ITEM: So there I am, reading the John Landis coffee table book Monsters in the Movies and suddenly traumatised to discover that director John Carpenter regards black and white classic The Haunting as ‘bullshit! It is so awful.’
More amusing was an observation from Landis himself regarding the Resident Evil films, that ‘You could take random scenes from each of these films and cut them together and I don’t think anyone would notice.’
This in turn led to me digging out the DVDs of the first couple of films in the franchise and perusing the notes on the back cover. For the second one it says that Alice ‘faces off against hordes of blood-thirsty zombies, stealthy lickers, mutant canines’. And now I’m wondering what the hell are ‘stealthy lickers’? They sound like something or someone who has wandered in from a different kind of movie altogether.
ITEM: Last weekend I did some ‘gardening’, by which I mean I borrowed my brother-in-law’s hoe for a few hours and took out my latent aggression on the weeds choking my driveway and surrounding the bungalow with evil intent. Previous readers of this blog may be aware that I regard any form of gardening as a painful necessity at best and a loathsome way to waste time at worst, and throughout all those long, long hours of wielding a hoe I cursed continually.
But here’s the thing – at the end of it all, when I surveyed my weed free demesne, I did feel a certain sense of accomplishment, that I had done something to validate my status as a male of the tribe. Standing there, with every limb aching and my body reeking of sweat, I could feel the testosterone pulsing through my veins and the super-ego plugging into some primal Pete, so that I wanted to beat my manly chest with tightly clenched fists and howl defiance at the darkening sky, then drag a fur clad Raquel Welch off to my cave for a wild night of passionate monkey sex.
In the event, I went indoors, stripped off and had a bath, fixed myself up a nice salad (but no quiche), which I ate while listening to a Brahms’ violin concerto, then settled in for a quiet evening of reading and watching DVDs.
And next year I’m buying weed killer.
ITEM: Tonight it’s Bonfire Night, when we celebrate Guy Fawkes by shooting rockets into the sky and playing with sparklers, though I’ll be doing neither of those things. I don’t really approve of blowing people up to forward political ends, not even in the current time of trouble when the option seems so tempting, but I will politely doff my hat in the direction of Mr Fawkes and his co-conspirators in recognition of the fact that they had the decency to direct their gunpowder plot at our political lords and masters instead of indiscriminately setting off explosions, as has become the custom with so many of their counterparts in the present day.
A round of applause for the ‘moral’ terrorist.
ITEM: It was Halloween on Monday, and as is my custom I dressed entirely in black for the day (well, except for the white stripes on my trainers – no getting round those, I’m afraid). I looked rather like a ninja assassin, albeit a slightly chubby, middle-aged ninja assassin, the kind that got into the work simply because he wasn’t supple enough for the Milk Tray gig.
As part of this ensemble, I wore my cherished Stephen King’s Insomnia t-shirt, which I won in a competition run by the British Fantasy Society to mark the launch of the book, and the pedants among you will seize on the fact that the book was out in 1994 and seventeen years later I’m still wearing the t-shirt (but I only wear it for special occasions, and those are few and far between).
Written on the front of the t-shirt are the words ‘MORNING WILL COME Just pray you’re there to see it.’, which sounds like eminently sensible advice, if praying is your thing. On the back it reads ‘Stephen King’s INSOMNIA’, plus some guff about the publisher, which I can’t remember.
Of course I don’t like the idea of walking around and looking like an advertisement, and so when I wear this t-shirt I always have a polo neck on over the top of it, but I know I ‘look good’, and that’s all that really matters.
ITEM: An observation – I take it for granted that most people have principles, though not that they’re necessarily the same as my own. And so when somebody starts blathering on about their principles, about how the way they’re acting is a matter of principle, I immediately become suspicious. Why would I think they don’t have principles? What is it they’re trying to hide under a cloak of integrity?
Nietzsche made a similar observation, along the lines of how principles are simply a pretext for people to act however they wish and feel good about it, with the caveat that usually they’d be acting very badly indeed.
ITEM: During my time without a computer and enforced absence from this blog, nobody seems to have washed up here through using search terms like ‘sex with a washer woman’ and ‘lucy liu bondage’, though it used to be a regular occurrence. This would seem to suggest that those searches originated from my computer. Oh crap! I need help.
Trumpetville 
In theory, the more you mention that people once came here looking for lucy liu bondage, the more people should come here looking for it. The system is clearly broken.
Funny to think that a new Charlie’s Angels TV series came and went in the US in the few weeks you were offline…
Alas, most of our systems appear to be broken.
No doubt the new “Charlie’s Angels” will be out on DVD sooner or later, so we can see what we missed.