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It's been a while since I bored everyone with talk of model railways, so I thought I'd bring you an update on something I recently bought at the local Toy and Model Train Fair: 

This is an ex-LMS General Utility Van (GUV).  Although built by and for the LMS.after nationalisation these could be found all over the British Railways network, often in parcels trains, or attached to the back of passenger trains.  This is the original Lima version, which was also later made by Hornby.  Interestingly, Lima, when they first appeared in the UK with their 00 range, were pretty cheap to buy new, but nowadays, some of their items are pretty expensive secondhand.  Particularly on eBay, where sellers ask some, frankly, ridiculous prices for items like this, the BR CCT and BR GUV.  Luckily, more reasonable prices are to be found at toy fairs and the like, where I've obtained examples of all of these for very reasonable prices.  All were well detailed and reasonably accurate for the era they were produced in, this particular LMS GUV looks as if it has had some of its paintwork retouched but, for a fiver, I'm noty complaining - I'd have paid at least twice that online.

While the real LMS GUV was, more or less, an equivalent to the GUVs built by other railways, it is much shorter than any of them.  Indeed, length-wise, it is closer to the four wheeled Southern CCT:

This is a Wrenn example, another recent acquisition, this time from eBay - at the moment prices for Wrenn goods wagons seem to be quite reasonable.  Again, it's a bit battered, but for the price I paid, perfectly acceptable.  So, there you are, some new goods stock for the model railway.  Actually, the reason I'm posting about this stuff today is that I'm still feeling a bit rough - I woke up yesterday feeling like I had a throat full of grit.  As the day went on, the sore throat got worse and I started to run a raging temperature.  Today was better - the temperature has receded and my throat is almost back to normal, but I'm still tired and easily fatigued.  I've narrowed down the origin of this outbreak of ill health to two potential culprits: that nutter we were forced to share a table with in the pub on Monday, or that guy who stood next to me at a trader's stall at the train fair on Tuesday and coughed continuously.  Every time he moved, he virtually collapsed into fits of wheezy hacking.  Anyway, it seems to be receding now and hopefully I'll be fully recovered tomorrow.

Location, Location, Location

One of the fascinating things about web stats is seeing where the various visitors to your site come from.  Or supposedly come from.  According to my IP address, for instance, I can be either in Leeds, Rochdale or Wakefield, whereas, in reality, I'm physically located at the other end of the country.  It's down to the fact that there days I'm with a relatively small ISP, whose servers are all based in the Leeds area, so that's where I appear to be when I surf the web.  Which can cause problems when visiting sites offering localised services: weather reports, for instance - if I allow the site to automatically detect my location then I end up getting a weather report for northern climes, which is useless to me.  Which is why I have to specify my locale myself.  It could be worse - when I was with a larger ISP, I sometimes found myself apparently being in California or even South Korea, so widespread was its server network.  I'm guessing that at times of high demand, they just routed customers via whichever servers were available.  That said, most of the larger UK ISPs have networks extensive enough that you'll be routed through a server physically closer to your real location.  Which brings me to the point I was originally intending to make: that every time I see visitors to The Sleaze or to this blog coming via servers in my local area, I immediately assume that they must be someone I know.  Which is obviously ridiculous, as I only know personally an infinitesimal number of the people who live locally to me and the majority of them don't know that I run these sites. Plus, as I've already indicated, there is no guarantee that they really are, physically, in my area - they could be at the other end of the country and simply being routed via a local server.

