After Hours: Voodoo Drums Over England

We’re After Hours again, where the mysterious ‘Night Caller’ is disturbing the sleep of people who didn’t even know he was listening. Who is he? Is he really from ‘Radio Midnight’, the talk station that calls you? Meanwhile, Dagenham’s top citizen journalist investigates strange goings-on at the local supermarket which could lead to the sound of Voodoo drums being heard all across England. The-Man-in-the-Pub declares war on street performers after an unfortunate encounter with a ‘living statue’, while ‘Camera Obscura’ is back, discussing an obscure bondage-themed beach movie. The WNKR late movie is previewed before we find out whether ‘Immigrants Ate My Granny!’ as political candidate claims widespread cannibalism amongst illegal immigrants.

Listen Here: After Hours: Voodoo Drums Over England 

‘After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio, ChatGPT with sound effects by Freesound Community via Pixababy.com. Opening theme ‘Twilight Static’ and closing theme ‘Twilight Sunder’ by Doc Sleaze via Freemusic.ai.

Officially the first episode of Series Two, this seventh edition of 'After Hours' turned out to be something of a trial to produce.  By last Friday, I thought that I'd got it all in the can, but then I started to try and put it all together and realised that the segments just felt unbalanced and didn't establish any kind of rhythm. So, it was back to the drawing board - three already recorded items were discarded and I hurriedly wrote and recorded three replacements.  By Saturday, I had something I was happier with - better balanced and with a better rhythm to it, so I could finally add the sound effects.  The three discarded items will, doubtless, turn up in the next episode.  The main difference you will here between this and previous episodes is the theme music, with new opening and closing themes.  Hopefully, with three segments already 'in the can', the next episode can come together a bit more easily! 

New Media, Same Old Cobblers...

Being the time of year when I find myself driving around quite a lot, as I try to get the most out of the good weather with trips all over the place, I end up listening to Radio Four in the car more than usual, (I'm too old for Radio One and have been boycotting Radio Two since they sacked Scott Mills).  Which means that I hear all sorts of stuff that might otherwise have passed me by - the suggestion, for instance, that broadcasters like the BBC and ITV putting material onto You Tube should have it boosted in their algorithms.  A suggestion which, not surprisingly, has been met with hostility by a lot of those You Tube 'creators' who bang out endless crappy videos.  Especially those self-styled 'citizen journalists'.  There was one such example raging against the idea that the news output of BBC News or ITV News should be given priority over his 'reports'.  Yeah, I'll just bet you don't want something as outrageous as reporting that attempts to be balanced and neutral, actually basing itself on facts and created by professionals, competing with your paranoid, conspiracy driven lunacy, eh?  Quite frankly, a bit more in the way of real factual reporting is what You Tube and social media in general needs, bearing in mind that a scary number of people seem to glean all of their ideas and opinions from stuff put out by these 'citizen journalist' types - basically completely unqualified amateurs, usually with extreme right political agendas.

I also heard the head honcho of You Tube playing down this idea of prioritising legitimate content, claiming that You Tube is all about 'choice' and how their wonderful algorithm will always serve you up appropriate viewing suggestions.  Which, as the interviewer pointed out, simply wasn't true.  From personal experience I can attest to the fact that it frequently serves me up all manner of irrelevant and sometimes offensive viewing options.  Getting back to those 'creators', though, I also had to endure hearing one of the people behind creating and distributing their content across You Tube telling us how wonderful they were and how much better and in tune with public demand than mainstream TV is.  Really?  Their argument always seemed to be based upon the idea that, thanks to being across social media, they have 'reach', which means that 'everyone' is aware of them.  Well, I'm not.  I have no interest in the amateurish, egotistical output of these exhibitionist cocks.  Aha! is the response - but you  aren't in the target age group.  Which is exactly the point - the entire entertainment audience in the UK, let alone globally, doesn't consist of adolescent, easily impressed and influenced, males.  Moreover, even those who fall into this demographic will age and within ten years will no longer be interested in this shit any more.  Just because something is getting 'clicks' is no indication of actual popularity, let alone quality.  On You Tube, for instance, someone just has to hit 'play' on a video for it count as a 'hit', even if they only watch the first couple of seconds.  For all we know, people might simply be clicking on these videos by 'creators', realising after a few seconds that they are shit and turning off.  Hardly an endorsement.  We really do need to be very careful about the supposed 'reach' and popularity of platforms like You Tube, as the stats used to back up the claims of their supporters are highly suspect.

Dangerous Plant

Back in the day, I used to have a bad habit of just glancing at headlines on newspaper or web stories, misreading them and coming up, in my head, with some elaborate and bizarre story to justify my misreading.  Well, for the first time in years, I did it the other day, when I thought that a headline on an online aggregator read along the lines of 'Musk Plants Threaten Local Community'.  Naturally, my first reaction was to think 'Jesus, not satisfied with using his shitty social media platform boosting fascists around the world, firing off dangerous rockets that explode shortly after take off and trying to make robots powered by his crap AI, that crazy bastard has now started creating flesh eating ambulatory mutant plants!'  Worse than that, I speculated, he's unleashing them against unsuspecting small towns in the US - doubtless those that didn't vote for Trump in the last election.  Even as I think this, I thought, innocent people are being chased down streets by slavering plant monsters, with tooth-lined blossoms, oozing green sap.  Or maybe they are trained only to eat suspected illegal immigrants?  Of course, upon actually looking at the story, I found that the 'plants' referred to were of a completely different kind - the story was actually about how a small town was opposed to the building of giant data centres needed to power Musk's AI in their vicinity.  And who could blame them?  They are probably far more dangerous than ambulatory killer vegetation in terms of the vast quantities of energy and water they use and their potential contribution to global warming. 

