My Cultural Life - Sturm und Drang

 What's Been Up? 

I've never felt the need to be careful with what I say in my blogs. Anyone who knows me knows that I speak my mind; it often gets me into trouble but equally a lot of people are pleased that someone says things that they feel. However, I'm properly torn at the moment, because I want to relay an incident that happened to me the other day, but I'm concerned because it involves someone some people up here in Galloway might know* and I really have been trying very hard not to ruffle too many feathers in my home...

I was somewhere local, walking the dogs, when I engaged in a conversation with someone I've known for almost all the time I've lived here. We might not be called friends, but we have always chatted and our mutual love of dogs has meant there's common ground between us. This person is not heterosexual and I say that not to be provocative, but to compound a point. Several years ago, someone I'd known since I was at school, a friend, expressed extreme opinions of a right wing nature and that pretty much ended that friendship as I was not going to associate with a person with such extreme opinions given they were gay and had invariably suffered from a specific kind of discrimination throughout their life.

I tend to think of people who fall into the LGBT+ category as people who have probably seen some form of hatred, usually by ignorant bigots, aimed at them. I expect if there are any people out there who fall into the LGBT+ category who haven't experienced some form of discrimination or hate speech then they are lucky people. So the last thing I would expect is to meet someone from that demographic who could be so rabidly bigoted about foreigners and equally so dismissive of arguments contrary of their radicalised beliefs, but that is what happened. I listened to someone I've known for almost a decade spew hatred about Muslims, about refugees, about Africans, about anyone they didn't perceive as British. They were careful to say they weren't racist because black, brown and Asian British people who were born here and are patriotic are okay, but it's the raping, murdering, thieving immigrants who get more than our own poor people who should be drowned in the channel, who are responsible for ALL of the UK's ills.

I tried to argue that economic migrants come here because we have unscrupulous employers who would rather pay an illegal migrant £5 an hour to do a job rather than pay ordinary people the living wage, so some of the blame has to be directed at these people. But, apparently, that's been happening for years and isn't the reason. I said that asylum seekers get barely anything from the government, something like £9 a day to live on. But no, they get hotels, mobile phones, cars, free health care, carte blanche to rape and pillage without consequence. I said that the people complaining and vilifying migrants were responsible for this mess by lying about Brexit; that once we were out of the Dublin Agreement we were screwed by the people who told us Brexit would bring us 'are cuntry back'. And I was told that is it was snivelling shits like the new PM who won't make deals with Europe because they want our Christian-based country to be torn apart so that Muslims can take it over. That our king is now a radicalised Islam follower. That Brexit would have worked if the right people had been in control of it. That nowhere is safe to live now because we have rape gangs patrolling the streets targeting our children...

This wasn't just a tirade, this was an almost apoplectic rage rant containing so much anger and hatred and denial that I felt so uncomfortable I wanted to walk away. My wife said, "Why the hell didn't you do what you always do and argue with them? Why didn't you put them right with facts? Why did you stand there and let this person say such vile things?" And I said, I see this person at least once a week, maybe not to talk to, but they are around. They are friends with people I call friends and while our mutual friends might not be born again Nazis, they might have similar thoughts and beliefs. I simply don't want that kind of confrontation, because trying to be reasonable got an even more rabid response. This person isn't interested in the truth, this person has let hatred consume them to the point that they sound like lunatics when they rant... but lunatics who more and more people seem to agree with and what's the point of trying to be some kind of left wing woke King Canute, trying to stop the unstoppable tide of hatred when people are no longer interested in facts?

One positive thing happened. Just before we went about our own business, I think this person saw the sheer and utter shock on my face. The fact that I was appalled at what I was hearing, because they made their excuses and continued on their way. It left me mentally exhausted and writing this up 24 hours later, I'm still shocked. It was one of the most unpleasant 20 minutes of my time in Galloway; listening in disbelief to the mad rantings of someone overtaken by hatred and lies; who believes everything the right wing press say and worse. I felt violated and a mixture of very sad and unbelievably angry. Yes, the UK, like many other European countries is struggling on so many levels and I acknowledge that some tough choices will end up being made to appease these nutters. It bothers me considerably that people will always point the finger of blame at mostly innocent people without seeing or understanding why, but we're now living in a period of time where reason is not a way to counter hatred and maybe staying quiet, keeping our heads down and avoiding making these lunatics think we're part of their problem is probably the best way forward at this moment in time... 

* Do not ask me who this person is, I'm not saying.

Green Lights

I know I have a bug up my arse about The Guardian newspaper's reviews (among other things), but over the last 12 months they have stopped the comments sections on these reviews and I wonder if that's because they don't want people making comments like 'How come you're the only people in the world who like this shit?' or "Why do you give bad reviews for things everyone else likes?' Or maybe they just don't want people calling them out and accusing them of making reviews a paid for content part of the paper. You know, production companies pay the paper to write favourable reviews of shit things and the companies that don't pay them get crap reviews? This is just a theory, but there have been so many 'this is great' reviews when clearly they weren't and almost as many 'this is crap' reviews when they're not. I read the extremely negative review of Lanterns on Monday and it really hyped me up for what was likely to be an excellent debut...

Lanterns episode one was cracking TV. I obviously watched something completely different than the Guardian because this was everything I wanted from a superhero TV show. It helps that in the 1970s the only DC comic I had any time for was Green Lantern and Hal Jordan was a hero you could aspire to. This TV show casts Kyle Chandler as Hal and what an inspired bit of casting that is. Aaron Pierre as Jon Stewart is almost as good as the guy who the Guardians of the Universe chose to be Hal's replacement, but this is more than that. Almost from the opening scenes this drew you in and left you wanting more. It also wasn't like a superhero show, more like a neo-western with an extra-terrestrial twist; a kind of post modern Cowboys and Aliens but without Daniel Craig. The Green Lantern and his trainee are drawn to Nebraska where Hal believes aliens have been killed in a mass shooting (in 2016) and they walk into a ready made conspiracy theory where a local landowner and militia leader - Gareth Dillahunt - believes the earth is being primed for an alien invasion and it seems he might be right. Just enough was given away in this opener to make you want to come back for more. This is a great start.

** A Guardian Aside... Last December, I reviewed an indie film called It Ends, I gave it a score of 3/10. IMDB gives it a rating of 5.6, which is slightly better than my rating. The movie is getting a limited theatre run in the USA, Australia and the UK and the good old Guardian reviewed it this week and gave it a 4/5 rating and talked about it like it was some work of Gen-Z genius. 

