» Random Acts of Evil

TV-AM
Not sure if this is random as it was pre-meditated but....

Many moons ago, before Daybreak and before even GM-TV, there was the breakfast show ratings heavyweight that was TV-AM. This was the show that gave us Anne Diamond and Nick Owen, Ulrika-ka-ka Jonsson doing the weather before she hooked up with Vic and Bob, and for reasons that nobody has entirely explained - the mystifyingly popular puppet rat called Roland.

They also gave us Wacaday and Timmy Mallett.

My brother worked for a security firm and the owner of TV-AM, Bruce Gyngell, hired them when he was having trouble with the unions over some deal or other and they had to sweep his offices for bugs and upgrade the building security. As a result my brother had the keys to all the doors.

Because of the nature of the show it started in the early morning and my brother had to be there every day before everyone else and so he saw all the presenters arrive. Which means he spent a goodly amount of time perving over Michaela Strachan. But for every up there's the inevitable down and TV-AM's down came in the form of the arrival of Timmy Mallet, the relentlessly chirpy twat of foam-hammer fame.

Timmy used to cycle to the TV-AM studios every day and would usually coast into reception on his bicycle and announce his annoying presence to all and sundry. His ride was exquisitely timed such that his presence would trigger the infra-red detector and the plate glass doors would slide open so he could cruise in without a pause.

So one morning my brother locked the doors....
(Fri 17th Feb 2012, 22:04, More)

» Conspiracy Theories

Hollywood films with an inverted hermeneutic (fairly long post)
You've all seen films with Satan. Either he, or one of his minions, is harassing young women or little girls, getting them to talk dirty and vomit pea soup all over the place while wearing spooky contact lenses. That's the Satan everyone's seen and is yawningly familiar with.

How many of you are aware you've seen literally dozens of depictions of Satan disguised so you wouldn't know you're cheering him on?

For example, the movie The Chronicles of Riddick. The bad guys in the Chronicles of Riddick are the Necromongers. They're a religious order that fly around in crucifix-shaped ships looking for the Underverse. They "crusade" across the star systems telling people they must "convert or die". Their deity is a three-faced trinity. Their leader, the Lord Marshal, has died and been born again and is now neither living nor dead but "something else". They are, in short, Catholics in space with a zombie Jesus figure in charge.

But if they're the bad guys does that mean Riddick is Satan? Yes. Yes it does. Riddick is depicted with the hallmarks of the adversary from various religious traditions.

He is captured and confined to Crematoria (Hell) from whence he must escape for the "day of days" fight with the Lord Marshal (his own words).

He is suspended in Crematoria, just like Satan is said to be suspended perpetually falling into Hell eternally in some traditions and the Lord Marshal even says "your fall will be eternal".

He falls in Crematoria. Satan is a fallen angel, he is always depicted in the inverted hermeneutic as literally falling.

He is destined to fight the Necromongers. Riddick's entire race refused to bow the knee to the Lord Marshal. The Furyans are the fallen rebel angels of Satan.

He is immensely skilled with weapons. In the inverted hermeneutic Satan is always depicted as a skilled fighter due to one of the fallen angels of the Book of Enoch, Azazel, being credited with teaching mankind the art of combat.

He was confined to a pit and is hurt by the light. Riddick was initially imprisoned in a penal mine and had his eyes doctored to see in the dark and is now hurt by the light. Azazel was cast into a pit and buried under rock and is likewise hurt by the light.

He performs a false miracle to come back from the dead. He shields himself with an opponent's body and pretends to be dead, only to come back and haunt the bad guys.

And so on. There's a checklist of attributes of Satan that are used when portraying Satan and if you stick half a dozen up there, those in the know know just who they're watching.

And Riddick is just one example.

Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, just like Riddick

Falls when handcuffed to the suicide nut when handcuffed from a building

Is suspended and tormented under a shower by the bad guys

Is immensely skilled with weapons being one of the 8-10 best snipers in the world.

Performs a false miracle by "coming back from the dead" after stopping a shotgun round with his flak vest.

And just like Riddick who tells the imam in Pitch Black he believes in God and just hates him, Riggs tells Murtaugh to "hate God back, it works for me".

Oh and who does Riggs fight, at Christmas time, in LA? That would be a corrupt general whose side he initially fought on and his chief henchman Joshua (which is the same as Yeheshua which is the Hebrew name of Jesus). In fact, when Joshua is tortured for no good reason other than to lampshade who he is, the guy watching says "Jesus Christ" half a dozen times. They are, quite literally, telling you who the character is whom you are watching being tortured.