But, I certainly can't deny my contribution to the problem.  I try very hard to restrict my use of AI, always aiming to try and get it to fulfil whatever task I'm asking of it in a single take, so to speak.  I always have that slight twinge of guilt when I think about the resources I've just burned up doing something trivial like creating an image or a podcast segment.  But then I'd shrug and think hell, the data centre processing my task is probably in Wisconsin or Ohio, so why should I care?  I mean, if Ohio, say, was to be burned to a crisp, the civilised world might not hear about it for years.  But those data centres are creeping closer - there's one fairly close to me, in Slough, where it is being blamed for a rise in temperatures in the area.  Mind you, that simply prompted me to paraphrase Sir John Betjeman: 'Come friendly data centres, burn up Slough'.  Levity aside, the expansion of these data centres does pose a serious problem.  Apparently, approval has been given for the construction of large numbers of them in the UK, despite the fact that the UK has neither the electricity generating capacities, nor the water supplies, required for their operation, if all were to be built.  'Just build more power stations and reservoirs', is the glib response that I heard recently in a radio debate.  But, leaving aside the slow rate at which we build power stations, what about the environmental effects of this?  As for the water situation - well, we are, finally, building more reservoirs, but this is to meet domestic demand for water, with this Summer's drought showing how inadequate our current supplies are.  If we let the data centres start guzzling these new supplies instead, then we're back to square one.

Of course, the obvious solution is to come up with a way for AI to operate without being so resource-intensive.  Has anyone thought of asking ChatGPT or Claude how this might be done?  After all, we keep getting told that they can answer just about anything... 

Kolchak: The Night Stalker - Seventies Weirdness on a Budget

Over the past few days I've watched a number of episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  For a series that only ran for a single truncated season of twenty episodes in the mid-seventies, it has proven remarkably influential.  Indeed, it is pretty much the epitome of a cult TV series, in that it was short-lived, had low ratings on its original network run, remains fairly obscure with regard to the general public, yet has maintained a devoted and loyal fanbase.  Watching episodes now, one is left feeling amazed that it ever went to series, being a spin off of two highly rated TV movies, (The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973)), whose formats and subject matter would have seemed to be too restrictive for development into a typical prime time network show of the era.  But they gave it a go.  They just didn't give it much of a budget - the episodes are generally scrappy looking, with lots of over-familiar studio sets standing in for exteriors, threadbare production values and some pretty ropey looking monsters.  It is largely carried by the two main cast members, Darren McGavin (as Carl Kolchak) and Simon Oakland (as his harassed boss Tony Vincenzo) and some truly wild scripts which found ingenious ways to try and avoid making the format feel too repetitive.  Although, in truth, every episode was simply a slight variation on the formula of dogged reported uncovers some supernatural threat and has to battle police and authorities to resolve it, but high level cover ups ensure that nobody believes him and his stories never see the light of day.  In the first four episodes broadcast, for instance, he dealt with a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper, a zombie, a vampire and a werewolf (on a cruise ship) in quick succession.  It's to the great credit of the writers that, after running through the traditional monsters, they managed to keep coming up with ever more bizarre creations of their own to keep the series going, including an energy eating monster, a shape-shifting vengeful Native American spirit, a Spanish Moss creature conjured up by the subject of a sleep experiment, a rogue robot and a humanoid reptile.  

At times, despite the restrictions of network TV in the seventies, everything came together - the claustrophobic sets, the limited lighting used to disguise their shoddiness, some truly bonkers scripts, the often larger-than-life performances and some surprisingly good direction - to give episodes, in parts, a truly feverish, even nightmarish, feel.  The only thing that I could never suspend my disbelief over was the fact that Kolchak still had a job, despite his boss's weekly threats to sack him, as, not only were his supernatural stories all spiked, but he never seemed to file any other copy.  Overall, though, you don't come away thinking that this is something that requires a remake of any kind, as it's charm is very much the result of a particular period in time, combined with some crazy writing and fortuitous casting.  Yet, about twenty years ago, somebody tried to do just that.  I say 'somebody', but it was actually ABC, the network that screened the original TV movies and series.  It was hamstrung from the outset by copyright issues: the literary rights to the Kolchak character lie with Jeff rice, upon whose then unpublished novel the first TV movie was based, while Universal retain rights to the TV series - ABC, thanks to its continued ownership of the TV movies,still had dramatic rights to the character.  What this meant in practice was that the new series could only use elements established in those two TV movies, nothing from the TV series.  The resulting series, titled simply The Night Stalker, had only a cursory relationship with the original.  Kolchak was now an investigative reporter with a murdered wife, who looks into other unsolved murders, trying to link them to his wife's and establish some kind of pattern.  Gone was the 'monster-of-the-week' format and with it, the fun.  Not surprisingly, it lasted only six weeks on air, with four episodes left unaired.

On the face of it, the remake series seems to be another example of someone trying to exploit a property without actually understanding where the appeal of the original lay.  They doubtless saw the old series and thought, 'Hey, people like that even though it is really rickety and whacky with no budget - we could remake it 'properly', with a proper budget and actors and then more people will love it!'  Which, of course, isn't the way nostalgia works - devotees of the original series loved it precisely because it was scrappily made on backlot sets, yet delivered in the weird thrills department through ingenious scripts and performances which could carry you past those shortcomings.  But the problem is that to understand that, you have to see Kolchak in its proper context of being a seventies US network product, born of a time when networks were becoming aware that they had to find ways to break out of the indentikit formats for TV shows of that era, but were too timid to really go the whole hog and back something really different.  This resulted in shows like Kolchak, that brought in ideas from outside of the mainstream, but then tried to force them into a familiar, cosy, format, in the belief that audiences wouldn't be able to handle them otherwise.  But people nowadays, it seems, are unable to contextualise stuff, (hence all those warning you get before screenings of old TV shows that they 'reflect the values of their era' - well, of course they do, that surely goes without saying), with the idea that the past might be different from the present seemingly being too mind-blowing for them to grasp.  Anyway, if you like the weird and offbeat seventies style, then Kolchak: The Night Stalker is for you - the episodes vary wildly in terms of quality, but overall, it's an enjoyable experience, often harking back to the good old days of B-movies and pulp magazines in tone and execution.

