Shark Attack!!!

I was reading yesterday that a new mobile phone app has been released for the purpose of warning against shark attacks.

My first thought was that it would only be much use on a waterproof phone – Sony Xperia Z users, may your legs ever remain unsevered! - and would presumably flash up huge letter warnings saying “SHIT!!! BEHIND YOU!!!”

By which time it would probably be too late.

Of course, we know now that you don't just need a shark attack app in the sea, oh no. Sharknado shows that if you are caught in a tornado, you'd best turn on the shark attack app instead of the weather warning one. Caught in the desert? Don't bother with google mapping for an oasis; whip out your i phone and check for a shoal of sand dwelling white pointers. And now it seems that a shark attack app is needed as much for skiers as swimmers; avalanches are a habitat for deadly ocean predators.

Heading for Venice? Don't forget the shark attack app, and for the love of god don't take a temporary job poleing gondolas about. Don't forget the app if you are visiting a facility where octopus DNA is being experimented on, and steer clear of swamps, prehistoric times, and John Barrowman. And if you are Samuel L. Jackson, I'm not sure any app could save you.

In fact, just keep the shark attack app on the go at all times. Even sitting on your sofa. For you never know, even the safest looking DFS sale bought corner unit could house a deadly mako or hammerhead, just waiting to leap out from the chintz and devour you, anus first.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.12.13

Terror of the Evaporation Chamber

Back in the day, the very late 70s or perhaps the early 80s, there was a time when children were actually catered to in the daytime schedules on BBC1.

At Christmas, Easter, and most excitingly in the long summer holiday, children's TV was shown in the early morning AS WELL AS in the afternoon by the Beeb. It was superior stuff too, because instead of the childish Play School, and to me the earnest, boring and tedious Jackanory and Blue Peter, you got action!

By action, I mean staples like Champion the Wonder Horse (“like a something something arrow from a bow”) - in which use of the dog Rebel was the most interesting thing to me – and Eastern European seeming stories like “Down on the Danube Delta”, “Silas”, ummm, the one with the cities at war; where all the children were dubbed into posh prep school, and all adults were as gruff as Tommy Vance after a Fisherman's Friend. Heidi was also doing the rounds at this time, but I dismissed that as far too girly and cissy.

The big treat however, for a young boy who thanks to an eccentric sea captain from Scotland was already a massive space fan, was a showing of Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. I think I was possibly staying with my grandparents near Sellafield (true!) when the 15 or so 20 minute episodes from the 30s were shown in morning matinee fashion, with the voiceovered cliffhanger at the end.

I don't really remember the storyline of this at all, but the penile rocket ships with the drone of a World War 1 aircraft and a sparkler for an engine were present and correct. So was Ming, Dale, Aura, Barin, and I think the Hawkmen too. There might have been sort of “clay men” living in underground caves too. The presiding Flash was Olympic swimming gold medalist Buster Crabbe with his immaculately stylish hair.

For a children's show, there was something quite horrendous thrown in. 1930s torture porn in a sci fi sense. This was seen in the shape of the terrifying “Evaporation Chamber” where Flash, Barin and Co found themselves thrown in more than once for Ming's pleasure.

What was evaporating about it, I'm still not clear about. It resembled a sort of electrical playroom which General Pinochet's secret police would have had massive wet dreams over. Huge Tesla coils crackled and spat bolts of electricity between their arcs, and these conical devices shot showers of sparks over our writhing heroes.

Whatever the evaporation was, it was clearly very painful and I certainly didn't want it happening to me. I had nightmares about it a few times, and I was always afraid that I'd go into a big shop and find those big Tesla Coils waiting for me.

These big shops were already scary enough to a child. They had those slowly moving cameras that looked like Death Star Imperial pain droids. Brrrrrrrrr....

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 27.12.13

When the Snowman Brings the Snow...

Courtesy of Roy Wood of Wizzard, this is another little lyrical poser that Christmas songs throw at us.

How exactly does a snowman “bring the snow”?

A snowman cannot bring snow. He is snow surely, and can only bring snow if snow has already been brought with which to construct him, so he can then bring snow. Another snowman might have already have brought snow, but then, who brought the snow that constructed him?

To consider this, I suppose in all honesty, would have taken Mr Wood a long way from an all time seasonal favourite (and pension plan).