Similarly, Shane Black who scripted Lethal Weapon and who in interview has said he's fascinated by "fallen" heroes, reprised the character of Riggs with Joe Hallenbeck in The Last Boy Scout.

And on it goes. You can play this game yourself with a lot of Hollywood movies, preferably ones with two male characters who are based on Shemyaza and Azazel from the Book of Enoch.

Han Solo and Luke Skywalker - fall down chasms, check, threatened with a 1000 years of torment in a pit, check, blinded temporarily by the light after encasement in carbonite rock, check, etc etc. And who are they fighting? Oh that's the Godlike Emperor and his right hand man who was born without conception, was prophesied to be born, talked to temple elders as a youngster, stormed the same temple as an adult, is obsessed with life over death and actually quotes the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew in the final prequel. Star Wars is the story of the rebel angels, told from the rebel angels point of view and they even tell you it happened a long time ago.

This is, by far, my favourite conspiracy theory I've ever come across and I like it because it's testable anytime you sit down to watch a film.

Anyway, apologies for length but I find this theory very interesting and thought I'd put it out there so everyone can enjoy it.
(Thu 1st Dec 2011, 15:58, More)

» Not-stalgia

Mine was not a well off family...
...so in the 70's and 80's when the summer holidays rolled around, that invariably meant a holiday in England. Which usually invariably meant Cornwall to us. Being from oop north, this always entailed loading the family into the knackered old car my father possessed on a Friday evening and driving south throughout the night.

Naturally expecting two young lads to sit on the backseat for hours without fighting or trying to wind each other up is wishful thinking on the part of parents everywhere, so dad would bollock us with all the colourful invective he recalled from his army days as a tank driver. So we'd sit sulking in silence. Or not silence. Because the radio had Johnny Mathis, or ELO or ABBA. To liven up the proceedings occasionally I'd vomit.

And because the first vehicle dad learned to drive was a tank, he drove everything like it was a tank, which often meant the car would break down somewhere along the line, usually because dad thought the car would go through or over things. Though we often broke down in some spectacularly pretty places, so there was that.

Cornwall has some pretty stunning beaches. But if, like me, you don't like beaches because the sun turns your milk white skin into a seething angry red torment from hell, then having to remain fully-clothed on the beach because sun lotion wasn't good enough in those days, kind of defeated the point.

Still, there were always the amusement arcades, if you'll excuse the exaggeration. Oh the thrill of putting your 1 and 2p pieces into the machine holding thousands of them and watching the shelves slide back and forth and not push any of that copper into the dispensing slot for you to collect. For a similar thrill you could always throw your money down a street grate. The best video game at the time was space invaders. Okay at the time but looking back now, Christ.

So the highlight of the trip was always going to the cinema in Newquay, which we did when it rained, which was every year. Something I could easily have done at home.

I vividly remember the first foreign holiday we had. We went to Scotland! Scotland!! It was almost exotic. We stayed on a caravan on a farm so every day smelled of cowshit. There were so many horseflies I was covered in itchy bites including, puzzlingly, on my nutsack. I had to bathe in calamine lotion so looked like Mr Blobby. A Mr Blobby whose yellow spots itched and oozed and weeped and looked like a vivid warning poster against the perils of unprotected sex.

Seriously, fuck Scotland.

As a remedy for venturing to the foreign hell which was Scotland, the next year we went to Skegness. In the days before blue flags and standards, the sewage outflow pipe from Skegness came out about twenty yards from the seas edge on the beach, which we discovered when my brother emerged from the sea like the Monster From the Black Lagoon covered in shit on day one. So we spent the entire week not going in the sea. We got really good at Swingball.

Such were our holidays I used to long for the simple pleasures of staying home and watching "Why Don't You?".

Getting my own passport and job showed me you could actually have fun on a holiday.

tl;dr - The English don't do holiday resorts well. The Scottish are worse still.
(Thu 29th Aug 2013, 17:49, More)

» Shit Holidays

Brown trainers
The Cameron Highlands afford a welcome relief from the sweltering heat of the Malaysian coast and were used for precisely that back in the days when the map was coloured pink. Today they're part of the Asian backpacker trail and you can go hill climbing and visiting tea plantations if you go there.