While often this locational confusion is simply a result of ISP routing, increasingly it is deliberate.  Not just as the result of an increased use of VPNs.  Traffic stats increasingly seem dominated by bots, which routinely mask their true origin and identity by routing through servers and networks geographically remote from their point of origin.   Traditionally, these have been 'content scrapers', looking for data for usually dubious marketing schemes.  Increasingly, though, they are scraping content for the benefits of various AIs.  None of them seem to want to openly identify themselves - not even the 'household name' AIs.  Google's Gemini, for instance, scapes (or indexes, as they would have it), in the guise of the regular Google bots used to index sites for their search engine.  Similarly, Chat GPT scrapes under the guise of Microsoft's Bing bots.  Why so reticent about revealing their true identity?  Well, probably because they fear being blocked by webmasters if they scrape openly as AIs.  This way, because users won't be able to tell the difference between Microsoft and Google bots legitimately indexing for their search engines and AI scrapers, they won't get blocked.  Of late, one of my stats providers took the unilateral decision to block from customer's stats everything they deemed to be a bot. Unfortunately, their criteria for bot classification seem very shaky, based on location more than anything.  Swept up in this are all manner of legitimate visits, using VPNs or Google's AMP format, somewhat invalidating the stats we do see.  Moreover, it is actually important to see bot visits - what they are scraping/indexing is of as much interest as where they come from.  Some of the now blocked bot visits are of more direct use - Facebook bot visits, for example, give an idea of the traffic your site is getting from them and which pages are generating it.  (Facebook caches versions of site pages indexed there, so that when visited from Facebook, they don't generate a direct hit with your stats, but rather a bot visit - an oversimplification, but you get the gist of it, I'm sure).  

Not the stats provider in question seems to care about any of this, as they themselves don't seem to understand any of it and simply want to pander to their less informed customers who just see these bots a nuisance messing up their visitor statistics.  Which, of course, simply makes it ever more difficult to keep proper track of who and what are visiting your site any why - all vital questions to the serious webmaster.  But hey, getting back to my earlier point - if you are someone visiting here that does know me, get in touch properly, why not?  My mobile number hasn't changed - drop me a text, or something.  I'm not entirely anti-social, you know!

Off His Trolley...

Look, the media really do have to stop 'sane washing' Donald Trump.  Lately, I've come across even otherwise sober outlets like The Guardian and the BBC discussing how Trump's erratic behaviour in terms of his foreign policy are down to him employing the 'Madman Strategy'.  The thinking goes that this approach -  which supposedly originated with Richard Nixon - involves deliberately coming out with crazy, sometimes contradictory statements, in order to keep your opponents on the wrong foot, never knowing what you will do next.  The idea is that this uncertainty can be used as leverage by negotiators and diplomats to get the other side to agree to their proposals as if they don't, the President might do something really crazy.  All of which seems to me to be a tortuous way of trying to give legitimacy to the chaos which surrounds Trump - it's really all deliberate, just you wait and you'll see it is all part of a cunning plan.  But the simpler explanation is that Trump behaves like a madman because he's off his fucking trolley.  He's completely unhinged and, thanks to the fact that he has packed his cabinet and inner circle full of yes-men (and women), all of whom are busy pursuing their own agendas under cover of his chaos, nobody is acting as a restraint upon the worst excesses of his madness.  I mean, just look at this last weekend, which saw him picking a fight with the Pope and depicting himself as Jesus in social media posts.  That's just not normal, now is it?

Trump's tirade against Pope Leo gives a clear indication of his mental derangement - he criticises the Pontiff for being 'soft on crime' and lambasts his 'foreign policy' as being 'weak on nuclear weapons'.  The first point seems to imply that Trump thinks that the Pope is Batman and personally goes out and beats up individual sinners by night.  The latter point implies that Trump thinks that the Vatican is some kind of nuclear armed superpower which should be using its nuke-backed spiritual superiority to impose some kind of Christian world order by force, rather than preaching peace and understanding.   All of which speaks of an entirely demented world view.  Which the media really should stop trying to cover up or, worse, trying to gaslight us over: there is no plan, no strategy, no grand scheme behind it all - he's just crazy.  Something which would have been plainly apparent to the US electorate if the US media hadn't spent the last presidential election campaign focusing on Biden's supposed mental decline and not sanitised Trump's speeches and public appearances, which were characterised by rambling, gibberish and irrationality, in their reporting.  But hey, the US press, (even more than the UK press), is owned by billionaires who had decided that Trump was 'their guy', the best vehicle for their ambitions and economic imperatives.  Well, they got their tax cuts, but everything else is shit - not just for the US, but for the rest of the world as well, (I recently nearly bankrupted myself putting fuel in the car, thanks to the out-of-control oil prices caused by Trump's insane war on Iran).  Perhaps the US electorate should consider this come the revolution and ensure that they string up those billionaires from lampposts, alongside Trump and his cronies.

