Their patience was wearing thin. Zoger had to choose. He could hear the mockery of the arena through the plasti-hull. But the umpire had checked; there was nothing in the rulebook against climbing insider a "view-loosener" (as Zoger had termed his new conveyance).
Lady...
Or tiger...
Zoger checked the screens again. The readouts were clear enough.
Or were they? Was that a scar? Were those supposed to be tits? And even if he could decipher what he saw, was he certain which screen related to which door? The lights along the top had thrown him.:White... Red... White... White... White... Did that mean something? How to tell what was behind the doors? How? The panic rose in Zoger's chest as he began to wonder if it might have been a better idea to put the window at the front.
Sorry these are going up late, it's just I've... I've been getting jobs! Great little jobs. One after another. Here's a photograph from one of them.
The six prosthetic nipples pinned to polystyrene are part of something I did over the weekend, care of alarmingly young job creators Uncle Shortbread. As is this gorgeous display:
Okay. Now I think you're ready for Christopher Walken dancing his clothes off.
That was July 2015. I'd just been enjoying Icke's terrible 2009 lecture to the Oxford Union on Netflix and wanted to share the highlights, but wasn't sure how much of an introduction he needed, so gave up. I didn't bother watching his speech yesterday to the anti-mask crowd in Trafalgar Square, but from what I've read it
was pretty similar to the Oxford one a decade earlier – except it didn't have slides, which is a shame because they were hilarious – so I'm finally posting it now.
If any reader still doesn't know who David Icke is, in my 2015 draft I recommended "this excellent wikipedia entry
charting Icke's progress from footballer turned
sports-presenter, turned Green-Party-figurehead, via an encounter with
Brighton psychic Betty Shine,
to the turquoise-favouring Way turned Truth turned Light immortalised in this tender interrogation on Wogan", then went on to explain that Icke was "big with
people who get bored by the news. Far better-constructed
alternate histories are becoming more and more
mainstream, but fortunately for Icke the news has also become more and
more boring, so his stock remains high..." which is not an observation that dated well. I've no idea why I didn't think his stock would be at least as high in Interesting Times.
I've no idea how much his consistent but blurry narrative of world conspiracy owes to Betty Shine, but for over three decades it's remained large enough to accomodate both genuine government cover-ups and the belief that former Prime Minster Ted Heath was a giant lizard. To quote Icke's Oxford lecture: "Pyramids within pyramids, like a series of Russian Dolls." Imagine
that... No, I can't either. Here's another quote of his to lillustrate the kind of level we're working at: "Jimmy Carter manipulated the Soviet Union into attacking Afghanistan which blew up leading to Al-Quiada and all that lot." The lecture's now on youtube, not Netflix, and honestly I can't remember if I'd still recommend it but here's what you missed...
"Then he started talking about depleted uranium," I wrote in 2015, "and if I'm honest it gets less funny, because – yes – what's important is not automatically common knowledge... Like David Brent playing Simply The Best, he closes with another Bill
Hicks routine, the closing speech from Hicks' swansong Revelations, a beautifully judged meditation that
reality is just a ride delivered by a man who knew he was dying. But
Icke's done nothing to earn this observation and robs its punchline
of any comic worth." That's what I wrote in 2015. My biggest revelation of the evening though was this: "Icke is as good a proof as any of the theory he
champions, believing is seeing. Or, less clumsily, it's the ideas we never
question that keep us stupid. He's not insane. He's just dumb." That's maybe not such a novel insight in 2020.
"Fucking magnets, how do they work?" Simpler times. Please wear a mask.
These are what I finally put up on my wall. I painted them when I was eighteen, probably influenced by Michael Foreman and Tove Jansson (hence the absence of a mouth) to illustrate a story that I'd found in an old school magazine written when I was seven, probably nfluenced by Spike Milligan and, I don't know, pinball machines? It's called "My Island":
My Island is very dusty
and now and then you see winged lions with gold glossy manes and wings made of silk.
They are very tame creatures. They are vagetarians.
Because sometimes you just need to fall back into old habits for a night or two, tear yourself away from reality and surf your landlord's Amazon Prime until five in the morning, watching nothing, merely building up your list from a uniquely mixed bag of shit and riches, bunging on every single adaptation of Bartleby you can find for example, bunging on films you already own on blu-ray so you'll remember to watch them, until unaccountably you are recommended something called "a Steampunk re-imagining of The Secret Garden" and think, wait, isn't that already Victorian? How can you make it more steampunk? What is "steampunk" anyway? - and so you watch the trailer to find out.
Oh yeah. Extraneous rusty gubbins. I thought it was that. Follow your bliss, people. If you can dream it, you can make it. This exists. There are literally no more excuses.
Underpants. Shorts. Skins. Breeches. And two different frocks. It was my mate Neil who observed in the green room that the captain is the only ghost from Ghosts "in full trou'". For fans of knees, brains and heart, the entirety of series 2 is now available to viewers in either the UK or the know, here. Just saying. No reason. I'm going to look at this picture a little longer.
The mainly non-mythological constellations of the southern hemisphere,
including Chameleon, Compass, Toucan and Telescope (source.)
