No words

No jokes about the Emirates, please . . .

Fucking hell, they're using actual living kids as goalposts. The luxury. Posh bastards.

All I want for Christmas . . .

. . . is number 17.  

Thank You, Santa.

The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance by Stuart M. Kaminsky (1986)

When I opened my eyes, I saw John Wayne pointing a .38 at my chest. It was my .38. I closed my eyes.

The inside of my head seemed to be filled with strawberry cotton candy with little unnamed things crawling through its sickly melting strands. Nausea forced my eyes open again. John Wayne was still there. He was wearing trousers, a white shirt, and a lightweight tan windbreaker. He was lean, dark, and puzzled.

“Don’t close your eyes again, Pilgrim,” he said.

I didn’t close them. He was standing over me and I was slumped in a badly sprung, cheap, understuffed hotel chair. I tried to sit up and speak but my tongue was an inflated, dry pebbly football.

Animal Farm 2.0

"This time we're not going to fuck it up  . . ."

Road to Christmastide

I'll be watching old Bob Hope movies this Christmas, but for those of you with a more religious frame of mind . . .

Porridge (1979)

Last One In?

Could this be my last 180 of 2019?

Quite possibly but 16 180s for the year is not too shabby in the overall scheme of things. Maybe I will actually hit a double in 2020.

The Thing (1982)

Under Fire (1983)

Gauntlet thrown down . . .

and challenge accepted.

Cheeky bugger. I've been spewing out the occasional shite meme for ages now. I'm not some Johnny Come Lately when it comes to hackneyed political in-jokes. Here's one I did eons ago, and it was only 14 months after everyone else had stopped using and abusing that meme. 14 months, people, 14 months . . .  that's on the ball politicking for the SPGB.

Posted from said armchair . . .

Just doing some desktop clearing up before the end of the year. Found this floating around and, as I feel the need to explain my jokes most of the time, I thought I'd whack it on the blog.

I bet it'd been killing you all this time about what the blog header was actually referring to. I'm here to serve:

Marxist-Wertherism

Don't mind me. Just need to put this somewhere, and this is as good a place as any. 

I'm still on my one man mission to popularize the SPGB-Werther's Originals joke meme. I'm trying  . . .  very trying.

Economic Conscription

Stop the world I want to get off . . .

The Fala Factor by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1984)

The little black dog on my desk wanted to play, but with a corpse sitting in the corner and a murderer on the way up to my office on the elevator I just wasn’t in the mood. I patted his head, tried not to smell his breath, and said, “Maybe later.”

This didn’t please him. The Scottie lay down, covering the letter telling me where I was to pick up my sugar ration stamp book, put his head on his front paws, and looked up at me sadly. I checked my .38 automatic to be sure it was loaded, aimed it tentatively at the door to my office and hoped that I wouldn’t have to use it,  and, if I did, that it would work. It had never proved particularly reliable in the past.

Down for the Count by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1985)

I tried to ignore the shadow over me, but you can’t do that when it belongs to the heavyweight champion of the world.

“He dead?” Joe Louis said, breathing heavily. Louis was wearing blue shorts and an extra-extra large white T-shirt stained with sweat. His feet were bare.

“Down for the count,” I said.

About a quarter-mile down the shore some girls were giggling in the surf, the late sun hitting their tanned bodies, their voices bubbling through the white waves hitting the beach and the corpse I was kneeling next to. I looked away from the girls and out over the ocean at the sun heading for Japan. I wondered how I was going to tell Anne about the massive brown figure in the wet sand casting his shadow over me and the badly beaten body. There wasn’t much face left on the body, but there wasn’t any doubt about who it was.

Ralph Howard had always dressed tastefully, conservatively. Even now with sand, salt water, and pinkish blood staining the tan panama suit, the corpse had Ralph’s touch.

On this day in 1980 . . .

. . . saw the release of Sound Affects:

Maybe next year, I'll actually write a post about it.

Thanks to The Goldbergs

"I'm too old for tucks."

The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta (Harper Perennial 1997)

“This must be a tough time for you,” Stan observed.

“How so?”

“You know.” He pulled the cummerbund out from under his jacket and laid it on the steps. “This thing with Phil. It must have been awful for you.”

Walter worked his cigarette like a baby sucking a bottle. “Phil was an old man. Everybody's got to go sometime.”

“Still, watching a friend die in front of you like that …”

“We had our differences,” Walter said curtly.

“What kind of differences?”

“Creative.” Walter ejected the cigarette from between his lips. It landed on the sidewalk in a small shower of sparks. “I thought the band was starting to get a little stale.”

“How long were you together?”

“Too fucking long. Thirty-three years I took orders from that sonofabitch. I finally feel like I can breathe again.”

Stan didn't bother to pretend he was shocked. He'd been a musician long enough to know how it could come to this. There “were nights when he'd lain awake writing Artie's obituary in loving detail, nights when he'd imagined committing murder.

Tony Horsfall's Black and White Army . . .

Not a screen grab I ever expected to make . . .

