WTF Monday - The Adventures of Thomas Kinkade in the Seventeenth Century

Meanwhile, back in the 1680s, tacky kitsch crap collecting was all the rage.

Skymall, eat your heart out.

The only difference is that this stuff is actually collectible, as opposed to "collectible". It's probably worth a fortune and its survival is also a sure fire indicator that this person does not live with a cat.

Yay, Eurotrash

Eurovision last night and I indulged in my usual drinking game: a shot of scotch for every gratuitous key change in a final chorus. I gave up three songs in; I'd have had to drink pints of the stuff had I carried on.
Sheesh.
Watching Pilou Asbæk camp it up as host was decidedly weird after Borgen, but on a night when the same old same old includes a bearded drag queen as winner, gratuitous boobage on an epic scale, glitter, bad frocks, appalling dancing, atonal shrieking, execrable songs, cringe-inducingly embarrassing ad-libs and political bitching and xenophobia nothing really surprises any more.
Roll on next year.

WTF Monday - Tacky Kitsch Crap

Who buys this stuff? Please tell me it's not you.

WTF Monday - Dreck The Halls

After yesterday's comments box reminded me of the delights of a SkyMall Christmas, I checked their current catalogue to be sure and fill my life with "collectible" taste and "designer" elegance this Christmas. Remember, kids: Christmas is not just about the baby Jesus, it's also a time to send your money to China to support struggling billionaire entrepreneurs and child-labour factories.

There were way too many nuggets to make anything less than a novel-length post, so I've chosen just a tiny sample to whet your appetites and get you in the festive mood.

First up: a snip at only $124.95 comes this year's offering from everybody's favourite "artist" … the Thomas Kinkade Crystal Santa Claus (yay).

Here's what the catalogue has to say:
"This molded crystal Santa Claus has an interior three-dimensional holiday scene inspired by renowned holiday artist Thomas Kinkade's original artwork. The glistening Santa is holding a lantern and a list that he's checking twice. The interior holiday tableau has three Victorian homes with illuminating windows that cast a golden glow onto snowcapped evergreen trees, skaters on an "icy" pond, and a cobblestone bridge. A miniature reindeer-drawn sleigh carrying a merry Santa and glittering gifts automatically circles the base of the figurine.
Each Santa is hand-numbered and comes with a certificate of authenticity."

Er … "molded" crystal? I wonder just which type of "crystal" can be moulded? Plastic, perhaps? "Hand numbered" (whoop-di-doo! Some poor child labourer in China has been taught how to scrawl numbers on a piece of mdf). And not forgetting that all important "Certificate of Authenticity" - It's not just tacky crap, it's AUTHENTIC tacky crap. REJOICE (in upper case).


Next!

Whooee! Call Casey Jones! Here comes the Santa Express!

"Santa's Express is rolling your way with gifts, animated elves and music.
Twenty popular Christmas and railroading songs play as the wheels turn and real smoke billows from the smokestack.
(Bottle of propylene glycol for smoke effect included.)"

I included this for the very festive "railroading songs" and the chemical smoke-bomb to fill your house with choking festive smog. Fun!

Here's something no festive table should be without:

"This handsome Ice Skating Rink sets the scene of old-fashioned winter entertainment.
Victorian skaters enjoy the crisp weather as they twirl across an oval rink illuminated by two LED floodlights.
Plays 25 Christmas carols and 25 year-round songs.
Volume control and push-button song selection.
Complete with ticket booth and snack bar.
Free 5-1/2" mini Ferris Wheel plays We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
World's Fair Skating Rink with Free Miniature Ferris Wheel."

Imagine the hours of innocent pleasure your family (especially the teenagers) can get from gathering around the table to feast their eyes and ears on this little gem.

Now this next one I actually WANT!

Hokay, so I'm not Jewish but hey, you gotta admit this is strangely attractive.
Or maybe not …

"Evoking Picasso's expressionist paintings of women (Dora Maar), these handmade ceramic pieces are contemporary and timeless.
Hand-painted with abstract images and vivid colors, the menorah is finished on both sides. Metal inserts hold standard Hanukkah candles (sold separately).
Decorative dreidel comes with stand."

Happy Hanukkah, guys!