A snowman already constructed in another location where snow was already in place, could theoretically bring snow with him when he visits Mr Wood's vicinity. But this is assuming that the temperature in Birmingham was cold enough that the snowman and the snow he was bringing wouldn't melt, and if it was cold enough there might already have been snow there, so the snowman bringing some would have been pointless.

However, it has just been pointed out to me that I might be making an assumption vis-a-vis the nature of the snowman. A milkman is not made out of milk, yet he brings milk. So it could well be that a snowman is actually some sort of tradesman, who's job is to deliver snow – possibly by means of a float – to people in the Black Country.

The snowman thus delivers snow to adults, and also to children, so that they might “Take it!!!!”

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.12.13

Spaceman Came Travelling

I haven't heard this song for such a long time.

This is of course no bad thing. Chris de Burgh is a rolled up jacket sleeved, mono browed buffoon who's best known song is a paean to strange love with Cardinal Wolsey in drag. I have never paid the ferryman, I never even fixed the price, he drowned Mr de Burgh for me for free.

It's Christmas you see, and you'd think Chris' Von Daniken inspired talk of the birth of Messiahs being a 2000 yearly thing heralded by the appearance of the Angel Gabriel in a spaceship would be dominating our local gold station's seasonal output. But they have better taste.

Driving Home for Christmas by that other craggy Chris is their favourite. Possibly because it doesn't contain such lyrical gems as;

"He followed a light and came down to a shed,
Where a mother and child were lying there on a bed,"

Of course, it gets better than that.

We've always wondered what form our first communications with a sentient extra-terrestrial lifeform would be. We've sent them plaques with naked pictures on, a record with birdsong on, or a beamed message to the globular cluster Messier 13 with a digitised image of DNA within. So far, we've heard nothing back, and we're not even sure that if we did, we'd recognise it.

Chris de Burgh himself is in no doubt.

"And it went la la la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la."

Having travelled "for light years of time" - oh and by the way, light years are a measure of distance, not time, you fool - you'd have thought Homo Superior might have something more interesting than that to say on a First Contact. If the Vulcans had said that to us that wondrous day after Zephraim Cochrane had got to Warp 1, we'd have thought they were taking the piss.

"Gort! La la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la" - well, that wouldn't have helped.

"Ulla-la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la" is just about acceptable I suppose, but visitors, travelling spacemen, stick to "Take me to your leader."

Works every time.

Come to Life and Rampage!!!

Outside the library window, two statues stand, figures of the civil war, a bronzed embodiment of 400 years of history, where they fought for the right of Parliament, or the right of The King.

The sun has gone in and is no longer glinting off their patinated forms. One looks West, the other East, both poised for action. Like they could come to life and fight.

Oh how I wish they would.

The Riace Bronzes...

Riace Bronzes wikilink

...which I always think of when I look at these two chaps, are amongst the most culturally significant pieces of statuary ever found. The notorious Italian porno-comic Sukia featured them coming to life and, ahem, "seeing to" the eponymous heroine and her male friend on a trans-Atlantic liner voyage. I don't want these fellows to do that (too much), but it's easy to imagine them coming to life, in a time and culture alien to them, and reacting with fear and violence.

Watch a 400 year old sword plunge into the jugular of the abusive drinkers who congregate at their feet, scraping grimily off their calcifying cervical vertebrae, while the drummer boys beats them unmercifully with his lead stick.

They could pause to take in the forever green landscape, before espying bike thieves making their way about town with bolt-cutters they are too brazen to hide. Their Civil War justice is swift, and merited as they arrange for them to be hung drawn and quartered, dragged screaming into four wriggling bloody pieces by teams of cyclists, the modern day cavalry of our confused world.

"Draw them men! Quarter them so they might feel it, but not too fast!" they cry, facial hair stirred by the winter breeze. The smackheads who deal as children learn to read next to them, are forced to do cold turkey on the bear baiting post, tattoed necks enclosed in a spiked iron collar.

The sun sets, and now the moon lights their metallic forms with a cold glow. Now, they head for the ale-houses, taverns and hostelries, and lo! Shall the unworthy face their mighty come-uppance! The brain dead drinkers offer them out for a fight, and shot by musket are some, while others are piked through their orifices and hoisted 16 feet into the air to fly like flags, a warning for all!