The final Ships, Sea & The Stars of this series is up now, in which you can hear me read an A. A. Milne poem that was completely new to me (at 29:00) and a terrific account by Charles Darwin of his attempts to test the hearing of worms (at 4:17). The theme of this episode – in coordination with Heritage Open Days – is "Hidden Nature" which, according to guest and "preventive conservator" Maria Bastidas-Spence, unambiguously means bugs. It's rare to see an insect expert who actually hates insects, and weirdly rewarding, an addition to carpet beetles and constellations, the team discuss ship's mascots: it seems pretty much every species has at some point been considered for mascothood, including a polar bear.
This isn't him though, this is "Trotsky". As soon as I learnt of his existence I whatsapped my Finnemore colleagues and... well, long story short, John has finally decided on a name for his first child. Unfortunately though, Trotsky – the photographed Trotsky above, not the putative Trotsky Finnemore – would ultimately be shot dead by a sailor tragically unaware that "ship's bear" was a thing. A very sad death then, but I can't say he was necessarily on the wrong side of History.
"Well, I'm grateful. Not only for your goosebumps, but for your interest."
Last week Dad sent me an email detailing the "Cherokee parable"* about the two wolves of hope and despair battling inside each of us. He'd seen it mentioned on Death in Paradise, and admitted both to being very affected by it and to knowing how this made him sound. I sent him back footage of Fred Rogers securing public funding for children's television in 1969, which I'd just rewatched, and also found affecting. These exchanges were, as Mr. Rogers puts it, "expressions of care", above and beyond the routine. Dad signed off his thanks with "Goodness will prevail" which again was new, and nice to read.
* (I've put "Cherokee parable" in inverted commas because it turns out the story's actually the invention of Billy Graham. The sloppy evangelist originally tried to pass it off as an Inuit fable - Inuit wolves? No idea - before a
savaging in the Canadian press provoked the change in attribution.
I've only just found this out though, and have no idea whether to bother telling Dad.)
This week's Ship, Sea and the Stars doesn't seem to have gone up yet, but that's okay, because I still haven't posted last week's, so here it is. The subject is "Stranded Seafarers". You can hear me reading accounts of friendlessness from Frankenstein at 4:48, and faithlessness from an old Charles Dibdin ballad at 30:43, but the episode's main focus is a lot more contemporary. At least four fifths of the world's trade is still transported by sea, which is obvious if I think about it, but I don't normally think about it, and Covid has seen pretty much all the contracts of those working these ships extended, or even doubled, meaning they will be at sea now for anything from six months to over a year, their shore leave perpetually threatened with cancellation in order to meet "Same Day Delivery" commitments. One of Helen's guests is a chaplain, and that's not because the workers are doing okay. Another illuminating engagement with something ignored but essential, I really recommend it, even though it ultimately has very little to do with Frankenstein.
GALACTIC GREETINGS! Continuing the kidultification of this blog, here's the latest contribution to our gang's fortnightly quiz brought to you by none other than The Mighty Tharg himself, pretend editor of 2000AD. (I was worried my round might be a bit weak, so made this even weaker video to put the tin lid on it.) Un-jumble the covers from their red comic sans captions please. Answers as ever will be posted in the comments.
1.
"I OPERATED ON MY OWN BRAIN!!!"
2.
"ER... DEMOCRACY!"
3.
"COME HERE, FOOD!"
4.
"FLAMIN' NAZIS! 'AVE A TASTE OF TOMMY'S COLD STEEL!"
Thirty-seven years after the publication of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! the townspeople of Kristatanti still wear their hair high on their heads. John Blanche's illustrations are nothing like the meticulously researched environments you'll find in Skyrim or other first-person Fantasy walking simulators, they're actual folk art, immersing you in not a tangible landscape but an eccentrically embellished personal mythology, which is probably, really, what you want to be immersed in when you fantasy role play. Here, for example, is the guard who sees you off on your adventure:
Now you'd never see that in a video game. There would be too many questions. And no answers because there's no reason for any of this, other than Blanche's joy in making stuff up. They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee, but actually it looks far more like the pet project of someone who worked on the committee that brought out the horse. And pet projects are the substance of fantasy. We associate the genre with mythology, and we're right to, but mythologies are the product of a people, not a hive. Just bunch of people. There's no way to synthesise their differing accounts - mythology is not synthetic - nor any way of extrapolating what actually happened. Someone simply made something up and that happened lots of times, and I think Blanche's work expresses those instances perfectly.
I mean, what's this? Doesn't matter. You encountered it. Or this is how you remember it. I think I enjoyed reading, or playing, The Shamutanti Hills this week even more than I had as a child. Video games in the interim had probably conditioned me a little better for all the keeping track one has to do, and I bothered learning the spells this time too, which came in very handy when I lost my sword halfway through the book. I also took time to make a map, something I'd always written off as a chore before, but it turns out it's a creative act, part of the game: you can draw a small crow where you saw a crow for example, or rolling hills, or heads on spikes when you encounter heads on spikes, a classic shorthand for the outskirts of sub-human savagery despite heads on spikes marking the boundaries of the City of London well into the seventeenth century. Talk about projection.
After how glum the South Bank looked in July
it was good to see some life return this evening, specifically two distant mudlarkers with, I
guess you'd call them headlamps, they're lamps worn on the head anyway,
and a lone goose. Everything felt pretty lone on London Beach, although I may have seen some couples in the shadows of the wall. In my ears, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey were talking to Dave Rogers about how he edited The American Office, which doesn't show up in these photos and is probably for the best. In other words I haven't really recovered the knack of experiencing.