I'll finish with this one as I really must get my ass in gear and get to work. You'll have to check the catalogue for more great ideas.

I particularly love this one … for its Christmas message and especially for those delicious words: "collectible", "2010 Edition" (in 2011), and the glorious use of "quality" and "designer" in front of the word "resin." I gotta get me some designer resin.


""Bigfoot, the Holiday Yeti" 2010 Holiday Ornament
Our legendary yeti makes a holiday appearance, decked out with all the trimmings! This collectible, 2010 edition holiday ornament makes a fun-loving package tie-on, stocking stuffer, tree ornament or creative addition to your Bigfoot collection.
Cast in hand-painted quality designer resin."

Tis the season, people, so get out your wallets and prepare to suffer.

Oh, We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside

Just to bring you up to speed now that Blogger has managed to get its trousers on the right way round:
Our Lynn from Cheltenham Daily Photo is staying in Norfolk for a bit. She's caring for her Mum and Dad; her Mum's been ill and her Dad's been in hospital for an op, but thankfully they are both on the mend.
Anyhoo, Lynn came for three days and has been stuck here for weeks, so we've been having some fun together (Lynn's joined the Saturday Breakfast Gang) and enjoying little excursions to distract her from worries and chores.

As for where we went last weekend, Vanda suggested a circus and Petrea a gay bar and I must confess this place combines the two. For we return to the heart of kitsch-crappy, tourist-tacky cultural desolation that is Great Yarmouth.

Ah, tristesse …
When I was a wee laddie, this beach at this time of the year was so packed with people that you had to tread on them to reach the sea.

No takers for the deck chairs

And only a single … er … sunbather, avoiding the rays.




What on earth has happened to the traditional seaside holiday? Where are the queues waiting to use the beach huts?

Whither the kids clamouring for their turn at the telescope?

Aha! Some sign of life! A busy shopgirl rushed off her feet by the crowds fighting to purchase buckets, spades and windmills.

Sqwawk!

At least there are fresh doughnuts. Yummy!
More from Lynn and myself later.
Oh, and please come to the beach for your holidays and liven the place up. It's like a bloody morgue down here.

WTF Monday

WTF Monday

Yesterday, being the fourth Sunday before Christmas, saw the advent of … er … Advent, so here's a tasteful Parisian window display to wish my Christian friends a Happy New Liturgical Year (woohoo and Halleliuia) and in hope that the season brings you joy and reflection, thankfulness and praise in celebration of the birth of the man who taught us that compassion and love are not necessarily bad things.

For the rest of you, it is now officially open season on chocolate and time for the start of the annual sickening orgy of greed, gluttony, waste, binge-drinking, depravity, silly hats, bickering, disastrous dating decisions, wretched family gatherings filled with arguments and loathing, execrable TV, misguided lust, hideous hand-made sweaters, excruciating office parties, crappy unwanted gifts, unwise sexual couplings, hellish hangovers, appallingly bad music, tacky festive decorations, monumental hypocrisy, seething resentment and bitter remorse.

Enjoy!

Dress Up Dive

Hmm … Decisions, decisions …

For the first time since the cretaceous period I actually find myself with a girlfriend.
If we're going to be walking out together it's about time I started looking after my own appearance.

I'm no longer svelte, but balding and saggy in places where saggy should never be seen, and I have the dress sense of of a Goth tramp, whereas my girlfriend is five-ten, willowy, graceful and drop-dead gorgeous, with that long, beautiful auburn hair and glasses 'sexy librarian' thang going on.
I've got my work cut out, dammit!

Realistically, without resorting to plastic surgery and liposuction (though I am regularly torturing myself in the gym and eating ludicrously healthy food … like er … chowder and cookies) I'm going to have to think seriously about my hair and my clothes.

Fortunately for me, my girl is also arty and smarty and has generously left a gallimaufry of miscellaneous arcana all over my house, including a magazine from her neck of the woods that is chock full of splendid fashion advice.

I can take a hint, honeypie.

Right … Let's deal with my distinct lack of hair:

Holy crap! $164 for a full head of "hair and scalp"?
That's a real bargain!
I'm sorely tempted, but do I really want to look that mad-eyed and psychopathic?
That guy is seriously scary!
Brr …

Hokay; so I'll stay balding, but at least I can do something about my clothes.

