Warriors, come out to play-ee-ay
So, Paramount will be remaking (that’s industry code for "not spending any time coming up with new ideas when old ones are ripe for butchering") 1979 classic – despite what my girlfriend says – The Warriors. Dear God, Please smite Hollywood, Sincerely, Mark. Here’s an article about it and here’s a quote from the article with some of my own emphasis: [The new and ruined] version will follow the outline of the first film — in which a gang leader is assassinated during a truce, and The Warriors, wrongly accused of the assassination, must make their way home through hostile gang territories — while updating the heightend (sic) reality of the original film for contemporary audiences Cold shivers should be on their way to you now. Let me know if you don’t receive yours. How can you make a film about gangs in any way contemporary when gangs aren’t a problem in modern life? Possible suggestions include: the Warriors, a "gang" of scouts selling cookies are wrongly accused of not helping an old lady across the road and must make it back to wherever the hell scouts go at the end of the day avoiding girl guides and busloads of foreign exchange students, the Warriors, a "gang" of stockbrokers are wrongly accused of insider-trading and must make it out of their skyscraper avoiding accountants, angry shareholders, evil corporations intent on takeovers, and cleaning women, the Warriors, a "gang" of peewee ice hockey players are wrongly accused of being rubbish and must make it through to the playoffs avoiding being beaten and any accusations that the film is The Mighty Ducks. We can’t know for sure until the "new" script is written (believed to be starting over the weekend, scheduled to finish on Monday) but some pre-production shots have been leaked already that might give some clues as to what a contemporary remolestation of the film might look like: Original – Cyrus addresses the gangs Remake – Barney addresses the gangs Original – the mysterious DJ keeping everyone up-to-date with current gang news and traffic reports on the hour. Remake – lolz txt...
Albums a-go-go!
People frequently stop me on the street and say "Mark, you’re so hip, you’re so now, you’re the man I wish I had been, you’re no longer under investigation for running a white slavery ring, you’re practically poured into those jeans, you’re in the way, you’re gonna die in the flames of hell for all eternity for what you did to my alsatian" and then follow it up with "but what is the real you really like?" and I laugh in their faces because it’s all true but I have no desire to let anyone into knowing the real me and having that desire triggers off my giggle gland. But people – in addition to the all-pervasive odour – are inquisitive and persistant and I have grown tired of the involuntary chortling. So, by way of a compromise and with a quick check around for non sequiturs – we appear to be clear – I’ve had a hunt through my record collection and pulled out albums that I think will help explain my inner workings without me actually having to do much myself. Observe the scans, read the reviews, and conclude what you will. Kros Kris – Trapped In Moscow Zoo This was the Russian duo’s follow-up album to the hugely successful (in Kazakhstan) debut Deffer Than Gorky which you may remember as it featured the dance anthem Jump, Or Be Shot As A Spy. Their second album dropped most of the hip-hop beats and Americanisms that had gained them a cult following among young soviet boys and embraced the concept of the concept album using orchestral arrangements, choral backing, and samples of wild animals to appeal to a wider and hopefully more-evenly-spaced-among-the-sexes audience. It bombed. Kros Kris consisted of Alexei "Mack Tolstoy" Finlandia and Viktor "Tolstoy Mack" Stolichnaya. Their record company dropped them after disappointing sales of Trapped In Moscow Zoo and both boys returned to their pre-music-career jobs as cinema ushers. I bought this album in 1997 as the concept behind it appealed to me. At the time I had been planning a daring heist on Marwell Zoo which involved releasing the caged beasts as a distraction. After listening to Tolstoy Mack’s quivering, childlike voice on "Please Don’t Let The Penguins In The Storeroom" my conscience refused to let me go ahead with my plan and I started a timeshare business instead. Various Artists – Stars Of Lithuania NME said: "K-Tel have done it again and produced the definitive album of up-and-coming and well-established and disappeared-suddenly music stars of Lithuania. From the erotic ballad ‘Plastik 69’ by pop duo Sisters Volvo through to the hard-rocking, upbeat, angry...