Unhistorical Fiction

Some historical movies really need to run a disclaimer in the opening credits, along the lines of 'any resemblance to historical fact is purely coincidental and completely unintentional on the part of the producers'.  I watched a couple of such movies, both from the sixties, which fell firmly into this category over the Easter weekend.  One was Battle of the Bulge (1965), a war movie which was extremely popular in its day and which doesn't seem to have been off of TV screens since the seventies.  It was one of a spate of US produced war movies of the era which, basically, took the name of an actual historical battle in vain, weaving an entirely fictional story around the barest of facts.  Battle of the Bulge is one of the worst offenders - General Eisenhower even came out of retirement to condemn it for its inaccuracies.  Not that that seemed to affect its box office takings.  The film was badly compromised from the outset by being filmed in Spain, which simply couldn't replicate either the terrain or climate of the Ardennes in 1944-45.  Most notably, the Ardennes campaign was fought entirely in wintry conditions - blizzards and thick snow, (indeed, the Germans deliberately coincided their offensive with a severe cold front, so that the Allies' air forces would be grounded).  While the film starts off with snow on the ground, it quickly vanishes, as do the trees, (the Ardennes is, after all, a forest), with the film's latter stages taking place on what appear to be the Russian steppes, without so much as a shrub in sight.  Worse, the film fictionalises the action and characters and ignores completely key parts of the campaign, most notably Patton's relief of Bastogne, which required an incredible feat of logistics, as he managed to disengage part of his 3rd Army from an entirely different engagement, march them north to the Ardennes, then surround the German forces who were themselves surrounding Bastogne.  It also ignores the British contribution, (surprise, surprise) and, being a Hollywood movie, has to end with a big tank battle.  Which never happened - in reality, the German advance slowed, they ran low on fuel and the skies cleared, allowing the Allies' air forces to attack them, forcing a withdrawal, as the Allied reserves (which is where the Brits come in), came into play.

It's such a terrible film, (apart from all the other inaccuracies, all of the tanks and other military hardware are completely wrong and anachronistic), you might well ask why I've sat through it so many times?  Well, it might be crap, but it is surprisingly well made crap.  If you ignore the fact that it is meant to be portraying an actual, historical, battle and instead treat it as a work of fiction, then it is quite entertaining.  Which is more than can be said for Alfred the Great (1969), Britain's contribution to the ahistorical movie genre.  Despite looking great, having a good cast and well-staged battle scenes, it quickly becomes something of a chore to watch.  Even if you don't know about Anglo-Saxon history and therefore aren't aware of the numerous liberties being taken with actual history, the film becomes a difficult watch due to an overly talky script, full of characters giving is indigestible chunks of stilted-sounding dialogue laboriously explaining every point it is trying to make.  It also has some strange ideas about Saxon England. (although, of course, England as an entity didn't exist at the time), seeming to think that it looked like Ireland (where the film was shot).  As someone who grew up in the heart of what had once been the Saxon kingdom of Wessex, I can assure you that it doesn't.  Perhaps most bizarrely, they seem to think that the Saxons didn't have roads - there's not a single one in sight.  Which ignores the fact that most of the paved roads built by the Romans would, at this time, still have been at least partially intact - indeed, to this day, many modern roads still follow their routes.  Probably the film's worst sin, though, is that it seeks to impose twentieth century ideas on historical characters, a common problem with historical movies of this era.  In this case, it seeks to make King Alfred into some kind of populist, proto-democrat, championing the rights of the oppressed.  While it is true that he made many progressive reforms to the laws of Wessex and promoted literacy and better education, the film falls well wide of the mark in its characterisation.  Cromwell (1970), similarly tries to paint the titular character as a champion of democracy and the rights of the common man - his subsequent actions as Lord Protector (conveniently not covered by the film), showed how from the truth this was.  Alfred the Great saves its greatest travesty of historical fact for the end titles, where it implies that it was King Alfred who united the Saxon kingdoms to form the first iteration of a united England (or 'Angleland' as the Saxons would have styled it), a feat which, in reality, fell to his Grandson, King Athelstan.

