, charged with guarding the golden treasure of the Nibelungs in her grotto beneath the Rhine, where she is attended by the three Rhine Maidens and her retainer Alberic.  Also thrown into the mix is the 'sword of Siegfried', an irradiated blade prepared by the savant, which can force Loreley back into her human form and kill her.

In terms of execution, The Loreley's Grasp fails to match the bar set by Ossorio with his previous movie, the first 'Blind Dead' film.  Despite a brisk opening, with the Loreley in scaly form crashing through some windows to claim its first victim before the titles have rolled, Ossorio fails to maintain this pace, following up with far too many talky scenes of exposition before we get back to the monster's deprivations.  Moreover, the script is poorly structured, with the presence of a nearby girls' finishing school set up early on, but then not developed properly, with the Loreley seemingly taking two thirds of the film to realise that there is a copious supply of beautiful babes who like to take their clothes off close to her lair.  An opportunity largely missed.  The film's biggest weakness, though, is its monster, which is a pretty unconvincing man-in-a-rubber-suit which, following Ossorio's previous monster, the shambling, relentless blind and undead Knights Templar, who exude eeriness and menace with their decayed appearance, comes as a major disappointment.  It simply lacks the blind dead's originality, coming over as a poor relative of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Consequently, the film lacks any real atmosphere or suspense.  On the positive side, it does have some strong gore scenes and features some familiar Euro-exploitation faces in the cast, notably Tony Kendall/Luciano Stella as the hunter, Helga Line as Loreley and Franco veteran Luis Barboo as Alberic.  Not as insane as a Jesus Franco movie nor as much fun as one of Paul Naschy's monster fests, (although, in the English dub I watched, his usual English-language voice is used by Tony Kendall), The Loreley's Grasp definitely falls into the second rank of seventies Spanish horror and, despite Ossorio's credentials, it isn't surprising that it has fallen into obscurity.

As a footnote, despite what the film would have you believe, the Loreley isn't actually an ancient Germanic myth, instead having her origins in an 1801 ballad by Clemens Brantano, which, in turn, was adapted, in 1824, by Heinrich Heine into a poem.  The poem was subsequently set to music and it is this version of Loreley, as a siren-like menace, that entered German popular culture. The version of the Siegfried myth the film entwines with Loreley is likewise the one created by Wagner for his 'Ring Cycle'.

Drawing a Blank

I've been sat here, staring at the blank text field in the Blogger back-end, for what seems like an eternity, trying to think of something to post.  But, to be frank, it's defeated me.  I'm drawing a blank.  Right now, I really feel like I've run out of steam.  Not just in terms of what to write here, but generally.  Maybe it's this run of extreme temperatures we've been enduring - while, to some extent, I feel that I've become acclimatised to plus thirty temperatures, I still find being out in them for any length of time physically draining, not to mention the loss of sleep they've caused - maybe it's the ongoing aftermath of the family bereavement earlier this year, maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm back in the familiar territory of feeling stalled on all fronts.  There's so much I should be doing, from work on the house to outstanding dental work, but I'm just not doing any of it.  It doesn't help that I'm a procrastinator by nature - I even told someone that in a dream once, so clearly it is something that stretches deep into my subconscious - so when I fall into one of these moods getting even the simplest of things done becomes a major trauma.  Damn it, I'm even stalled on producing the next episode of 'After Hours' - it isn't just that I haven't got anything scripted or recorded, I simply don't have a clue what its content is going to be.  Even my repainting programme for various model railway coaches has stalled, with numerous projects queued up.  To be fair, this is partially due to the weather - spray painting and high temperatures don't really go together.

