I laugh at the stupidest things

I imagine a Catalan private dick named 'Oliver Detectius'. As Sara said, "his destiny was pretty much decided from birth". A long and proud line of private investigators...

Look, you don't have to find it funny. I do. That's enough.

More pictures from Barcelona soon. I'd write about it further but I'm feeling a little drained at the moment, oddly enough. Think it's the pressure of all the assignments and my dissertation hanging over my head, plus the thought of what the hell I'm going to do when the time comes to seek gainful employment. The funny thing about crossing bridges when you come to them: sometimes when you get close enough you realise that there isn't actually a bridge in the first place, and the water's running quite fast...

Plots summarised a little differently...

I've been lolling at this on and off all day. Here's one in particular that grabbed me:

"NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: Authorities contain terrorist threat."

Pitch black, utterly fitting, and very funny.

I've been thinking of some ones related to Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, for example:

CHINA MIEVILLE - 'PERDIDO STREET STATION': A purportedly Liberal academic wreaks havoc through irresponsible animal testing, resulting in many deaths and much work for beleaguered authorities.

BORGES - 'THE SOUTH': Medical and social services fail a mentally ill old man who is a danger to himself and those around him.

JEFF VANDERMEER - 'VENISS UNDERGROUND': A man who can't get over his ex girlfriend does her douchebag brother a favour and loses his job because of it.

MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI - 'HOUSE OF LEAVES': A couple buy a home but neglect to hire a surveyor first. They realise their new property is structurally unsound and the resultant strain is too much for their marriage to bear.

ITALO CALVINO: 'IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER': "You" eventually come to realise that quality control in Italian publishing/printing during the 1970s must have been shockingly bad.

H.P. LOVECRAFT: 'THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP': The protagonist and a friend drift apart after the latter marries ("bros before hoes, dude!") and finds that his father in law becomes increasingly controlling.

CLARK ASHTON SMITH: 'THE DARK EIDOLON': Animosity flares up between new neighbours. Property values plummet.

PHILIP K. DICK: 'THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH': A philanthropic entrepreneur returns from a lengthy sabbatical with fresh thinking that could really make a difference. His contemporaries are ungrateful and unenthusiastic.

WILLIAM GIBSON: 'COUNT ZERO': A wayward lad spends too much time on the Internet, resulting in his mother's house burning down and a lot of problems for everyone.

NEIL GAIMAN: 'NEVERWHERE': London's street people take time out from their busy schedule of Special Brew drinking to take a man on a sightseeing tour.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK: 'DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME': A woman plays hard to get and spends all her time worrying about 'what her friends would say'.

The ever-amiable Mr Papaya

I like 'Fringe' a lot. OK, so it's can be a little formulaic, and the actor playing Broyles is really just playing the same character he played in 'The Wire', and maybe the show's open to accusations of being an 'X-Files' ripoff - a similarity I noticed immediately, as someone who never missed an episode of the show at the time. I prefer to think of it as a post-millennial take on paranormal investigation, with J.J. Abrams bringing in the kind of things that make 'Lost' such damn good TV.

I particularly like the way that Dunham possesses fragments of Agent Scott's memories and the way that this is used - emails, phonecalls, meetings with the dead(?) man that only actually happen in her head, her mind's way of translating the shreds of his consciousness. I really like the isolation-tank sequences as well, where Dunham finds herself present within scenes of Scott's memories but can't actually hear everything that is said, for instance, because he wasn't within earshot himself at the time. Great stuff.

This aspect of the show is particularly relevant to me because memory and our relationship to the past are pretty central themes in my own writing. It's nice that I can actually engage with a mainstream US TV show in that way, it restores a little of my faith in big broadcasters.

When looked at in an overview maybe 'Fringe' doesn't seem that impressive, but it's the little things like that, or Walter Bishop's hilarious utterances (every time I watch an episode I end up talking in a "Walter Bishop voice" for a while afterwards - sad, yes, and annoying for others) that keep me watching.

Ridiculous Pulp Paperback Covers - 'Where Were You Last Pluterday?" by Paul Van Herck

I came across this today and sort of wish I'd bought it. It looks bonkers.

The title itself is amazing, utterly Lintian. "Pluterday" LOL.

Hope it's still there next time I visit.

I doubt this typo would have pleased the author...

A couple of quotes showing that Hodgson's attitude toward the porcine might not have been particularly favourable:

"As the sounds ceased I saw something was rising up through the middle of the "defense". It rose with a slow steady movement. I saw it pale and huge through the swaying, whirling funnel of cloud - a monstrous pallid snout rising out of that unknowable abyss.... It rose higher like a huge pale mound. Through a thinning of the cloud curtain I saw one small eye.... I shall never see a pig's eye again without feeling something of what I felt then. A pig's eye with a sort of hell-light of vile understanding shining at the back of it." - The Hog

"It was a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appearance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine." - The House on the Borderland

Full texts of 'The House on the Borderland', 'The Night Land', the Carnacki stories, and more of Hodgson's fiction is available to read online via places such as Project Gutenberg.

Hodgson was a writer ahead of his time in many ways and although reading him is sometimes pretty tough going (the cod-archaic style of 'The Night Land' a case in point) I believe he made a lasting contribution to Weird fiction. China Miéville's excellent introduction to this collection, now unfortunately out of print (I bagged a copy before the prices shot up) is well worth reading for anyone interested in the author and his works.

