Futtocks

Single ladies, form an orderly queue... he's back!

Ox cheek, cooked in a roasting bag in the slow cooker with the standard mirepoix mix (plus smoked garlic and three crushed juniper berries). Very easy, very tasty, extremely cheap. I served it with chunky sweet potato chips/fries and horseradish mayonnaise. I was going to steam some green beans, but forgot 'til it was too late. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I will eat something healthy tomorrow*, okay? I brought a knife to the table, but the meat was so tender it wasn't used. *yeah, right; I just bought a haggis!

I have never attempted Finnegan's Wake, though. However, you can get his complete prose on Kindle for 99p, so...

I'm now wondering if an audiobook of it, if read by someone sufficiently talented, might turn out to be a pretty hallucinogenic experience.

Ulysses is, for me, more of a performance piece than a novel, like something meant to be read aloud. The concise, down-to-earth stories in The Dubliners, while also excellent reading, are barely recognisable as the work of the same writer.

I just finished a couple of Gregory Benford books (Tides of Light & Furious Gulf). Now a couple of chapters into the autobiography 'The House of Elrig' by Gavin Maxwell.

That was also shown on BBC4 a couple of years ago. A very good documentary.

Not heard of this before, and I'm looking forward to watching it. Thanks!

A short video from the BBC on Wally Lewis at Wakefield: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/35803266

Instead of 'Dragons', how about 'Ten Gallon Cats'? I'll get me coat...

A branch of Morrisons has opened just up the road in Colindale/Burnt Oak (not far from where the London Broncos were based last year). I went to take a look. On a Sunday afternoon. Which was a very stupid time to visit any supermarket. Not only was it crowded, but virtually everyone in there was fairly lost, as it only opened 4 or 5 days ago. Still, it does stock League Express. I'll visit it at a more carefully-selected time in future.

I will be digging out my copy of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Trilogy for a good listening session tomorrow.

The computer game 'Hitman', acted by real people and controlled by the Chuckle Brothers.

How I learned to love Tony Blackburn, by Pete Paphides. A really good read, which also touches on Bob Dylan, George Michael, Morrissey, Kenny Everett and the whole "growing up" thing. Well worth a few minutes of your time.

West Virginia lawmakers suffer stomach illness after drinking raw milk to celebrate legalising the drinking of raw milk.

The live RiffTrax treatment of 'Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny'. This is a colossal mess of a children's Christmas TV special, as a ramblingly incoherent, arm-flailing Santa Claus gets his sleigh stuck in the sand on a Florida beach, because his reindeer have run away. An assortment of children, animals and a bloke in a gorilla suit try to help him shift it, with no success. They are watched by Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, lurking in the bushes. By this time, the dark sweat-stain on the seat of Santa's trousers has grown even more huge and obvious. Then it switches to a musical (in the very loosest sense of the word), based on Jack & the Beanstalk. Finally, the the Ice Cream Bunny turns up on a fire engine, a dog barks in quite evident hysterical fear at the Bunny, which drives off with Santa as the children wave. Apologies if any of the above seems to make sense. If it did, that was my error, not the film's.

Samurai Cop II: Deadly Vengeance Let's get this out of the way right at the start; this KickStartered sequel is far too self-referential for its own good, and that's not really a positive. It lacks the thunderingly inept, yet earnest appeal of the original. On the other hand, it does not quite have the cynical schlock-by-numbers knowingness of Asylum releases like Sharknado, Mega Shark, Sharktopus and (surely some time soon) the Sharkshank Redemption or maybe Sharks & Recreation. However... Matt Hannon/Karedas and Mark Frazer are back together as partners and they seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves. There are nods to fans of bad movies and the riffing thereof, in the casting of Tommy Wiseau (The Room) and Joe Estevez (Werewolf, Soultaker). There's even a character called Officer Z'Dar, in an affectionate tribute to the late B-movie legend Robert Z'Dar who was the villain in the original movie. Otherwise, it looks like everyone's family and drinking buddies were invited to fill out the cast, along with young women willing to take their tops off at the drop of an Eighties cliché. There is a welcome sprinkling of original cast members, some of which have aged a lot better than others. Overall, however, this is a garbled and gratuitous mess that's just a little too pleased with itself. Maybe a proper sequel could never really be made in the modern era, where every trope is extensively discussed and laughed at online. These days, genuinely bad films are made by the likes of Michael Bay or feature characters like Jar-Jar Binks... and they're not fun-bad. I hope I'm wrong, but the movie world seems to have lost an innocent something; the "heroic failure" factor. People who aimed for the epic, but achieved magnificent wretchedness - they seem less common nowadays.

I'd forgotten that 'Shawshank' was one of his. Interesting that you rate 'Carrie' as one of the flops though. It is generally quite highly thought of... unless you mean the 2002 remake.

If you can find a nicely priced large-sized hardback, go for that. Make sure it's an English edition, BTW, as it was originally published in German.

Scanned editions of the counterculture magazine 'Oz' (1967-1973), made available as free downloads.

A man who really really loves his job! It's like 'Will it blend?' with knives.

Here's a bit of fun to test your ears'n'gear - three different pressings of Bowie's The Prettiest Star edited together in one song. Same turntable, arm and cartridge, so see if you can tell when the switcheroo happens, from original UK pressing, to 1997 reissue, to the new box set version. There's a link in this post if you want to download the full quality 24/96 file instead of the compressed YouTube version.

I am also dipping into Judith Schalansky's Atlas of remote Islands (Fifty Islands I have never visited and never will). It won a German Arts Foundation award for "The most beautiful book of the year". It combines detailed illustrations for each island with a page of text that can be plainly historical or sometimes a little poetic, as the mood of the author takes her. It is also fun to read while looking up the islands on Google Earth for aerial photos.

For such a prolific author, I'm not sure I've ever read any of his books. I've seen a fair few films of his work, and it seems like there are a lot more bad adaptations than good ones.

Gavin Maxwell - Harpoon at a Venture. His first book, chronicling the time when, just out the army after WWII, he attempted to start a basking shark fishery on the Hebridean island of Soay. With zero experience and a fair amount of bad advice, he has a tale to tell. As always, he's a wonderful writer, no matter what the subject matter. It just seemed like everything he did in life went awry in the end somehow. I lost my old copy of this years ago, so asked for a new one as a Christmas present and my dad obliged.