I've selected a few choice items from the magazine and now I'm asking your advice.

Which of these is "me"?
(Click on 'em for bigger, readable versions).

Which look is guaranteed to impress my new girl?

I trust your opinions implicitly, so do let me know.

There is much more like this in the magazine. If you're lucky I'll post some more another day.

964 Little Rays Of Sunshine

Holy, crap! I just added them up and found that this is my nine-hundred and sixty-fourth post! Another few weeks and it'll be my thousandth.

That is quite staggeringly scary … nine-hundred and sixty-four pages of complete and utter toss; a veritable fœtid pismire of unconscionable wank.

Will I let the side down by writing anything worth reading today?
Will I fuck …
Let's talk drivel.

Camp drivel, to be precise.
Both Katie and Lucio have recently held forth on the subject of camp, with lucidity and insight.
Never one to be blessed with either of those things, I - on the other hand - shall reminisce about that most disgusting and unpalatable of childhood privations: Camp "coffee".

Let me take you by the hand and lead you back in time to Austerity Britain shortly after the end of post-war rationing.
Exhausted by war and crippled by debt, we survived on such things as powdered egg, Spam™ and Camp coffee.
Those were the days when the only fruit we saw was an orange in our Christmas sock.
We didn't get to taste actual coffee until the 1970s, when mum and dad bought a new-fangled "percolator", which may go some way to explaining my overcompensatory caffeine addiction in adult life.

What we had was this wretched stuff:

Made by the Scots - probably in revenge for Culloden, and originally envisioned as a quick way of brewing something awful for military purposes - this ghastly concoction consisted (and still consists if you have the stomach for it) mostly of water and sugar, together with 26% chicory essence and 4 (yes, four)% coffee essence.
It is a thick, syrupy glop that is truly nasty, even when massively diluted in hot water and leavened with yet more sugar.
Totally unpalatable.
Utterly disgusting.
Ick.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, it produces a cup of brown liquid that is almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee.
I still shudder at the memories …

In an amusing twist, a couple of years back, the company changed the label (much to the fusty spuffling fury of racist old tories and Daily Mail readers … "This is political correctness gone MAD!") to finally allow the Sikh manservant to sit down and share a mug of this revolting liquid with his Scottish superior, having been standing there with his tray since 1876, when the stuff was first unleashed upon us.

Anyhoo … enough camp nostalgia; let's get nostagic about condoms instead.

Yesterday's Japanese phrase was inspired by the title of the accompanying song: "Weekend".
The phrase was:

何かには週末

"Nani ka ni wa shuumatsu".

This probably makes no sense whatsoever in Japanese, as it is an English idiomatic phrase.
Another classic would be "A piece of cake" for something that we find easy, yet translated into French and rendered as "Un morceau de gâteau" it becomes gibberish.

As with 何かには週末, which - as any fule kno - means "Something for the weekend."

Apparently - having discussed this with a Colonial - the phrase is meaningless even to our cousins across the pond, so please allow me to elucidate.

Let us step back again for a moment into Austerity Britain.
Due to a mixture of prudish and cowardly government and nutjob religious pressure, condoms are not actually available anywhere in the country …

… except …

… for some unfathomable reason in … er … barbers' shops.
Accompanying dad to such establishments for a short back and sides in my youth I became familiar with the phrase.
Condoms were deemed too shocking to display, even in such a male-dominated environment as the back room of a barbershop and so - once a gentleman had been shorn - the barber would ask his customary question:
"Something for the weekend, sir?"
Monies would change hands and said gentleman would walk nonchalantly away, wearing an embarrassed smirk, his jacket pocket bulging with stinky rubber.

So …
Now we've got that out of the way, let's dance.
Or "踊りませんか", as you should have learned by now.

Today's phrase for you to learn is a handy one at a dance:
"酔っぱらっただけならまでしも、彼はとんでもないばかをやらかしたんだ。"

As it is Pizzicato Five Week here on the Planet, we'll get jiggy to another of Nomiya Maki's incomparably stylish homages: Baby Portable Rock.

Love that dress!