Goodfellas VS Peanuts

Charlie Brooker on Literature: "Apparently 65% of us have lied about reading the great works of literature. We needn't have bothered"

"The other irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren't worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn't bothered turning up). That's why so many contemporary novels seem to largely consist of a thinly veiled version of the author discussing politics and art and quantum theory over a carefully selected bottle of wine with the devastatingly beautiful mixed-race wife of an impotent international statesman and/or gangster (delete where applicable) before whisking her off to a swish hotel room to have expert animal sex with her all weekend until a pigeon symbolising the unions or something crashes into the window and blah blah blah blah BLAH. I mean, really, who cares? Mr Tickle had 20 times the raw entertainment value - and it came with pictures - so if you can't beat that, don't bother."

Full article here.

LOL.

Cue dullards calling him 'anti-intellectual'. There's nothing particularly 'intellectual' or worthy about stuck-up, elitist bullshit. I think Brooker's seen through the Emperor's New Clothes..

Things that have made me LOL today

* I love internet memes. I like to think that within the dog's yoyo is a smaller you, and that you also has an even smaller yoyo with a dog inside that... Would Borges approve? No, he'd say it was silly.

* This South Park clip always has me in stitches. "Artemis Clyde Frog" is great. I now can't take 'Wild Wild West' at all seriously when it's repeated on TV - although whether I took it particularly seriously in the first place is another matter...

* Earlier in Paddington I witnessed a two tourists trying to pay for their KFC with Euros. The man at the til looked at them like they'd just turned up with wheelbarrowfull of Zimbabwean Dollars.

* We've noticed that 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares' seems to have fallen back on an utter reliance upon it's conventions. Now we've got to the stage where we can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what'll happen: he'll turn up, call the waitress 'my darling', completely diss the crap out of all the food he's given, argue constantly with the boisterous owner/chef (who will likely be Italian-American and live somewhere on the East Coast - usually New Jersey) - then he'll say that they've "lost their passion". He'll bang on about 'fresh local produce', revamp and slash the menu, make the portions smaller (this is, after all, America), then his team will "work through the night" and completely reinvent the restaurant's interior - which the staff and by now abashed and humbled owner will love, especially the photos of their family which he's had put up around the place in a schmaltzy appeal to sentimentality. There'll be one highly problematic night to show how much of a mess the place is, then a successful one after Ramsay's changes. He always comes up with a signiture dish for the place (Italian cuisine? Meatballs then!) which debuts in a P.R. event for the local community. By the end of the show Ramsay has mended both the restaurant and the relationships between the people working in it and their families - hugs and learning all round. Then he disappears in his black coat like David Carradine in 'Kung Fu' or Banner at the end of an episode of 'The Incredible Hulk' - his work is never done and he must move on. In so many ways it's a perfect example of how shockingly bad US TV can be, but we're addicted. It's just too easy to take the mick.

* I find a lot of humour in the idea that Emilio Estevez bears a secret jealousy of Charlie Sheen and spends his days watching 'Mighty Ducks' on repeat, muttering "I could have been the big star with the sitcom, I wouldn't have become a f*cking sex addict..." I also like the idea of him as a Gormenghast/Farseer-Trilogyesque black-sheep of the Sheen dynasty, unable to bear the family name (although Estevez actually is the family name) and working clandestine plots to regain his rightful throne. Yep, that's a bit of a weird one.

* I've also been deriving much amusement from pissing Sara off with my Jackie Mason impressions. What, you want I should stop?

Holler at ya President!

Shouts out to all my presidents

Behold: the ultimate archvillain

A bizarre combination of 'the most evil man in history' and arguably one of the most harmless lifeforms on the planet.

Ross Kemp hits those mean streets

Bare lolz

The cake is a lie

A delicious lie but a lie nonetheless.

I suppose it makes no difference though as there is no spoon either.

A hard-boiled haiku & why I love South Park

I'm an absolute sucker for the ol' incongruous juxtaposition. What that says about my particular flavour of wit I don't know.

I can't take credit for this haiku unfortunately, it's from Jsut's DeviantArt page.

"DAMMIT KOWALSKI
HAND OVER YOUR BADGE AND GUN
YOU ARE OFF THE FORCE"

Try to picture it being recited beside a waterfall in a japanese rock-garden. "Chief, I'm going to follow this case on my own whether you like it or not-" *tinkle of windchimes* "-and you can't stop me"

I tend to like things that show a self-consciousness of conventions, especially those of pop culture. It's part of why I enjoy South Park so much. Their parodies show a genuine, endearing fondness and deep understanding of the genres/programmes they're drawing from, and it shines through.

The Guitar Hero rock movie spoof, and the "Who's in charge here? Not anymore you're not!" sketch stand out in particular in relatively recent episodes, but going right back to the first series you can find, for instance, elements of John Carpenter pastiche in the Mecha Streisand episode. The 'spooky synth music' at one point made me laugh out loud when watching it again recently, something I never really knew the significance of when I first saw it all those years ago. Despite occasional off episodes and a few clumsy attempts at shock tactics, South Park just keeps on giving.

The Turing Cops are on to me...

See above: something that popped up while commenting on Livejournal when I failed to do the "type the letters that you see" thing.

I now have an image of Wintermute sitting there scratching its head (figuratively speaking) and wondering "Is that an E or an A?".

I reckon they should implement the Voight-Kampff Test for greater security. Would love to be confronted one day with "You're in the desert, walking along on the sand, and all of a sudden you see a tortoise..."