The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (1980)

Cannon Films, while they existed (which was for a surprisingly long time), were always reminiscent of Universal or Columbia Pictures as they existed in thirties and forties.  Almost, but-not-quite, major studios adept at turning out mid-budgeted pictures or grinding out series spun off from such a successful film, with ever decreasing budgets and ambitions, yet all the time still striving to be taken seriously by turning out the odd, higher budgeted, 'prestige' picture.  While both Universal and Columbia eventually succeeded in elevating themselves to the status of 'major' studios, (a status they still hold today), Cannon never really achieved the legitimacy they so obviously craved, instead being remembered for their seemingly endless series of mid-budgeted action films starring the likes of Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris, various dodgy low budget science fiction and fantasy films, (not to mention big budget science fiction disasters like Life Force) and would be sex comedies.  Which brings us to The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (1980), aka Hollywood Blue, the second of two cheap and quick sequels to one of their most popular films, The Happy Hooker (1975).  The first film was loosely based on the autobiography of Xaviera Hollander, a Dutch sex worker and madam, who found success in New York, and starred Lynn Redgrave in the lead role.  Naturally, Cannon wanted to spin it off into a series, but as cheaply as possible.  Which meant that Redgrave was replaced with less expensive and recognisable actresses for the two sequels: Joey Southerton in The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977) and Martine Beswick for The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.

Now, Martine Beswick might well have been less recognisable to general audiences than Lynn Redgrave, she is still a talented and hugely attractive actress (and later enjoyed success as a novelist).  Indeed, I can't deny that she was a major teenage fantasy for me, fuelled, not so much by her appearances in two Bond movies, but rather her genre appearances in a number of Hammer films.  She often seemed to play sultry cave women in various states of undress and, most notably, was the female half of Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971).  The latter film was a late night TV favourite for young men of my generation, as you could tell parents and other adults that you were watching it for educational purposes, as it was a feminist take on a literary classic.  In reality, of course, we were watching it for Beswick, who not only gave us some flashes of side boob, but also bared her shapely bottom in one scene.  In retrospect, bearing in mind the effect that her behind alone had on our libidos back then, it is probably just as well that The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood didn't appear a few years earlier than it did, as her appearance in it leaves nothing to the imagination.  Seeing the fully naked Martine Beswick would probably have induced fatal seizures of ecstasy in those of us of a certain age.  All joking aside, these scenes are actually a large part of what is wrong with The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.  Not that I have any objection to Martine Beswick getting naked.  The problem is the context.  Despite its subject matter, The Happy Hooker didn't actually give the audience much in the way of explicit sex and nudity, focusing instead upon the comedic aspects of the story, a trend that continued with the first sequel.  But third time around, Cannon had clearly decided that what they needed to protect the box office was an injection of full on sex and nudity, which ultimately shades the whole movie over into softcore pornography, rather than sex comedy, territory. 

Beswick has a number of lengthy sex scenes with, of all people, Adam West, (allegedly, one actress had turned down the lead role on the grounds that she had watched West as Batman on TV as a child and simulating sex with him on camera would be just too freaky for her and Beswick herself was somewhat taken aback by the number of sex scenes she was required to film).  These feel increasingly jarring in the context of the rest of the film which plays out as a very broad satire of Hollywood, featuring the likes of Phil Silvers and Richard Deacon, giving the whole film a disjointed feel, as if scenes from a completely different movie were being inserted into an otherwise harmless comedy.  The plot, such as it is, concerns Silvers' struggling studio optioning Hollander's book, with studio executive West seducing her so as to get the rights over the line, then use just the title to create a fictional story.  Objecting to West's plans, Hollander instead strikes a deal with West's rival executive's son to produce the film independently with a script she approves.  The rest of the movie concerns their attempts to finance it, the studio's attempts to sabotage it and climaxes with the only print being stolen before the premiere and a car chase to retrieve it.  To be honest, as jarring as they might be, without those sex scenes, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood really wouldn't have had any sort of unique selling point.  A thin script and lacklustre direction from Alan Roberts ensures that the film largely wastes its cast and never really manages to make anything out of its set-pieces.  If you are a completist Martine Beswick fan then, yes, it is probably worth a look but otherwise is hardly a must-see.