A Sense of Malaise

Times change.  It occurred to me the other day that, once upon a time, I'd have been all over the coverage of the Artemis II moon mission.  I mean, I go way back with this stuff - when I was a child the Apollo missions dominated the news and fascinated us all.  I remember the anxious days and hours of the Apollo 13 mission, when there was a very real chance that they wouldn't make it back - the world held its breath.  I remember at primary school, (or infant school, as it was then called), classes being suspended and the entire school ushered into the main assembly hall, so that we could see the live coverage of a moon landing, (I can't recall whether it was Apollo 12 or Apollo 14 - I suspect the latter).  I was captivated by it all.  A captivation that lasted into adulthood.  Until, it seems, now.  I have to admit that I've barely given a glance to the Artemis II coverage.  Has my 'sense of wonder' regarding space exploration finally faded?  Or is it just that there have been too many distractions - from bereavements to Trump's war in Iran, (actually, let's be honest, even if he isn't waging illegal wars, anything that madman does is guaranteed to distract the entire world from more constructive avenues of activity - it is so bloody exhausting), there have been too many things competing for my attention of late.  More than anything, though, I just don't seem to have the motivation to do anything or get interested in anything much at the moment.  I know it's just part of the fall out from my recent bereavement.  Hopefully, when everything surrounding it is finally done and dusted, I'll be able to move on.

Anyway, all of this is probably the reason why my posts here have, of late, become more introspective than usual, as I try to figure out where I go next.  I seem to be at one of those proverbial crossroads that characters in films find themselves at and agonise over which route to take.  It occurs to me that recent developments have left me with little in the way of family ties to hold me here, where I've lived most of my life.  I could pretty much up and move wherever I liked, without any feelings of guilt about neglecting close and ailing relatives.  I seem to have drifted away from those friends I might have wanted to maintain relationships with - I've tried rekindling some of them, but received no indication that they wanted to do the same thing.  All of which is fine - we all move on in our lives, our circumstances change and old relationships inevitably fall by the wayside.  So, without any real ties here in Crapchester, I could just up and leave.  Go somewhere else.  Start again.  Except that, for the life of me, I cannot, right now, think of any place I'd want up sticks and go to, lock, stock and barrel.  It's like the scene at the end of the seventies TV adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh's The Blue Knight, when the shoeshine guy remarks to William Holden that he'd heard he was retiring from the LAPD and leaving the city, Holden simply replies: 'Where would I go?  What would I do?'.   But maybe that's all part of the grieving process, too, just another part of the general malaise and lack of motivation currently afflicting me.  So, for the time being, I'll be staying put.  But I know that, once everything else is settled, I'm going to have to revisit this idea.  I'll try and find something less introspective to post about tomorrow...   

Death Screams (1982)

Death Screams (1982), part of the cycle of slasher movies that followed the success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), certainly gets off to a brisk start, with a pair of young lovers gorily murdered by an unseen assailant before even the opening titles have rolled.  Unfortunately, we then have to wait to virtually the end of the film before we get any more slasher action.  The rest of the intervening footage features the bland lives of a bunch of bland college age kids, (all played by actors who look to be at least in their thirties), in a bland small town, cross cut with the local sheriff's attempts to find the two missing young people we saw murdered before the titles.  Now, the fact that there is only one bizarre murder, (bow and arrow followed up with suffocation by plastic bag - on a fairground roundabout) and an offscreen slaying, between the opening and the climax, doesn't necessarily make for a bad slasher movie.  There are plenty of examples within the genre of successful movies with minimal murders.  So clearly, this sort of script structure can work. Provided, that is, that the film provides plenty of suspense and near misses in the intervals between murders, racking up the tension and building audience expectations.  Death Scream does have a few half-hearted attempts at suspense as the (still unseen - apart from their arm and machete) killer sort-of-stalks some of the girls around the town.  Which results only in a screen door being slashed.  Lots of details of small town life and relationships are established but, unfortunately, none of them are very interesting.  It can't even muster much in the way of sex and nudity, those other staples of the genre.  Ultimately, the film's early momentum is quickly dissipated, rapidly turning to tedium as we wait for something to happen.