Lies, Malice, False Reporting, Hacks and Google

You know, I hate starting the week with a mega moan.  (Who am I kidding?  I love a bloody good moan).  But my Saturday turned into an online nightmare thanks to Google.  I was just settling down to watch some crappy TV, (a favourite Saturday early evening pastime), with half an eye on checking my emails, when I see an email from Google saying that they've removed a post from this blog because it has been reported as contravening their content guidelines.  Now, Google's regular censorship on the nebulous grounds of contravening content guidelines is like a red flag to a bull to me at any time, but even more so when the post in question was simply the one promoting the latest episode of the 'After Hours' podcast.  I mean, it simply comprised the promotional artwork for the episode, a brief synopsis, a link to where it can be heard and some brief notes on the creative process behind it.  Nothing that contravened any kind of content guidelines - certainly no promotion of violence, child pornography, illegal activities or anything else they list.  Of course, trying to resolve this sort of thing is made next to impossible by Google's penchant for secrecy, in that they won't tell you exactly what contravenes which of their guidelines, nor will they tell you who or what reported your content in the first place.  So, your only recourse is to use the link provided to request an immediate review.  Within half an hour of my having made my request, the post had been reinstated, with a cursory email saying that 'upon review' they had found that it didn't contravene any guidelines after all.  Well, no shit, Sherlock!  

Nevertheless, that quick turnabout on Google's part gives us a valuable clue as to what passes for their review process when it comes to handling alleged reports of material contravening their guidelines.  I think it is obvious that if someone decides to press that button to report content on a blog, they automatically sanction it, without question, without actually checking the content in question.  If a report is made, then the content is assumed to be in contravention. Which rather goes against the accepted principles of justice, under which one is innocent until proven guilty.  If you request a review then, it seems, your content actually gets looked at by a human being, at which point it becomes obvious as to whether the original report was valid or instead malicious. Which, in this case, in view of subsequent events, it most certainly was.  Because shortly after I dealt with this problem, I had Google blaring to the world that The Sleaze was a 'dangerous' site hosting malware, resulting in red screens and dire warnings on every browser when you tried to access the site, (unless you have the good sense to disable the 'extreme paranoia security settings).  I was effectively being blacklisted across the internet.  Bizarrely, Google had sent me an email, but I didn't see it because, as they had deemed The Sleaze a 'dangerous site' and blacklisted its URL, the message, containing the URL, immediately went into Gmail's spam folder, where i didn't find it until hours later!  Anyway, a malware check via my web host revealed some suspect files, (there seemed to have been a hack, which I haven't yet got to the bottom of), which were quickly dealt  with, followed by a reinstallation on the Wordpress code for good measure.

Once again, I had to request a review of the site from Google to get those warnings removed, which I had to do through the Google Search console, something I haven't bothered using since Google started systematically de-listing my site from their search engine, (I'm just one of many, many victims of this policy).  Now, here's the bit which really pissed me off - while Google is very quick to brand sites as 'a threat' and accuse them of peddling malware, 'social engineering', stealing credit card details and God knows what else, (all stuff they accused The Sleaze of, without foundation), they certainly drag their feet when it comes to withdrawing all that shit.  I was left, for the better part of a day, with Google spreading what were, effectively, slanderous misinformation about a perfectly legitimate site.  Going back to that false report about the blog post, I'm now pretty sure that that was intended as a diversion of sorts - while I was dealing with that, I was distracted from anything going on with The Sleaze.  So, while the real villains here are the hackers, they are aided and abetted by Google's own policies.  Moreover, Google now clearly considers itself as some sort of 'Guardian of the Web' and has taken it upon itself to act as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to supposed 'security' issues.  Who appointed them?  Who are they accountable to?  It is also deeply ironic that they have taken on this role when they have spent so much time over the past few years trying to destroy the web as we know it, putting vast numbers of sites out of business by denying them visibility in web searches, (basically, they have unilaterally decided that things like satire and humour sites, niche sites, informational sites and the like (anything non-commercial, in other words) have no value and that they therefore won't serve them up to users in searches, even when they may be the most relevant resource).  I'm left hugely frustrated by this whole business.  I mean, sure, if Google doesn't want to give me traffic, fine, but I get pissed off when they pull stunts like this to deny me traffic from other sources (which I still get - other, better, search engines exist).  Really, they are complete bastards who think that they have the right to decide which sites should or shouldn't be on the web.

The Shocking Truth

So, these gloves that can give electric shocks to people touched by their wearers which the Trump regime wants to issue to ICE agents, don't they sound like the sort of thing that you used to see advertised in the back pages of porn magazines?  You'd find them alongside the ads for dodgy masturbation devices like the 'Wanky-Doodle-Dandy', (I kid you not, that was a real product), blow up sex dolls and the like.  They'd be promoted with something along the lines of 'how to make your love life electric', or 'give your woman an electrifying sex experience when you stroke her with these'.  Believe me, there are a lot of people into mild S&M who go in for this sort of thing - giving electric shocks to their partners' erogenous zones would, for them, be considered a major erotic turn on.  Especially if they shackled to iron bedstead at the time.  Or so I'm told.  But to get back to the point I was originally intending to make, this raises the question of whether ICE is now having its equipment supplied by the sex industry?  What next, you wonder: nipple clamps to restrain detainees, making it easier for ICE agents to pull them, by the nipples, into custody?  Or perhaps whips for crowd control?  Maybe they could use vibrators, claiming that they are powerful weapons to harmlessly subdue female targets?  How about swapping their current ski-masks for more durable leather gimp masks to keep their identities secret while they go about their illegal business?

Now, I know this sounds bizarre, ridiculous even.  But let's not forget the levels of corruption in the Trump administration.  In particular, the way in which various lucrative government contracts keep getting awarded to Trump cronies and family members.  Also bear in mind Trump's associations with porn industry figures like Stormy Daniels.  Is it so far-fetched to imagine that some hooker, madame, stripper or porn actress of his acquaintance  has set up some kind of sex equipment supplies company and has managed, via their contacts with him, to land a contract to supply ICE with equipment?   Perhaps she's also got the contract to outfit their detention centres, with the holding areas now styled like bondage dungeons, featuring detainees shackled to the walls.  The interrogation rooms could be equipped with wooden chairs fitted with manacles, or maybe even cages and racks, where detainees are spreadeagled naked while they have hot wax dripped on them until they give up the names of all their equally illegal immigrant associates.  If that doesn't work, then perhaps having a gimp-masked ICE agent bend them across his knee and give them a good hard bare-arsed spanking would do the trick.  After all, if Trump can give the White House a makeover so that it's interior now looks like a bordello, it seems perfectly reasonable that he'd hire someone to turn ICE's buildings into bondage parlours. 

