Tuesday, October 20, 2020

shite entertainment

Generally I like the Headline Of The Day candidates to be freshly-minted and just plucked at the moment of perfect ripeness from whichever website has bunged them up without proof-reading them properly first. This one is a little different as it's from around eighteen months ago, but has some present-day resonance for me in ways which I'll explain shortly. Here it is:


There's quite a bit to unpack here, so let's start with the simple stuff: Blippi is a supremely irritating American children's TV creation who has become a gazillionaire by the seemingly simple method of bouncing around seemingly abandoned trampoline parks, softplay centres, playgrounds and skateboard parks making lots of high-pitched squeaking noises and gurning at the camera in a way that young children (my 3-year-old son among them) find as irresistible as some people find injecting heroin into their own eyeballs on a skanky old mattress under a highway overpass. 

When I first encountered Blippi back in the early days of the coronavirus lockdown (I think it was Alys who happened across him first) I jokingly tweeted that he was a bit like Pee-wee Herman (true) but at least he wasn't a sex criminal (also true, but, well, wait and see). 
Blippi does, it turns out, have some back-story of his own, though - in his case (in contrast to Pee-wee Herman) from before his kiddy-centric fame happened rather than after. He is the creation of someone who these days goes by the real-life name of Stevin John, but seems to have been originally called Steven Grossman. The reason for the name change seems to have been his real name's uncomfortably close proximity to Steezy Grossman, the name of his youthful comedy alter ego as whom he made several videos whose content is definitely not for kids, including one notorious one where he takes a gargantuan splattery (and, as far as I can gather, real) shit over a friend in a toilet cubicle. 

Needless to say now that he's a MASSIVE HIT with the under-fives he's not very keen for his MASSIVE SHIT with the number twos to keep popping up in internet searches, so there has been a fair bit of legal effort expended on suppressing the video wherever it pops up. Just to be clear, I haven't seen it, nor am I especially keen on seeking it out, but I expect you could if you really wanted to. I'm not judging you, any more than I'm judging Blippi or suggesting that he is not a fit and proper person to be entertaining small children, as long has he keeps his anus out of it. I think this is a not unreasonable expectation of any children's entertainer, to be honest.

Monday, October 12, 2020

follow the gourd

One of the things that's kept me at a reasonable level of fitness during lockdown is Nia's love for running, which has acted as an incentive for me to get out and get some exercise periodically. I mean, I do have indoor options which I make use of as well, but it's nice to get out and get some fresh air while pounding the streets occasionally. Ordinarily we'd have the weekly parkrun (of which we have a choice of two in Newport) to go to, Nia having graduated around the start of 2020 from the leisurely kiddy-friendly junior one (2 kilometres) to the proper adult one (5 kilometres), but of course that's all been shelved during the pandemic as, even outdoors, lots of sweaty people in close proximity breathing heavily and coughing all over each other isn't a good thing.

This is a pity, as Nia clearly has a genuine aptitude for this stuff, and as the lean willowy type is perfectly built for endurance running (and indeed endurance activities in general). But we've made the best of it by finding some routes we can do from the house, including the nearly-parkrun-distance one we did at the weekend.

The second tweet here is actually what this blog post was meant to be about, though I seem to have digressed onto the running topic more than I intended to. No matter. The watermelon conversation started when we ran past a piece of squashed discarded watermelon on the pavement and I humorously speculated that it must have fallen off a watermelon tree, only to be scoffingly informed that watermelons weren't native to the UK, and was there actually such a thing as a watermelon tree? At which point I had to confess that I'd no idea what sort of plant a watermelon grew on. The Twitter thread went on to list some other fruity items whose parent plant and general appearance in their natural milieu aren't quite what you (or in any case I) might expect. 

Anyway, it turns out there is no such thing as a watermelon tree, and indeed a moment's consideration of the size and weight of a fully-grown watermelon will tell you that they must grow in contact with the ground in the style of, say, pumpkins - indeed it turns out that they belong to the same family of gourd-like plants, the Cucurbitaceae. As it happens we have a member of that family taking over a significant portion of our herb and vegetable patch at the moment; it's a pumpkin plant which we bought as a bit of a joke in the spring but seems to have thrived, and in the process spread itself out laterally, as these things do, right across the front of the vegetable patch, through the herb patch, through the decking railings and onto the decking. I'm going to need to be scrupulously careful about keeping the shed door locked or it'll be in there too. 