American Amateurism

'Washington in shock after Trump press gala shooting' blare the headlines today.  Shock at what, exactly?  The fact that this is the third (alleged) attempt on Trump's life?  Or that the US, a nation renowned for its gun nuts, who have been brought up to shoot from the moment they can walk, has produced so many bad shots and just downright incompetent would-be assassins?  It's like a metaphor for the whole Trump administration: professionalism is constantly side-lined in favour of amateurism.  I mean, just look at the state of their diplomacy: where once they had an entire State Department full of trained diplomats and negotiators to resolve international crises, the US now relies upon sending out inept real estate dealer Steve Witless and Trump's creepy son-in-law, Jared Kushner.  With a marked lack of success.  In fact, Witless is so intent upon living up to his name that I'm amazed that during recent negotiations with Iran, he didn't turn up in, say, Tajikistan rather than Pakistan, because both countries have names ending in '-stan' and are therefore easily confused.  Which brings us back to these (alleged) assassination attempts which all seem to be carried out by utter and complete amateurs.  In the latest case, the idiot is so amateur that he couldn't even get past reception.  You'd really think that a nation of psychopaths like the US could come up with at least one efficient crazed killer?  

It's clearly the influence of the Trump regime, dumbing down even would-be assassins.  After all, just look to history - John Wilkes Boothe and Lee Harvey Oswald both took out their presidential targets.  Even John Hinkley managed to actually hit and seriously wound Ronald Reagan, even though he was so dumb that he was infatuated with a lesbian.  But nowadays - the best we get is some dude supposedly shooting Trump in the ear, (a wound which has, astoundingly, left no apparent scar).  I've said it before and I'll say it again: what we need are professionals on the job.  The rest of the world needs to club together and put a bounty on Trump's head, thereby ensuring that every professional assassin mercenary and bounty hunter in the world will be trying to get the fat bastard in their sights, (which shouldn't be difficult, bearing in mind that we're talking about a giant ambulatory tub of lard here - the failure to hit him where it hurts is another testament to the amateurism of these clowns).  The only alternative to the idea that the US can no longer muster anything but incompetent amateurs to try and assassinate the president is simply that all of the so-called attempts on his life have been staged.  Whilst I'm not a conspiracy theorist (quite the opposite, in fact), just looking at these incidents, it is tempting to think that they are all publicity stunts, designed to bolster Trump's standing, or enable his extremist policies, with those killed or injured in the process seen as collateral damage.  This latest attempt though, was the most pathetic yet - the alleged would be assassin wasn't even on the same floor of the building as Trump when he started shooting. Yet the incident is being used as an argument as to just why Trump needs that secure White House ballroom to ensure his safety at such events.  Utter bullshit.  Anyway, right now I'm pinning my hopes on the idea that King Charles has been set up as human bomb during his state visit to the US and is prepared to sacrifice himself for the good of the world by exploding while addressing that joint session of Congress.  He could take out the whole bloody lot of 'em in one go, that way.  God Save the King!

After Hours: The Man Who Fought Hitler's Ghost

The latest episode of 'After Hours', which can be heard here:

After Hours: The Man Who Fought Hitler's Ghost

This is episode three and I'm somewhat happier with this one than the previous edition.  It could still do with a slightly shorter running time, but overall, it is far more streamlined than its predecessor.  Most of the segments were recorded as the scripts were completed, which was a far more satisfying production process than the hurried scrabble of the the previous episode.  I did encounter a couple of glitches, the main one being that Google AI Studio decided that it didn't like something about one of the scripts, but wouldn't specify exactly what, resulting in some trial-and-error rewriting on the fly.  Whatever the problem was. some aspect of my rewrites must have eliminated it.

As ever, some technical credits:  ‘After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio and GPT Reader.  Music and sound effects by Freesound Community and Simplesound – all via Pixababy.  

Actually, for the benefit of the knee-jerk AI-haters out there, I should emphasise that the AI part of After Hours' is simply the AI generated voices that provide the dramatis personae.  The words they speak are entirely scripted by a human being: me.  So think twice before you go off on some rant about 'AI Slop'.