何かには週末

More retro cosplay hilarity with Pizzicato Five (this is turning into Pizzicato Five Nostalgia-fest Week here at the Planet).
I love the awesomely cheesy Hammond solo on this one.

Today's post is especially dedicated to my mum and to anyone else who ever gets into their head the absurdly horrifying notion that brown might someday come back into fashion.



Ah, the seventies; the original and genuine decade that taste forgot.

Yesterday's Japanese phrase for you to learn was, of course:

踊りませんか
"Odorimasenka"

A polite way to ask a girl if she might not care to dance.

踊る　"Odoru" is the plain form of the verb to dance;

踊ります　"odorimasu" the polite form.

When asking a girl it is nicer to inquire whether she might "not" like to dance;
踊りません　"odorimasen" is the negative with か　"ka" making it a question.

Today's phrase is in the title of the post.
If anyone is silly enough to use Babelfish, yesterday's translated as "It doesn't threaten?" for the hiragana, and with the correct kanji: "It doesn't dance?" … probably not the translation you want to use unless you like your face slapped.

Lemony, Love, Loss And A Werepig

Holy frijole, that SkyMall catalogue is such fun. I shall be revisiting it before long (probably during the holidays when I will have the time to scan crap).

Our own English crapfest catalogues (the bewilderingly kitsch Argos gift catalogue and the WTF-fest Innovations catalogue - thanks for the reminder, Lynn) are almost as bad and I shall endeavour to get hold of copies to reassure our Colonial Cousins that they are not alone in their inexplicable yen for tasteless tackiness.

The "collectible" trash in SkyMall reminded me of a dear friend who once got bitten by the "collectible" bug.
Well not just bitten but comprehensively savaged …

So … Are you sitting comfortably?
If not, arm yourself with a cup of coffee and a nice biscuit and settle in for a true yet tedious tale of love and loss among the SkyMall people.

Once upon a time there lived in Norwich a girl called Lemony.
Lemony was my secretary for several years; a sweet, pretty girl, very good at her job, great fun to have around the office, made a good cup of coffee, filed like a dæmon and indeed was quite normal in almost every respect.
Talk to her for any length of time, however, and it became apparent that something was missing in there.

Lemony had lived all her life with her oddball mother in a house full of feathery screeching, psittacosis and birdshit (made even more maddening by being located right under the flightpath at the end of the airport runway) but was now spreading her own wings at last in her late twenties and had bought herself a nice little house.
When I popped round to see it, what was missing in Lemony became apparent; she possessed not one scintilla of a real life outside of her deranged batshit-for-brains mother and the dreary office.
Much to my dismay, however, she soon found a purpose in life … she began to collect "collectible heirlooms".

For want of anything to do one dreary Sunday afternoon Lemony fell victim to one of those awful Franklin Mint ads and "invested" half a week's wages in a "collectible" plate … basically a dinner plate with a picture of a cat on it, excitingly "created by a world famous collectible artist" who nobody had ever heard of.

Nice …
"That's very pretty, Lemony, but I do think it was a little expensive for a dinner plate with a picture of a cat on it."

Against my cynical advice that wasting her money on these things would not pay her pension, sweet yet empty little Lemony started on a spending spree, plundering her savings account and filling her sweet yet empty little house with hundreds of these appalling, ugly, cheap and trashy "heirloom investments".
She - with more than a little help from Franklin Mint - convinced herself that these worthless pieces of crap would gain exponentially - indeed miraculously - in value and that in a few years she would be able to prove me wrong and pay off her mortgage by selling a few to slavering fellow collectors.

What made all of this even harder to watch was that Lemony somehow managed to find a kindred spirit in one of Elaine's cast-off Marks (Elaine from the tax office spent several years serial-dating guys called Mark, to whom she referred as Mark 1, Mark 2, Mark 3, etc. This was not a conscious decision to start with but after the first three she decided to roll with it and kept going up to Mark 7).

Anyhoo … Mark 4 and Lemony hit it off straight away. She came in to the office floating on a cloud of cheap perfume and googly-eyed bliss.
Lemony in love was quite a sight.
Perhaps - I thought foolishly - now she actually has a life she will stop wasting her money on this crap.
Hey ho …

A brief aside:
Mark 4, although a pretty nice guy in most other respects, was in fact a werepig.
Outside of a full moon, werepigs are a lot easier to spot than werewolves - and mercifully less dangerous; simply place a finger under your nose and lift it up so your nostrils face forward.