Pike them well, my Civil War friends, pike them hard! And never stop acting as you do, a 17th Century cure for modern day social ills!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.12.13

H2G2 versus (H2G2)2

This afternoon, after running outside in a howling wind, I decided to settle down under my duvet and have the pleasure of watching the original BBC TV production of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

I first remember seeing this when I was a very small boy, thinking it was going to be some sort of boring programme about travelling, like the sort of thing you'd see with Cliff Michelmore or Frank Bough in Holiday 81. But as soon as I heard the music, and saw the opening titles of an astronaut travelling through the letters, I was hooked. My mum was sympathetic to my love of Sci-Fi, and allowed me to watch every episode despite it being on late.

I loved the two headed alien, I loved Marvin - me and a couple of other kids at school were impersonating him saying "I'm just going to stick my head in a bucket of water" for weeks - I loved the space cow that wanted you to eat it, and I loved the Vogon poetry, even though I had no idea what "micturitions" were or why they should be funny.

I got older, and devoured the books. I remembered the TV show but it hardly ever got repeated on TV, much to my disappointment. I got hold of a DVD of the series in about 2001, and loved it all over again.

Sadly Douglas Adams died, and the film he had been working on came out. I'd never seen it all the way through until I bought the DVD for a pound at Cash Converter.

It is, in the main, charmless, and terrible. Hammer and Tongs are fantastic at making Blur videos featuring animated milk cartons, but they evidently realised early on that they were never going to match the TV series, and so altered absolutely everything to put their own stamp on it, as you would expect to be fair. Problem is at no point does it match up to the TV series, except that I'd rather have Zooey Deschanel than Sandra Dickinson as Trillian anyday.

Martin Freeman is boring and bland in entirely the wrong way as Arthur, Mos Def is miscast, the Humma Kavvula sequence is baffling even if Douglas Adams created it specially, supposedly, and none of the design - Marvin, the ships, the Vogons and other aliens and the book - works on 100 times the budget the BBC had.

Worst of all, however, is Zaphod Beeblebrox as played by Sam Rockwell. Setting aside the second head down his neck which is again Hammer and Tongs being different for the sake of it, the idea that Zaphod is some kind of redneck General Custer idiot on speed, rather than the cluelessly louche Mark Wing-Davey properly two-headed interpretation of the character.

The American market was bet on, and the wheel came up red instead of black.

So I will stick with my TV version thank you very much, and hope that Radio 4 Extra broadcasts the radio one at some point at Christmas, as well as repeating Neverwhere. I will never watch the film again, unless I'm somehow desperate for a fix of Zooey Deshanel.

I'm not a Douglas Adams obsessive by any means, but the film is one heck of a crashing disappointment, and frankly, I don't see how it was ever going to be anything else. Such a pity.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.12.13

Daydreams of a Workplace Hanging

This is disturbing, and it is meant to be. Proceed with caution. Tourette boy gets upset when he gets teased!

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When you have not had scalding coffee thrown in your face, you don't know how unlucky you are.

There are these steps at work, mobile gantries stolen from a steampunk Apollo launch. You can move them around by pulling these bent, rusting levers that take the support legs off the ground, and you can push them on wheels where the bearings are oiled knucklebones from a starving child.

Push them into position for the spectacle. Summon the spectators, the old women knitting before the scaffold, the cackling whores. The other staff in others words, they are as good as all those, the collective intelligence thereof. Drawn from large screen football, the only thing that could tear them away, not even the burning of their own children would normally stop them watching.

Prod the fucker up the stairs at sword point while ducking under the flying lumps of shit I wish everyone else would throw at you while thinking the man who deserved them might have been me. Put it out of your mind, Tudor master of ceremonies, the Lords of the Humiliations, the Chamberlain of Suffering.

There is a noose affixed to a criss cross of sprinkler pipes and girders that shake in the rain. It hangs down like guts fallen from the guts of a disembowelment. Yeah get your neck in there, you scrawny fucker. The safety cage at the top has been crudely removed by the cortex-less repair men who's normal function is to bang broken wheels on trolleys so they are even more broken.

Look up there. You see your god up there? I hope so. God lies within that hoop of rope. Push his head in, set the knot behind the mis-shapen inbred right ear. Give him a second to think, give him a gentle lean out over the void to the massed “ooohs” of the crowd as they bang their cans of Relentless together. Then shove hard.

