Luxury apartmen

 That's Reuben's and my digs on the right, just eight minutes walks from the Bolton Octagon. The apartment came with a profusive rainforest shower, towels to lay on the floor, and carpeting so thick when I put my laptop on the bedside table, it sank. One of those fancy lamps that's just a big Menlo Park lightbulb came down with it, shattering immediately, all within an hour of my moving in. Here's the room after I moved my bed ninety degrees to the wall so I that could fully open the draws.

 

 I'd emailed Reuben beforehand to ask if he wanted the dandelion print or the Mercator projection, noticing that the latter room seemed to have no window, but it turned out Reuben was taking the hit, as my windowlessness made it a lot easier to get to sleep Friday and Saturday nights (see location of window above – London's not a twenty-four hour city, but Bolton is). Around a week into rehearsals, I received a parcel at the theatre from my parents. Having already broken the lamp I didn't want to damage the room further, so I never got round to pinning it up, but I really appreciated the view...

Frankenstein Placeholder Week, Day 3: Not Yet. Not There.

This lightbulb has been burning for a hundred and thirteen years.

  Right, I've asked my friend Lauren to supply today's placeholder. A bunch of us have just been to see our friend Bex in "A Passage To India" at the Tower Theatre, which I loved, and which reminded me how just much India and Pakistan used to figure in my cultural life when I was a teenager: film after film about the Raj, the works of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, there was Madhur Jaffrey, Sayeed Jaffrey and Roshan Seth, and Peter Brook's "Mahabharata", whose hypnotic utterances and daft action prancing I would watch on tape again and again, and Milligan and McCarthy's "Rogan Gosh" whose pages I scissored out of my old copies of "Revolver" and stitched together, and Camden, and ideas of God not as a lawgiver but as the thing things have in common, and I've missed it. Anyway, Lauren offered this as a placeholder. Her Gran has just bought a lightbulb from Wilco that promises to live for fifteen years. Her Gran is eighty-six, and determined to outlive it.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in... Oh we are?

Thanks to this pinterest account.

 Continuing my celebration of youtube essayists completely obsessed with theme parks, here's Kevin Perjurer's "Defunctland". The first two series pesented beautifully researched info-dumps about extinct attractions from Kevin's (and my) own childhood, but series 3 goes back even further, to the childhood of Walt Disney and a golden age of fevered Can-Do-ism that gave the world the Ferris Wheel, the Eiffel Tower*, and "Elecric Park": In 1900 the Brothers Heim had spent the then equivalent of three million dollars on a tram to bring citizens of Kansas to their brewery out of town, but when it turned out nobody wanted to take a tram to a brewery they shelled out even more on the introduction of lightbulbs, roller coasters, actors dressed as mermaids, alligator wrestling and the world's strongest magician, resulting in both a roaring success and a decisive inspiration on the tiny Walt (as well as, I assume, on The Simpsons' Duff Gardens). Enjoy the full history of this wacky Xanadu below, including tales of airship crashes, escaped carnivorous animals and "hooligan loop" accidents, all with zero causalties.

 DefunctTV's six-part documentary on Jim Henson is also hard to beat.

* And apparently, before settling upon the Eiffel Tower as its centrepiece, the 1889 Exposition Universale had considered a one-thousand foot tall guillotine, while proposals put to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, charged with topping this, included a five-thousand foot tall tower from the top of which visitors could toboggan to Manhattan.