Werepig.

You know the word "retrousé"? Well, use it as a euphemism if you want, but there's no hiding from the fact that it's a werepig.
You probably know some yourselves. You chat away to them at the water cooler but you can't remember a word they've said as your attention is drawn wholly to the contents of their nose which they are pointing straight at you.
Pray they don't sneeze.
Anyhoo, werepigs are perfectly normal for most of the month but the day after a full moon they wake up naked in your vegetable patch having rooted up all your carrots and trashed your kitchen looking for your truffle oil.

And Lemony was dating one …
Pretty soon one thing led - as it does with tedious inevitability - to another and I found myself helping Mark 4 to move in to Lemony's house one Saturday.
The cause of their mutual attraction soon became clear as we opened his boxes: to the house full of "collector plates" was added several dozen "collectible reproduction antique firearms" (made of plastic) and a quite awe-inspiring quantity of Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who memorabilia and figurines.
It was a match made in "collectible" Heaven!

We started playing a rather cruel game at work.
We got hold of a copy of our own version of SkyMall, the Argos Gift Catalogue and went through it, placing bets on which of the monstrously crappy kitsch items Lemony and her werepig would choose to grace their home.
One of the things we picked was a quite hideous white porcelain "sculpture" (straight out of a mould) of a pair of praying hands. They had a little gap between them and you were supposed to put your TV remote in there.

Boy, did we hit the jackpot with that one! There on the coffee table in front of Lemony's sofa were three (you heard) of these monstrosities, each holding a remote for their TV, video and "home entertainment centre".

Anyhoo, within a worryingly few weeks Lemony and the Mark 4 werepig were marrried and we waved them off on their honeymoon; a two week coach tour of Germany and Austria during which they learned that they had nothing in common outside of collecting "collectibles" and by the end of the second day they could not stand to be in the same room together, let alone jammed against one another on a coach.

They grimly stuck it out for the whole two weeks as neither of them had been abroad before and they didn't want to waste the holiday, but as soon as they got home the Mark 4 werepig was ejected from Lemony's house together with his plastic "collectible reproduction antique firearms" and his nutjob hoard of sci-fi trash.

Lemony - much to her credit - took stock of her life and reined in her "collectible" collecting, boxing the whole shebang up and shoving it all in the attic.
Once the mutually agreed interspecies divorce came through she sold up (redeeming her collection at less than a hundredth of what she had paid for it - each of her "investments" revealed to be worth slightly less than a second hand dinner plate) and moved to the southern colonies where she appears - from the occasional email - to be leading a normal life as a slightly batty but sweet expat Englishwoman.

Make of this sorry tale what you will, but I advise you to never buy anything advertised as "collectible" or "heirloom" and to stay the fuck away from werepigs.

This has been a public service broadcast.

Culture Schlock

Tis the season to wallow in greed and genefluct at the feet of Mammon and so it's time once again to indulge in a raucous chortle at the expense of the culturally challenged at Christmas.

I had heard rumour - from Robyn and Katie - that these things existed, but until Amanda returned from a recent trip to the US I had - like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and an edible American cheese - doubted their existence.

"I saw this and thought of you" she said as she handed me a copy of that Holy Grail of tacky kitsch crapola …

The Sky Mall catalogue!
Yay!

Ah, me … Be still my beating heart.
The whole office gathered round and we spent a productive half hour laughing our breakfasts out of our noses at the essentials of an American Christmas.
Boy, howdy!
This is the pinnacle; the very height of high camp trash.
In fact you can't get much higher than 39,000 feet above the Bible Belt, which is where Amanda tracked this thing down.
And which is about as close as any sane person wants to get to Middle America.

Here then, for your puerile entertainment is a small selection of Christmas presents you never knew you didn't want.
Celebrate the birth of Jesus the American way … Step with me into a wonderland of cheesy horror …

First (and worst) up: The Thomas Kinkade "Animated Holiday Tree".

Please, PLEASE, click on these and read the blurb for each item; it is funnier by far than anything I could write about them.

