Eight legs bad

I was trying to find some conkers the other day.  I managed two which I fear is scarcely sufficient for my purpose.

And that would be?  Keeping out spiders.  A correspondent to The Guardian had stated firmly that conkers keep spiders away and as we are entering the spider season and given that spiders and me have a complicated relationship (faults on both sides I’m sure, but I’d just as rather not have them in the flat) this seemed like a plan, albeit one unlikely to work.  But a low level arachnophobe like myself has to try what he can.

In the meantime I have spreading the word.  A till driver at Tesco who was fretting that there had been a spider in her car while she was driving to work and would still be there when her shift ended, was very taken with the idea and vowed there and then to fill her car with the nuts as soon as.  I just hope they don’t all roll under the brake pedal, though that would make for an entertaining inquest.

Meanwhile the female half of the couple in the ground floor flat (the male half was once bitten by a moth as long time readers of this blog may recall) was also fascinated by the idea and has asked me to report on whether it works which strikes me as tricky as I will have to show the absence of spiders.  A bit like the old joke about the chap who carries an anti-tiger charm in Scotland and when asked why states that he hasn’t been bitten by one yet.

But my researches may come to naught as I am finding it hard to find any, as stated above.  I have put out a plea on facebook, the modern equivalent of chaining yourself to the railings outside the Houses of Parliament and will keep looking.

Wish me luck.

'Now is the Summer of Our Discontent...'

So it’s possible that they may have found Richard III’s skeleton? Gosh.


I had the chance to visit the place where the Battle of Bosworth Field apparently didn’t actually happen (as recounted here) and as stated, just by the canal is a rather sweet little memorial at the spot where, tradition has it, Richard died. If memory serves, the small monument had an inscription to ‘the last English king’ which was odd as the Plantagenets were French. As the peerless 1066 & All That points out, the last English king of England was Edward the Confessor as after that we have Harold (Danish), the Normans and then Plantagenets (French) then the Tudors (Welsh) and the Stuarts (Scottish) and finally the Hanovers/Windsors (German). And people say that the English are insular.
It is thought that the skeleton might be Richard because it has signs of curvature of the spine. I had thought that version of him was Tudor propaganda (x-rays have shown that the famous portrait of him was later altered) and wonder what this will do for those people who believe him to be a highly maligned figure.

I’m sure you’ve heard about this, Richard was a good king who didn’t murder the Princes in the Tower (though I side with George MacDonald Fraser who, like Cicero, asked cui bono) and was an all-round good egg unlike the untrustworthy wife-executing and altogether a bit too Celtic Tudors. It’s one of those things that people get surprisingly wound up about to the surprise to outsiders. Other instances I’ve recently come across on the net include the behaviour of George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars films, the behaviour of the Doctor in the most recent episode of Dr Who and the incidental music in the last couple of seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation which apparently spoilt one poor chap’s childhood.

The observant amongst you, ie all of you, will notice that all these examples above come from the world of science fiction film and television. I do paddle in the shallows of that particular fandom and one of the attractions is the high emotions that it produces in a few unhappy souls. ‘But what about the pain Jackson caused me!’ wailed one commentator on a forum about the Lord of the Rings films in response to the moderator complaining that his increasingly vicious comments were causing pain to others. You get it with Sherlock Holmes fans as well where liking the recent Robert Downey characterisation is a sin beyond forgiveness or redemption. I know connoisseurs of horror cinema who still hold Barry Norman in open contempt for his many slights on their preferred genre.

In the meantime, here’s the excellent Horrible Histories programme doing old King Dick with full admiration and open worship to whoever came up with rhyming ‘can you imagine it’ with ‘Plantagenet’.

Not to Mention the Dog

I keep having this strange feeling that there’s a dog in the room.  Oh, good.  There is.

I’m looking after him while his owners (assorted members of the clan) are away for a long weekend.  I think of him as a dog in law.  I’ve done this before and he knows me well so it’s no great ordeal, rather the opposite even if he is a touch excitable and tactile in his affection.  At least he’s sleeping through nights now.  The first time he came to live at my expense, I awoke at about four in the morning as I sometimes do and sleepily went for my glass of water before falling back asleep until a reasonable hour.  On this occasion though I was brought to a fuller awakeness by a furry snout and wet nose thrust towards my face, attached to a dog that was not only wagging its tail but its whole body in that way that long-leggéd canines can.  ‘Oh great,’ he seemed to saying, ‘this is way earlier for my walk than my usual owners manage!’  I was obliged to disillusion him but he bore the sorrow well.

Better than he did than when he arrived on that first visit.  After his pack had left, he took to his basket and whenever I looked around I could see just his two eyes poking out from his bed and gazing at me with complete and total reproach.  As it happened, another brother ‘phoned just then so I shared my discomfort with him.  He failed to help by pointing out that not only was the dog obviously thinking ‘I’ll never see them again’, he was also thinking ‘And it’s all your fault.’  Very helpful.  My lodger cheered up soon enough though, round about lunchtime if memory serves.