The rope doesn't drop for long. Who wants to break his neck too soon anyway? Legs kick out thrashing, and as intended he shits himself over the loathsome toads from the offices, who lap it up like thirsty dogs and then turn to lick the faces of their frightened Eastern European slave girls. Another parasite climbs up his legs, the length of his body and sucks his eyeballs out saying “I love you, I love you!”

I kick him in the face and send his sprawling into a crowd of secretaries, shit and vomit. This is the best fun I've had in years, and I turned my conscience off especially. I'd best not turn it back on.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.12.13

She's an Alien Spy, I Swear

Sitting two computers down from me at the library. Blonde hair, running leggings, trainers decorated with a flash of orange. Foreign trainers, not English. perhaps not even of this Earth.

She is booking flights with her brood mother, maybe to Riga. Her mother gave birth to her and 600 others like her in a larval chamber on their homeworld. They were despatched out through the galactic neighbourhood, to observe, report, and monitor. She is a spy breeder, specifically chosen by the hive elders.

She looked at me just then, clutching the printout of her Ryanair details. Ha, the perfect cover story, why fly Ryanair when she could easily get a ride in one of their space runabouts? She probably works at one of the local warehouses or cake factories, and I know for a fact young genuine Eastern European women disappear from these places, never to be seen again.

Abducted for breeding purposes. Most of them don't survive the experiments and are used to feed new larvae. Those are the lucky ones, the survivors are trafficked back to the homeworld and used as hybrid mating stock for the industrial drone classes.

She's gone now. I'm sure she's reporting to her controllers that I spotted her. I ought to be in fear for my life, they will come through the walls as I sleep tonight.

And if they do, well, let them make it quick...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 13.12.13

They Lurk in the Mist

As I sit writing this, head sore from rum and astronomy dabblings last night in my garden, there is a distinctly misty look about the world outside. The grass is lush and green, with no frost tickling it like yesterday, and the grey sky has come down from the air to meet it.

A number deal of mysterious events are usually presaged by mists...

I think of Napoleonic battlefields, of tales of modern day people seeing phantom armies from the era emerging from banks of mist, for example. The Hound of the Baskervilles prowled the misty moors, HG Well's Martians travelled to Earth in cylinders that trailed a green mist, and of course had a toxic mist, the so called "Black Smoke", at their disposal.

Many famous UFO encounters began as people encountering a strange mist. I think of the famous Barney and Betty Hill abduction, that started off as they drive into a bank of fog. The cases of the Avises in the UK started similarly, and eventually led to a terrifying abduction painting, the worm faced aliens with glowing eyes, carrying out an examination on Mr Avis. I first came across this illustration in a UFO book in the early 80s, and like the Hopkinsville Goblins featured in the same book, made it occasionally rather tricky for me to sleep with the light off.

I wonder what would happen if I were to run off into the mist one day. Would I encounter phantom armies or mythical beasts? Would I find glowing eyed, worm faced aliens insisting on giving me an intimate examination? It does not bear thinking about.

Yet I want to run off into the mist. Fog is the most wondrous atmospheric event there is; everyday objects like people and cars are reduced to indistinct shapes; moisture clings to every surface and if the temperature is below freezing, it makes everything into a crystalline wonderland.

I don't know what lurks within the mist. But I must encounter it, shed all my fears. And when I run off into the mist, I may not come back.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 11.12.13

Synthetic Skin

Winter has closed in on me. I don't mind the cold, I enjoy being out in it, if I am warm enough.

But I never am. My winter skin is a pattern of open sores, death of a thousand cuts sores, bleeding out, staining my gloves, dripping down my pen.

Paperwork covered in haematological fingerprints.

I probably have Reynaud's Syndrome. Poor circulation, paralysed capilliaries. Cycling is agony. My ankle is a flaming mass of crackling skin. Moisturisers don't help, steroids only briefly. The wounds gape millimetres deep, washing my hands becomes a stinging displeasure, greatly exacerbated by my obsessive compulsive contamination fixation.

My unhygienic workmates make it all worse. My hands feel like an open invitation for syphyllis and other diseases carried by the unsalubrious. Norovirus magnet. Filth agents.

And still the wounds gape. In two weeks, I will look like a junkie with a penchant for carpal injection.

I wish I could have a skin transplant, or have synthetic skin like Commander Data. He doesn't have a problem with excema, jammy bastard. I want new skin. New skin for old ceremonies, Leonard Cohen said.

I want new skin for new bicycles and new gloves that don't lead to unbearable cold pain and chilblains.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 02.12.13