I feel compelled to point this out to all of you, despite very few of you probably reading this neo-liberal sell-out and fewer giving a shit. The thing is, there an element of comedy in there now. It actually works really well for me - bad review is 90% likely to be a good film; good review, check IMDB and then don't watch. It is so contrary it's funny.

The Road to Armageddon

We watched another movie we thought we'd seen before, but if we had it must have been erased from our memories. The Book of Eli is a post-apocalyptic road movie starring Denzel Washington as a man on a very long mission to take a trusted book out west. He is a man capable of looking after himself in a dangerous Mad Maxian styled landscape in the aftermath of a war that has destroyed humanity and left it in ruins. Along the way he runs into Gary Oldman's Carnegie, a man who is after the book that Eli is transporting. Mila Kunis is the girl that Eli takes under his wing and there are a number of colourful survivors they meet on the way. It's a grim film with an uplifting message of hope and while I don't remember any of it, it was entertaining and not at all preachy despite its biblical implications. 7/10

Trailer Trash

A double bill from the MCU this weekend just gone. First there was a special Avengers: Doomsday trailer, which displaced and proved wrong so many You Tube know-alls and secondly there was a trailer for VisionQuest, the third and final part of a trilogy you never knew existed...

All those ITK [In The Know] Tube of You channels claiming that the twist in Avengers: Doomsday is going to be that Doc Doom isn't the villain in this film will be quietly hoping that the collective memories of people who tuned into their usually bullshit channels will have forgotten what was said. This is because the second trailer for the December blockbuster makes it absolutely clear that Doom is the villain of the piece. The new trail is essentially Sue Richards starting by saying that Victor was a decent man, the cleverest in the room, but some tragedy turned him into a monster. Then we have a bit more of RDJ's dodgy Latverian accent, interspersed with Reed Richards shouting at Doom, asking him if all of this was his doing. There's headshots of various heroes, but this time it's all about Doom (and the Sentinels he raises from the ground). It doesn't have the impact that the trailer from a fortnight ago had, because there's no end cameo from you-know-who and Doom naturally has Tony Stark's eyes. It's not floating my boat as much mainly because I'm struggling to see how a man in grey armour and a green hoodie is going to be the scariest thing Thor has ever faced...

The VisionQuest trailer does look very interesting. It's pretty much taking place inside the new Vision's head, as he seems to be coming to terms with who he is now that Wanda's influence (and power) no longer has any effect on him. This ties into the Agatha All Along series, which loosely continued on from WandaVision and has Paul Bettany reprising his role as Vision and James Spader as Ultron. It's out in October and feels like it could be one of the better series from the Disney/MCU stable.

Back briefly to Avengers: Doomsday, there is a trailer - released by Disneyworld Vacationer (a Tube of You channel) where Huge Ackman - on screen - and Ryan Reynolds - off screen - petition Kevin Feige for a role in the above film. This suggests to me that both of them are indeed going to feature. The other short trailer, also from Disneyworld Vacationer, is Adam Driver announcing that he is going to be Marvel's Mr Sinister (albeit obliquely). There is also a video with other casting decisions for the new X-Men movie, which might be in pre-production - these people include Sadie Sink and Nat O'Connor - I was massively underwhelmed by all of it. The same Tube of You channel also announced a third Incredibles film...

A Fine Tribute

The wife summed it up perfectly, "This is like an Australian Local Hero." I'm not sure the comparison works in terms of story, but the sentiment and gentle comedy in this is comparable to that great 1983 movie. We watched The Dish as a sort of tribute to the great Sam Neill, who died a few weeks ago. It is the story of the space telescope in the town of Parks, in New South Wales, which NASA used to transmit the television footage of Neil Armstrong's moonwalk. It's a quirky but thoroughly wonderful film that tells the story of the three Australian men who man the telescope and the American, from NASA, who joins them to be the vital cog in the wheel, to allow the rest of the world to see probably the greatest achievement of mankind, so far. It is a superb film, full of great humour, a fantastic soundtrack (this was 1969 after all) and if you ever get the chance you should track it down and watch it. 9/10

Men Bad

Well... It took me nine years to get around to reading Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King, but I finally did and here are my thoughts... I had never really wanted to read this book because of the cover blurb. I know that sounds almost trite, but it really didn't sell me. Sometimes the short synopsis on the inside of the dust jacket cover does exactly what it needs to, but this sells it short, in my never humble opinion. What this book is pretty much encapsulates what I love about King - it has an apocalypse (of sorts), it's set in a small town, it has a vast array of characters - all of whom play a significant part in the story and most of all, it's bloody brilliant. It took me about five days to read - it's over 700 pages long - and is about a strange event where mostly all the women of the world fall asleep and are cocooned inside a substance not unlike cobwebs. it is essentially a modern day fantasy novel, but it's considerably more visceral and pulls absolutely no punches. The main thrust of the book is how the males of the species pretty much fall apart in the face of this unknown phenomena and how the fate of the entire world centres around the town of Dooling. I would probably say it's one of the best books - of this nature - I have ever read; it draws you in and never really lets you go. It doesn't really have a happy ending, but equally it doesn't have a bad one either; it has a logical ending, if such a thing is possible with such a fantastical premise. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of fiction; you really don't know what's going to happen with every page turn.

Oh Spider-Man

Ouch. I'd forgotten what an absolute heap of shit this was. To give it some credit, the opening 10 minutes or so were mildly interesting and then it went downhill very very fast. This is the much maligned Spider-Man 3, a movie that is pretty much despised everywhere on the planet and not just because it has a script and plot that could have been written by a deaf, dumb and blind imbecile but also for the 10 minutes about 90 minutes into it when Peter Parker becomes a really annoying 'hip and trendy dude' because of the symbiote that has attached itself to him. The 'Venom' character was a massive contradiction in terms during its stint hitchhiking around on Peter - was it living in/on him or did it live in his newly blackened costume in the suitcase in his cupboard? What did that even mean and how did it happen? Add to this an occasionally excellent Thomas Haden Church as Flint Marko aka The Sandman and also James Franco as the flip flopping around new Green Goblin and you have a film where MJ probably sleeps with yet another person - other than Peter - and still looks like she hasn't had her gingivitis cured. I think Sam Raimi - who I don't rate as a filmmaker anyhow - tried far too hard to try and make this a brilliant movie but instead turned in a half-baked turd. 2/10 

Musical Youth

We occasionally watch The Hit List on BBC1 on a Saturday and the new series started last Saturday and it was one of those quiz show episodes that blew us away. There were two (out of three) teams - a couple of young girls from Merseyside and a blind guy with his father-in-law - whose musical knowledge was unbelievable. The speed and accuracy of these players was almost faultless and the two girls, who eventually won £9.6K plus a £500 bonus for getting five out of five on the opening round, were phenomenal. They had a musical knowledge of the last 50 years that was mind blowing. It's on iPlayer, you should watch it just to be astounded.