More Milk Deliveries

I've had a busy couple of days, on the road a lot, culminating in an evening in the pub.  So, I'm too knackered to actually come up with a proper post - I'm sure that I had an idea for a post, but I'm too tired to remember what it was.  Instead, here's a picture of a couple of recent model railway acquisitions.  These are a pair of Wrenn six wheeled milk tankers, which will join the other ten (a mix of Wrenn. Lima and Hornby) in my milk train.  I think that I probably have more than enough milk tankers now, having acquired another couple of Wrenn tankers a few months ago, (they can be seen behind the latest two). 

I must admit, that I had no intention of buying another two, but these were very cheap at the local Toy and Train Fair, (Wrenn wagons, even unboxed are still usually relatively expensive).  Plus, they are in the St Ivel livery I already have two of the Lima tankers in a version of this livery, but the Wrenn version is fairly unusual.  Whilst Wrenn were notorious for putting out rolling stock in colourful, but fictional liveries, this colour scheme is actually genuine.  In the sixties, the newly formed Unigate had a number of tankers refurbished and repainted in order to promote their new yoghurt brand.  Which means that they might have been hauled by steam locomotives, meaning that they aren't necessarily anachronistic with regard to my layout. 

Bully the Bullies?

Picking up from where I left off yesterday, how best to retaliate against these online bullying bastards who like to whip up virtual lynch mobs?  Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually identify them in real life and give them a taste of their own medicine?  Of course, some of them are easily identified as they are part of that 'blue tick brigade' who want everyone to know who they are, to the extent that they are willing to part with money to actually buy that badge of infamy.  So, we could organise mobs to stand outside their houses with placards saying 'Murderer!' and the like, they could follow them around wherever they went, shouting abuse and waving those placards some more.  I can guarantee that these scumbags would soon be screaming about 'mob tactics', 'harassment' and 'invasion of privacy' - all the things they themselves were guilty of in their treatment of Jason Arday.  Even better, we could trawl through their lives, trying to find discreditable stuff about them, no matter how minor, and broadcast it to the world.  Fighting fire with fire, so to speak.  But still a pretty shitty thing to do, no matter how vile and deserving of it the recipient is - which is why the majority of us would never actually do it, just fantasise about it, instead.  Unlike those bastards, who are apparently devoid of any morality or sense of decency let alone consciences.

But what about all those 'rank-and-file' idiots who just followed the herd and joined in?  Their lack of any agenda, other than trying to appease the bullies by going along with them in the hope that they'd be spared, happy to see someone else having their life made a misery instead of themselves, makes their actions, in many ways, far worse than those of the ringleaders.  So, to extend our fantasy, couldn't we get someone to do a bit of hacking of social media accounts and track them down?  We wouldn't need mobs for retribution against them - just some masked avengers to knock on their front doors, punch them in the face when they answer it, before running off into the night.  They just wouldn't know who was going to get the knock on the door in the night next.  But it needn't just be confined to door knocking attacks - we could get them in the streets, just run up to them and knee them in the groin or give them a good slap.  Maybe a kick in the balls as they walk into the pub.  You get the picture.  Perhaps this is the only way that they'd start to get the message to stop being sheep and 'going with the flow' to appease their social media gods by 'piling on' to some bastard when directed to do so.  Except, of course, that we're far too civilised to actually enact this fantasy: that's the problem with this sort of shit, it's an uneven contest as the conscience free online bullies will always stoop lower. 

Utterly Vile

There are some vile, vile people out there.   The other day I asked whether those in the press and social media who had hounded Jason Arday out of his job as a Cambridge academic were happy now that they had destroyed his career.  Because, driven largely by racism, that seemed to have been the metaphorical lynch-mob's aim.  Yet still, they wouldn't stop with their campaign of vilification and humiliation, begging the question of what their objectives now were.  Then the news broke that he was dead, presumably having taken his own life.  So, are they ecstatic now?  Jumping with joy, having driven a man to apparent suicide?  You'd think that maybe, just maybe, they'd exhibit some remorse: if not the main instigators of this horrible shit show, the right-wing 'influencers' and their ilk, but maybe the rank-and-file social media users who had retweeted and liked their bile.  But no, the morning after, there they all were, busily repeating the excuses being put out by the prime movers of the whole hate campaign - it wasn't their fault, it had nothing to do with anything they had said or done, in fact, it was all the fault of those woke lefties, (presumably because, for reasons of 'political correctness' they had been complicit in getting a black man a prestigious professorship which, obviously, his sort aren't cut out for), or even Arday himself for having the audacity to try and put himself on the level of obviously superior white academics.  Indeed, even his suicide was simply a self-serving attempt to make himself a martyr.  Like I said: vile.  Utterly, irredeemably, vile.

Of course, these unrepentant arseholes won't learn anything from this tragedy - as soon as they see an opportunity to humiliate someone else whose very existence seems to offend them, they'll swing into action, whipping up the hate, cheering on the lynch mob.  But, hey, they'll tell you - they most definitely weren't motivated by racism, just a concern for maintaining proper standards in public life.  Except that allegations of plagiarism aren't that unusual in academia, but never attract this level of attention, let alone these sorts of consequences.  Most of these, though, concern white academics, so one can only surmise that what really enraged these bastards was that the allegations drew to their attention that a young black man had been appointed a Professor at Cambridge.  Oh horror of horrors!  As I said last time I talked about this, I have absolutely no idea whether Arday was guilty of plagiarism or not  - but I do know that we are meant to consider people innocent until proven guilty.  There was an ongoing academic process to ascertain the veracity of these allegations - but these evil shits just couldn't wait for that, they decided to jump the gun, assume guilt and round up a lynch mob.  The fact that they seem so unwilling to accept any responsibility for their actions just makes what they have done even worse.  They clearly have no consciences - any of them, from the instigators to the followers.  Let's be clear, even if 'all' you did was re-post some of the ill-informed and poisonous bile flying around social media, you are just as guilty as the instigators.  You are just as culpable in the death of Jason Arday.  Not that you care, obviously, you soulless, utterly vile little bullies.

