The Footballing Pacifier

Today, as a group of folk sat in the canteen at work lightly watching the Grand Prix qualifying, or quietly reading, or staring into the middle distance with a look of lobotomised despair, some of the usual overweight and unpleasantly sweaty subjects came in and took control of the remote control.

“Mind if we put the football on?” they asked with a redundant question mark. They were going to whether we screamed in protest or not.

The football in question wasn't even a football match, as such. It was watching three people watching football matches that you aren't allowed to see, while and endless string of numbers, letters, and non-existent place names in Scotland scrolled down the screen at the bottom, and staid static on the left.

This screen, which looked like a really messy “Frames” style website from 1997, enthralled this bunch of guys who collectively were less attractive than Masterblaster from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and also worse company.

All I could think about, as more people told more things about footballing men we couldn't see, was that these men, who are just about if not a bit below the fabled “living wage” were sat watching, and discussing, the activities of a bunch of men who earn seventy thousand pounds a week.

Men who in a few years will earn more in five years than they will earn in lifetimes.

And are they angry? Are they shouting, cursing, launching an uprising, storming the Bastille? Are heads rolling in blood soaked streets. Are there hell!

Football gives these guys something to talk about and something to live for where otherwise, there would be nothing. Rather than make them mad at the who spewing iniquity about the whole thing, they shell out chunks of their low wages to watch them, willing sponsors of their pacification.

Juvenal. Panem et Circenses. Keep the hoi polloi amused and distracted, and make them pay for the pleasure. For while the little men on the screen kick a round thing around, and there little eyes lap it up and fill up their heads with it, they will not be kicking down the gates of the palace, or doing anything at all that might actually improve their lives.

And I suppose it gives them a sense of community, of belonging, that I have never had, so perhaps they are the ones who are correct.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23/11/13

Punching a Martian

I used to have Martian dreams a lot.

I'm always saying this...dreams of trying to keep away from fearsome tripodsof varying colours in a deserted modern London...paralysed as finally one loomed up over Tower Bridge and reached for me with grapple claws sharply open.

Another time I was trying to cross a wood near Horsell Common, in the dead of night, and the Martians had sent out strange bio-machines to patrol the woodland – mechanical metal birds, with big cone shaped heads, lit up in christmas light flashes and hunting me making soft synth owl sounds.

It cornered me behind a fallen, burnt out tree, and I woke up a-shiver.

But for all there technology, as HG Wells kept pointing out, the Martians were feeble and vulnerable under Terran conditions. But no-one ever did the obvious.

No one ever waited until they had all climbed down from their fighting machines for the night, and then treated them to what Wells rather more talented rival Jules Verne would have said was “A fine application of English fists.”

In short, why didn't anyone ever just walk up to one and twat them?

I imagine doing it myself. I leave the artilleryman to his delusions of underground society, seek out the nearest Extra-Terrestrial nest, and evade any patrolling tripods and drop upon the tentacled monsters unaware.

And then I'd just march up, and punch their lipless, slabbering faces smack in their luminous disc – like eyes. I'd punch them over and over again, fist making a sound like someone hitting a bag full of liposuction by-product. Look at its tentacled flabby body trying to get away, when it can barely move in our gravity.

Kick it for good measure. Kick hard and often, leave army boot imprints in its leathery hide, fungal lesions starting too ooze a pus type substance. It can “Ulla” all it wants, it won't do it any good.

Kick it like a deflated football until it bursts. And then start on its friends, until the world is our again. Don't wait for the bateria! Smash their alien faces in!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22/11/2013

Anyone for Eyeballs?

It’s not as blatant as it used to be on TV cookery programmes, but its appearance on Masterchef the other day reminded me that eating bone marrow is still very much an in sort of fad.

It always seems to be presented as a sort of deep fried mini scotch egg, a little round parcel of offal, to be sold for 16 quid as a starter by Michelin starred “Brit-Chefs” on the ghastly gastro pub circuit. The sort of people for whom The Obese Goose or whatever it is called, is just not experimental enough.

I’m all for utilising the whole of an animal. Farming for meat is expensive, barely-to-un-sustainable and thus using the whole of the beast for food is ethically the right thing to do. But please, let me eat it as reconstituted cheap ham, or ground up eye-and-ballburgers.

I am not a Buffy monster, or a space creature with unusual tastes in organs. Ergo, the idea of scoffing into tripe, or kidney (piss making) or liver (shit making) or any intestinal or ocular apparatus is vile. But no, the new Brit-Chef scoops out parts that should never ever see the surface of the plate, and foists them upon a gullible public.

“Oh dahhling…that warm calf’s throat salad with an experience of lung was just deeeee-viiiiine. And cheap for twice the price at 18.99”.

If I was a glooping, slurping creature with the wrong number of arms and legs, or none at all, I might be interested in eating such hip concoctions. But I’m not. Give me burgers, or cheap ham, or turkey twizzlers.

Just don’t give me eyes.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 19/11/2013

What is a "Bizarre Love Triangle"

New Order sang about one without ever explaining what one was.

Whatever one is, I don’t think I’ve ever had one.

First up, is establishing what is being talked about. Is it a “Bizarre Love” Triangle, or a Bizarre “Love Triangle”.

The latter is easy to explain. Back in the mid 1980s “Love Triangles” were sex toys bought by those who had been mutilated in horrible accidents or attack by wild animals and could no longer achieve sexual pleasure through more linear devices. The Bizarre one in question was presumably seen in Affleck’s Palace in Manchester by a member of the band or their management, and was a custom made triangle studded with rubies and crystallised fish eyes for extra pleasure.