A large part of the problem is knowing where to start with all the things that I should be doing.  This dilemma then becomes an excuse for procrastination.  Instead of just picking one thing to get started with, I just end up doing nothing.  I actually started the year well, with a plan of action: I got the first bit of dental work done and thought that I was setting in motion the replacement of the house's rotting old windows.  But the latter was then stalled by the fact that I live in what the council has designated a conservation area, meaning I need planning permission to replace the windows - something I've been assured won't be forthcoming.  I know what I need to do - get in someone who can refurbish the existing windows and install secondary double-glazing.  It will probably cost just as much as installing new, look-a-like windows with double glazing, but as, technically, nothing is being replaced and thus the exterior look of the house won't be affected, it won't require planning permission.  But this, along with the next stages of my dental work, were derailed by the events leading to the aforementioned bereavement, since when, I really haven't felt motivated to do anything.  Clearly, I need to get a grip on the situation and focus on one thing to get me started - if I can get something started then, hopefully, my enthusiasm for the other stuff might be revived.  Fundamentally, though, I think that my life needs a new direction - since I decided to take early retirement - and even more so since the events of earlier this year - I've been drifting, feeling rootless and without any real purpose.  Which, of course, is something else for me to procrastinate over.

The Big Balls of Courage?

Apparently, to be a true 'warrior' you have to have big balls.  Literally, it seems.  Self styled US Secretary of 'War' Pete Hegseth's latest obsession is apparently the testosterone levels of US servicemen - he thinks they have to be sky high if they are to be effective killing machines, sorry, 'warriors'.  It seems that there are to be compulsory tests of testosterone levels for US servicemen, with booster shots on offer if they are too low.  No, I'm not making this up, it's the latest policy announced by Hegseth.  Bearing in mind this buffoon's intelligence levels, he probably really does think that you can measure male testosterone levels by the size of someone's balls.  So his compulsory tests will probably involve lines of soldiers dropping their pants and having their knackers sized up.  You can just see it, some Master Sergeant taking a tape measure or steel rule to soldiers' testicles, weighing them up on a set of scales in order to decide whether they 'make the grade'.  Of course, this obsession with testosterone levels might end up conflicting with one of Hegseth's other obsessions, that of beards.  Having declared war on facial hair in the military, (and very upset at the fact that it is being ignored in many quarters), it seems somewhat perverse to propose injecting servicemen with testosterone, which could well promote facial hair growth.

Yes, we all should be worried - the idiocracy truly has arrived and the self-styled 'world's most powerful nation' is currently in the hands of the sort of morons who take everything literally:  they really do think that when someone is described as having cojones, it means, quite literally, that they have big balls which account for their supposed bravery.  It's the sort of simplistic world view that equates testosterone-driven aggression and thuggery with the idea of a 'warrior class'.  The likes of Hegseth have clearly seen far too many ludicrous Hollywood action films and read far too many war comics.  Next thing, they'll be promoting military guys on the size of their dicks - nothing under ten inches if you want to be a general.  It is perhaps appropriate to reiterate here that the Ancient Greeks, considered the progenitors of western thought and civilisation, were of the opinion that, far from being a sign of prowess, large genitalia were an indication of a bestial, unintelligent and uncivilised nature.  Which why most male sculptures from the era are modestly endowed - that was considered a sign of civilised values.  Something for Hegseth and his buddies to ponder on, I think.

In the Dark...

I don't want to keep harping on about this Ann Widdecombe business, but with the police investigation seemingly in chaos and contradicting itself, isn't it about time that they called in Miss Marple?  I mean, this sort of thing is right up her street: some bigoted old spinster gets offed in a remote and obscure village in the rural south west of England, there's no shortage of people who hated her thanks to her views and political connections, while the local police are a bunch of carrot crunchers.  I'm sure that Miss Marple would have it all tied up in no time, with assistance from the local vicar's daughter and the village cub scout pack.  Now, at this point, I was going to go off onto a complete tangent about some model railway stuff I'd just bought at this evening's local model train and toy fair, but at just after ten, the power went out, meaning that I have no internet, other than the very expensive minutes on my mobile phone - some of which I've been forced to waste making an outage report to the electricity company, (you can't just call them and report this sort of thing anymore - you have to fill in, in the pitch dark with a half charged phone, bloody online forms).  But hey - it's just come back on, so let's hope that, once the broadband connection has reset, it stays on long enough to get this finished and posted.  So, anyway, the stuff I got tonight:

These are a couple of the old Hornby 57ft coaches from the late 70s/early 80s.  They were actually mostly based around a generic moulding with a few variations to produce 'Southern', 'Great Western' and 'LNER' coaches. The latter had beading around the windows and doors and a teak finish, while the only difference between the 'Southern' and 'GWR' coaches, apart from the liveries, were their roof designs.  The upper of the two here was a unique later addition to the range, a restaurant/buffet car that was only offered in GWR (and later BR Western Region) livery.  The lower one is the 'Southern' version of the corridor composite.  I have no idea what I'm going to do with them -  they were bought on a whim because they  were cheap.  Both will undoubtedly be repainted and renumbered, then I'll figure out what to do with them - the 'Southern' coach will probably end up as part of a boat train formation.

