The rain in (erm, North Berwick) falls mainly on the plane(s)...

Had a lovely day out last Saturday at the Museum of Flight over at East Fortune to watch their annual air show. Beautiful little place doing sterling work looking after marvellous old planes, it's a wee slice of heaven for anyone with lurking jet-boy propeller-head tendencies (guilty). The weather was half decent (for the most part), the bacon butties were tasty, tho', sadly, the doughnuts were scandalously AWOL... I worship and adore the old kites they have on static display and in bits in the maintenance hanger. In fact, I still get a cheap thrill from walking by the huge Vulcan bomber that they have sitting outside the main building (sighs)... what a commotion that old girl would have made in her heyday...

Anyway, as for the show, the Red Arrows are always good fun and there was plenty of old prop goodness (including a wonderful old Lancaster) but, for me, the undisputed highlights where elsewhere... For starters, a mighty, twin rotored Chinook gave a rare air show performance for us and it truly was an extraordinary sight... like some ungainly Glasgow bus being dangled around the sky on two strings by an unseen, celestial puppet master. How the hell does it stay in the air? Beautiful noise it made, too, like some giant bizarro stealth Flymo. No, really. The other wonder was the Typhoon, which came on right at the end of the day as the heavens opened up and the rain started hissing down. What a glorious racket it made, especially when the hammer was being put down, a sound like the very fabric of the sky itself being ripped apart. In fact, it moved so much air that half a dozen alarms went off in the car park as it made its nearest low level pass. That awesome, bassy roar it eminated when at full tilt scythed its way mercilessly through the chests of the agog spectators, a feeling going so deep that it shook their very ancestors right down to their bones, I tell you... Give me a live album of that every week... Heavy metal bursting through the sky indeed...

BTW, that pic I've posted isn't one of mine, sadly. I did buy myself a camera recently but have been struggling to get to grips with it. Yes, yes, the lens keeps steaming up when I try and snap my favourite subject, har de har. Ach, f*** it, insert your own tripod jokes here...

Made with the help of -

Galaga '88 - Super cutesy graphics, ridiculously silly sound effects, some lovely music, gormless little aliens saying "Ohto ohto!" to you, and the inevitable classic old skool shooter game play, that's galactic dancin' for ya! What's not to love ?

Hmm, I've had that same problem with flaps myself....

No, that isn't a pic of the latest big game I've shot hanging from the wall in the trophy room here in the fortress of bolloxtude - it's a pic of a silly big dog that got its silly big teddy bear head caught in a cat flap. I've been very remiss in posting those stories of canine stupidity that I'd previously promised my readers before so hopefully this will go some way to redressing the balance...



Speaking of tight, little flaps with a black, furry protrusion (pah, why go for the double entendre when a single one can do so much better ?) my lovely Bavarian neighbour was nicking about in the altogether yet again this morning. Marvellous. I was down at the local library a bit later and contemplated picking up a book I spotted,"German in fifteen minutes". Fifteen minutes ??? I'd only need two minutes. At most. To paraphrase Alan B'stard - "Two minutes ? I'm not doing it twice !!!"

Made with the help of -

Robert Fripp "Exposure" - Tee hee, see what I did there ??? Anyway, far too good an album to be relegated to use as a mere pun on a throwaway blog entry...

How we used to live...

Okay, I was a wee bit late to the whole MAME party, mainly through the fact that I'd been keeping a P133 alive for the best part of ten years, a situation due in no small part to being too tight to upgrade my heartfelt concern for the environment - the old bird struggled enough emulating a PC Engine (with the sound turned off and the frame rate w-a-a-ay down) that I rightly felt it would be rather a waste of time getting it to try and crunch its way through the arcade version of Chase HQ...

However, I finally got around to getting myself up to speed the other week at long, long last and have had an absolute whale of a time gouging my way through stacks and stacks of the old classics... Out Run, Salamander, Gryzor, et cetera ... but the current favourite has to be the mighty Green Beret. I'd forgotten how good that old girl was, bringing back all those hours I'd spent down Sweaty Betty's every other weekend trying to get past the end of that second level (bah, making those lovely doggies the end of level baddies is not playing fair with the big chap, boo hiss). Anyhoo, got to be still worth a look to any discerning gamers out there... jeez, a couple of hours knifing and / or flamethrowing some pesky Russians doesn't half make a chap hungry... note to self : must remember to dig out "Raid over Moscow"...


BTW I - if anyone au fait with POW rescue behind Soviet lines is looking at this, please let me know how the hell you kill the paragliding karate bastard who parachutes in with his smart arse machine gun every so often from level 2 onwards ??? He's no danger but I keep missing the fucker with my rocket launcher and he jumps off before I can get down and knife him in the cojones...

BTW II - on a completely unrelated note, it seems the TV Cream blog bloke is an old school Genesis fan as well... nice work, fella

The Bam Flies Down (On) Old Trafford Way

Flew down to Manchester on Saturday, on a nice wee de Havilland Dash 8, no less - thankfully the weather was nice, those ickle prop planes don't half move around when a wind gets up. Anyhoo, I was going down to see G*n*s*s at Old Trafford so wasn't all that worried about the prospect of hitting the ground at 500mph and meeting a fiery death. After all, I had the Drum Duet to "look forward" to. Yes, I was trying not to look forward at all - mucho "what the f*** were you thinking, ya big fud" moments ever since I bought the tix. Oh dear...