Very Angry

This week's Furious was a mixture of comedy - yes, really - and things falling apart. Alice's boss thinks she's got her own boss trapped in her clever plan, but she doesn't and that ends up putting Alice in serious trouble. Meanwhile, Alice's former partner in the NYPD is getting a break with Alden (the serial killer's disabled fiancé), who has been giving the FBI a bit of a run around, in what is the episode's second comedy section and Alice's former boyfriend has not just gone off the rails, he's catapulted away from them like a shit from a cow and that can only mean one thing and it doesn't end well for him. This episode seemed like it was going to be the end of Catherine and I was suspecting the series would take a different direction for the remaining two parts, but FBI cover-ups and incompetence has now made it considerably more complicated.

Dead Ends

The most interesting thing about the second half of Ride or Die was how it stopped being a slightly frivolous comedy about an assassin and her suburban housewife bestie and become something very dark and twisted with a lot of things happening that firmly placed it in the nasty category. Things happened in the concluding parts that you could see coming a mile off, but some other things happened that really were not expected as Hannah Waddingham's Whiptail finally brought this to something of a conclusion. The thing is it also sets itself up for a sequel with Bill Nighy's Jack now on Interpol's radar and Judith and Deborah on a train surrounded by assassins from other agencies. It was fun at times, but also slightly excruciating at others with some of the humour feeling forced, but overall it was considerably better than either of us expected.

Faaaaark

When Brett Goldstein was in Shrinking he was a bit namby-pamby, but in Ted Lasso he is the absolute dog's bollocks. His Roy Kent is essentially a Rottweiler with a heart of gold and he always makes this show so much better than it is whenever he's in it. The latest instalment is essentially the usual bollocks as Richmond Ladies play their first friendly, in the face of hostility and a lack of belief. There's lot of swearing and crap set ups, but that's part of the charm, having set pieces that would seem quaint in a 1970s sitcom. There's the usual cod philosophy and borderline sexism, but it has found its feet since that woeful season opener.

The Hitman and Him

There are very few Ryan Reynolds films we haven't seen now and most of those we wouldn't touch with a barge pole, however The Hitman's Bodyguard has never fallen onto my radar, mainly because I expected it to be a load of shite and oddly enough it isn't. It is an entertaining buddy movie about an assassin and the man charged with protecting him when Interpol realises they have a dangerous leak in their ranks who might be working for the former Belarussian president - Gary Oldman - who is a very very nasty man. This is one of the better Samuel L Jackson movies of recent years, but this is essentially both Reynolds and Jackson playing characters [read: themselves] we've come to know and love. It switches between serious and silly with ease and is actually a lot of fun. 7/10

The Shitman, Him and Her

Oh my dear God... The original was a semi-serious action film with some laughs in it, this was a full blown comedy with very few funny bits in it. In fact, the funniest scene in the film ended up on the cutting room floor (and that was the reason I ended up watching the films only to be disappointed when the scene I was so impressed with wasn't in the finished product). This reunited Reynolds, Jackson and Salma Hayek in a movie that seemed to forget large swathes of the original, but that wasn't the worst thing; the worst thing was thinking that you could just make a overwhelmingly stupid film because the first one was funny. This was a fucking disgrace and if Ryan Reynolds has a problem with The Proposal why the fuck hasn't he disowned this steaming heap of shit? I'm not going to bother telling you what it was about because it doesn't matter; if you fall into a bath full of excrement, you do not start sifting through it to see what the people who filled the bath ate for their dinner. 2/10

Spewtiny

Oh come on. Seriously? This week's blog is brought to you by the people who do reviews for the Guardian and the fact they're either morons or, as I've already alluded, get paid for their content. I mean this newspaper has to find funding from somewhere, so why not get paid for content and then not say it's being paid... The latest Jaysun Stayfum 'action adventure' (and I use that term loosely) has landed and my favourite newspaper gave it a 3/5 rating, which considering the number of one and two star ratings it gives, is a real hallmark of excellence, at least in the eyes of the people who may or may not have actually watched this dung heap of sweaty arsehole debris. IMDB has it at 5.7 after less than a day of ratings, I expect that will fall hugely over the next week and the reason is because this is an appalling load of tripe. The best thing in it is Stayfum's stubble in a jeopardy-free, incoherent load of dog's cock. He plays a body guard who fails at protecting his boss - Ramon Tikaram - and then gets on a ship to find out who paid for the hit. From this point on it's about as exciting as constipation and as tense as some ancient knickers with slack elastic. It all seems to hinge on people trafficking, but what it really does is showcase the lack of talent available to make half-arsed wank like this. It's not even fun; one-man army films are essentially comedies, this was about as funny as dying of dysentery. 1/10

Conspiracies

We watched the opening two episodes of the Chris Pratt vehicle The Terminal List, from 2023, about a Navy Seal whose entire team is killed in an ambush in Syria and comes back to the USA and gets embroiled in a plot to have him killed, by unknown but hostile members of his own government. Is he suffering from PTSD and imagining it all or is there something trying to stop him from finding the truth? In the opening two episodes, those after Pratt's Reece have already brutally killed his wife, his daughter and his best friend and have successfully made it out to look like Reece is a loose cannon gone off the deep end. This is the latest in our search for TV series we have missed first time around which have good IMDB ratings and this is pretty good so far, if a little badly lit - it's like the cameraman is always in the dark. It is worth sticking with, so far.

What's Up Next?

There's been a lot in this week's blog; more than I thought the week would bring. sadly a lot of it has been worse than the drippings of my arse and my week was rocked by the story I told in the opening section. It's also been fucked about by the return of the chest infection - which may never have gone away - and feeling like shit for half the week, with an ongoing headache that has veered between nasty and full blown migraine. I could do without having a repeat of this week, which has had barely any high points and some of them were ruined by the fucking Guardian newspaper, which I have had a serious bug up my arse about all week.