These three are some rather tatty Trix wagons which I picked up very cheaply.  They all have various marks on their bodies, (the container wagon's other size has what look like several melt marks from a soldering iron on it). and one has a missing coupling.  But there's nothing that can't be repaired (even the soldering iron attack aftermath).  These will supplement my Trix locos and, with the use of the converter wagons I now have, will also be able to run in formations with stock and locos with Triang-style couplings.  

Well, the power's still on, (I'm guessing that it was a tripped fuse at the sub-station, although, until they find out why it tripped, there's a risk it'll go out again), so I'll post this and e-mail the police as to why they haven't got Miss Marple on the Widdecombe case yet... 

Disrespecting the Dead?

I see that the right-wing snowflakes have been out in force following this Ann Widdecombe business, working themselves up into their usual frenzy of self-righteousness over anyone perceived as 'disrespecting' their fallen 'heroine'.  We had their 'thought police' in the form of the right-wing press fuming because Sky's Adam Boulton had apparently described her as an 'old maid' and a 'spinster', forcing him to issue an apology.  Now, I'm no fan of Boulton, although his Alistair Campbell-induced on air meltdown in the aftermath of the 2010 general election was hugely entertaining, but seriously, we're meant to condemn him for simply stating facts?  It's a fact that Widdecombe never married, making her, by definition, a spinster and at her age, 'old maid' is also a pretty fair description.  If I'd been in his position, the only apology I'd have issued would have been along the lines of  - 'I'm sorry that you are so oversensitive that you feel the need to censor public speech you don't deem to be 'woke' enough'.  I mean, it's just political correctness gone mad, isn't it?  Bloody right wing woke bastards getting upset over nothing!  It's just words, for God's sake!  

But we're back in that strange world where you aren't allowed to speak ill of the dead.  Well, not if they were some kind of right-wing icon, that is.  I'm sure that if, say, Jeremy Corbyn, had passed away, regardless of whether he had died of natural causes, or been assassinated by an axe-wielding neo Nazi maniac, indoctrinated by years of listening to the speeches of Nigel Farage, whilst making jam or planting tomato plants on his allotment, the right-wing press would all be telling us that he had been a loony left-wing extremist hell-bent on having us all raped and murdered by one-legged transsexual illegal immigrant terrorists.  Yet if, say, I was to (accurately), describe the late Ms Widdecombe as a 'bigoted old biddy', then I'd doubtless find myself facing the opprobrium of her, equally batty and bigoted, admirers.  It's the same across the pond, where politicians from across the board feel obliged to find positive things to say about the recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that he was a hypocritical Trump-enabling right-wing reactionary who had long ago destroyed whatever credibility he might once have had.  We really need to start questioning all this nonsense about 'respecting the dead' and 'not speaking ill of the dead'.  Look, once someone is dead we can say what we like about them - legally speaking, you can't libel the dead - so why are we so reticent about actually speaking the truth about them?  Just because I think, correctly, that Ann Widdecombe espoused and worse still, put into practice when in government, some utterly repugnant ideas which should have no place in any civilised society, doesn't mean to say that I think she deserved to be bludgeoned to death.  I'm entitled to express my opinion, for God's sake.  It's called 'free speech' you right-wing woke warrior snowflakes!

White Rage

It was another of those times when you could just feel that mixture of fury and frustration emanating from the racists over on Twitter when a suspect in the Anne Widdicombe was arrested and turned out to be a white British national.  Once again, their dreams of stirring up more race hate, a few riots and some burnings down of hostels housing asylum seekers had been foiled by inconvenient facts.   They'd all been banking on it being a racially-motivated murder and had already started drooling over the sort of provocative headlines that would follow the killing of a well known extreme right-wing politician with hardline views on immigration, by a non-white perpetrator, preferably an illegal immigrant.  So, naturally, they're all venting their frustrations, raging how the police wouldn't have mentioned the suspect's race if they'd been non-white, (despite the fact that nowadays, thanks to lobbying by extremists like them, the authorities have to mention such things, regardless of relevance), and trying to find ways to redefine 'white' as maybe 'not quite white', or clutching to straws, like the idea that the suspect might actually be a naturalised UK citizen from Eastern Europe.  It's surely only a matter of time before they start claiming that the suspect is non-white, but wearing 'white face' as a disguise.