Cooking with Mark
I’m a kept man and I like it. I don’t mean that I never want for money thanks to an elderly spinster with cataracts, bagfuls of money, and only an occasional need for lubrication "down below" in her waning years. Serious offers will be considered. I am a kept man in the kitchen. And by this I mean that my other half does the cooking. Our arrangement is that she cooks and I wash up. Slightly more accurately: she cooks every day and I wash up when the leftover food on the tower of dirty plates starts to show rudimentary signs of sentience. It’s a solution that works for us. Still, at the back of my mind every now and then I do wonder what would happen if, for instance, my better half took an extended vacation from me on work-related business, because there are only so many takeaways in the area and etiquette demands you leave longer than four days before ordering the same thing from the same place. Could I survive if – God forbid! – I had to cook? Well, I’m not a complete stranger to the ways of the food preparation and food heating and food consumption (especially the food consumption) but I think it’s fair to say that we are but nodding acquaintances unaware of each other’s first names. Time for me to remind myself of just what I think I know. Beans On Toast What You’ll Need Bread – preferably Hovis thick-sliced because the thick-sliced bread is medium-sliced which is what we want while the medium-sliced bread is very thin and the thin-sliced bread breaks through the boundaries of space-time into the realm of negatively-sized dimensions and most toasters can’t cope with this. Beans – Heinz beans. There is no substitute for this. Any other beans are mere bean-shadows compared to Heinz beans, not fit to lick the boots of Heinz beans not that Heinz beans would ever wear boots inside the tin and spoil their lovely flavour. A toaster – you might think you can grill the toast instead but that is only for women who can multitask. Men are not capable of grilling and keeping an eye on the beans as well and at some point the smoke detectors will sound and send you into a panic. Wooden spoon – not metal. Metal spoons have a few properties that make them undesirable in the preparation of ‘Beans On Toast:’ they conduct heat causing surprisingly painful burning sensations in the fingers and lead to spoon-droppery and they occasionally squeak against the bottom of the saucepan sending jolts of terror through your spine...
Your First Camel
A Message From The Department Of Homeland Camels Like it, love it, or loathe it but sooner or later there will be no more oil. Oily people are here to stay but no more oil. If we could refine the oil from oily people that would be something but we can’t. Bottom line: the oil’s running out and there’s nothing we can do about it. You could stick your head in the sand like the cunning yet proverbial and quite often peck-happy ostrich and hope that such an oil disaster doesn’t happen in your time. Or you could look to the future, become known as an entrepreneur, wallow in adoration from nubile wenches, and be the first person on the block to own … a camel! A camel? But aren’t there better, more futuristic alternative transportation methods? Oh sure. Hovercars perhaps? Personal jetpacks? Segway trains? Molecular de- and re-materialisation tubes? If there’s one thing that scientific programmes from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have taught us then it’s that every futuristic future fuel of the future has singularly and spectacularly failed to appear. We had the car back then and we’ve got the car back now. Looking to the future simply doesn’t cut it but we can always look to the past, learn, and modify it. What are the benefits of the camel solution? Camels occur naturally in nature just like oil but, unlike oil, camels are renewable. This should be good enough but there are plenty of other renewable animals out there too: greenfly for instance, harnessed in herds of several thousand, could easily pull a small child on a skateboard and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of their potential. However, were we to suddenly ditch oil in favour of the aphid we’d find ourselves at the wrong end of the Stick Of Wrath wielded by the Saudi royal family. It’s a big stick with a long reach and it’s got sharp bits at the tip. The mighty camel is the answer to all our problems. You’ve sold me. I want a camel. What should I know about them? I’m glad you asked. The History Of The Camel Remains of an ancestor of the modern camel have been found in caves in France dating back to the late Jurassic period. As with all creatures of the time the camel was far larger back then measuring over five metres in height and with a wingspan of twice that. Palaeontologists still debate to this day whether the carnivorous Humpadactyl could actually fly. What is known for certain from experiments undertaken in 1975 out of the back of a...