Next week, I'm hoping I have more to be happy about. We're due a more tolerable return of summer and I'm reading another book; actually rereading one I've read twice already, I'll explain why next week. Until then, try not to kill each other and whatever happens in the next seven days, you're probably going to hear about it.

Up the Spurs!

My Cultural Life - Running Hot and Cold

What's Been Up? 

* William Orbit died in July. His family kept it quiet from the press until the first week of August. Like so many of my musical heroes, he had done little of note for quite some time. His 2022 album - The Painter - wasn't bad, but as an artist he peaked in the mid 1990s and as a producer his time was between the late 1990s and early 200s, when he produced the likes of Madonna, Blur, All Saints and a few others, all with thunderous success. He released a number of albums after his Strange Cargo peak and each one had echoes of his former brilliance, but nothing will ever top Hinterland, one of the most played CDs in my collection. I often say it's an album that perfectly sums up my life - but don't ask my how or why...

* With the heatwave over and the threat of some rain on the horizon, it has been, even here in south west Scotland, a memorable summer, especially after what was a forgettable spring. There are signs that we might be in for an encore before the end of August, with the Met Office suggesting that the last week in August and maybe the first week in September might see us have another spell of warm/hot and dry weather and, of course, we'll then enter the autumn and winter months where we'll have unprecedented rainfall, replenishing the rivers and reservoirs before we probably rinse and repeat next year.

* My faith in dentists has all but disappeared. I've never trusted them and despite being a good patient for the last nine years, I have run out of patience with them and I will attend my check up in January but refuse any work that's recommended unless I believe I need it. My experience with them over the summer has been horrendous and I haven't enjoyed the good weather as much as I should because of problems with that early summer extraction and subsequent infections and revisits - which they had the audacity to charge me for despite it having been their fault. It seems to me that becoming a dentist is a sure fire way of making a shit load of money...

* I've been shit on by birds THREE times this summer, that's almost more times than I've been shit on by birds in the last 50 years. Apparently it's supposed to be good luck, but given that I haven't seen any good luck anywhere that's one old wives tale I think was created by a dryly humorous old wife...

* I know I appear to be having a thing about Facebook at the moment, but I figured I'd share something with you. I run a couple of things on the social media platform; a page for my football team (with 23,000+ followers) and a group for wild mushroom foraging (with just over 6,000 members). Last week (well most weeks actually), I was offered the chance of setting the controls to automatically allow comments to be deleted without being published if they contained certain words. At first this sounded innocuous but then something happened that made it sound quite insidious...

I got suckered into buying some mullein extract from a company called Origin Drops, which claimed, in lots of places, that the extract of the verbascum flower was a reliever for COPD. They made a lot of claims, which seemed to be backed up by lots of unconfirmed sources. I took the plunge, ended up with a couple of bottles of bright green sugar syrup that was fit for fuck all. So when I saw an advert pop up on Facebook for them, I looked at the thousands of positive comments* and didn't see one single negative one, so I left my own comment. It involved the word 'scam' and almost as soon as I hit enter, the page refreshed and I no longer was allowed to post on the page, my comment had been deleted and I was effectively banned.

A couple of days later, friends of mine opted to share that bloody 'a 17 year old won this motor home but is too young to claim the prize, so like and share this to stand a chance of winning it yourself' bullshit, scam and phishing post. I went onto the - newly created - page and told people it was a scam and instantly I was ejected from the page and I couldn't find it again; I had been blocked from it. So I went back into my own pages and looked again at this new feature Facebook was pushing and it essentially said that I could block anyone who says anything I didn't like - it could block people alerting others as to whether I was a scammer! This is the same company that doesn't want regulation of their platform; a company that is happy to allow children to be influenced and corrupted by hideous and malevolent content and now have made it easier for nefarious, illegal and harmful content creators to block anyone calling it out for what it is...

* I spent ten minutes looking at a bunch of the positive comments made by people on this page and every single one of them looked fake; many had only been in existence for less than a year, most had no information or history of people posting, 50% of them had their profiles blocked (a sure sign they're actually bots) and none of them had any interaction with whatever friends they have. Elaborate scams backed up with fake IDs designed to make you think they are genuine. Facebook is dangerous, don't let anyone try to make you think otherwise.

Like Sugar

Some websites are talking about how the season finale of Sugar sets it up for the next series, but I don't think it does. I think it might be the end of the coolest guy on television, in one of the craziest TV shows ever to land on this odd planet of ours. Yes, there's some dangling plot threads, but hey... life; to continue would probably mean more sci-fi and this is a show that keeps its extra-terrestrial roots parked - usually - at the back of the viewing room. In an episode that starts off as an epilogue to the previous seven, something I've been forecasting happens and suddenly this noirish homage to Hollywood with its hardboiled detective stories becomes the one thing it has tried very hard to not be over its 16 episodes - it finally becomes a science fiction story. I'm quite torn, because this finale tied everything up from the start of season one to the end of season two, everything was given a chance and some air to breath and we learned about the mysteries that seemed to be unexplained throughout this strange, compelling and wonderfully shot TV show.

Sugar has effectively been about John trying to find out what happened to his sister, Djen; it's always been the underlying reason this show exists, whether he was tracking down a serial killer or exposing high level corruption from the police all the way up to high office, the thing that has been driving John has been why his friend might have possibly killed Djen - the sister we only ever saw in alien form. The thing I didn't expect was that it would all tie together, especially as the second season ended the way the first one started, with Colin Farrell talking to James Cromwell, except this time the latter knows more about John than he did at the start. I really liked this season finale, because while there is some open ended things in it, it also felt like the perfect place to stop; to leave John Sugar with his mysteries solved - for now - with his dog back in his life and in the knowledge that his superpower is being a really nice man. I think I might miss this series more than I realise and unlike other shows, if it does come back I won't be disappointed. That's the mark of something truly special. 

Oh My Good God...

Last week, I said we might watch The Last House despite a 5.7 rating on IMDB. By the time we watched it on Sunday night - less than two days after the last blog went live - it had dropped to 5.5, so I didn't tell the wife we were about to watch a heap of shit. The thing is it started reasonably weirdly and felt like it might be something a bit different, but then the levels of far fetched came and then the preposterously absurd until we were introduced to the creatures and... I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me explain...