Maybe  the usual rent-a-fascist mob will gather outside wherever the suspect is being held and try to storm the place, armed with damp cloths with which they'll try to wipe the 'white face' off to reveal that they are actually a Somali illegal immigrant.  Indeed, maybe this could be the start of a new campaign by the right-wing press to expose the 'army' of disguised illegals living, unsuspected, in local communities.  'How many of them are living amongst us?  Is your neighbour a secret illegal immigrant?  Do they ever go out in the rain?'  Readers could be encouraged to 'accidentally' spray suspected neighbours with a hosepipe, to see if their 'whiteness' washes off, (obviously, hosepipe bans have nothing to do with the heatwave - they're a liberal conspiracy to stop the exposure of those illegals falsely living as whites).  Doubtless any white celebrities who have spoken compassionately about the plight of immigrants and asylum seekers will be targeted as potential illegals in disguise. 'Is Gary Lineker really a Bangladeshi immigrant?  He comes from Leicester and the place is full of brown people - is he secretly one of them?  We challenge him to wash his face live on TV to see if the white comes off!'.  After all, everybody in the tabloid media knows that you can really boost sales if you can link celebrities to a contentious issue - who cared about peadophiles until they started unmasking celebs as kiddy fiddlers?  So, why not do it with immigration?  It's only logical.

One of Us?

God help me, I think I'm beginning to become acclimatised to these plus thirty temperatures.  I've found this latest bout far easier to live with than the previous two.  Of course, the wider question is just how acclimatised to Nigel Farage's grift the voters of Clacton have become.  Because that seems to be the main plank of his campaign for re-election in a self-inflicted and entirely unnecessary by-election: 'What's the world coming to when a man can't accept the odd five million quid here and there without having to account for it?  It's bloody outrageous!'  A bold platform to campaign on - I mean, I'm sure that many, many people in Clacton can identify with his dilemma.  But while the whole business seems to be sliding into farce - with the main parties refusing to play Fartage's game and not running candidates, it looks like he'll be spending the campaign debating a man with a bin on his head - there is, obviously, a fundamental principle at stake here: the accountability of elected representatives.  It's clear that Reform UK doesn't subscribe to the idea that if you are elected to office, then you are held to a higher standard and that all of your conduct, particularly your financial affairs, are up for scrutiny.  At least, they don't accept that such standards apply to them - they seem more than happy, though, to try and call members of other parties to account for alleged transgressions. 

Farage can wriggle around at claim that, technically, he wasn't an MP when he accepted that five million so it didn't have to be declared, but the fact is that he is an MP now and bearing in mind his interest in promoting dodgy crypto-schemes, (lobbying the Bank of England not to impose restrictions on transactions, even), the fact that he accepted this sum from a crypto-currency billionaire is a matter of legitimate public interest.  Trying to avoid accountability in the matter by resigning and forcing a by-election so that he can try and turn the whole issue into one of 'The Establishment vs The Little Guy', is so transparently dishonest that surely nobody is fooled.  But then again, part of his success has been based around selling himself to voters as 'one of them' - despite the fact that, even before that five million quid - he was a very wealthy individual from a privileged background - he's a public school boy - with a prior career in the city.  But this time, he may have overstepped in this regard: 'ordinary' people don't get cash gifts of that kind.  Moreover, he won't be up against 'The Establishment' in this by-election - he'll be up against Count Binface, who could be heading for a record share of the vote in a by-election.  It'll certainly be more than the ninety five votes he got at the Makerfield by-election.   It's all pointless, anyway.  If Farage wins and resumes his position as MP for Clacton, then the Standards Committee investigation into the five million will simply resume and could result in another by-election being forced upon the voters of Clacton.

