…and it’s back to
working in the office for this week and we’re well into the routine that I’ve
outlined previously…aside from working and food shopping the following
happened:
…our postie
delivered Tim Burgess’ new album ‘I Love The New Sky’, The Three Amigos ‘Louie Louie’ single and Kyle Starks ‘Old Head’:
…I’ve only listened
to ’I Love The New Sky’ once and it was pleasant enough, but none of the songs
stuck out and grabbed me. The songs weren’t bad, and I enjoyed listening to
them, but when the album finished, I didn’t feel a need to put it back on and
re-listen. But maybe it’s a grower and I just need to give the songs a bit more
of a listen, let them grow on me?
…The Three Amigos
‘Louie Louie’ is a big beat cover/remix/re-edit of The Kingsmen’s cover of
‘Louie Louie’ amping up the party-ness by several notches. The b-sides are aremix by The Wiseguys, which takes a slightly sideways tack, adding a laidback swnigness
to the big beatnish of the original track and ‘We Rock’, a mid-tempo party
track that you can shuffle and jive to or just head nod…
…I got and read this
month’s Mojo magazine, which was okay, none of the bands featured are particularly
favourites of mine, but the cover CD is awesome. When I saw I thought “ug,
they’re copying Uncut and just putting on 15 new tracks and they’re ditching
have a theme for the songs and just chucking on whatever the labels have given
them”, but that was a very bad first take. There is a theme as these tracks
broadly fall into the ambient folk/acoustic genre and you can just lose
yourself in it. Real blissful.
…and finally got
round to listening to this old Mojo magazine CD, 'Heavy Nuggets Vol. 2':
…and it’s pretty
awesome, every single track is cool, mixing rock ‘n’ roll and soul and funk,
the whole album just grooves like a mother and is well worth getting. And you
can probably pick it up for peanuts from Discogs or eBay.
…I also watched ‘The Ruins of Empire’ by Akala, which is basically a multi-media history of the world,
via “all of the sites of conflict and war throughout human history as both the
Conqueror and the Conquered simultaneously”, in half an hour. Very thought
provoking.
And I watched a load of old Universal Monster films: ‘Dracula’s
Daughter’, ‘Son of Dracula’, ‘House of Frankenstein’ and ‘House of Dracula’.
Which was interesting.
‘Dracula’s Daughter’
is a sequel to ‘Dracula’ taking place immediately after it, with the police
coming across Van Helsing just after he had killed Dracula, and mostly involves
Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula’s daughter, trying to cure herself of being a
vampire and the consequences of this. With a side bar of whether you can stand
trial for murdering a dead person.
In ‘Son of Dracula’, Count Alucard, the
titular son of Dracula, journeys to the American South and tries to take over a
New Orleans plantation as his new home/empire, causing trouble for and with the
locals.
In the ‘House of Frankenstein’ a former colleague of Doctor
Frankenstein continues the Doctor’s work, during which he crosses paths with The
Wolfman, and trouble insures (to say the least).
And in the ‘House of Dracula’ is
the weirdest of the batch and involves Dracula searching for a cure for his vampirism
at the same location that The Wolfman is seeking a cure for his lycanthropy,
which is also where Frankenstein’s monster has washed up at (following the ending
of ‘House of Frankenstein’), all of which ends up in evilness and villagers
forming a mob. It feels weird watching these films in 2020, something like
eighty years after they were made. Cinematic techniques, styles and censorship
have changed so much, that while enjoyable these films do feel odd. Like, in
these films backstory and plot points are dealt with in almost throwaway lines,
which in modern films would take up many minutes of screen time.
…and I saw a weird
ad for a telescope/camera lens, which features way too many shots of women being watched from far
away, and it totally comes across as an ad directed at stalkers and voyeurs,
it’s just totally “look at how well you can perv on women without them doing
you’re doing it”. Just bizarre and it’s so obvious that you can’t say that it
was done by accident. Messed up:
…and I went for a
Long Walk on Saturday:
…and I did this
week’s G2 Crosswords:
…Monday’s crossword gets the week off to an okay start, we
just had to cheat on a sixth of the clues (four out of 23). I think the little
grey cells were just tired from the weekend and that’s probably why we didn’t
get ‘wretchedness’ from ‘misery’, ‘needle’ from ‘annoy – provoke’ and ‘decreed’
from ‘ordained’. And we learnt that it is the ‘Rhone’ and not the ‘Rhine’ that
is a ‘river running through the city of Arles’, if we hadn’t of dropped
geography when we were younger (when I was at school we had to choose between
studying geography, history and humanities after our third year of senior
school) our river knowledge might be stronger…
…there’s a massive upswing with Tuesday’s crossword as we
didn’t have to cheat on any of the 25 clues. The little grey cells just monstered
their way through the clues, like a Freddy or Jason, leaving no survivors and
without a final girl to stop them. Even when we didn’t know the answer, we knew
what letters were most likely to go in the gaps. Like, with ‘maladroit’ we had
the intersecting letters ‘I_E_T’ and it’s very likely that ‘N’ went after the
‘I’, which left ‘P’ as the most likely fourth letter, and it was, which gave us
‘INEPT’, simples 😉…
…thing took a little dive with Wednesday’s crossword, maybe
the little grey cells were tired from yesterday’s triumph? That the reason I
can think of for not getting ‘crème caramel’ from ‘baked custard dessert’, or
‘tureen’ from ‘deep dish for serving soup’ and for going for ‘curx’ for ‘heart
of the matter’. I mean, man, we should have spotted that we’d misspelt ‘crux’!
Whatever the reason, we had to cheat on a fifth of the clues (four out of 21).
But we did learn that ‘Dresden China’ is a type of ‘fine porcelain from
Germany’…
…Thursday’s crossword goes better, with just having to cheat
on an eighth of the clues (three out of 24), and we almost did much better.
Like, for ‘using mocking irony’ we went with ‘sarcasism’ rather than
‘sarcastic’ (misspelling words seems to be a bit of a theme this week!) or with
‘very last part (4,3)’ we got ‘T_i_/END’ but couldn’t get all the way to
‘tail/end’. But we did learn that ‘oasts’ are ‘kilns for drying hops’…
…Friday’s crossword took a bit of a dive, we had to cheat on
just over a quarter of the clues (four out of 18). This grid was a bit of a
toughie, it did ‘bamboozle’ us a little , which is probably why we didn’t get
‘hoodwink’ from ‘bamboozle’ for 16 across 😊, but we did learn that Valletta is the
capital of Malta, that ‘a ‘groat’ is an ‘old coin worth four pence’ and that a
‘divan’ is a ‘backless couch’…
…and Saturday’s crossword ends the week on a pretty good
note as we only had to cheat on a ninth of the clues (two out of 19). We
couldn’t get ‘cautious’ from ‘chary’ or ‘unsaid’ from ‘not made explicit’, I
think we were focusing too much on the vague or censored side of things, but a
pretty good end to an okay crossword week…
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