Wagner Moura and Greta Lee play parents to two kids; he's unemployed and their house is falling down. An unexpected storm arrives and the rain appears to cement everyone into their houses; the doors don't open, windows don't break and even drilling holes in walls and doors soon get plugged up by the water - there is no explanation for this. No one can escape; they are all locked in. People stuck outside can't get in etc etc etc. After a while, as the food runs out people start to die, but the family in The Last House have a DVD of Annie to watch, grow hydroponic tomatoes, eat their dog and manage to survive for FIVE FUCKING YEARS while the rest of the world gets on without humans. Oh and there appears to be a monster outside who hadn't bothered showing up for the first few years, but now appears to be menacing the remaining living humans. There's elements of Cthulhu at work, even a suggestion this might be a cosmic horror, but in the end, these horrid sea creatures (for that is what they were) just needed a human to show an act of kindness towards them and they packed up, went back to sea and were never seen again, ever. The end. Jesus wept salt water... 3/10

Unjustified

With a dwindling amount of movies on the Mystery Stick, I spent Sunday morning trawling IMDB for TV series rated higher than 8.0 that we had never watched, in the hope of finding something - a kernel of sweetcorn in the vast arrays of shite - that we could watch. and with a rating of 8.6 and some pretty good reviews, we settled on the 2010 series Justified with Timothy Olyphant as a US Marshal. With that kind of rating it looked nailed on to be a winner, but there was an element of reservation, especially as The Guardian rated it extremely highly. By the time we finished the pilot episode we'd seen enough. It felt almost ridiculous that a TV series from 2010 can feel dated, but this did. The acting was very good ol' boy redneck with a hint of tongue in cheek and long before the end of the opening episode I was thinking there was no way we are going to watch one season, let along six and a sequel, so we're not.  

King of Tales

This summer has been one for doing a lot of reading. I usually read between two and four books during the summer, mainly because I like sitting in the garden reading - I like the light. This summer I've read five novels already and am about to embark on the sixth. All but one of them have been Stephen King novels; the reason for this was I decided in the spring that I should read the King books I've never read, plus the latest one, which ended up being the most disappointing of the five. They were: Never Flinch - the latest Holly Gibney crime thriller; Mr Mercedes, Finders Keepers and End of Watch - the three Bill Hodges stories, which introduced Holly Gibney - the slightly autistic private detective with a nose for the weird and Billy Summers - King's take on the life of a hitman and the overriding theme behind these five books are that none of them appear to be supernatural, although the last in the Bill Hodges trilogy is and there's a chapter in Billy Summers that places it squarely in the King Universe.

I'm pretty clear on which one is my favourite, that would be the last one. Billy Summers didn't float my boat. I couldn't bring myself to read it in 2021 when it came out; my supernatural snobbery not allowing me to touch it because I didn't think I'd enjoy it; so I was quite surprised when it turned out to be an absolute blockbuster of a tale and one of the best stories I think King has ever written. It goes in strange directions and while the premise is quite light, the execution (if you'll pardon the obvious pun) is perfect. It's an archetypal 'last job' story, which has a number of curveballs thrown in and I devoured it in three days. The Bill Hodges trilogy really is summer reading and the last two books are nothing like the television adaptations - nothing at all like them, so it was like reading something totally new. All three stories are set over a short period of time, the last one literally takes place over a week. Never Flinch was an absolute let down of a story, which even the wife was on the same page as me; it was almost a why bother book...

The sixth book was the concluding part of Philip Pullman's Book of Dust trilogy, which I reviewed in these pages about six or seven weeks ago and was baffling and felt something like an anti-climax. I am about to embark on Sleeping Beauties - another King book, this time written with his son Owen. I've had the books for yonks, but never felt like reading it, but as it is the only thing the near 80-year-old writer has written that I haven't read, I figured I'd better get it out of the way. I'm going to sit down with it today (Monday) and I might finish it by the weekend, despite its 700+ pages. 

Dragon Ballz

The biggest problem with all three seasons of House of the Dragon has been the middle six episodes. Every season has started and ended well, but has been marred by six boring stinkers in between. The season finale was a tour de force of battles, set-ups and double crosses, but ultimately it was all about the next series, because every fucking season end has been about next year. It's why I'm unsure whether I can bear another eight weeks of dull medieval nonsense that doesn't go anywhere until the final season is given the go ahead. This time around some minor characters died; one of the dragon riders goes rogue; Matt Smith almost carks its and the queen has a bad day all round; plus the rebel brothers Targaryen make up and plot for season four. Largely it's just a borefest, but I might have to tune in next year just to see how it will set up, then I can take six weeks off and watch the finale...

Livid

Despite finding Furious great TV there's a couple of things about it. The first is that it is uncomfortable television; it's got an edge to it that gives you a little bit of the ick. The second is how it can always seem to end in a situation where you wonder how they're going to string it out and this fifth part was no exception. Last week we were left wondering how Alice can play any future part in the investigation and this week we were left with her sitting in a room next to the killer and knowing it. Emmy Rossum is a fantastic actress; one of two brilliant break out stars of the old Shameless (US) - the other being Jeremy Allen White - and in this she's playing a blinder. The problem is, without wishing to sound like I'm repeating myself, this is just really uncomfortable because it's dealing with all manner of things that just don't feel like the usual thing you would find in a drama. It's difficult to explain, but the overtly sexual opening couple of episodes have been replaced by the deeply disturbing and unusual. 

Pulverised

When Fox made X-Men Origins: Wolverine did they even bother taking into account the three earlier X-Men films, to the point of were they even aware that much of this movie makes no sense at all? The reason I say this is because there were so many things wrong that it felt like it could well have been part of the current MCU's Multiverse nonsense. Not only did this movie give Wolverine - Huge Ackman - an origin, which seemed incongruous to everything we've ever known about the character, it also introduced other characters that made little or no sense and were substantially different when they reappeared in later films.