The UFO Scam

I suddenly realised that I hadn't commented on the passing of so called 'MoD UFO Expert' Nick Pope.  Now, while my condolences obviously go to his family, I feel that it is worth reiterating that all of his supposed insights into the UK MoD's 'UFO Files' were absolute bollocks.  There has never been a 'UFO Desk' at the MoD - there is simply some poor desk officer to whom falls the task of dealing with the various nutters who write in with their supposed sightings of aliens.  Pope and I were near contemporaries in the MoD - he had left just as I joined - and, on a course, I once met the guy who had taken over the 'UFO Desk' from him.  He confirmed that the UFO aspect was only a tiny part of his responsibilities and that all that happened when a report came in from the public was that a form letter would be sent out and report filed and forgotten, (usually in the bin).  The letter explained that the MoD's only interest in unidentified flying objects was when they posed a clear threat to the UK's defences.  Which none of the unsolicited reports seemed to suggest.  But Nick Pope clearly saw an opportunity and was able to conflate his MoD experiences into a whole media career.  I have no idea whether he was a UFO enthusiast before he did that job, whether it 'converted' him to the cause, or whether he simply saw an opportunity to make some money.  

Whatever the case, everything he came out with on the subject were a load of old bollocks.  Which it would have to be - like me, he signed up to the Official Secrets Act, (actually, we're all, as UK citizens, subject to it, but crown servants handling sensitive information have to sign a declaration stating that they fully understand how it impacts on what they can say about their work), meaning that if he really had learned anything really sensational from his job, he wouldn't have been able to report it.  If he had referred to genuine official materials in any of his books, for instance, then he would have faced prosecution. Which he never did, meaning that, basically, he made it all up or simply relied upon cases of alleged alien encounters already in the public domain.  I once had the misfortune to read (or try to read, I can't remember if I finished it), one of Pope's books and, as I recall, it was just a rehash of various well known alleged UFO incidents.  His conclusions seemed baffling to me, defying logic.  But hey, I'm not here to trash Nick Pope's memory, but I can't help but always come back to the fact that, in my opinion, he was a complete bullshitter, a feeling reinforced by the various TV appearances on those whacked out TV shows that clog the schedules on Blaze that he made.  I was always somewhat disturbed by the way in which he would ignore the obvious and omit any anomalous (anomalous to his ideas) facts in order to whip up a conspiracy theory.  I well, remember on one such show, he tried to make an MoD computer installation near Bath seem sinister - as he was, like me, an ex-MoD employee, then he knew as well as I did that it was all tied in with the Naval design bureau based in Bath, (which needed a fair amount of computing power to design warships).  Like I said, an opportunistic bullshitter.  But heck, he made a living out of it, which is fair enough, but it is important to grasp that, far from being an 'authority', he was just another bollocks-spouting grifter.  In my opinion.

Attack of the Killer Carrots

Damn it, I did it again!  I allowed myself to be drawn in by one of those tabloid story headlines and ended up underwhelmed!  In this case it was a Daily Star story on an aggregator site, entitled 'Brit Scientist Killed by Carrots After Horror Experiment Went Very Wrong'.  I mean, how could I resist?  It immediately conjured up visions of a crazed botanist in a lab full of bubbling test tubes, hell bent on creating a new race of ambulatory, intelligent carrots through genetic modification.  Doubtless, despite his plans to create a carrot army for world conquest, his creations turned on him - probably boiling him hot water in revenge for humanity's treatment of their vegetable cousins.  Of course, it turned out to be far less exciting than this: the story turned out to be about a nutritionist who had to try and prove the efficacy of 'healthy eating' by going on an insane diet of carrot juice and vitamin A supplements.  The inevitable overdose of vitamin A destroyed his liver with fatal consequences.  Yeah, I preferred the walking carrots as well.  Moreover, it turns out that all of this happened in 1974!  Hardly current news, I'd say.  Clearly, the Daily Star's writers' ability to make up vaguely plausible shit woven around the bare bones of a contemporary story, is flagging and they are having to go back to the archives to create filler.  Frankly, in this case, they'd have been better off just making up a story along the lines of my imaginings.  

The idea of intelligent killer carrots does, of course, have some precedent.  In 1951's The Thing From Another World, of course, the title creature is the thawed out pilot of a flying saucer crashed in the arctic ice, who turns out to be a plant-based lifeform: 'an intellectual carrot!' as one character declares.  Not that he looked like a carrot of course.  He was distinctly humanoid and played by James Arness, long before he became Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke.  But TV did give us a genuine malignant intelligent carrot, in an especially ludicrous episode of Lost in Space in the sixties.  Played by Stanley Adams in a truly crappy costume, he got very het up about Dr Smith picking a flower, turning Smith into a tree and Penny into a flowerbed, (I kid you not - I'd like to think that young Angela Cartwright, previously a promising child actress, was onto her agent after being forced to portray a floral border, after all, she'd been one of the Von Trapp kids in The Sound of Music only a few years earlier!).  Notoriously, the episode was so bad that several cast members couldn't keep straight faces and ended up being suspended, (Professor and Mrs Robinson are absent from a couple of subsequent episodes).  So, getting back to the point, such as it is, the Daily Star really had no excuse for teasing with a such headline, then failing to deliver any true killer carrots - they had plenty of precedents to rip-off, after all.