That deals with that. A “Bizarre Love” Triangle involves three couples who have intercourse with each other in a complex series of rituals designed to give birth to a mildly satanic creature with magical powers. Five of the group sit at each point of a pentacle in a place charged with power where ley lines meet, while the 6^th, always a woman, stands at the centre of the pentacle naked and chanting the words of power that will enable the process to succeed.

At a given signal, a diviner inspects the six with his rod, and the rod indicates which two should have sex in order to produce the devil’s progeny. It doesn’t matter if two women or two men are involved in the final act, because the spells cast have charged all of their bodily fluids with procreative force, and all internal cavities with the ability to nurture an embryo.

Exactly one year later, the satanic child is born, and grows rapidly. Within a year, it is fully grown, and capable or wreaking evil upon the land.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18/11/13

Schroedinger's Organ

The insides of our bodies, the slew or supremely organised mess and gore that lies inside all of us, is a Schrodinger’s cat, a blood soaked feline wreathed in nerve and sinew waiting for the knife.

For how do we ever really know our own internal structure? We never see it. Until it is X-Rayed or MRI scanned, it isn’t there and the conditions of imaging (i.e. measuring) our structure must change it – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says so.

We can’t ever see our own heart our liver or lungs. We only have the word of others that they are there. If you were to try and take a look at your own heart, you would almost certainly kill yourself in the process.

I’d like to think, in my own case certainly, that until you take a scalpel to my rib cage, I don’t actually have any internal organs. I certainly don’t have a heart. I think that my body is actually part of the multiverse, that the eleventh dimension and all the branes it contains, is actually within this unsleek skin. My insides are not a butcher’s shop slab; they are stars, and black holes and quasars and masers.

Starlight shines, and yet, as I know for sure, there must be an awful lot of dark matter and dark energy in there too, in the cranial space where my brain is thought to be by conventional science.

It is ironic too, that the means of my escape from drudgery are contained within me, a journey into the universe! And I can never reach it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16/11/13

The Space Time Trampoline

It occurs to me that when people try to explain the concept of Space-Time they always use an analogy of a foam mattress or the surface of a trampoline to illustrate it. Gravity is then shown to be what happens to Space-Time you sit a mass in it - it creates a dip, or hole, in the surface of space, that objects - usually rolling marbles! - fall in towards.

"So, if Space-Time really is like a trampoline" I wondered to myself, "would this form of space travel work?"

What I had in mind was a sort of bounce effect.

If you were to take a large mass, and then thrust it into the surface of Space-Time using some sort of exotic energy or field source, you could drive it into its surface like an acrobat, and then harvest the spring back effect to lift it out of Space-Time.

I would imagine, to observer's in the 4 dimensional universe, you would disappear in a shower of energetic relativistic particles to mark where the object "took off" from.

And then it would travel out of time, either straight up or down, or perhaps in a non-existent curve, and arrive back in our Space-Time in another shower of energy as its energy is absorbed by the 4 dimensinal universe. It may stay in place if enough energy is scrubbed off, or it may "bounce off again" somewhere else.

I wonder what there would be to see outside of Space-Time? Where gravity bleeds into our world, and where light perchance bends back on itself.

Quatermass on the Potty

I now have Quatermass and the Pit.

Having just missed what I think what was the original TV version in the Save the Children charity shop, I found a 5 movies for 6 quid Hammer compilation with this classic movie on it, and snapped it up.

This is the 60s cinematic version, featuring Andrew Kier as Quatermass, and a young but not looking it Julian "The Shield Will be Down in Moments Lord Vader" Glover as the cliche sceptical military bloke.

T and A hunters will be sorely disappointed after seing this rather misleading poster

The plot, the same as the TV original, involves maintenance work at a London Underground station unearthing skeletons what turn out to be previously unknown species of hominid from several million years ago. Further rummaging by a gang of archaeologists reveal a long buried space capsule.

At about this time rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass turns up on the scene, and fails to stop the military taking over the investigation of what they end up believing to be a Nazi propaganda weapon.

All the while, increasingly powerful paranormal phenomenon are taking place in the vicinity of the eponymous "Pit", and Quatermass discovers that over the centuries, many terrifying phenomena have been seen in that part of London - Spring Heeled Jack type glowing apparitions. When the previously empty capsule suddenly reveals a sort of mini-hive of dead alien locusts...

The three legged martian locust is unearthed

...Quatermass somehow determines (with no evidence at all) that these creatures are Martians, who were involved in experimenting on primitive primates to alter early man.

Things now get rather bizarre, as he works out that the psychic happenings are caused by a sort of mental cinematic projection into people's brains. Rigging up a Heath-Robinson brain viewer to an early video recorder and monitor, and attaching it to his damsel-in-distress assistant's head and sticking her in the capsule, reveals the truth.

The Martians had been enganged in some sort of genocidal race war, and the extreme violence of these events has caused a great evil to be couped up in the Pit - and now it has been released!!!

It is these scenes of Martian warfare that stick in the memory. Utilising small Martian models in a sandpit, unintentionally amusing scenes of puppet carnage follow, as the creatures are stuck to pieces of card and pulled along through the sand, manhandled like a child playing with a star wars figure, wafted about on strings, and thrown into holes by unseen FX merchants.

It reminded me of something, but what? The old educational children's show "Watch" used the figures pulled along on cardboard strips to animate their tales of the nativity, but that wasn't it. And then it occurred to me what it was.

Michael Bentine's Potty Time!

This was anarchic children's TV show from the 1970s that I only just remember, a sort of puppet "Horrible Histories" of its day, involving the former Goon presiding over occasionally rather racially dubious portrayals of historical events.

Anarchic, and much filled with explosions and destruction, this will be only remembered now by those hitting 40. THere's not much to see on Youtube either. But Quatermass and the Pit reminded me instantly of it.

The 70s might have been a grim decade, but there was some great Television around.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.11.13