Take Wade Wilson for starters. In this he was already a mutant wielding a katana before he was transformed into a Deadpool that didn't resemble any rendition of the character in later films or comic book. Then there was the addition of Remy Labeau or Gambit, who this time around was played by Taylor Kitsch and the least said about him the better. Then there was Scott Summers, who it seems was conveniently unable to see when he was in scenes with Logan, so doesn't remember him when they meet again later in their lives... Then there was Sabretooth, who unlike Logan didn't lose his memory yet manages to forget he's Logan's 'brother' between this film and the first X-Men movie when they met again (or for the first time depending on stuff). There is so much wrong with this film that I could write a thesis on it but the worst thing is the complete lack of any continuity - which, as we know, was never really a thing in the first place with X-Men movies. I suppose the biggest problem I have with this is despite it being pretty much a load of shite, the scattergun approach to writing mutants in the 2000s was never more pronounced than with this. 4/10

Pickett Up

The TV series with good ratings we've never watched list arrived at Joe Pickett, a couple of series about a game warden, played by Michael Dorman, which came recommended. This time it was a show from 2023 which featured on Paramount+ and because I'm a bit of a Dorman fan I had some hopes this would be okay. We managed 25 minutes and to be honest I'm surprised I gave it that long. It started with some bad CGI - which was surprising given it styles itself as a 'modern western' - before descending into a kind of soap opera format inside the next few minutes as Joe discovers his wife is pregnant. The following scene, with Joe, his wife and two existing kids at a kind of car boot sale thing wouldn't have been so bad if his wife didn't already look about six months pregnant, but this was just a couple of days after the opening scene when he stopped a hillbilly from butchering two big deer - which had already been killed. Everything about this screamed 'shite' and we put it out of its misery very quickly, vowing to never return to it again. I've come to the conclusion that ratings for TV shows on IMDB are about as reliable as a Nigel Farage MPs surgery for residents of Clacton...

A Return to Form?

Did you like the footballing analogy I used there? I wouldn't have used it if this week's Ted Lasso hadn't felt like it had rediscovered how to be a half decent comedy show. The problem with last week was it was all wrong, but this week we were back in Richmond and back at the training ground with recognisable characters and a familiar feel to things. This is never going to be a brilliant show, but it can, at least, try and rediscover its instinct for scoring goals... [ahem]... This week Ted is finding his feet again, meeting his new team, reacquainting himself with old friends and making some new ones. There were some LOL moments - which is always a bonus - and I have high hopes the following six or so weeks will not have me reaching (or wretching) for the sick bucket again.

A Massive Wadd, Missus

Hannah Waddingham has been all over my TV this week and that is not some kind of bizarre euphemism. Not only is she back as the chairperson of Richmond FC, she's also the hired assassin Whiptail in the miniseries Ride or Die, the latest TV series on the mystery stick we've decided to give a go to. This time we're halfway through it and while it is a wee bit silly and Waddingham essentially plays herself in everything I've ever seen her in (this and Ted Lasso), she's good value for money and team her up with Octavia Spencer and you have an interesting show about best friends with a twist. One doesn't know the other is a hired assassin despite them having been friends for 25 years. This has some cringe moments, but it's actually good fun and Waddingham is convincing - in a TV show kind of way. It might be a keeper, however we're going to finish it next week, so I might change my mind.

The Pulveriser

The first thing, almost the very first thing, you notice about James Mangold's The Wolverine is the opening sequence has Logan stuck in a makeshift well/prison just outside Nagasaki, despite him also being at the D-Day landings in Europe - with his brother Sabretooth - about a year earlier. Now, it is possible that he might have gone and done a solo mission after helping defeat the Nazis or equally it might have simply been forgotten about so they could do a loose adaptation of the Frank Miller four-part comicbook mini-series based in Japan. I'm going for the forgetting excuse, because, you know, as mentioned above, Wolverine and X-Men continuity is as dependable as my memory. Anyhow, this pits Logan against the Yakuza (after a fashion) and the Yashida family, of which half like him and the other half want him dead.

By and large it is a better film than his first solo outing, but that isn't difficult. The story is relatively slight, despite it's two hour run time and while the Viper is a strange villain, some of her 'achievements' weren't easily explainable and the man Logan saved the life of at Nagasaki turned out to be a bit of a twat; but this was also a film that was a bit all over the place at times. Huge Ackman seemed a little more like Wolverine from the comics - for pretty much the first time - but the cameo from Famke Janson as Jean Grey felt shoehorned in. There's a post-credit scene which sets up X-Men: Days of Future Past but overall it felt a little bit pointless. 6/10 

What's Up Next?

The big thing this coming week surely has to be Lanterns - the Green Lantern reboot. It's less superhero more neo-western, in what seems to be an oblique nod to Sugar - less extra and more terrestrial. I've found a few movies to add to the Mystery Stick (but I'm not too hopeful) and the usual other stuff. We're heading towards autumn and that usually means longer nights with more stuff to fill them - oh and the football season starts properly next Saturday - woo and indeed hoo!

My Cultural Life - It Is the Summer, After All...

What's Been Up? 

* Dynamic Car Parking charges... What the actual fuck? In a world where almost everything costs money, private firms are now coming up with even more ingenious ways to screw more money out of us. Everywhere you look people are talking about the ongoing cost of living crisis, where everything is hugely more expensive than it was six years ago, so instead of businesses thinking they can make some things cheaper to encourage more people to use them, they're just making it worse for everyone else. Town and City centres have been destroyed in recent years through a number of things from rates to business parks to people buying on line, so how about we charge people even more money for wanting to park in these places during 'peak' times... But don't despair, if you want to use these car parks in the dead of night, it will be considerably cheaper... FFS. 

* It would be really nice if journalists, when speaking to opposition politicians, would ask these people what they would do instead, rather than just allowing them to tell us how bad a certain thing is without offering us the alternative they would suggest. When Andy Burnham scrapped VAT on electricity bills, Reform and Conservative MPs (and spokespeople) complained incessantly, claiming it only amounted to about £55 a year. No one asked them what they would have done that would have been better and none of the MPs offered their own solutions. Are we not getting fed up with opposition politicians complaining about things but never offering their own remedies?

* I've been preparing for this month's quiz - which takes place the day before this blog goes live - at The Merse, which is literally a stone's throw from my front door. I know a few people who have given the old quizmaster game a go and they always seem to marvel at the time and effort that goes into a quiz with approx 100 questions. I'm usually about three months ahead of myself, which gives me time to tweak rounds, change questions and make sure I'm 100% happy with what I'm putting out, especially after last month's quiz had a round on the World Cup and I'm never doing another round on that ever again...

The thing is, sometimes a question's answer changes and sometimes the answer is simply not the one you've got written down. This month was supposed to have a question: how many varieties of seagull are there in the UK? Now, even before I get to an answer, this is question fraught with problems - everything from 'seagulls don't actually exist' to 'is that indigenous gulls or does it include visitors during the summer?' The point was, I had an answer of 11, because when I wrote the question - about five years ago for a different quiz - that was the answer Google gave me. Half a decade later and the answer I'm getting is completely different - DuckDuckGo says 6, Bing says 7, Google no longer has a definitive answer. It is no longer a viable quiz question and therefore had to be replaced.