The Dead Are Alive (1972)

An Italian/German/Yugoslav co-production, the fact that The Dead Are Alive (1972) isn't better known is possibly related to it being misleadingly marketed in various territories.  It's English language title seems to imply a zombie movie, while the German release title and marketing - which translates as Mystery of the Yellow Grave - plays up a tenuous Edgar Wallace connection, (it was actually loosely inspired by a short story by Wallace's son, Bryan Edgar Wallace).  The Italian title, which translates as The Etruscan Kills Again, also implies some kind of supernatural horror.  In reality, the film is a giallo movie, made at the height of the genre's popularity - there are no supernatural elements (although this is implied as a plot device a few times) and certainly no zombies.  Unfortunately, it isn't exactly vintage giallo, being far too slow moving with clunky plotting that all too often gets bogged down in various personal melodramas.  While the genre always relied upon throwing in plenty of misdirection in order to keep audiences guessing as a twisty plot unfolded, The Dead Are Alive suffers from having far too many sub-plots going on, with the film's constant jumping between them hurting the story's progression - the film's narrative has a halting quality, with tension and momentum built up in one plot strand being dissipated by abrupt switches in direction to pursue other sub-plots.  There are so many false trails that the film generates enough red herrings to stock a kipper factory.  The sheer number of characters these multiple plot strands bring in also becomes confusing - trying to keep up with who they are and what their relationships are is hugely distracting.

The film's initial set up is certainly intriguing - a group of archaeologists led by recovering alcoholic professor Jason Porter (Alex Cord) open up an ancient Etruscan tomb in Italy, revealing a series of violent wall paintings depicting an ancient Etruscan god and a ritual of human sacrifice to the deity.  Pretty soon, a pair of youths are found dead in the tomb, beaten to death in a manner similar to that depicted in the paintings.  Everything seems to point to the professor - who, when drinking, is prone to violent outbursts and memory lapses - but there are plenty of other suspicious characters: could it be that creepy site security guard who is trading in stolen artefacts and likes burning insects to death?  Or is it the world famous composer (John Marley), who is married (bigamously as it turns out) to the prof's ex (Samantha Eggar) and is also prone to violent outbursts (he disfigured his first wife in a fit of anger years before)?  Then again, could it be the composer's son, who works with the prof and is the son of the disfigured ex-wife?  More murders ensue and 'clues' pile up, the murder weapon is a missing probe used by the archaeological team in surveying tombs, pairs of red shoes, apparently taken from a live theatre production the in which composer is conducting the orchestra, are left at the murder scenes, while the prof keeps hearing snatches of classical music close to the murder scenes.  The audience's constant bombardment with characters, clues and incidents rapidly becomes both confusing and wearing.

Still, the film does look very good, its colourful photography making good use of some attractive Italian locations.  While Armando Crispino's  direction is steady enough, with the murder scenes harrowingly well staged and the scenes in the tomb suitably atmospheric, it is never able to build up the tension and suspense required to make this sort of film work.  Despite the frenetic cutting between sub-plots, the film overall is far too slow in progressing its central narrative and is far too long - you can't help but feel that it would have benefitted greatly from tighter editing.  The film cast strongly, with its three Anglo-American stars and a smattering of Italian, German and Yugoslav actors, most recognisable from other continental films of the era, making up the supporting cast.  Alex Cord as the lead makes for particularly interesting casting - never an exactly charismatic or sympathetic actor, here his lack of sympathetic qualities is deployed to good use, in what is, in effect, an anti-hero role.  For the plot to work, it is essential that, for once, the audience should be able to feel that the lead is something of a bastard who might well be capable of murder - Cord's complete absence of charisma makes this very easy, with his character, even when he does eventually unravel the mystery and identify the real killer, remaining essentially dislikable.  By no means a bad film, The Dead Are Alive is simply too crowded, in plot terms, to work effectively as a giallo, its plethora of sub-plots and proliferation of red herrings meaning that it never fully develops and explores an interesting opening scenario.