Yesterday's Zaniness...

Just recently I've watched a number of episodes of the Kenny Everett Video Show.  I'm not sure his posthumous reputation as some kind of 'zany comedy genius' can stand many more of these repeats.  This is the show he did for ITV, for its final series, it became Kenny Everett's Video Cassette, but the format was much the same.  Anyway, watching it now, it is hard to believe that this was ever considered 'cutting edge', let alone 'daring'.  Basically, each episode is simply a platform for a couple of performances from well known pop acts of the era, punctuated by some very weak, sub-Monty Python shenanigans, some involving Everett dressing up as various characters and cracking lots of corny old jokes and the dance group Hot gossip performing some supposedly 'naughty' routines.  The lack of a studio audience doesn't help - instead we hear the studio crew cackling away every so often, which simply gives the impression that this is Everett performing for his mates down the pub.  The only segments which still seem mildly amusing are the animated 'Captain Kremmen' episodes - by the final series, though, these had been replaced by vastly inferior live action versions.  It's not that it is irredeemably awful - Everett exudes a great deal of charisma which carries the show through its many longueurs - it is just that even when it was made, it was all very old hat and derivative.  That, combined with an air of quiet desperation which accompanies many of the skits, (they aren't developed sufficiently to be described as sketches), leaves one wondering just why Everett was so popular back in the day.

I have to admit, that I never saw these shows when they were first transmitted, so this isn't a case of revisionism on my part.  Perhaps younger me would have found them amusing at the time, but decades later, they do little for me.  I came to Kenny Everett on TV after he moved his show to the BBC and it became the Kenny Everett Television Show, an entirely different kettle of fish.  This was a fully fledged sketch show, where Everett's characters were given more room to develop and better scripts.  The range of characters on display was wider, with running gags and catchphrases established, helping the show to achieve a much more polished finish - it actually felt like a proper TV show rather than simply a self indulgent video Everett had recorded with his mates.  The presence of a studio audience not made up of employees and mates helped - the laughter didn't feel forced.  It proved a popular format, propelling Everett into the mainstream of TV entertainment.  But, inevitably, he threw his success away, not by breaking broadcasting standards, as he has when working on BBC radio, instead by appearing at a pre-election political rally for Maggie Thatcher.  He made all kinds of excuses for his appearance and various of his friends and associates tried to claim that he was essentially non-political or even politically naive, claiming he only appeared at the Tory rally because they'd asked him first, but it was to no avail - he'd alienated part of his audience.  It's difficult to present yourself as an anti-establishment, anarchic, comedian when you end up supporting the most establishment political figure of the time.  Viewing figures for his show began to decline - perhaps coincidentally, because it certainly felt as if it was past its prime and running out of steam - and Everett gradually vanished from our screens.  As I say, looking back now at his ITV show, on which his TV fame was built, it's difficult to see why it was considered so 'daring' - maybe it's a case that you had to be there at the time to understand it's success.

Glorious Counter Revolution (Part Two)

Getting back to that idea of bringing the US back under the umbrella of British rule after their, frankly disastrous (for the rest of the world) 250 year experiment in independence, I think that we need to do more to expose their foundation myth as the pack of lies it really is.  As we've already established, that whole business about throwing off the shackles of a tyrannical king was all utter bollocks - George III, like every British monarch since William and Mary was a constitutional monarch with very limited powers.  It was really about the fact these revolting colonists didn't want to pay tax - most specifically the taxes which would pay for the UK's defence of them against the expansionist French, (we were, after all, in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars at the time).  But even then, it wasn't quite that simple, as it wasn't everyone who would have been paying the lion's share of those taxes, the main burden would have fallen on the wealthy. Like their 'Founding Fathers'.  These guys were the eighteenth century equivalent to today's billionaires and, like those contemporary guys, just don't see why they should pay tax.  Any tax.  So, again, just like today, these rich creeps decided to manipulate the populace into acting against their own interests.  Rather than trying to buy the system to elect their own right-wing millionaire clown, they instead cooked up a revolution by mobilising the masses against British rule.  Which, of course, involved lots of misinformation about the British.  Like the King being a tyrannical absolute monarch.