The problem seems to lie with the choice of director.  While David Nelson already had an established directorial CV, mainly in TV, he had no track record when it came to slasher movies or even horror films in general.  Indeed, he was probably best known as an actor, having been, both in reality and on screen, one of 'Ozzie and Harriet's' sons in their long running TV show - he later directed numerous episodes of their later, seventies, show.  Which, perhaps, is why he seems more comfortable directing the small-town life and relationships scenes of Death Screams, which have the feel of a TV episode.  That said, the two main slasher sequences, which top and tail the film, are actually handled pretty well, with the finale seemingly trying to make up for the prior lack of slasher action by serving up a frenzied series of decapitations, slashings and dismemberments.  The final couple of minutes, however, border on farce, with the killer himself slashed with broken glass, before falling out a window and having his head, literally, blown off by the passing sheriff.  The script also somewhat short changes the audience with the reveal of the killer's identity, with an explanation for their motivation clumsily crammed into a brief flashback - we're given no real build up to the revelation, little in the way of clues as to their identity and an entirely underwhelming reveal.  Underwhelming is probably the best way of describing Death Screams overall.  It is too languidly paced to build up any tension, with production values at the level of a TV movie.  The characters are all interchangeable - it is extremely difficult to keep track of who is who, as they are all so poorly defined and poorly written, with utterly unmemorable dialogue that barely moves the plot along.  An overemphatic score tries to compensate for the film's inadequacies, but instead simply draws attention to them, being so completely at odds with what is happening on screen.  Not so much a bad movie, Death Screams simply lacks any impetus or sense of identity.

Easter Weekend

What an Easter!  Every time you think that Trump and his buddies can't possibly do or say anything crazier, well, they just up the ante!  Who'd have thought that we'd ever see the day when a President of the United States would be publicly effing and blinding at the leadership of another sovereign state?  'Open the fuckin' Strait!'  I mean, I know that the US is at war with Iran, but nonetheless - you didn't see Winston Churchill screaming over the BBC Home Service that Hitler was a 'fuckin' arsehole', or that he should take his plan to invade Britain and 'stick it up his arse and set fire to it'.  Maybe he should have, not that it would have actually had any impact on the way the war was going.  But surely the whole point of leadership pronouncements during a war is to legitimise your own stance, making you look like the reasonable and righteous one and the enemy like a bunch of foaming at the month crazy bastards.  But with every day that goes by, the Trump administration succeeds in making the religious fanatic psychopaths who run Iran look like reasonable, sane and balanced people.  It's like some sort of reverse white washing - the US makes itself sound more unhinged and out-of-control with every official pronouncement, while the Iranians come off as utterly reasonable and measured in their responses.  In truth, of course, they are both utterly unhinged, but the Iranians seem to be winning the propaganda battle.  Or rather, the US is losing that battle, shooting itself in the foot on a daily basis.  

But enough of Donald Trump's Easter.  What about my Easter?  After all, this is my blog and should surely revolve around my ego?  I don't know why, but I always enjoy the long Easter weekend, despite the fact that I'm not religious, can't eat chocolate and as I'm enjoying the fruits of my work pensions, it really shouldn't make any odds to me whether it's a public holiday or not - every day is a holiday to me.  But it represents a chance to change routines - I've just spent four days of crashing out on the sofa all afternoon watching long movies I don't usually have time to watch in a single sitting, for instance.  Plus, it feels and sounds different.  As I've mentioned before, I live on the nexus of several school routes, so most mornings, as I lie in bed, I can hear the hustle and bustle of the school run going on outside.  On school holidays it gets quieter, but the regular work day traffic is still there, but on bank holidays, it is just so quiet and peaceful!  I treasure such mornings, particularly the Easter weekend, which offers two bank holidays and a quieter than usual weekend sandwiched between them.  It's like the rest of the world has finally got the message to bugger off and leave me in peace!  Anyway, my sedentary long weekend suited my mood: after recent events, I still don't really feel like doing much, although I really must force myself into action, as I have so much to get done on multiple fronts.  For one thing, I really need to focus more on posting properly here - I winged it last week, with a podcast and that Pete Hegseth cartoon allowing me a couple of easy, lazy posts.  (The Hegseth cartoon has also helped me confirm my theory that what you post on Bluesky is less important than who you are - if you are one of those 'cool kids' forever 'working on their books', then you can post any old shit and it will get liked and re-posted ad infinitum.  But if you are a mere mortal, then no matter how topical or notable your contribution is, it'll get ignored.  Not that I'm bitter and twisted at my satirical genius going unnoticed, of course).