* Facebook no longer really works for me. Almost none of the adblockers work on it now and the ones that do strip out things I'd like to see as well. These adblockers all slow down the browsing and I presume have detrimental effects on the feeds in general - such as slow typing, slow browsing and slow everything else. I've tried it with other browsers and even without adblockers, it's become huge and unwieldy. The other observation is that barring a few people, it's no longer a social platform but a promotional thing; people sharing stuff they're going to or doing and re-sharing stuff from their feeds, which is often duplicated by other friends who are on the same pages. I heard a rumour that MySpace is attempting to make a comeback and while it seems like one of those futile gestures, I was wondering if it could bring back that sense of belonging and camaraderie, of being in touch with friends and seeing how they are rather than what they're doing or promoting. I think the problem is social media no longer feels social, especially now it's used as a tool.

Bad Wishes

The premise of Obsession felt contrived, especially in the execution of the opening 15 minutes, but once the film starts in earnest it becomes a clever exercise in filmmaking and pushing your capabilities of comprehending the concept presented to the limit. This is a movie that is both challenging and clever, but I'm intrigued about why it has had such a great reception, with many calling it one of the best horror movies of the last couple of decades. I suppose that is because, while it has supernatural elements, it's about human obsessions from small, barely noticeable ones, to secret desires that maybe only exist in ones head and become all too scary when they become reality.

This is about a shy and withdrawn young man who pines over one of his female friends but can't bring himself to ask her out because of his fear of rejection. So he turns to a magical solution that backfires spectacularly, turning the object of his desire into a monster capable of the most heinous acts. It is extremely well framed; it's a lesson in making a feature film with as little as possible; with a couple of notable exceptions, I doubt this had more than a few special effects in it, but the girl with the obsession - Inde Navarrette - is quite remarkable and will go onto great things. The object of her obsession - Michael Johnston - is suitably nerdy and feeble and grows quite annoying to begin with until you realise that that's part of the movie's charm. It's a quality movie that is both excellent and difficult to watch. Oddly enough it deserves an 8 but I feel I can only give it a 7/10.

The Last Bowman

Some things are best left alone. One of those things is the Huge Ackman film The Death of Robin Hood. This is a movie that is on for just over two hours and most of that is as boring as a wet Sunday afternoon in January. It tries to be a realistic look at a man whose myth is far nicer than the man himself. Robin Hood is portrayed as a brigand, a murderer, a thief and a man with little or no honour, who killed the innocent in brutal and cruel ways and is now facing his own death. To be fair, it starts reasonably well, but soon stumbles around in a mumbled frenzy of what the fuck is going on. Anyhow, Robin is mistaken for Little John who is on the hitlist of a vengeful family and after being stabbed and bashed about is dumped on a remote island to be looked after by a nun called Brigid, played by Jodie Comer. Some stuff happens in a long drawn out way, but nothing that acts as a way of keeping you awake and then it ends with the title. 4/10 ish...

Dragon Seeds

I suppose something had to happen. After six weeks - well five, because the season opener at least had some stuff happen - something else actually happened. All the dithering about, the wandering aimlessly through forests and swamps, the pointless subplots with nowhere to go, this week we not only had an absolute feast of dragons, we also learned of deception, double crossings, mothers killing their children and how sowing the seeds of insurgency will finally pay off. The problem is I'm not sure I actually give a fuck. I don't know if I can put up with another season of uninteresting barely mad Targaryens trying to get one over another part of their family. This week really was an episode full of 'I didn't see that coming' yet I was glad when the hour had elapsed...

Brazen Hussy 

After last week's opening three episode volley of Furious, this week's solitary episode was one full of possible leads and unusual situations. The three main female leads in this - the serial killer, the junior FBI agent and her cynical and acerbic boss are all fucking bonkers in one way or another, but I'm beginning to think that the serial killer - Lola Petticrew - is the least insane one. She at least is pursuing a course of action and has a brazen but well executed modus operandi; Alice Black - Emmy Rossum - is deeply disturbed and seems to love the thrill of abusive relationships, while her boss, Nora Washington - Quincy Tyler Bernstein - is both a high functioning alcoholic and trying desperately to cover up something she was ordered to do 14 years earlier. There's far more to this than it first appeared and after the unexpected ending, one wonders where one of the lead women is going to go come the next episode...

Simulants Need Stimulants

It might be nearly ten years since its release and about eight years since I last saw it, but Bladerunner 2049 is still a glacially dull movie with a simple storyline drawn out to well over 150 minutes. The problem I have is I thought the original Bladerunner was a load of arty farty nonsense and I never understood the adoration it got from people, so the sequel was always going to be hard work for me and even on second watch I was stifling yawns and hoping that something was going to happen to lift me out of my torpor. Ryan Gosling is the latest version of simulant tasked with offing an escaped earlier version, farming grubs in rural dystopian California, when he stumbles upon a much deeper story that involves an earlier version simulant having given birth to a synthetic baby in an act that would change everything. What follows is just a load of pfaffing about that seemed to go on for ever. Harrison Ford reprised his role as Rick Deckard and seemed crossed between bored and bewildered and it has that wanker Jared Leto in it. 5/10

Spider-Something

Spider-Man: Brand New Day took almost $1billion in its opening weekend and is on course to be one of the best financial returns in cinematic history. This, of course, has superhero movie buffs claiming that superhero films are coming back into fashion and with Avengers Doomsday heading towards us at Christmas, a new Batman film being made and another Superman movie due in 2027, this could be the renaissance superhero cinema needs... except, it probably isn't. It's very easy to say when an iconic movie franchise such as Spider-Man scores big at the box office, but it's the lesser known comicbook characters who really show us the situation. Take Supergirl as an example; it bombed big time at the box office and while people can point fingers and blame this person or that demographic, Supergirl isn't Superman and basically people don't know the brand - it's vanilla flavoured Coca-Cola, not the Real Thing...