Mental Health and Relegation Battles

I recently decided to do my mental health a favour and opt out of following the Spurs, or, indeed, any football for the time being.  With Tottenham looking down the barrel of relegation from the Premier League and the whole 'controversy' over the appointment of Roberto DeZerbi as manager, the whole fan discourse surrounding the club has become incredibly toxic.  I alluded to the Roberto DeZerbi nonsense a while ago - a 'controversy' manufactured entirely by some sections of Spurs fandom based around not something that DeZerbi himself did, but what a player who worked under him at Marseille had been accused of doing (although no charges resulted from the allegations against him), at said player's previous club.  Again, as I've also noted, there are plenty of good footballing reasons to question DeZerbi's appointment, most significantly his volatile temperament, but the fact is that he is now the team's manager.  But certain sections of the fandom just can't accept this - I've seen so-called fans saying that they are now going to abandon the club and support someone else.  Well fine, fuck off then.  Worse still, there are those now actively hoping for relegation to 'teach the owners a lesson'.  Shame on you - what kind of fans are you?  Being a fan surely means supporting the club through thick and thin, through good times and bad times.  

Like I say, it has all become so toxic, so quickly.  It was really getting me down, particularly seeing one of the few Tottenham blogs I had any respect for descend into internecine warfare, with anyone questioning their anti-DeZerbi stance or simply trying to offer an alternative view, banned and their posts erased.  I've lost all respect for the blog and those who run it.  So, I made the decision last weekend to stop reading it, stop looking at any Spurs newsfeeds, in fact, stop reading match reports and generally just stop following the team.  Right now, my plan is to wait until the season is done and dusted, then look at returning to following them next season, regardless of which division they are in, but still avoiding all the online commentary about the club.

Anyway, all of this led to me wondering just why it is that some people can get so wrapped up in supporting a football club (or any sporting team, for that matter), that it can drive them to the extremes I've recently seen online?  Personally, I'm largely an armchair supporter: I follow the club's fortunes, occasionally watch their matches on TV (if they are free-to-air) and watch the highlights on 'Match of the Day'.  I don't feel that my entire identity is wrapped up with the club, that their winning or losing a match is life-or-death, or that if they are relegated I, personally, will feel humiliated and diminished.  Yet, clearly, many people do - as the past few months have shown, many fans really do take it all personally.  It becomes even more baffling when you bear in mind the decision as to which club you support is often purely arbitrary.  Sure, for many it is simply a question of supporting your hometown, or local, club.  But if yours is a lower league or non-league side, it isn't unreasonable to support also, say, a Premier League or Championship club.  Which is where it becomes a bit random.  There are the 'glory hunters', who pull for a club simply because it is always successful and always competing at the top table, perhaps hoping that its glory can somehow reflect upon them.  Others deliberately pick s less successful club, enjoying supporting the underdog.  There are plenty of weird and quirky reasons why we choose to support a particular team.  After all, Spurs aren't my local club, not even remotely.  Southampton and Portsmouth both have league clubs closer to me geographically, (they're also, sometimes, in the Premiership).  Even Bournemouth and Brighton are reasonably local to me.  Yet, since childhood, I've followed Tottenham.  

Why, you may well ask?  Well, it's simply this: when I was very young, one of my older brothers had a Subuteo set - this was way before the era of video games - the 1967 FA Cup Final set, to be precise, which featured Chelsea and Tottenham, (in real-life, Spurs beat Chelsea that season in the final).  So, it was a choice between the team in blue or the team in white.  Even then, I didn't like blue, so I naturally gravitated toward the white shirted team - Tottenham Hotspur - when playing with the set.  It's that simple and arbitrary as to why I ended up a Spurs supporter!  Which is why, I suppose, that I've never become fanatical about them - I don't really have that much invested in them.  Ultimately, they are just a football club - I can have no influence over how they play, how well run they are, who manages them: I'm just a spectator, something that too many fans seem to lose sight of.  It is pointless getting so wound up over something you have no control over.  Still, my decision to back away from the whole footballing circus has done my mental health the world of good - the whole negativity and irrationality surrounding the current Spurs situation was really getting me down, at a time when already have more than enough real-life shit going on in my life.  I mean, really, these online Spurs supporters really need to get a grip and put it all in perspective - none of it really matters, it's just a game.

Express Delivery

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.