Until Robyn pointed me in his direction a couple of years back I had never heard of Thomas Kinkade.
What I saw on Google Image Search made me want to tear down my collection of paintings and prints from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to burn my collection of modern art and replace it all with … er …
Actually, I would rather rip my eyes out of their sockets than look at any more of Thomas Kinkade's alleged "art".
This is only one of a dozen such kitsch monstrosities in the catalogue. They left me reeling with nausea.
And there are other "collectible artists" in there, too. Maybe we shall return one day and frighten ourselves some more …
But for now:

Woohoo! An animated k.d. lang!
Er …
I love the fact that this has motion sensors in it and will regale passers-by with a "famous Elvis remark".
I always felt there was something missing from my recording studio and now I know that this is not it.

Oh, merciful Heavens!
"No tree branches to get in the line of sight as your guests view up to 120 of your prettiest ornaments!"
Holy fuck!
Okay, fess up … Who has one of these?

If your neighbour gets in first this year with a lifesize illuminated Nativity Scene, simply plough 'em into the lawn with this … um … well actually words fail me.
"It's fourteen feet long! Eat that, Holy Family!"

The American penchant for festive lawn decorations has long bemused me. Over here in Blighty this kind of thing is reserved exclusively for our version of trailer trash, the Chav family.

I can just see these appearing on Essex council estates among the burnt-out cars and abandoned pushchairs.

Ah, now we're talking!

"Thanks to Time Mug you can have a clever alternative to glancing at your watch during long meetings."
Meet "The World's First And Only 100% Dishwasher Safe, Time-Telling Drinkware."
This is truly what the modern Christmas is all about.
Bugger peace on Earth and goodwill to all men; forget celebrating the birth of Christ, let's just get shitfaced, snog workmates and give one another non-presents like this.
Sigh …
Time to point out - as I do every year - that an anagram of "Christmas Day" is "Mad, Scary Shit".

Hey! Trust!
The foundation stone of any lasting relationship.
Let's blow it out of the water with this paranoid piece of shit.
Show your loved ones just how much respect you have for them by secretly tracking their movements.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Click on this one and read it … Oh, PLEASE read it!

Fucking, fuckity fuck.
"Fact!" - Pseudoscience gets madder and sadder every day.

Er …

I truly love this catalogue!
"Bring laid-back comfort to your favourite sporting events …"
Holy crap! This would look great in the grandstand at a rugby match.
Be the laughing stock of your friends and anyone else passing by.
String yourself up like a fat, beer-swilling puppet from the back of a truck.

I'll stop today with this …
Again, words fail me.

And I've not even touched on the awful things in the catalogue for children and pets!
This is too rich a gold mine of mirth for one post.
We shall return another day to point and laugh at those of little brain who actually buy this shit.

In the meantime, I am placing my orders, so look out!

Drive In Saturday

Fuck flu!
Thanks to the snot monster I've missed Louisa's craft fair, my Japanese lesson, Tony's gig and my yummy Saturday breakfast in the city.
Oh, and some crappy commuting, so perhaps it's not all bad.

Here are a couple of things that are truly bad:

As Robyn and Lucio kindly informed me yesterday, the world is a slightly less knotty and red-assed place today after the sad death at 85 of everybody's favourite 1950s bondage and spanking queen and born again Christian, Bettie Page.

What an alluring …er … haircut that gal had.

To help all of us bereaved Bettie fans mourn in our own … ahem … private way, here are some classic Bettie shots:



And to make your day even worse, Mikey sent me an unnecessarily festive little gem which I just sat and giggled my way through.
I confess to an addiction to crap B-movies, and B-movies don't come much crappier than this one.
Yay!

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.

If you have the time, please make yourself a coffee and a bite to eat (popcorn would be good), click on the link and settle in to enjoy a truly strange and horrifyingly festive Christmas crapfest.
If you don't have the time, make it. Watching this tosh is well worth sacrificing something like the ironing or cleaning the bathroom (actually that's a pretty close call).