I am not Jimmy Osmond
Anni wanted to see pictures of me. Anni is a deranged a dangerous person. I wouldn’t normally give such a request more than a passing thought before shooting it down in flames with a sharp and witty retort but … I have seen pictures of her and, well, I haven’t been updating as much recently and, well, hell, why not? The only problem is that there aren’t many photos of me and I’m terribly shy. We’ll have to do with some old pictures and a bit of artistic licence mixed with photoshoppery goodness if that’s okay. Here goes: I’ve had to watermark these images. I’d hate for them to get out and be mistaken for other people. Aged somewhere between 1 and 4 (I can’t tell how old kids are even when I’m the kid in question) and the only person in my household with a clean driving licence. Still got it. This early introduction to cars and jumpers with skiing patterns on them helped see me safely through the transitional period of puberty later in life and helps to explain why I couldn’t care less about cars (I own a Punto for Christ’s sake!) and why skiing holds no appeal at all. That picture above really was me. The picture below really – I swear – is me too. I wouldn’t make this up. Nobody would make this up. It’s hard to believe that I’m a fashion guru now, setting trends all over the place, advising Derek Zoolander on new looks, and helping Jean Paul Gaultier out when he’s stuck for wacky ideas when this was the start in life my parents gave me. Tartan from the MacShitstain clan in a delightful juxtaposition with horizontal stripes of red and blue: why, it’s a bloody miracle that nobody has tried to copy this look since the seventies! It’s possible that having the picture taken above is one of the reasons that from this point on there aren’t any of me without two fingers raised or my hand conveniently in front of my face. Or my life is a lie and I’m a robot with a badly-constructed past. Or it could be a coincidence. In any event you’ll just have to take my word for it that I simply grew to resemble Little Jimmy Osmond from this point onwards. For many years I looked just like the photo below: I refused to appear in colour. Extrapolating from this point we can see that I must still clearly bear some form of resemblance to the smallest of the Osmonds in big form. So you’ll have to use you imagination and picture...
Haircut! Haircut!
I had my hair cut just t’other day (as we Southerners like to say when we’re impersonating Northerners in the typing medium.) It’s always a good sign when you walk into the barbers or hairdressers, they look up to smile or nod, and you can see the fear in their eyes as they spot the bird’s nest on your head. It says: here is a person who is not blind and merely responding automatically to changes in air density through the doorway. Always a good sign. Always. I have very fast-growing hair. Both the hair on my cranium and my facial growth are record-breakers or would be if Norris McWhirter was still alive. Guinness just don’t want to know now though. Apparently I’m not "commercial enough" and my "face will scare away potential customers" and "we will call the police if you phone again." My hair-sprouting rapidity means I should probably go to the barbers every, ooh, let’s say … week. I tend to be "busy" or "lazy," though, so two months is more reasonable. It means I get my money’s worth and keep the barbershop staff’s skills honed to perfection. There’s another benefit too: if I’m ever captured and held hostage without access to scissors and a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo I can simply hold out for a few days and wait for Han Solo to rescue his wookiee pal. It was damn hot at the barbers. My usual Hair Manipulation Technician wasn’t there. Instead, there was: Woman Hairdresser #1 : dark-skinned, skinny, usually sporting thick glasses which were disturbingly noticeable by their absence – can you get inch-thick contact lenses? -, and enough bangles, chains, and rings to make me wonder whether Mr T was going to burst through the back of the shop any second pitying the foo’ who’d half-inched all his jewellery, Man Hairdresser #1 : wouldn’t look out of place in a stereotypical film about football hooliganism and held the electric razor much like you imagine a broken beer bottle would be grasped. I got the feeling that he mostly told his customers they would be getting all their hair shaved off just like his and they were glad to sit still and obey, Woman Hairdresser #2 : if you remember Chumbawamba then picture an amalgam of all the women. Actually, you can throw in a few of the men too. We’re talking … disturbing. I didn’t want her. I hadn’t seen her before. I got her. I cursed God’s name. I then retracted the curse and asked that He please not remove any haircutting power she may have until about half an hour...
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