Okay, third and final thing of 2012: Photo of Lion looking at a Rainbow

taken here

Whoo! Song of the Year!

 

Coffee or Tea?

 Lisa Gail is of course most famous for the far horribler hit 3 Second Rule, but I think actually I like this one. Anyway I couldn't shift it from my head at work today. Having said that, work today did chiefly consist of shouting at a foggy queue in cockney about smog and textiles before trying to herd 25 of them into the spewing lines of two black-parachute-silk-filled crates, killing the lights, turning on the sounds of coughing, hooves and "Timmy?!" and leaving the punters to God, all on a three minute cycle, so maybe my head hates me... The London Dungeon is moving. Bit by bit. Something had to be done with the room that was once Sweeney Todd's so management decided to make it a room of fog. The big fans and the black silk are our designer Verity's nod to the opening scene of "Money". True. Up the workers!
   

 P.S. I've just remembered another callback to shunt, which is the appearance of smoke in London Bridge Station occasioning the arrival of the Fire Brigade and subsequent instructions to the downstairs feature, reliant almost entirely on filling a room with smoke, to not have smoke.

Barf to the World!

Well that was nice. Popping into Lanna's flat before heading out once again to a pub I bumped into Ned Mond. He lives very nearby now and we hugged and wished each other Happy New Year and shared our plans for the next six hours.
"I like to get to sleep before the new year," said Ned, "I really do, then get up very early, go into town - it's harder now I live further out - and look at all the vomit."
"Oh wow."
"It's like..."
"A baptism?"
"I am Legend. But you know what got 'em."
Anyway I thought I should post something for New Year's so thanks for that, Ned. Happy 2013, everyone! Spacehats!

Some vomit I found last week in Gatwick airport, relieving slightly the compensatory anxiety brought about by a life too taken care of - the sudden realisation standing over a urinal as my effluent is pumped to the sea that the last minute has been lived on autopilot - the double-take necessitated to confirm I do indeed have my knob out in the Gents' and not, say, the Ladies', or over a laptop in Costa. Phew.

La Bionda and Billy Ocean receive more sexy space messages.

La Bionda - "I wanna be you lover"

Actually from the Eighties. Stunning.

Billy Ocean - "Loverboy"

Unlike Saturday morning, European coproduction-type anime, the use of

gratuitous prosthetic monsters in pop videos has yet to make a comeback.

Oh well.

"We are interested in everyone." "That's most encouraging."

He mapped the moon, so he was more than an enthusiastic amateur. Was he a great communicator? Well watch him in conversation here, with this nit who claims to be receiving messages from extraterrestrials: he's hilarious but also scrupulously polite, and there's nothing dishonest in the refusal to pull the guy up, because that's not his role. 

 

Yet another voice of space

It actually takes two to communicate. By never forgetting that, Patrick Moore pioneered "interactivity" before the word was even needed. (It wasn't needed because, once, that was simply how people behaved.) It's more than politeness being displayed in this clip though, it's grace. Communicating this grace is what made Patrick Moore so great, because he was also communicating through it what television could be and be regularly. There's a lot to be said for keeping things human-scale and human-shaped, even if those things do then go and die. Night night, magic.

Or Else

Yes, to hell with this campaign even if she does have nice eyes. And to hell with the dead children that Tfl ("TFL"? "tFL"? "TfL"?) keep plastering across the daily commute. To hell with all the punishing, public-funded, landscape-poisoning Mene Mene's. Here's an alternative approach from the traditionally more relaxed New Zealanders which proves it's perfectly possible for an effective public information campaign to be warm, kind, even funny, and its slogan had me punching the air. Excellent work, Don Draper.

As for what the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was thinking here...

Still thanks for the laughs. (Picture taken while rehearsing Alice in Wonderland on bikes. A council's shed is full of polling station signs, road signs, unused street lamps. it's like being backstage at reality.) 

 In other news the outstanding National Office of Importance joins the blogroll over on the right, as does the the great, glogg-serving, theatre-doing, actual science-writing Michal Regnier's fab blog.

Kari Vaananen doubles Klonkku and Konkari!

Kudos! And "Kudos" to everyone at Finland's Yle TV1 for having the gumption back in 1993 to attempt a small screen adaptation of Lord of the Rings without recourse to CGI, motion capture, or any technology not readily available to the makers of Michael Bentine's Potty Time. "Take what you've got and fly with it" as Jim Henson said. So, okay, stuff like the Balrog may have to go, and the whole "Mines of Moria" sequence may have to be cut down to a minute and a half...




... but  cast it correctly, adapt judiciously, and who's to say you won't have another Brook's Mahabharata? Not me! Now December is here, the 'taches of Movember have fallen, and the grey dawn greets unopened windows like something distant, brilliant, viewed from the bottom of a well while dusk begins to take the piss, I for one am happy to join those huddled round the glogg in fingerless gloves and, transported by the sound of goat bell and sax, hear tales told in comic sans and glimpse adventurously cast faces in the fire. (Is that Paul Putner?)