Smell My Chin! - or - All the Songs in Daisyland are Called 'Cheese'.

"Rats! Rats! Rats!"

The above is a slightly toned down version of what I just said - very loudly - while punching the computer - because I had just completed this great long Blog entry - when Firefox crashed and took the fucker with it. Bye bye blog entry.

Most of it was about my ramblingly unstructured TV watching. I don't watch a lot of TV these days. I just can't get into any rhythm with it. Time was I used to make dates withall sorts of shows. There were 'Must Watch' moments every week. Not any more. The last time I remember this happening to me was with the new Dr Who a few years back with Mr Eccleston. Even that didn't last beyond the first series.

Mostly my brain-dead, zomb-in-front-of-flickering-images time is spent in the company of badly dubbed Italians from Outer-Space or American teenagers fighting Astro-Zombies but occasionally I get too pooped even to go and choose a DVD from the avalanche of crud over in the corner of the room so I channel hop around the Free To Air channels that come in through the Sky dish.

The other night I came across: - wait for it...

Celebrity Near-Death Experiences.

Woohoo! The bottom of the whole Car-Crash / Reality / Celeb culture mashup Barrel!* This is the IT!. The Nadir of TV! Fortunately for my sanity it was on one of those channels which we, as principled cheapskates who refuse to give any more money to Rupert Murdoch that we have to, can't get.

Given that the show's IMDb page doesn't actually list the 'Celebs' involved, I think it would be a safe bet to say they were probably the kind of celebrity no one has ever heard of.

Scrolling down a bit more I came to my usual resting place when i'm in this kind of mood. The Free to Air Movie Channels: Film Four, Zone Horror, Zone Thriller, True Movies, Movies4Men, and Movies4Men2 (weirdly the latter two, despite their hunky, UberButch names, carry endless commercials for very girly things like Dove beauty products, fabric conditioners, and 'Lite' mayonnaise.)

About the only one of them I don't watch is the True Move Channel. The others sometimes have things of interest** (despite themselves I suspect) but the True Move Channel? Naaaaa!. It's full of the sort of thing that used to fill up Wednesday afternoon schedules when there was no sport on. Disease of the Week movies. 'One Woman's Courageous Fight Against all the odds to get Justice for her Daughter's... insert cause here... and keep her family together'. The sort of thing that starred Lindsey Wagner, and people who used to be in L A Law a lot, and usually ended with a wide shot of happy homecoming on a suburban lawn and a caption reading:

"Slimecreep Peabody was sentenced to 127 years in a maximum security prison. Three years later the Alabama State Legislature passed 'Patty-Anne JoBeth's Law' which made it Illegal to Murder People on Tuesdays with a fish."

Anyway, (the original post that Firefox ate was a lot funnier and structured than this, sorry) The True Movie channel was showing The Day After - a 1983 'graphic, disturbing film about the effects of a devastating nuclear holocaust on small-town residents of eastern Kansas'.

Did I miss something?

*Next WeeK: Celebrities' Pets Near-Death Experiences.
** 'Interest' being a word that covers a multitude of sins, including watching Joan Collins running around a Florida swamp being menaced by giant, radio-active ants.

This is just plain brilliant. The best Spam subject that got through Orange's filters this week. I didn't open it of course but it was sooooo tempting. I mean who could resist:

Re: New pornos with Avril Lavigne + 3 chinese homosexuals!

You can almost hear the circus music can't you?

Hold Onto Your Safety Twig!

Pure dead brilliant track of the week:

http://zoizoi.com/mp3/thepussycats_iwantyourlove.mp3

Okay, I wasn't specific, the week in question may well have been in 1966 - but it's still one of those perfect two minutes and sixteen seconds of pop music that time forgot. Found among many other goodies at Babette's Feast, the blog of the wonderfully named 'Mimi la twisteuse.'
For reasons that may be very obvious to someone with any more nouse than me about these things (ie everyone) it sounds a lot better saved to the hard drive and played through, in my case, Media Player (but the same seems true of RealPlayer etc. etc.) than it does playing it off the page - as it were. I guess Media Player comes with better speakers than Firefox.

Meanwhile the rain and sodden miserableness I was moaning about yesterday vanished overnight. We woke up this morning to blue skies, birds singing, bucolic peasants frolicking in the meadows - and sod all sign of either a plumber or a roof fixer-upper.

Daddy, Help! My Elbow's in Trouble.

Sorry for the lack of bloggery recently. It's been raining a lot. For weeks. Raining. It has been depressing and boring. Grey miserable and wet. Going outside has not been fun. Staying indoors has been a chore. From time to time (just to keep things interesting) it has blown up horrendous gales which have kept anyone from doing any work to the house - like fixing the barge boards that blew off the prevailingly windward end of the house a few weeks ago, and fixing the holes where the rain comes in.
The day after I finally got fed up with trying to work out where the drips were going to land and placing buckets underneath (only to find the next morning that the drip had moved about overnight and dripped everywhere BUT the bucket) I gave in and dragged a ladder inside the living room, climbed up it and rigged plastic sheeting inside the gable end windows to channel all the water into the damn thing, I mean the day after I finally did all that, Craig turned up at some ungodly hour of the morning and started ripping off what remains of the old bargeboards and putting on the new ones. Because the bloke who was supposed to be helping him didn't turn up I ended up on the roof holding onto things - again. First week of February and I've already been up on my roof.
Same time as all this water was coming through our roof two of our three dehumidifiers have given up the ghost. They still make great noises, whirr away like crazy, but just when we need them the most they decide they don't want to actually dehumidify anything any more. Another half day of my life wasted as I took the big old workhorse of a machine to bits to try and fix it. I know nothing about refrigeration units* but after afternoon taking it to bits and putting it back together again I'm pretty sure that's what has gone. I mean I now know all the things that aren't wrong with it. There's nothing else left. It's got to be that. Bum. More expense.


*Dehumidifiers are basically self-defrosting fridges.

Money making idea of the week:

I want to produce an edible newspaper. Print it on rice paper, or wheat paper, or whatever with edible, flavoured inks and, when you've finished reading it, you just put it through a shredder and have it with milk for breakfast.

I'm thinking of calling it The Newsli.

I'll get my coat.

.