It’s all been less fraught this time.  A twenty-something neighbour referred to him as a doggy, being apparently unaware that there is an age restriction on that word, otherwise all well so far.  And best of all, we haven’t found a corpse. 

As any reader of the crime reports in the papers will be aware, murder victims are frequently found by dog walkers and this always alarms me mildly whenever I am dog sitting.  He’s here for another day, so fingers crossed, I really don’t have the time right now for the paperwork.

On an entirely different topic, it was brought to my attention last night that for the last four years I have been completely misunderstanding the purpose of those label things that you put on your blog.  I thought they had something to do with search engines, apparently not.  It seems they’re an aid to navigating to my other blog entries.  To quote Jessica Hynes’ character in Twenty Twelve: ‘Who knew?’.

Given I was in the habit of ensuring that I never repeated a label, this will have meant that anyone clicking on one will probably have been directed back to the blog they’d just read.

Sorry about that.

Ratepayers Against Bloggers Inciting Democracy (or R.A.B.I.D)

As of midnight tonight squatting will be a criminal offence.

And hurrah to that I say.  At last an end to all those times I’ve been out to get some milk and come back to find an anarchist collective has moved into the flat.

Because that’s the odd thing about this.  It’s an issue that a lot of people are very scared of, but which rarely if ever seems to actually happen.  I mean, how many times has a family returned from holiday to find strangers living in their homes?  I venture to suggest hardly ever.  As it happens the only incident I ever came across was in my legal days when we had a landlord client who took the opportunity of his tenants being on holiday to move another family into the property.  The first family came back from wherever to find their possessions piled up in the hallway.  And you have to admit, that's not quite the same thing.

It is a sure sign of a bad law that it sounds like it’s been drafted in response to a slightly drunk middle aged middle class man in a pub.  You know the ones.  They prop up the bar complaining about things that don’t actually happen. ‘So there was this Muslim bus driver who refused to let a old woman on board because she was wearing a cross’ or ‘some council has banned Christmas because it’ll offend the Hindus’ or ‘And of course all you need to do is walk into the dole office with a slight limp and you’re on disability benefits for life’ and so on and so on.

The last law I can remember being formulated in response to golfclubman (as I like to call him) was the poll tax which was introduced to Parliament in response to a lot of dreary moaning about the rates and so the incompetently unfair poll tax was brought in and, in the fullness of time, destroyed Margaret Thatcher as a political force.

For those of you too young to remember the rates, they were a local tax which was set according to the value of the property.  They had a weird fascination for a certain type of small-minded person who used their status as a payer to somehow suggest that their opinions carried more weight than others.  A local group where I live, the Jesmond Residents Association (whose sole raison d’être as far as I can make out is to ensure that we never again have a chippy in the area) was originally the Jesmond Ratepayers Association.  And the main opposition to the Greenham Common Peace Camp was a group calling itself Ratepayers Against the Greenham Encampment (or R.A.G.E., see what they did there?) thus announcing that their status as payers of a local land tax gave their views greater weight than those of equally effected residents who did not (eg dependents, students, children, the unemployed etc) and while there were issues around Greenham Common* it seems strange that greater weight to the debate should have been given to those who paid the rates.  It’s as if they were still smarting from the removal of the householder qualification from those eligible to vote.

*the most bigoted people it has been my misfortune to meet have been a couple of BNP skinheads I once advised in the police cells and a Greenham Common veteran

Personally, rather than criminalise the squatters, I would increase council powers to claim properties abandoned or forgotten by their owners and put to use as social housing.  But then that would be a step towards the alleviation of poverty and, as the last two governments have made abundantly clear, being poor is a lifestyle choice that should not be encouraged.

And I suppose that putting squatters in prison is one way of solving homelessness.

Identies 'r' Us

I have recently been setting about a facebook profile not my own.  Not an attempt to further damage their share price, I’m not sure the stock market could handle another mauling, but as part of the on-line marketing of the weird fiction website that I may have mentioned I am involved with, Spring Heeled Jack.  Now according to a friend and new media advisor, to market a website these days it is necessary to ‘whore yourself across the net’.  His words, not mine.  Personally I prefer to think of it as providing a discreet service to discerning gentlefolk but as this is all getting a tad EL James, I think I’ll kill that metaphor stone dead right now.

One of the peculiar effects of this flurry of facebook activity is that I am now getting existentially weird emails.  I am just computer savvy enough to ensure that most of my email accounts send their messages to the same inbox.  The practical upshot of which is that when I sent from my own profile a friend request to the Spring Heeled Jack profile, a message popped up in my inbox saying ‘Sandy Chadwin wants to be friends with you’ which was surprisingly disconcerting and highly reminiscent of a certain type of self-help book.  Be Your Own Best Friend or Befriending Others by Befriending Yourself type of thing.  You know the sort.  To make it worse, the temptation to turn down my own friendship was surprisingly strong.  ‘That Sandy Chadwin, he’s the sort who’d think nothing of whoring himself across the net.  A J Chadwin and Spring Heeled Jack want nothing to do with such a low fellow,’ I found myself thinking.  After wallowing in this phenomenological mud for a time I calmed down.  I began to think of it as the opposite of identity theft, a kind of identity gift if you like.