Unfortunately, getting there requires a bus trip and I was feeling distinctly uneasy when I settled into my seat at 10pm for the bus ride up. One reason I was feeling uneasy was the curry I'd just eaten in Ipoh, which I could tell was planning to cause havoc with me in due course. The other reason I felt uneasy was the presence of the sick bag attached to the back of the seat in front of me. A sick bag? On a bus?

It turns out there are something like 470 hairpin bends on the road up to the Cameron Highlands and in the dark you can't fix on the horizon.

After half an hour of those bends I'd already filled one bag with vile-smelling puke, I was drip white, shaking like a leaf and drenched in sweat. But the bus was just beginning. I lost count of the number of sick bags I swiped from other seats, they were quite small and I was heaving up soupy-lumpy vomit like a discount Mr Creosote. Because of the constant lurching of the bus as it went round corners, a not inconsiderable amount of said vomit was deposited on the floor, on the seat and on myself. At least three other passengers were inspired by my performance enough to join me in wretching their own guts up but we had the sympathy of the driver who was grinning his brown leathery face off in his rear view at us all.

He deposited the acrid-smelling bunch of us off in the middle of Tanah Ratah village at 1am. Everybody wandered off to their various guesthouses they'd had planned. Unsurprisingly nobody was eager to share a room with me so I went to a separate guesthouse and roused the grumpy owner who grudgingly allowed this shivering, carrot covered foreigner to have one of his rooms.

Just in the nick of time too. The trip up had been that long that the curry had worked it's way through my digestive tract as if it were a ticking bomb passed hand to hand. I'd just squat down on the Asian hole in the floor bog when the Krakatoa of liquid shits erupted from my arseparts. Fucking hell, it was like I had a pressure hose on a tanker of diarrhoea and my thumb partly over the nozzle. About half of the pungent slurry made it into the crapper, the remainder went over the floor, my calves, my shorts and my trainers. I shat for a good few minutes, feeling fainter by the second, wiped, flushed then stumbled into the shower in all my clothes.

I was ill for four days. Climbed no hills. Saw no tea plantations. I saw a squat toilet and the shop which sold toilet rolls and that's it. The clothes cleaned up and you could only faintly smell the puke.

The trainers were still brown though. They had to be chucked.
(Fri 15th Aug 2014, 22:11, More)

» Break-up Stories

Brought it upon myself perhaps, but still
I had thought my backpacking days were over.

That was until I met James in my new job. James was a company IT guy and all round generally decent chap and he would sit there and quietly absorb the travellers' tales Sarah, another co-worker, and I would share. One company night out, in the pub, James revealed he'd been listening to our tales and wasn't getting any younger and wanted to jack his job in and do the working-visa year-in-Oz thing. I obviously had loved my wandering, did I want to go with him?

There was a problem - I was in a relationship.

Luckily, knowing I was a dromomaniac and that I still had the travel bug in my system, the girlfriend didn't mind if I went. We had phone, we had the internet and could keep in touch. Two other friends had heard about the plans and wanted to quit their jobs too so they could come along (though they'd be joining us four months in) and she'd know I'd be with them. So off James and I went to Oz.

James, it quickly turned out, hadn't been on a holiday without his parents and had never been abroad in his life. He couldn't cook, couldn't do much of anything as it turned out and wouldn't lift a finger to do anything that needed doing. I was the experienced traveller, obviously I had to do everything. Setting him up with the tax authorities? I did it for him. Setting him up with the reciprocal medical aid? I did it for him. I even had to get a spider out of his room at one point. Okay, this *was* Australia and their spiders apparently eat people but this one was tiny.

We soon went our separate ways. I made a new circle of friends via my temporary job and being on my own and ostensibly single, at a glance, I started to get offers from Australian ladies and female backpackers both. However, knowing my girl was waiting for me I informed them, with much regret, that I had a girlfriend and was unavailable. Six or seven girls I knocked back (though one of them was a flake, a tarot card reader had said her future hubbie would be a Brit and I showed up the very next week). The others were wonderful girls though.

I remained faithful, in spite of temptation, in touch with my girlfriend the whole time; enjoying what I imagined would be my last serious bout of travel before settling down.

Funnily enough, things never turn out how you imagine though. I didn't last the whole year, I cut it short with three months still left on my working visa. When I got home the girlfriend had a kid. Not mine either.
(Thu 12th Sep 2013, 21:20, More)