For those who share my predilection (or are just morbidly curious and have way more time than taste), check out:
Classic Cinema Online, home of Tod Browning's Freaks, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Giant Gila Monster, Night of the Living Dead, Creature with the Atom Brain, It! Terror From Beyond Space and way too many more.
… and America Free TV, replete with Roger Corman classics like Little Shop of Horrors, Swamp Women and such wonders as Teenage Zombies, The Wasp Woman, Attack of the Monsters, Mesa of Lost Women et al.

It's all free and it's all complete trash.
What's not to love.
I'm off to continue my own personal B-movie, Dive vs. The Snot Monster.
Happy Saturday, earthlings.

Spike Lite

Yeah, I know … Why is the man who hates TV posting about a TV programme?

You know me; I try to steer well clear the idiot box, but I do keep in my dusty vaults television's only worthwhile spewings (DVD sets of The Big Box of Buffy, Frasier and The Simpsons) and am currently re-watching Buffy on my big new Mac.

This post is for fellow Buffster Kate, to let her know that when this series arrives on Aussie TV she can watch without fear.

Someone at the office told me this week that the incomparable James Marsters - our beloved Spike from Buffy - has turned up in in the BBC's teen-kiddie, Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood.
I'd actually caught a couple of the first series, which was only made watchable by the weirdly sexy Burn Gorman (who stole the show as Guppy in the Beeb's adaptation of Bleak House), the openly gay, ham-acting Captain Jack and a token sexy Japanese girl.

Spike … Cool as fuck

So this morning, after breakfast in the city, I switch on the Mac, open the Beeb's iPlayer and watch last week's Torchwood.
I almost daren't look.
Spike in a Brit teen show?
Could this ruin him forever?

I needn't have worried … the scriptwriters are very obviously Buffy fanatics.

Hokay: Big flash of light and here he comes; he walks the Spike walk, he talks the Spike talk, but he's now a brunette with an Adam Ant pirate jacket and silly guns … oh, and he's no longer a vampire but some kind of time traveller addicted to sex (men, women, even a poodle), booze, drugs and murder … Kinda like Doctor Who should have been.
So far, so watchable …
Within seconds he's dropped some bloke off the top of a multi-story car park and hits the first Buffy tribute line: "Thirsty now."

Not to spoil things for Kate too much, there follows an hilarious "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope" piss-take, worthy of Buffy; a full on snog-fest with gay Captain Jack (well, several actually), and some chortle-inducing bitching and posturing.
After that is was, rather disappointingly Spike Lite, played for laughs and never quite evil enough (this is British teen TV after all).

Gay fun with Jack and John

So … our Spike survives the transition. He's still kinda residual-cool, bitchily funny and so much more camp than everything else on TV … but it ain't Buffy.

This has been a public service announcement for my fellow Buffsters.

The rest of you can just go watch all seven series of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and discover that - in an ideal world - television can actually be genuinely cool, sexy and funny.

It's just not an ideal world any more.

Tacky Kitsch Trash

A couple more things for Ame to think about:

For shows and gigs and stuff, take a look on Visit London's "What's On" page. You can search for stuff coming up over the next thirty days, so give it a week and check it out.
Book online in advance.

And Sassy rightly suggests eating Indian (which is actually Britain's native cuisine these days).
Should you, however, feel slightly more adventurous, try this site. It lists London's more strange restaurants where you can chow down on scorpions and other weird shit.
Or you could of course do a home from home and stick to Starbucks and Mc.D, but where's the fun in that?

And use GoogleMap to plan walks (parks and riverside).
The best bits of London are all in the old parts (City and Westminster), but that's still a huge area, so group your West End activites and your River activites and the rest so you split it up into days.

Oh, if you do the appallingly touristy thing and visit Harrods (ugh), be sure to photograph the world's tackiest statue, while making obscene gestures in front of it.
The disgusting Mohammed Fayed (Harrods' owner) erected a pukably kitsch statue of Diana and his son Dodi yanking on a seagull's penis (that's the ugly fucker standing beside it). It's called "Innocent Victims", because he's convinced that the Royal Family and the Secret Service murdered them. He's kind of in denial about sending his own drunk chauffeur to drive them into a concrete pillar at speed.

Hey! Here's a quick assignment:
If anybody knows of anything on the entire planet more tasteless and kitsch and shamelessly tacky than this vom-fest, please post it.