The Joys of Solitude

I often get these videos turning up in my You Tube feed with titles like 'I Have No Friends' or 'How to Avoid Loneliness' and every variation you can think of on the theme.  Now, I know that this indicates that You Tube's algorithm thinks that I'm some kind of sad old git lacking human contact (probably as a result of the number of videos of model railways I look at), but I'm afraid that I'm the wrong guy for this sort of stuff.  When I see something like 'I Have No Friends' my immediate reaction is 'why are you telling me?'  If it worries you that much, you should sure;y be out in the real world, socialising and making contact with real life human beings, rather than posting videos online.  Personally speaking, as I've noted here previously, I actually don't understand this anxiety about having few friends or being alone.  I'm one of those weirdos who enjoys their own company.  I have friends and acquaintances, but I like them in small doses: I can handle them better that way.  In general though, I can't say that I really like people much, especially not en masse.  When I hear people saying how terrible it is that some poor old git that they are patronising hasn't seen or spoken to anyone in a week, I think 'Jeez, lucky bugger!'  Solitude is my idea of paradise.  

In fact, I sincerely believe that from solitude comes strength: if you can make peace with yourself and happily live with yourself without self-loathing and self doubt for an extended period, then you'll develop the mental strength to deal with just about anything.  It just isn't clear to me exactly why so many people apparently can't deal with being on their own - do they really need constant external stimulation from others?  It probably helps that I've always had a well developed imagination, but I can happily live in my own head.  I can always find ways to amuse myself.  The best thing about solitude is that it gives you the time and space to actually think properly about, well, everything.  I love thinking.  Maybe other people don't.  Perhaps they find it challenging and confronting.  Nowadays I look back on the days when I was still working full time and marvel that I ever survived it with all the other people I had to deal with and their constant demands frequently leaving me without the time and space to think properly.  The sense of freedom that I enjoy now is marvellous - my time is my own and I can set my own pace for my life.  I can't help but feel that what is needed to combat loneliness is to teach people to actually enjoy their time alone, rather than all those bloody patronising 'initiatives' the do-gooders go in for of 'reaching out' to the allegedly lonely.  Look, I accept that loneliness is apparently a problem for many people, but it isn't for me, so please You Tube, stop shoving these videos in my timeline.  

Walking Through the Eclipse

Yesterday's daily walk ended up coinciding with the much vaunted eclipse.  I certainly didn't plan it that way - the timing was the result of a series of setbacks and incidents.  My setting out for the walk ended up being delayed for various domestic reasons and when I finally got into the car to drive out to a local country park, I found the roads around Crapchester unusually congested.  Recalling that it was the day of this bloody eclipse, I suspected a connection, but assumed it was just people going home early to observe it.  Nevertheless, it took me forever to get out of the town, but the traffic was still abnormally heavy for the country roads I was on and I began to suspect that the bastards were all going the same way as me - which, it turned out, they were.  As I turned onto the very narrow lane which is the quickest route to my destination I found myself in inexplicable gridlock - the lane was just solid cars as far as you could see, none of them moving.  As I later learned, the Crapchester Astronomical Society had issued an open invitation for people to come and observe the eclipse at the primary school which is on that route.  Apparently failing to grasp that this town's population has an unusually high proportion of morons, it hadn't occurred to them that they would be overwhelmed and that when the car park was full, these morons wouldn't instead just drive on.  No, instead they blocked the entrance and treated the road as a car park, blocking it in both directions!

I eventually extricated myself from the gridlock and after much shouting at other drivers blocking my way, took the long route to my destination which, mercifully, proved to be pretty much deserted.  Anyway, as I couldn't be bothered to invest in any of those rip-off  'eclipse glasses', (I mean, what use are they when there isn't an eclipse and as the next one here in the UK isn't due for another sixty years I felt that my money could be better spent elsewhere), my view of the event was limited.  I mean, damn it, it wasn't even a full eclipse - I remember the last one which was a full eclipse.  At least it momentarily went dark during that one.  This time, of course, despite being a ninety five per cent eclipse, it never really got especially dark.  I observed with interest, however, the change in the quality of the light as the eclipse reached its peak and the way in which the birds and animals quietened down and ceased activity.  (On that previous, full, eclipse, I remember a cat looking alarmed and diving for cover as the sky darkened, then re-emerging when it was over and giving me an accusing look, as if I had been responsible for it all).  So yeah, I experienced the eclipse in my own way, but I still don't rate it as highly as the last one...

Unpopular Opinion

As ever, I find myself out of step with public sentiment, or rather, what the media would have us believe is public sentiment.  I speak, of course, about the whole 'early release' furore whipped up by the press as stick with which to try and beat Andy Burnham - ignoring the fact that this is a policy he inherited. rather than something he came up with.   Anyway, most of the 'outrage' centres around the early release from prison of two of the three people jailed for their part in a police officer's death.  Now, I'm not going to try and argue that his death wasn't a particularly horrific crime - he was dragged behind a car while trying to foil a robbery.  But the fact is that the two people whose release is being mooted were convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder - they were passengers in the car which killed him so, arguably, had little agency in the events that unfolded.  The driver - whose release isn't being contemplated - was convicted of murder.  The reality is that manslaughter is considered a lesser offence than murder, mainly because there is no 'malice aforethought' or premeditated intent to kill involved, so is it so unreasonable that those convicted of it who have served a proportion of their sentence should be released on licence?