One of the supposed key events in working up this revolutionary fever was the so called 'Boston Massacre', when British soldiers allegedly opened fire on protesters in Boston, resulting in casualties.  It was the basis for much revolutionary propaganda.  But, bearing in the mind the parallels we've been drawing between 'Founding Fathers' and today's billionaires and their MAGA mobs, how do we know that these really were British soldiers?  I mean, the MAGA crazies like to claim that those January sixth whackos weren't really extreme right-wing Trump thugs fired up by Trump himself, but actually Antifa agitators in disguise, their actions designed to discredit Trump and his supporters and backers.  This is a narrative spun not just by the usual online crazies, but by wealthy Trump supporters, too.  So, is it inconceivable that those wealthy 'Founding Fathers' didn't organise some revolutionary cronies to dress up as British soldiers and shoot colonists in order to ferment dissent and slander the British?  Far fetched?  No more than that Antifa-disguised-as-MAGA January Sixth bollocks - and large numbers of Americans seemed happy to swallow that, so why shouldn't we use our version to further erode their foundation myths?

Because, you know, it's important to disabuse Americans of their self-aggrandising creation myths, from which they derive their extraordinary hubris that makes them think that they are somehow the God's 'chosen people', the 'Land of the Free' and the 'Greatest Nation on Earth'.  While Trump's reign might have started to beat some humility into some of them as a result of the US' subsequent lack of popularity in the rest of the world, it's important to remember that Trump isn't really that much of an aberration.  The US has always been a hypocritical bully that likes to preach its supposed democratic values at the rest of the world whilst simultaneously taking opportunistic advantage of the misfortunes and weakness of other nations in order to extend its wealth and power.  It's just that under Trump, the bullying and hypocrisy is undisguised.  But with their perfidy out in the open, it means that we no longer have to listen to their tiresome lectures about their supposed moral superiority, their claims to be a bastion of free speech or how we all 'owe' them for World War Two. (ignoring the fact they couldn't be bothered to turn up until some of us had already been holding off the fascists for nearly three years).  It's time we started reminding them that, in reality, their whole state was founded on lies, the creation of a bunch of super-rich scumbags who gaslit their population into a 'revolution', which swapped rule by an elected parliament (albeit in London), for rule by the aforementioned super-rich under the cloak of local 'democracy'.  An exaggeration?  Well, maybe a bit, but ultimately I'm so tired of being lectured by Americans about the UK's 'awful' imperialist past and all the bad shit done in our names back then.  But at least we acknowledge the evils of our past and accept that our prosperity was based upon the exploitation of weaker nations.  So, I think it's about time the Yanks started critically evaluating their history and accepting that their prosperity is equally based upon the bullying and exploitation of weaker nations and that they also have been responsible for a lot of nasty shit.  They aren't the greatest nation on earth by a long chalk, just another country founded on the lies of the rich.

Some Seventies Sitcoms Revisited

Seventies sitcoms are a funny thing - and not necessarily funny in the way intended by the makers.  Watching them now, from a distance of fifty-plus years, you are sometimes left wondering exactly why some of them were so popular at the time.  Of course, in part, for me, the answer lies, partially, in the fact that when I first saw them, I was a child and far less critical, not to mention far less aware of the gender, class and racial politics that underpinned the humour.  While most of them seem dated, to put it mildly, I many of their attitudes, as always, we have to put it all in context and accept that, at the time of their making, these merely reflected the wider social values of the time.  Well, usually.  Even as a child back in the seventies I thought 'hilarious' ITV race comedy Love Thy Neighbour was offensive, it's supposed humourous look at race relations in the UK simply an excuse to for having every offensive racial epithet for non-whites spoken on air in the guise of it all being 'a joke'.  'But the black characters give as good as they get', was the excuse used by the makers.  Except that a black man calling a white man 'honky' (the extent of the white epithets used), is in no way equivalent to a white man calling a black man by the N-word (amongst other offensive terms).  Mind Your Language, which came later in the seventies is another ITV sitcom which often gets bracketed with Love Thy Neighbour as being irredeemably racially offensive, but, having recently seen most of the first series again, for the first time since its first screening, I'm left feeling somewhat ambivalent about it.