A Crisis of Confidence...

The Pete Hegseth Story, Episode 241, 'A Crisis of Confidence':  

 

Happy Easter!

Devils From Space?

So, JD Vance thinks that aliens are actually demons, rather than beings from other worlds.  Really?  I mean, is that the best you've got, JD?  With all the shit going down in the world today, (most of it perpetrated by a US administration of which he is part), that's what he spends his time worrying about?  Now, at this point, I could go off into a diatribe about how terrifying it is that a nation in possession of the most advanced technology the world has ever seen (and which it uses, primarily, to wage war on poorer nations), is being run people with an essentially mediaeval world view, which still believes in the existence of angels and demons, but I'm sure that someone far 'cooler' than me (who is doubtless 'working on their book'), has already done that on Bluesky or wherever.  What intrigues me is what this means for the US's policies with regard to contacting alien life - after all, right now there are radio telescopes scanning the heavens for possible signals from aliens, those old Voyager probes heading out of the solar system with contact details for earth and schematics of humanity on them, not to mention signals being blasted out into space by us.  All of these assume that these hypotheticals aliens are intelligent and peaceful, but in view of Vance's belief that they are devils, will future contact attempts switch emphasis to trying to convert them to JD's brand of Christianity?  Will NASA be forced to send out into deep space broadcasts of those crazy American preachers who rant on about 'salvation', redemption' and the 'fires of Hell'?  Will future deep space probes be packed full of crucifixes and Holy water, just in case they encounter these 'space devils'?

Will there also be a change in the protocols for alien contact if and when they land on earth?  (Because, you can guarantee that most major nations have such protocols in place, no matter how much they might deny it - it is the nature of bureaucracies that they try to come up with plans for every possible contingency, no matter how unlikely they might seem - I speak as a former civil servant).  Right now, I suspect, they are all about containment, attempts at communication by teams of top civilian experts and intense observation, all backed up by overwhelming military strength held at a discreet distance.  I'm guessing, however, that JD would probably favour a first response of sending in hordes of priests waving crucifixes and quoting passages from the Bible via loud speakers.  Maybe followed by showers of Holy water dropped from those planes they use to fight forest fires by dousing them in water.  If that doesn't work then, no doubt, we'll see a full on exorcism carried out by specially trained cardinals, all clad in NBC suits (in the appropriate shade of crimson, obviously), designed to try and cast these demons back to Hell, (or Mars).  Of course, this also has a knock on effect with regard to space exploration in general.  I wouldn't be surprised if the current Artemis II moon mission didn't have crucifixes stitched into the crew's spacesuits, just in case they encounter any demons out there.  In future, can we expect every mission to include some fire-and-brimstone preacher and for a large wooden cross to be implanted in each newly visited planet's soil alongside the American flag?  This is the face of the future, folks - and you heard it here first!

After Hours: A Day in the Life of a Tribute Messiah

 

 

Another episode of 'After Hours', my new podcast.   I have to admit that it isn't as polished as I'd hoped, not to mention the fact that it should have seen the light of day at least a week ago, unfortunately, however, everything got delayed by events beyond my control culminating in a family bereavement.  I'm not going to go into further detail, but it all blew off course.  So, while most of the scripts for the various segments were already written, a couple had to be hurriedly knocked together in order for me to be able to record and edit the episode over the weekend.  Which meant that none of the scripts was edited as tightly as I would have liked, with one being a last minute replacement for a planned segment which was just too complex to edit in a short time and would have sent the running time way over length.  As it is, the episode runs just over half an hour - my intent was to try and keep these episodes down to under thirty minutes apiece.

 

Still, I'm reasonably happy with this episode.  I have to admit that putting it together proved to be pretty theraputic and helped take my mind off of other matters.   Lessons to take away from creating this episode are that the scripts need to be tighter and shorter and that I need to start the recording and editing process as they are written, not wait until I've got them all completed.  

 

Anyway, you can listen to it here:  After Hours: A Day in the Life of a Tribute Messiah. 

 

As ever, some credits for the technical side: After Hours was created using Google AI Studio, GPT Reader and TextSpeakPro.  Music and sound effects by Freesound Community, Crab Audio, Dragon Studios and Artificially Inspired - all via Pixababy.