Now, if it was someone close to me who had been killed, then I accept that I might feel differently about this, but when dealing with matters of justice we surely need to try and be objective.  Nobody is talking about putting 'murderers' back on the streets, despite what the tabloids would have you believe.  OK, so you might think that I'm just being a contrarian here, but there's another issue related to this case which is the real sticking point for me: the suggestion that simply because they were involved in the killing of a police officer, these particular offenders should be singled put for harsher treatment.  Indeed, it goes beyond that, with suggestions that any murder of a police officer should be treated more severely than the murders of other people.  Really?  So some lives are worth more than others?  Personally, I think that all murders, regardless of who the victim is, are equally heinous and should all be treated with the same gravity when it comes to their investigation, prosecution and the punishment of the guilty parties.  I notice that in some quarters of the press they've tried to qualify this outrageous and offensive notion by saying that the 'extra severity' should apply to the murders of all 'emergency workers'.  But the same response applies - we cannot measure the value of peoples' lives in terms of the jobs they did in life - all life is sacred.  Even that of some down and out who fried their brains on meth, or that of a sex worker or even someone who is themself a criminal.  Just because a person is a scumbag doesn't give anyone else the right to take their life.  Not a popular view as far as the gutter press go, but tough - it's the right view to take.

Recent But Not Decent?

I'm pretty sure that the fact that, increasingly, I prefer old movies to new ones is a sure sign that I'm getting old.  Mind you, when I say 'old movies', that can include anything up to the nineties.  Although, I have to say that, to me, those nineties movies feel like they were released just yesterday- I remember seeing many of them for the first time at my local cinema.  But, I hear you ask, what has triggered this sudden bout of reflection on the subject of movies?  Well, it comes off of the back of a weekend of watching a lot of films, some old, some recent.  One so recent that I actually went to the cinema to watch it (a rare occurrence for me these days).  But two of them stood out as embodying my polarised feelings about old and new films.  I had an opportunity to catch up with 2018's Hereditary, a horror film that critics raved about and that plenty of people have told me was a great modern horror flick that I really should watch.  I found myself disliking it intensely, for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, like too many films of recent vintage, it runs far too long at far too slow a pace - it lumbers through a two hour plus running time to a climax that had been telegraphed what felt like an aeon before.  It needed to lose at least half an hour of running time.  Incredibly, the original cut apparently ran closer to three hours, with the producers taking over editing to bring the length time, much to the chagrin of the director, although this was clearly a case of financiers trying to protect their investment by trying to salvage a viable film from the footage.  The excessive length felt even more ridiculous as it became increasingly obvious, as the story unfolded, that it simply didn't have enough plot to fill much more than ninety minutes.

Maybe if that length had been used to build up tension, suspense and atmosphere it might have been justified.  But it doesn't, instead spending the first hour plus dragging the audience through lots of overwrought family trauma, which might give the cast plenty of opportunities to act, but doesn't really do much for audiences expecting a horror film.  Indeed, the performances all have that air of 'Look, this is acting.  Real acting!  Look at our anguish, look at our emoting - isn't it brilliantly real?  Is it awards season yet?'  Once it finally remembers that it is meant to be a horror film, it rushes through the rest of the hand-me-down plot, which is delivered with an air of knowing winks that the film makers had seen Rosemary's Baby and The Wicker Man.  Well, yeah, but guess what?  So have we.  Look, there's nothing wrong with being derivative, but you have to give those borrowed elements some kind of new spin, which Hereditary fails to do.  The movie also makes the same mistake that many modern films of this genre make: thinking that the unpleasant is, in itself, horrific or shocking, whereas it is, in reality, merely unpleasant.  I'm not saying that Hereditary is a badly made or badly acted film, as such - the great cinematography, design and performances are obvious, but it all feels so empty, so devoid of ideas.  Interestingly, I subsequently found that, according to audience research, viewers of the film on its original release seemed to have felt similarly, giving it a rating of D+.  

So, to take the lingering bad taste that Hereditary had left in my mouth, I decided to rewatch something older from the horror genre and ended up, on a whim, descending on It! (1966).  I've written about this film previously here, but to recap, it is one of a pair of low budget horror movies shot in the UK by Gold Star Productions, a company which seems to have been created simply to produce these two films, the being The Frozen Dead (1966).  It! is easily the better of the two films, being a Golem movie set in contemporary (well, 1966) London.   The Golem itself, which finds itself a statue on display at a museum, is decidedly ropey looking, the budget minimal, (my favourite 'effect' being its destruction of Hammersmith Bridge, represented by the Golem straining at some rubbery looking girders, before cutting away to bystanders' reaction shots to a load crashing noise, then a bad glass shot of the demolished bridge), and production values pretty basic.  The sets certainly look as if they've been borrowed from other productions.  But what it has in its favour is a hugely entertaining and utterly bonkers central performance from Roddy McDowell in the lead role, as the downtrodden assistant curator - who keeps his mother's mummified corpse at home - who finds himself master of the Golem.  Herbet J Leder's direction is solid, if not particularly inspired, but does include some very nice Eastmancolor photography.   In fact, the whole film is pretty much bonkers, culminating with the British government trying to destroy the Golem by detonating a tactical nuclear device at the country house where it and McDowell are ensconced.  It's every bit as derivative as Hereditary, plundering the Golem legend and Golem films for imagery and plot devices, but giving it all a lunatic spin and running through its mayhem in around ninety minutes, so as not to outstay its welcome.  Moreover, its air of general lunacy, tattyness and McDowell's performance all combine to give it, at times, a somewhat nightmarish feel.  Best of all, it is entirely free of the pretensions to art and gravitas that drag down the newer film.

It! is hardly a classic,  Indeed, it isn't even a particularly good movie.  But as entertainment, it easily scores, for me at least, over Hereditary.  In no way is it the superior film, not technically, at least, but it has a clearer grasp of its genre and a clearer idea of how best to deploy its borrowed elements to best effect.  So yeah, I'm getting old, raging at modern movies like some old guy shaking his fist at the clouds.  That said, I watched a very recent film, The Odyssey (2026) at the cinema yesterday and while I have some reservations about Christopher Nolan's approach to the source material, I most certainly don't think that the 1950s Italian adaptation, Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas, was better!  In fact, I rather enjoyed it, (all the more so because my ticket was free - part of the 'rewards' I get for having a high-interest account with my bank).  So, there you go, I don't think that all modern movies suck.  So maybe I'm not getting that old...

