Ink Spots

Sitting at the front of the bus this morning, I saw a young dad escorting his son onto the bus. As the boy climbed into his seat, his dad waved him off and blew him a little kiss, and I thought that was really sweet. The dad was quite handsome and I noticed he had a big gold ear-ring and tatoos.

And then I realised that this was perhaps an example of a social trend we're seeing more of in the last few years. The rise of ink on people's limbs seems to come from Robbie Williams, Amy Winehouse and Fred Durst developing an addiction to the needle. Everyone seems not only to be getting tatoos, but simultaneously not knowing when enough is enough.

I remember little Christina Ricci describing Winona Rider's makeup in 'Mermaids': 'It looks like someone drew on you'.

Are we sliding back to fashions from past ages? Perhaps. I'm sure it has something to do with news stories like this one. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that we're all criminals now, thanks to online filesharing.

It's not just me being squeamish though. I just think the dad this morning would have looked better if he hadn't have let little Wayne loose on his arms with felt tips...

More Tardis

Think I've almost finished the model Tardis now, so here are a couple of pictures.




And in this one, you can see the fault locator wall.



[Updated 18 Aug 2009)
And now with the floor plate in place:

Please, Sir - Can We Have Some Sperm?

I've not really discussed the Jacko thing - it's been overdone by everyone else and all I could think is that for a man who's been vilified as having an useasy relationship with young boys for over a decade, dying was possibly the best, sanest career move he could have made. That's not to undermine his achievements as a performer and artist, but with all of the various operations he'd submitted himself (way more than the two he admitted to), plus the possibility that even just a tenth of the health-obsessive rumours about him might be true, he can't have been in the best of health for a long time anyway. He was a virtual recluse whose list of 'friends' appear to be the kind of people that, individually, you'd worry about, but as a collective they sturck me as being a particularly destabilising influence on aman whose mildest actions earned him the monicker 'Wacko'.

But now, The News of the Screws reports that former child star Mark Lester has stepped forward to identify himself as the possible father of one of Jackson's children.

Oliver Twist fathered Jackson's fair-skinned, blue-eyed daughter, Paris?

This story surely can't get any weirder without the help of Santa Claus, Spider-Man and Gary 'Whatchoo talking' 'bout, Willis?' Coleman's involement. Though I'm not sure Gary Coleman's real, so I won't hold my breath for that.

Birdies!

Back in June I was woken up by the sound of something outside my bedroom window. I'm one storey up, but we've been broken into before so I leapt out of bed and opened the curtains - to be confronted by the sight of a pair of magpies picking through the ivy on the roof below me.

So I grabbed my phone and recorded them.

Lazy Bar Steward

Haven't blogged for two months. That's what happens when work lets me manage a twitter account.

Chasing a punch-line has become a full-time occupation. Still, I'm spending my spare time productively, making a model Tardis control room, as seen in the Hartnell era...



Still a work in progress - have to work out how to do the innards of the central column for one thing - but I'm also having a go at doing custom figures of Ian and Barbara. Trying hard not to lose a finger while using a scalpel to carve an existing figure down to size.

Shut Up, Just Shut Up, Shut Up!

With an hour's travel every morning, and another on the way home each evening, I tend to get a lot of reading done while on the move. I also listen to podcasts and documentaries (partly work-related). All this means that when I'm on the tube and the train driver or platform staff make an announcement, I have to unplug my earphones to make sure it's not something important. And when it isn't, my frustration levels begin to rise.

It might not sound much to people who live outside of London and have to wait for trains for up to half an hour at a time, but London's a busy, angry city. The tube trains should run at regular intervals of a minute or two apart, or else the platforms become dangerously congested. It's a situation that isn't helped by stupid people with no spacial awareness, who stop dead in the middle of a platform and then glare at anyone who tries to pass them to stand further up the platform where there's room and where they won't be blocking the entrance. Or people with prams. At rush hour.

See - congestion makes people intolerant. Anyone who stops you getting to somewhere where there's enough room for you to be more than six inches away from someone else's armpit is preferable. People don't talk on the tube, unless they have mental health issues, are drunk or are annoying. We're an anti-social breed in London, and we like it that way. So, when we've got a book so we can avoid eye contact, and earphones so we can block out needless communications, or the screech of the train as it speeds along the tunnels, the last thing we really want is to hear announcements, because they invariably mean our uncomfortable journey is likely to take a) twice as long as it should and b) about three times as long as we can bare. Speak to a Londoner after they've had a long journey on the tube and count the facial ticks.

Which is why I greeted this piece from BBC News with dismay. Any announcement that isn't essential to the decisions I make while travelling are a needless distraction. It's audio spam - noise for the sake of trying to convince me they're doing a better job than I'm willing to accept. If they're doing a good job, I'll know. If they're doing a bad job, I'll know - and the only things I might want to hear are explanations, apologies and alternative routes.

I don't want some platitude from Gandhi!

(Don't) Carry on Screaming

I was having dinner with my parents recently. The food was tasty and all was going great until a small child decided to treat us to her special interpretation of The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre: she toddled round the restaurant screaming gleefully at volume. Now, it's tricky, I'm sure, to get baby-sitters, just as it's a welcome relief to escape the confines of the house when you have a baby. But when the apple of your eye is spoiling the relaxing mood of everyone else, it's more than a little selfish to just let her wander off like that and I'm sure they'd have been up in arms and threatening all kinds of legal if one of the waiting staff had tripped over her while carrying hot soup.

And yet... as I sat down to write this, my mind drifted back to when I was only a little older.

We had a huge back garden and my dad, being a proper dad who can build things, had constructed a shed for me to play in. Bright red, with a black, sloped roof, it was big enough for me to sit in with a mate and read comics, some of which I'm rediscovering to a staggering degree of detail with my bingeing on Marvel Essential compilations. That's the comics I'm remembering, not the friends.

I think I must have been trying to test myself - see how long I could make a single note without stopping. And at the greatest volume. In other words, I was sitting in my shed, screaming my head off. I'm not sure if I actually remember this, or if that's my rationalisation 34 years after the event, but what I do remember is the door to my shed being pulled open and my mum's face lit up in the summer sun. She was livid.

See, our next-door neighbour had come to complain about my screaming. What was a simple matter of vocal endurance for me was particularly distressing for him: he was a dentist whose practise was next door - and that day, he'd booked in a few tooth extractions. The screams had apparently resulted in a number of cancellations as frightened children refused to walk any further up his path while I was wailing away.

Haha.

Yep, parents should definitely not allow their kids to scream their heads off in public. And kids should definitely not allow their parents to get rid of their comics when they 'grow out of them'. I've spent about 70 quid on The Amazing Spider-Man Essentials alone...