A Crafty Cigarette – Tales of a Teenage Mod by Matteo Sedazzari (Zani Media 2015)

Luckily for my father Theo did not press charges for criminal damage. Later my mother explained to him about my father’s problem with Charlie Cairoli. Theo, being the wise man that he is, totally understood and told my mother that he was once in The Kinks for a brief time, as 2nd guitar and backing vocals. They did a gig in Acton, this was before they made it big, by the way. Theo broke his strings during a song and Ray Davies never called him again, or so he told my mother. Now Theo can’t listen to any records by The Kinks and has to leave the room the moment their music comes on. 

Shit, both Vinnie’s father and my father could have been huge stars, that’s quite depressing.

Tootsie (1982)

He Done Her Wrong by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1983)

“A few members of the staff now believe that the constant reign of terror to your anatomy is causing a building up of resistance by your body. Not that you are immune to damage but that your body has somehow said, ‘What the hell, I can take anything.’ Your skull no longer deserves the anatomical right to be referred to as a skull. We are not quite sure what to call it.”

I tried to sit up and made it to one elbow. I was in a hospital gown.

“The closest thing I have seen to what we are laughingly calling your cranium belonged to a punch-drunk fighter named Ramirez who, when his career was finished, made an occasional fifty cents by battering down doors with his head. Mr. Ramirez was incapable of coherent speech by that time and seemed to think he was a robot. Are you following the allegorical level of my tale, Mr. Peters?”

“If I continue to get hit in the head, my brain will turn to Junket pudding,” I said.

“Your brain is almost certainly pudding by now,” said Dr. Melanks. “I simply want you to sign it over to me on your death. I am sixty-seven and suffering from arthritis, a weak heart, mild sclerosis, and a very poor hereditary profile, but I should outlive you by a comfortable margin.”

The Opposite of Shit, Bugger, Fuck

My third 180 in three days. My ego is currently floating down 7th Avenue.

A slave to the waves.

New flights  . . . new 180 . . . old story of scoring 11 with my next 3 darts.

The Winmaus of Your Mind

New dart board . . . newish city . . . new 180.

Fever Pitch (2005)

Defence of the Realm (1986)

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books 2019)

FRIDAY, 6 MARCH

Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2

Nicky in. She has hijacked the shop’s Facebook page again and left this typically bewildering post:

Good morning everyone!
With a song in my heart, I skip in to work only to be berated for buying books off a customer for £45, whereas the BGC would have paid £175. Happy customer, happy me, disgruntled tube, sorry, I meant to say ‘boss’.

BGC is Nicky’s current nickname for me, and stands for Big Ginger Conundrum. ‘Tube’, for the uninitiated, is a Scottish insult, the politest interpretation of it being ‘idiot’.”

Ghost World (2001)

Loose Connections by Maggie Brooks (Abacus 1984)

Harry was twenty minutes early. He located the ICA in an unlikely spot amongst some blind government buildings in the Mall. It was a white, low-lying block, like a slab of impenetrable wedding cake. He walked up and down in front of it a few times, uneasy and uncomfortable in the borrowed suit. The shadows were black and geometric in the overhead sun. He fancied the building had an Egyptian flavour to it. A parched palm tree would have looked at home.

His spirits soared momentarily. Perhaps next week he’d be in a foreign country under a foreign sun. The suit was lightweight seersucker, white with blue stripes. This morning it had seemed just the thing - rather casual and devil-may-care, a suit for someone used to travelling, crisp and cool and effortlessly elegant. Now he was not so sure. The sweat was trickling down his back and running a stream into the bunched fabric of the outsize waistband and he was increasingly aware of the way the trousers ballooned out at the knees and ended up lapping unwanted over his glistening brogues. An image of Andy Pandy in a white and blue one-piece kept humping into his mind unasked and he scowled as he felt his confidence ebbing. He swerved into the doorway before he could think better of it and lurched into the bookshop with a purposeful air. The assistants had the air of people who’d agreed to lower themselves to the task as a short-term favour and who found each contact with a customer unspeakably droll. They sparred roguishly with one another, letting out occasional hoots whilst keeping a weather eye on Harry’s spade fingers as he leafed through creamy pages of text looking for pictures. Harry turned on his heels and made for the gents, his confidence ebbing to rock bottom.

George Orwell was right, he told himself bitterly as he quarrelled with the towel roller, it’s something you give off in your pores and people have an infallible nose for it. He jutted his jaw at himself in the mirror. I may not have class, he told himself defiantly, but what I do have is boyish charm. At thirty-three this was a rare and useful tool to have in the kit. It had always served him well before and in this instance it was his only card. He had never been so determined about anything. He was going to Munich.

The Day Shall Come (2019)

Upstairs Planet: Cleaners From Venus & The Universe Of Martin Newell (2019)

Unbelievable (2019)

Love Me Do!: "Beatles" Progress by Michael Braun (Graymalkin Media 1964)

The New Statesman printed an article by Paul Johnson called ‘The Menace of Beatlism’. He wrote that: ‘Bewildered by a rapidly changing society, excessively fearful of becoming out of date, our leaders are increasingly turning to young people as guides and mentors – or, to vary the metaphor, as geiger-counters to guide them against the perils of mental obsolescence.’ During the following week the paper received nearly 250 letters about the article. The correspondents were three to one against Mr Johnson, and one reader suggested he try monkey glands.

Rushmore (1998)

The Paper (1994)

Late Night (2019)

Beetlejuice (1988)

Go (1999)

Gone Baby Gone (2007)

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Juliet, Naked (2018)

'71 (2014)