The Future of TV?

Yesterday I added this Roku app which simply plays loops of young women dancing.  Sometimes they are in swimsuits, sometimes in their underwear, other times low cut dresses.  Sometimes they are on the beach, sometimes indoors in what look like beach side houses, other times they are outdoors at inland locations. (Apparently, these locations are all in California).  They all dance provocatively, but never actually show anything, so the app avoids being classified as 'adult'.  It is strangely fascinating to watch - TV as moving wallpaper personified.  Perhaps, I idly thought while half-watching it today, when I had it on as 'background noise', this is the ultimate future of television - minimalist content requiring minimalist viewer engagement.  Why spend money producing elaborate dramas when you can just entrance viewers with an endless parade of anonymous girls gyrating around?  Because, the thing is, that as you watch it, you find yourself starting to speculate about what you are watching: who are these girls?  What, exactly, are they doing?  What's their backstory?  Where do they go, what do they do, when they aren't half naked in front of the cameras?  After a while, you start making up your own narratives about them, how they might relate to each other, (sometimes two appear together in a video).

I'm convinced that this basic idea could be expanded by enterprising streaming services to create a viable replacement for a plethora of more expensive content.  Just present random footage of people just doing normal stuff - no explanations of who or where they are, what they do, etc.  Instead, just let viewers make up their own narratives based on what they see and what they hear in snatches of dialogue.  As with those dancing Californian girls, you'll soo find yourself making up your own stories about how they relate to each other and what is going on - it's a psychological imperative in humans to impose narrative structures on what we see, (in its most extreme form, this results in those whacked out conspiracy theories), to create a sense of order in the observed world.  Just imagine the buzz this could generate as people discussed it online, set up blogs, Facebook and What's App groups to try and interpret what they are seeing.  You'd doubtless get competing narratives battling it out on social media.  Viewers could maybe take bets on what they think is going on - or maybe the streamers could run competitions with cash prizes for those viewers who can correctly predict what's going to happen next.  It would be reality TV, must-see drama and gameshow all in one.  Best of all, from the streaming companies' perspective, it would be cheap to produce: just random footage of real people.  No actors, writers, bloated film crews, directors, contestants, etc, to pay.  Believe me, it's the future of TV!

Stupidity and Ignorance

I really should stop reading the comments on articles on my local newspaper's website.  Not only are they, invariably bad for my blood pressure, but they are also profoundly depressing to read - it's the sheer stupidity and ignorance of the sad bastards who post them.  It's always the same half dozen, or so, idiots, all fully paid up members of Reform UK, Restore or the Crapchester Nazi Party peddling the same old bigotry and idiocy.  I mean, I really should, by now, know better than to check out any of the comments but the other day I just couldn't resist - against my better judgement - looking at the comments on an article about rising petrol and diesel prices.  Jesus Christ!  According to these bozos, rising fuel prices are entirely the fault of Andy Burnham because the government is doing nothing to stop them from going up?  So, you guys want the government to implement price controls on the free market?  Nowhere does Trump and hos war in the Gulf get mentioned - it's as if they are completely ignorant of the fact that it is his war which has directly led to rising oil costs.  In their world, it's all down to the fact that so much of what we pay at the pump is actually fuel duty imposed by the government.  Which brings us back to that tax conundrum: as these self same idiots will also rant on about failing public services, NHS waiting lists and the like in the comments under other stories, they presumably want these improved, but how are those improvements to be paid for?  That's right, through taxes - and if you want your income tax cut then the government has to make up the lost revenue from other sources.  Like fuel duty.  Finally, one idiot did mention the huge profits being made by the oil companies, yet they still chose to pass the rising costs of crude directly onto customers at the pumps.  Yeah, that's right!  You're getting there!  If you want villains here, then you should be directing your ire at Trump and the oil companies!

But at least these guys are merely stupid oafs, over on social media, their equivalents are stupid, oafish and mean.   Just this week I witnessed yet another of those 'pile ons', where some individual who is in the news for some reason, finds themselves pilloried online by bevies of self-styled experts and commentators, with the rank and file of social media all jumping in as they smell blood.  Most of the latter are individuals who really should know better, who have probably themselves suffered bullying either online or in the real world, but they just can't resist the opportunity to lay the boot into someone else, doubtless relieved that it takes attention away from them.  In this particular case, the victim was that Cambridge academic who has been accused of plagiarism.  The key word here is 'accused' - investigations are ongoing and nobody knows whether or not he actually has done anything wrong.  But that never worries those internet lynch mobs, who treat even the most innocuous of misdemeanours as capital offences.  In this case, the victim's main crime appeared to be that he is black and from an underprivileged background, which inevitably leads to all the murmurings of 'positive discrimination' and how he obviously didn't deserve his position on merit and had therefore blocked all manner of hypothetical better qualified candidates.  The mob achieved its first objective, as he has now resigned.  So, the question is - are his persecutors happy now?  Or more pertinently, are they proud of themselves?  I mean, how fragile does your own ego have to be, how insecure and inadequate must you feel about yourself and your own achievements if you feel the need to publicly utterly trash and humiliate a complete stranger?  Really, they can all go fuck themselves, from those self-appointed instigators with their bought-and-paid for 'Blue Ticks' they like to use to try and establish that they are 'someone' and therefore their opinion is more significant to yours, all the way down to the shits, scumbags and bottom feeders who travelled on their coat-tails.  Fuck 'em all!  At the end of the day, the guy involved might, or might not, be guilty of plagiarism, I neither know nor care, but at least he isn't a bullying coward hiding behind a 'Blue Tick' on Twitter.  I abhor bullies of all kinds.  So, again, fuck 'em all!

More Converter Wagons

Back to the model railway.  As I'm planning to dismantle the current excuse for a layout and start constructing an expanded version, I thought that I'd take some time over the next few weeks to shoot some videos of some of the more recently acquired locos and stock.  First, however, I thought that I'd revisit the business of converter wagons, which allow my Trix and Dublo  locos to run with stock fitted with Triang-style couplings.  Last time around I had only the solitary Triang/Dublo converter wagon.  It has now been joined by a homemade Trix/Triang converter wagon - basically just an old Trix mineral wagon I picked up cheaply which had been fitted with Triang couplings - I substituted a Trix coupling for one of these and voila!  My fleet of converter wagons doubled!