However, things got much better once I got down there. The weather was scorching hot, the hotel was a little beauty and the folk I met down there were all pretty damn top notch - those folk from oop north are the salt of the earth, they really are. Plenty of Scots around as per usual, adding to the healthy bonhomie you find amongst groups of balding old fart proggers of all persuasions. What a magnificent stadium, I have to say. Enormous. I was up in the gods back in the east stand facing the stage and had a good, if somewhat distant, view of the proceedings. Heck, as a theatre of dreams it maybe even trumps the mighty Douglas Park but, hey, let's not get too carried away here...

Well, what about the band then ? Er, um, they were pretty damn good, actually. Not enough old stuff for the big man's liking, of course, but it was all rather pleasant, mucho well played light prog goodness abounding. Old Phil really is a talented little fella and should be highly praised for the services he's done for the standing of baldy auld bawbags all across the world. Not a great deal of Peter-era stuff, sadly, or even much old Phil stuff - although they played Ripples and Los Endos from my favourite album (which at least gave me a cheap thrill) most of the set was Duke onwards as wearily expected. Ho hum. I did find my mind wandering during the longueurs to visions of the stadium filled to the brim on a normal business day to watch ManYoo stuffing seven past Roma or going toe to toe with the real Reds. Now that would have been something to savour. But, ultimately, the Genesis lads did all right in the end (there, I can even bring myself to type their name!). I know what I like (in their back catalogue). And at least they didn't play anything off Abacab, right ???

Made with the help of -

Justice "†" - I'm still down with the kids, I tell ya. Anyways, how could I not like a band that plays in front of a giant, illuminated cross ???

Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it infamy!

In tribute to my old mate iKon, who very kindly sent me a stack of Heroes episodes the other day (feckin' brilliant work, old boy, cheers!), I thought that I would post a link to something a bit obscure (and, frankly, cool as f**k) that I've stumbled across via the fabulous tv cream site, something which I'm sure will be well appreciated... Kenneth Williams presenting Wogan! No, really. Just take a look at this...

Marvellous stuff. Takes one back to the days when the old goggle box wasn't quite so dominated by gurning, talentless fuckwits of all stripes... hmm, must be showing my age :-(

FF ??? FFS !!!

Bah, the big man finds himself having less and less time for any of these new fangled blockbuster SFX demo's that are polluting our collective head space these days. Went to see Spidey III the other week and it was total, total guff. Now I read that the Fantastic Four sequel with the mighty surfer being introduced in it for the first time has an appearance by Galactus in it (yay!)... in the form of (wait for it...) a "cosmic mist" !!! Ay Caramba! WTF is that all about ??? Galactus is an 80 foot tall, fat bloke with a TV aerial stuck to his head. Everyone on the planet knows that. A fucking cosmic mist ??? What next, the Puppet Master appearing in FF III as a frigging pea souper ??? Jesus wept. Well, I'm not flippin' buying it, mister !!! They can stuff their shitty movie where the sun don't shine, sell out bastards, I'll stick with my Roger Corman version thankyouverymuch... I could rip a tissue, honestly...

BTW I - ah, so that's who Jessica Alba is, Lurkio... hmm, as Roy Walker might say, she's good but she's not right...

BTW II, balls to mainstream Hollywood, I watched that Tarantino approved cult classic Used Cars last night on DVD and it was a belter, the way I always remembered it late on Friday nights on the telly. Wall to wall classic American cars, a soupçon of female nudity, and gratuitous profanity all the way, baby :-)))

(side note : if Galactus is "but a mist", I guess Klaw will have to be "but a claw" - ho ho ho, one for the fellow Frank Skinner fan(s) out there...).

Nothin' but Trouble...

My first pilgrimage of the year last Monday. A trip down to the holy city of Wolverhampton to see the legendary Trouble at the Civic Hall. Well, the Civic Hall bar actually. Curse all you trend pandering, false metal felating bastards that would let such an iconic band be forced to resort to changing down venue from the Wulfrun Hall to the bloody bar of the big venue next door. Grrr. Anyways, said venue wasn't all that small, actually, being sized halfway between, say, the ABC 1 and the ABC 2 in Glasgow. Not exactly packed out, either, but then again Doom metal never was big box office (apart from, well, you know who). You're into it for the love of the damn thing.

None of that matters anyway. The band themselves were simply magnificent. Tighter than a constipated gadfly, heavier than four dozen buffalo stampeding on your cranium, louder than the coming apocalypse, yada yada yada. Have I really been waiting nearly twenty years to see them live? Brrrrrr. They ran the full gamut of their material, all the way back to the oldest, slowest, most funereal stuff right through the Jimi / Zep styled era of the mid nineties and then on to some new material which sounded super heavy in the old fashion - not that anyone will be buying it, sadly. I had heard that they will be on the same bill as Heaven and Hell on at least one festival line-up in Europe this summer. Probably in a land where the mullet is the official national tonsorial style - just a shame I can't afford the requisite hair weave.

Have to say that I really like Wolves the town. The lovely folk from the Midlands are generally pretty damn cool IME and you always get a nice bit of conversation with them, especially when they find they are talking to a Scot. Funnily enough, the town centre, to me, actually looks a lot like, erm, Hamilton... without the omnipresent shell suited, semi-human garbage polluting the shared psychic head space, obviously. Lots of great buildings with some beautiful architecture, especially the art gallery and St Peters church. Just, y'know, old-fashioned nice. I like old-fashioned nice. Defo worth a visit, I'd say.