Obviously, it now being mid-October, what would be ideal, and give some purpose to the whole plant-growing exercise, would be for the plant to now burst gloriously forth with a select but shapely crop of pumpkins which we could use for Hallowe'en entertainment purposes (and, if supplies permit, perhaps some hearty soup afterwards). It is only in the last few days. however, that any sign of meaningful fruit production has been apparent, right at the tip of the plant up on the decking. As you can see it's all fairly minimal at the moment, but my experiences with growing courgettes tells me that these sneaky bastards can double in size overnight, so I'm not giving up hope yet. I just need to make sure I harvest them before this happens.

Going back to unexpected fruit/plant appearance for a moment, the two I mentioned in the Twitter conversation are probably worth noting here: firstly, the pineapple. Hard to say in hindsight what I was expecting, but a single upright fruit presented on a low-slung shrubby throne of frondy leaves almost certainly wasn't it. Even this is outdone by the humble cashew, though - neither the honest-to-goodness down-to-earth (literally) utilitarian rusticness of its apparent near-relative, the peanut, which just minds its own business under the ground, nor the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin matter-of-factness of a true nut like the hazelnut, just growing straight out of its parent tree like it was the most natural thing in the world. No, the cashew emerges into the world via a freaky space alien arrangement involving being extruded out of the arse of some lumpy apple-like fruit and just hanging there like a tenacious turd until harvested. 

The basic rule for both fruit and nuts is: whatever you might think you know is wrong, and, furthermore, knowing that whatever you might think you know is wrong won't help you, because you'll still be wrong anyway. Is a peanut a nut? No, you fool, it's a legume. Is a banana a fruit? No, you fool, it's a berry. Is the big clearly-a-fruit apple-like structure in the picture above a fruit? Is the smaller clearly-a-nut hard-cased thing under it a nut? No, and no, obviously. The apple thing is an accessory fruit and the cashew "nut" is the true fruit (of which the bit we habitually eat is a seed). Honestly, you can see why people just give up and eat crisps instead; at least you know where you are.


Tuesday, October 06, 2020

they practically own south america

My mother, who evidently keeps an eye and ear out for these things, alerts me to a couple of appearances of our mutual relative and science fiction author Olaf Stapledon in popular culture. Firstly, she was watching the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (the one featuring Leonard Nimoy, a very young Jeff Goldblum and Donald Sutherland's memorable screechy alien finale) and noticed a brief piece of dialogue featuring Veronica Cartwright's character and one of her mud bath customers, wherein the customer extols the virtues of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and she recommends that he also read Stapledon's Star Maker

There is an important distinction between the two works, though: Star Maker is explicitly a work of fiction, whereas Worlds In Collision purports to be a work of non-fiction, though in reality it is as much of one as, say, Chariots Of The Gods

I have never read Star Maker, as it happens, although I do have a copy in the to-be-read pile. You may recall that I have read Last And First Men, though - those two books are Stapledon's most celebrated works, although he did write a lot of other stuff.

Last And First Men has its own, more recent, popular culture intersection, it turns out: this film with a voice-over by Tilda Swinton, which premiered in Berlin earlier this year. Rather than being a formal adaptation of the book (Swinton's voice-over is taken exclusively from the last two chapters) it is mainly a vehicle for the music of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (more famous among mainstream film buffs for his score for the 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory Of Everything), and features lingering shots of various immense pieces of abstract architecture. The film was largely made in 2017, but was only completed after Jóhannsson's death the following year.

The immense monuments featured in the film are mainly located in the former Yugoslavia and are a fascinating subject in their own right. Known as spomeniks, there are mainly Tito-era memorials to World War II, placed in some bizarrely remote and inhospitable locations which just accentuate their otherworldliness. Many of them still exist, in varying states of disrepair.

Back to Worlds In Collision for a moment: I used to own a work of that name, but it was a copy of the 1991 Pere Ubu album rather than Velikovsky's book. By far its most well-known tune (sung by one of my many namesakes) is I Hear They Smoke The Barbecue, a quirkily catchy pop nugget which references another branch of pseudoscience, the various hollow earth "theories". Coincidence? Or IS IT??!?!?!? I expect you know the answer by now.

[FOOTNOTE] A couple of things I meant to add: firstly that the static black-and-whiteness of the images, the voice-over and the general gloomy elegiac tone of the Last And First Men clips put me strongly in mind of Chris Marker's short film La Jetée, now available in full on YouTube and well worth half an hour of anyone's time. Secondly, the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a pretty good remake, as remakes go, of the original 1956 film (which in turn was an adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel); further remakes from 1993 and 2007 are also available, but since I've never seen them I have no opinion to offer.

Thursday, October 01, 2020

did he say that? he shaw did

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.