Anyway, the video shows the ever dependable Trix Warship, first with the Triang/Dublo converter wagon on a tanker train composed of assorted Triang, Hornby, Airfix and Mainline wagons, then with the Trix mineral wagon based homemade converter wagon. It is then - briefly - joined by the Trix Standard 5 with the Triang/Dublo converter and an assortment of Triang, Hornby and Wrenn wagons. The Trix wagons I recently acquired should have been part of the latter train, but misbehaved badly, as did the Standard 5, limiting its appearances in this video.  The main problem with the Trix wagons were, surprise, surprise, the couplings.  Now, I know this will upset all those people out there who champion Peco-type couplings, as used by Trix and Dublo, but in my experience, they simply do not work particularly well: frequently failing to couple at all and, even when coupled, uncoupling themselves with monotonous regularity.  Having discovered how easy it is to fit Triang couplings to Trix wagons, my intention is to fit all but the converter wagons with them at both ends and just use the latter to allow the Trix and Dublo locos to couple up to goods trains.  

That's it for this time, hopefully I'll have some more short videos of various other locos and stock in action soon. 

The House That Vanished (1973)

Another wilfully obscure low budget British would be shocker from the early seventies, the main reason for my interest in The House That Vanished (1973), is that it was directed by Jose Larraz.  Larraz was a Spanish director who directed a series of low budget exploitation films in the UK during the early seventies, of which Vampyres (1974) is probably the best known.  Most are psychological thrillers, involving protagonists, often women, trapped in remote locations and finding themselves under some kind of threat, either from unstable individuals or sometimes the supernatural.  Isolation, be it psychological or physical, seems to be a key theme in Larraz's work.  The House That Vanished conforms to this basic template, with a model reluctantly accompanying her more than slightly shady photographer to a remote house, where is to carry out some unspecified (and probably illegal) activities.  Getting lost, darkness falls, a mist comes down and they find themselves driving along a dirt track through some woods before finally arriving at what the boyfriend assumes is the right house.  He breaks in and they enter the apparently abandoned house, while the boyfriend searches for some unspecified object, they hear someone else enter the house and hide in a wardrobe.  From their hiding place, they witness a woman being murdered by an unseen assailant, before they flee.  Becoming separated from her boyfriend, the woman gets back to their car, only to find the keys missing.  Pursued by the killer, she eventually stumbles into a scrapyard, where she hides until daylight.  Later, her boyfriend's car mysteriously appears parked across the road from her flat.  In it, she finds her photographic portfolio, but missing a single picture.

It's an intriguing start for the film and further incidents are piled on top of each other: the car vanishes again, only to turn up in the scrapyard, a mysterious new tenant turns up in the flat below and the woman meets a young male designer who, we learn, is having an incestuous relationship with his aunt.  Crucially, of course, despite returning to that scrapyard, she just can't seem to locate that house.  It has, as the title says, apparently vanished.  Worried by the fact that her boyfriend had broken into the house, the woman is advised by her friends not to report his disappearance and the murder to the police.  Not that it would have done her much good as, like most exploitation movie cops of the era, the police seem remarkably complacent, even when they do have a crime reported to them - the rape and murder of the woman's flatmate.  Inevitably, of course, she does end up in that house again, but failing to recognise it because, this time, she is taken there in daylight and, most crucially, to the front of the house, rather than the back.  Equally inevitably, she finds herself in peril again as, while exploring the house, she starts to recognise some of the decor in the back rooms of the house, eventually stumbling on the bodies of the first victim and her boyfriend.  

In common with most of the Larraz films I've seen, the director goes for low key menace and slowly building suspense rather than shocks and gore.  The onscreen violence is very limited, much of it implied, rather than seen.  The opening scenes of the drive to the house and their subsequent exploration of the seemingly abandoned rooms, is very atmospheric and tense, as is the subsequent chase through the woods.  Unfortunately, the film somewhat loses pace as the plot unfolds, with too much dialogue which doesn't seem to be moving the story forward.  One of the film's problems is that both the red-herrings and the real killer are far too obvious.  The mysterious new tenant, for instance, is written and played as so stereotypically creepy, that you just know he's a diversion.  Possibly the film's biggest asset is its depiction of early seventies London in all of its grimy, run down glory.  It also captures the sheer seediness of the bottom end of the modelling business - there's a distinct lack of glamour in Larraz's depiction of the modelling scene.  The performances, like the script (by British sexploitation legend Derek Ford) and direction, are generally low key, with Judy Matheson representing the closest thing to a star name, (she could also be seen in Hammer movies and other UK horror films of the era, later enjoying a career as a local TV presenter in my region), although her supporting role here is relatively brief.  

One thing that struck me whilst watching The House That Vanished was how it didn't seem to flow smoothly in places, with what felt like a huge jump at a key juncture - the rape and murder of the flatmate, which we see nothing of, it is just mentioned as having happened.  The ending also seemed rushed and abrupt, with the police turning up just in the nick of time - and completely out of the blue.  Who called them?  How did they know where the house was?  Why was the downstairs tenant with them?  It just didn't make sense.  A little bit of research revealed that the only version of the film apparently available is the US edit, originally distributed by AIP, which reportedly had around fifteen minutes of footage cut from it.  (Indeed, it was this version which used The House That Vanished title, it had been released in the UK, at its original running time, as Scream - and Die!    This version was also given a limited US release as Please! Don't Go in the Bedroom, before being picked up by AIP for a wider release in an edited form and with a new title).  I'm assuming that these cuts explain the narrative jumps - it seems clear that we're meant to assume that the creepy red-herring downstairs guy found something out and alerted the cops.  Likewise, I'm assuming that the murder of the flatmate had a bigger build up, possibly with a murder sequence similar to that at the beginning of the film.  Once again, this just serves to illustrate the problems we have when trying to properly assess these kinds of films as, as is the case here, the only available version doesn't represent the movie's original form.