The thing is, even poor Spider-Man films do well at the cinema. Andrew Garfield's two movies weren't very good and the second one is the smallest grossing of all the Spidey films, but it was still higher than lots of recent high profile features. The most recent Fantastic Four movie did okay in its opening week or so, but was lucky to recoup costs and didn't make as much money as Disney would have liked. Thunderbolts* was critically liked and financially poleaxed. Deadpool might be phenomenal success for a late 20th century creation, but your average Joe likes the concept and despite 2024's team up with Wolverine being a huge financial success, it was also a heap of shit in terms of story - a kind of superhero version of Scary Movie and another example of the law of diminishing returns. 

The question that's going to be asked at Christmas is: Will Avengers Doomsday be a success because it's a) an Avengers film, b) has Steve Rogers in it, or c) because it is a big event film with lots of mainly meh characters? What will be the feelings if Avengers Doomsday isn't as successful as Disney hoped? Will it simply be a parade of the same old same old, without anyone really caring what happens to long extinct franchise characters and B list Marvel heroes? Endgame has been done, surely this is just a reprise?

Spider-Something 2002

This is how my Wednesday night panned out. I'd been reluctant about watching a film called The Sheep Detectives but relented because of the good rating on IMDB. The movie was on for 72 seconds before I turned it off. We then decided to watch the Tim Burton remake of Dumbo because it had always intrigued me. We lasted four minutes and 12 seconds before I turned it off. Two of the few films left on the FDoD - aka Mystery Stick - banished to the never to be seen pile of movies. There are now fewer than 20 films left on that flash drive and another dozen on the set top box. There's a crisis looming...

So, we decided to watch Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man from 2002 again and I have to say that while it was relatively as close to the original comics origin of the Webslinger as you could wish for, it is a wildly uneven feature, ranging from quite brilliant at times to laughably silly in others and I'm here to pin point the ups and downs of this 24 year old first Spidey film... Tobey Maguire - if ever there was an actor who struggled with the concept of acting it's this guy. For much of Spider-Man he's about as dopey as a pothead and as slow as a sloth; he makes a good Peter Parker visually, but his range is almost non-existent. Kirsten Dunst - doesn't suit being a redhead; looks as though she has gum disease and her Mary Jane, it seems, has had more pricks in her than a second hand dart board. James Franco as Harry Osborn is as thick as mince and not at all like Harry in the comics, whereas Willem Dafoe, as his father Norman, is to the Green Goblin what the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers were to serious drama; over the top, overblown and overwrought.

Elisabeth Harris as Aunt May was about as authentic as you could possibly imagine and she was a high point in the movie, while JK Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson was so perfect you can see why they brought him back in recent Spidey films. These two bits of casting and some of the Spider-Man special effects were excellent, but in general, the movie was just a melodramatic soap opera of bad scripting, poor plotting and laughable set pieces. It was all over the place almost all the time; it lurched from excellent moments to ridiculous ones without missing a beat and I'm not surprised that Tobey Maguire has done little of note since these films. 5/10

Oh Dear...

The thing that made Ted Lasso a good show wasn't really anything but the football, which was out of fantasyland and was written and conceived like the person writing it had been vaguely explained what football was and then asked to write a thesis on it. However, for three seasons, it was fun and it put a smile on peoples faces and when it finished it should have stayed finished. However, someone managed to persuade the band to get back together and the opening episode of season four was like having dog shit rubbed into your face. It was fucking awful and it didn't matter where you put your face it still stunk to high heaven. Ted is now the assistant manager of a supermarket - like that would ever happen, even in the States. He's still the same homespun, semi-hick, cod-philosopher he's always been and in the opening episode he's joined in Missouri by Hannah Waddington, Jeremy Swift and Juno Temple, as they've come halfway round the world to tempt Ted back into football management as the head coach of the new AFC Richmond women's team. It was 41 minutes of dreadful television and bad jokes with some sermonising thrown in for good measure, but at the very least, Juno Temple managed to get through it without showing her tits.

Spidey & the Four Evil Emus

This week never intended to be a Spider-Man week. In fact, when I originally wrote the piece about the latest Spider-Man film's success at the box office, it wasn't even a standalone piece, but part of my opening What's Been Up. Then we watched the first of Sam Raimi's films and we followed it up with the second, to finish off this shorter week's viewing. The first thing you notice about Spider-Man 2 is that it's a slightly better movie than the previous one. Yes, there's still more holes in the plot than there ends up being in Spidey's costume by the end of the film and the script is as inconsistent as an inconsistent thing, but it looks better, the special effects have improved and apart from the utterly pointless stuff that doesn't appear to add anything but extra time to the feature, it's arguably more entertaining and less Mighty Morphin Power Rangers - even if the corruption of Harry Osborn is the most contrived thing ever to feature in a superhero movie. This film also has the greatest single line ever uttered in a Spider-Man movie; it just happens to be the last line of the thing, but it still sends shivers up my spine whenever the woefully poor Kirsten Dunst utters it (oh, and she was shagging yet another person who isn't Peter in this one as well, if you're keeping score). It's marginally better than the first, so it's a 6/10.

What's Up Next?

Next time will be the season finale of Sugar, as I miss it this week because of a quiz. It will also be the finale of the Dragon show, which I don't think we'll bother watching again. Furious will be in full swing and hopefully Ted Lasso will focus on what it used to be good at rather than the dog shit the first episode was.

The third and final Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie will be watched; you know the one that everyone hated that has a version of Venom in it and other stuff. With fewer than 18 films on the FDoD - which I'm renaming the Mystery Stick because it's more accurate - and none of them leaping out at us, we might have to watch some old TV or figure out if there are any films of the last 10 years that we wouldn't mind watching again. I am currently reading my sixth book of the summer, so I am having other cultural highlights rather than moving picture ones. That said, we have The Last House to watch, which might be our Saturday night entertainment... But might not given the woeful IMDB score it currently has (5.7).

I might fill the following space with a 'review' of my second solo quiz night or I might just write 'whatever' and finish on a low point...

Actually, my second quiz at The Merse - our local Wigtown venue for anything you fancy - was another huge success and it makes me so happy to see loads of people turning up for my quiz, despite it no longer being in a pub. Everybody seems to have a great time, there's lots of laughter and every time I do one I get massive anxiety, but I don't really know why. The wife helps me even though she'd love to be doing the quiz herself and I feel as though I'm giving something back to the community - a community that has welcomed us totally over the last 9 years. I do a lot of work to ensure that my quizzes are as much fun as possible (all based on the work of the maestro called Phil Hollis) and I regard everyone who turns up as good friends. 

Whatever.