The thing about Mind Your Language - which is based around a class of English as a Foreign Language students and the tribulations of their teacher as he tries to teach them the language - is that it isn't so much that it bandies about racial epithets, but that it trades in some truly outrageous racial and cultural stereotypes.  Where it does employ terms of fairly mild racial abuse, it puts them in the mouths of non-white characters, most notably the Pakistani and Sikh students, who engage in an ongoing war of words.  At the time, this must have seemed a smart way to get away with generating a few cheap laughs from their use without seeming to be endorsing white vs black race hate.  But it is those stereotypes which seem most jarring today - they really are crude in the extreme, but at least not confined to non-white characters.  Whilst the Pakistani, Sikh and Indian characters do, indeed, speak in the stereotypical 'amusing' fashion popularised by Peter Sellers, complete with mispronunciations and malapropisms, so do the Greek, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, French, Japanese and Chinese characters, just with different accents.  They all conform to the appropriate cultural stereotypes: the Austrian woman is stern and frosty, the French girl a sexy tease, the Italian guy a sex maniac, the Chinese girl a propaganda-spouting devotee of Chairman Mao and so on.  The thing is that the stereotypes are so lazily obvious, that they simply fail to offend.  That, combined with the fact that the characters, regardless of race and culture, are presented as being sympathetic defuses the potential offensiveness of the situation.  Which isn't to say that the series isn't as corny as hell, peddling in hoary old jokes and running through all the farcical stock situations so beloved of seventies sitcoms.  But was very popular back in the late seventies.  So popular was it in overseas markets that, incredibly, five years or so after its initial run had ended, another series was made for export, featuring many of the same characters and stereotypes.  Even foreigners, it seems, can enjoy a good stereotype, even of themselves...

Travelling Hopefully...

According to Robert Louis Stevenson, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  Well, I'm betting that he wasn't trying to get to the coast from Crapchester on a summer's day.  It's just as well that I find the sight and sound of the sea relaxing - I needed to unwind after the nightmare journey down today.  OK, OK, I know that I started out late, so got caught up with school traffic and the like, but there was really no excuse for the sort of insanity on display on the roads today.  Along with far too many roadworks.  I was hoping that the journey back this evening would be easier, it usually is, but no, I found myself constantly hindered by slow drivers in front of me, tailgaters behind, over hesitant learners and even some idiots racing horses and buggies on the last stretch of dual carriageway before home.  I kid you not on that last one - it really happened, not for the first time, either.  So, was it all worth the effort and trauma?  Well, with more crazy temperatures forecast next week, I decided that I'd take the opportunity for a day out when it was warm enough to enjoy the beach, but still cool enough for getting stuck in seemingly interminable traffic jams without suffering heatstroke.  So, from that point of view it was worthwhile.  Plus, the beach made for a more unusual venue for my daily walk than the local park.  

Anyway, this was my second trip to the New Forest this week - the first time I've visited since they started charging for parking there.  The effects of the charges can already be seen: near empty car parks everywhere.  I know it is still early in the season, but in my experience, there's usually far more visitors than I saw evidence of at this time of the year.  The charges are an absolute pain - like most people I'll habitually visit a number of venues in the New Forest in the course of a day trip.  Now, it'll not only cost me a small fortune every time I go down there, but I'll have to go through the rigmarole of trying to pay via phone (they offer no alternative).  It's one of those bloody systems where you have to speak your registration number - which their software inevitably tells you it can't hear, or turns out to have completely misheard it.  Meaning, of course, going round the houses again and again - racking up charges all the time, which, of course, is the point of the exercise.  It does no good to try the option of texting the reg number as, when you call back, it claims not to have received it - more costs racked up.  I ended up shouting my registration down the phone in order for it to be correctly taken.  I then had to waste more time getting it to understand the make of my car - apparently it's never heard of a Saab.  Yet more shouting.  Incredibly, you can key in your card details - begging the question of why you can't key in the other details?  I must have wasted nearly half an hour trying to pay for an hour's parking on what Forestry England claims is a car park but, in reality, is simply a strip of unmaintained gravel at the entrance of an enclosure.  Bearing in mind that the New Forest is a national park and therefore belongs to the nation, ie taxpayers like me, it really is a bloody liberty to be trying to rinse us for money like this.