Then a message popped up informing me that Spring Heeled Jack is now friends with Sandy Chadwin and I felt as if I’d been left off an invite list.

I wonder what they’re saying about me?

It's Space Nazis on the Moon!

Chatting to a friend the other day, she informed me that she’d just been to see Prometheus and could not, in all honesty, recommend it.  On the other hand, she stated, she could recommend Iron Sky.  Now it so happens, I had seen it on the one day it was shown at the Tyneside Cinema a few weeks back.

If you are unaware of the Iron Sky film, let me elucidate.  A Finnish film, it concerns the consequences of an American moon mission discovering a Nazi base on the dark side set up in 1944, said base filled with fanatical Nazis awaiting their opportunity to return to Earth and re-establish the Third Reich.  In other words, space Nazis on the moon.  Or to put it another way, It's Space Nazis on the Moon!

This film is not only critic proof, it is criticism proof.  Any negative observation is completely countered by the fact that It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!  A kindly soul would describe the acting as wobbly, the script will not be troubling the Oscars committee, the humour is forced and not as clever as it thinks it is.  But…It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!

To be fair, the special effects are rather good and the design is spectacular with Wehrmacht overcoats and helmets/gas masks turned into space suits and 1940’s era technology applied to the space age.

 

 All that goes to just add to the fact that It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!  There’s even space Zeppelins.

It was only shown for one day in a few cinemas across the UK as a publicity stunt to showcase the subsequent DVD release.  Unfortunately, anticipation had grown so high (It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!) that this backfired rather spectacularly with the distributors being booed when their name appeared in the credits.  In at least a couple of cinemas, the run was extended to a week.

Here in Newcastle we only had two showings to satisfy our Space Nazis on the Moon! needs.  I went to the afternoon showing and was lucky to get a ticket. 

It was an odd experience watching it.  It is, probably, one of the worst films I have seen in a cinema and yet I hugely enjoyed it owing to the It’s Space Nazis on the Moon! factor.  There were a group of people behind who dutifully laughed at every leaden joke with a ‘ho ho ho’ that you never hear in real life, only light operetta, and I felt sorry for them.  No need to try to persuade yourself that this is comedy up there with Jacques Tati.  No need at all.  Just relax and revel in the fact that It’s Space Nazis on the Moon!

So I find myself in the odd position that I feel obliged to highly recommend a film which is, exerting every charitable iota I possess, not terribly good, but I must.  I’ll probably get the DVD in the fullness of time.  I have little option.  I’m sure you all understand.  After all…

IT’S SPACE NAZIS ON THE MOON!

The Reader's Fear of the Self-Published

There has been a little flurry of articles recently about self-publishing on-line.  These have varied from the generally approving to the sternly disapproving which is much as one would expect.  An interesting reaction, however, could be found among the below the line comments.  After just about every article there is a comment stating, in a tone ringing with the authenticity of experience, that the majority of self-published fiction is very bad.

Now I have to declare an interest here.  As you might be aware, and if you’re not it’s no fault of mine, I am involved with the weird fiction website Spring Heeled Jack and it is currently publishing a serial wot I wrote.

Anyway, back to the comments.  The curious thing about these comments revealing that the majority of self-published fiction is crap is that they are stated in a firm tone as if the commenter is revealing a hitherto unknown fact.  ‘Have you read self-published fiction?’ they cry like Jeremiah, ‘it is awful.’  You can almost hear their self-satisfied grunt as they sit back from the keyboard with the knowledge of a warning duly given.  Their job here is done.  The majority of self-published fiction is crap.

I know. 

I know a lot of it is awful because I’ve read some of it.  God help me, I’ve written some.

Now I’m doubtless missing something, but surely that fact that a lot of something is crap does negate the value of that small amount is good.  I am reminded of Sturgeon’s Law.  If you don’t know it, Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer in the 1950s who, in response to the statement that 90% of science fiction is crud, stated that 90% of everything is crud.

Another curious thing about these aforementioned commenters is that they often continue their condemnation of self-publishing with a smug aside to the effect that they themselves never read anything until it has been cleared by agents, editors, publishers and critics.  This seems to me a strange thing to boast about.  They’re basically boasting of the fact that they won’t do something until someone else tells them they can and confirms that what they plan to do is good.  In most fields of human endeavour such craven behaviour is not widely encouraged, in this specific area, it is a sign of superior judgement.

I have a horrible suspicion that these people are amoungst those who view reading as a way of showing their superiority over the rest of us rather than the life-enhancing joy it can be if you want it to.

But then what do I know?  My name’s A J Chadwin and I self-publish.