Monday 24 October 2011

Planet Dinosaur: The past was Wilde.

George Baxter lithograph, Crystal Palace dinosaurs (Iguanodon and Hylacosaurus/Hylaeosaurus) as restored by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in line with ideas derived from Richard Owen. Public Domain
Like a lot of people with too much time on their hands, I've been watching the BBC TV show Planet Dinosaur, and never cease to marvel at scientists' ability to keep making up new dinosaurs - even if the ones in the show seem overly-lively in their movements, to me.

However, one thing that does bother me is it's all very well going on about what they ate, how they bonked or how they ran but, let's face it, the only thing that really matters with dinosaurs is how big they were.

This is the one thing we get no real sense of from the show. Frankly those things could be the size of mountains or they could be the size of chickens. Therefore I demand that in future when anyone makes a TV show about dinosaurs, they always show every dinosaur with a human being (possibly 1980s popster Kim Wilde) riding around on it. Granted it might not be historically accurate but we would at least get a good idea of what size they were.

Sunday 10 October 2010

Of purple potatoes and misshapen eggs


Seeing the recent news reports about the nightmarish invention that is the purple potato did get me wondering about something else.

Whatever happened to square eggs?

I have distinct memories of once seeing an item on Tomorrow's World about a fantastic new technology that could produce such a thing. Thankfully, they made them square after they left the chicken, and not before.

But supposedly this was going to revolutionise our egg-buying habits, as square eggs could be packed into cartons more closely than oval eggs and weren't in the habit of rolling over and falling off things to their doom.

And yet, despite the obvious advantages of such a thing, all these years later not one of my local supermarkets stocks anything that even resembles a square egg.

For that matter, they don't stock the square tomatoes Tomorrow's World promised me either, nor the soya bean steak that's indistinguishable from the real thing. It seems that, however trustworthy Raymond Baxter and his friends may have seemed, for all those years, they were just stringing us along.

And as for their claims that one day every house would own a videotape recorder, well, here we are in the 21st Century and I don't know anyone who owns one. Will these things never become a part of our everyday reality?

Thursday 9 September 2010

Lady Gaga's raw meat bikini

I'd just like to congratulate lady Gaga on her raw meat bikini - she's somehow managed to put me off both women and food simultaneously. All she has to do now is put me off life itself and she's done the impossible hat-trick.

Wednesday 1 September 2010

If I were two-faced, I wouldn't be wearing this one

In order to get myself a better reputation in this town, I've decided to tear my face off and replace it with two metal masks I've made. One of which is in the image of Cary Grant and the other of Audrey Hepburn.

Here's me with my Cary Grant mask on; "My dear girl, I've just been strafed by a bi-plane."

Here's me with my Audrey Hepburn mask on; "Oh, Mr Grant, what a great big silly poo-poo draws you are."

Actually, I'm starting to regret having torn my face off now.

Monday 30 August 2010

Beyond our Ken. Karen Black and the Trilogy of Terror

Ken and Barbie. Which of us hasn't at some point considered sticking them in the microwave and seeing if they end up looking like the mutants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes?

I haven't. I'm too busy giving them genitals. But, if I wasn't, the microwave would indeed be their first port of call, thanks to me having always viewed dolls as things of purest evil.

I wasn't exactly dissuaded from this notion by the 1970s' made-for-TV flick Trilogy of Terror in which Karen Black's chased around her flat by an African Zuni fetish doll.

Now, I have to admit I don't have a clue what this blog's about or even what kind of purpose it's meant to serve but at least it means I can talk about what I want to when I want to. The other thing I value about it is that is that, unlike my other blog, the mighty Steve Does Comics, I don't feel any need to have the slightest clue what I'm on about. Thus I feel free to declare that, even though I haven't seen it for twenty eight years, and can remember almost nothing about it, Trilogy of Terror is the scariest horror movie ever made.

Granted, if I actually saw the thing again as a grown-up, that opinion might change.

And that's why I won't be making any effort to see it again. Better to hold onto my youthful fancies than to blow them away, like cobwebs, with the icy wind of reality.

Saturday 28 August 2010

Cats in bins. The answer

Even though people often accuse me of being out of touch with reality, like everyone else I've been horrified by the story of Mary Bale putting the dinky little kitten in the wheelie bin. "How can we guarantee this won't happen to our own dear cats?" I hear a nation cry.

And so, I've come up with this, the perfect solution. Simply by placing a cannon ball in your cat's mouth, a stick of dynamite in its lower intestines, and a wire fuse protruding from its rear quarters, you create the catzooka.

Now, whenever your cat's menaced by middle-aged women, all it needs do is set fire to its own backside, and the unbearable forces therein created by the exploding dynamite will launch the cannonball straight at her. Cue one happy cat and one less threat to kitten kind.
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