PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Shape of Things to Come

 

For some reason that touch of The Yardbirds made me dig about YouTube looking for some old songs I liked in the 70's. I don't have them on cd for the most part and don't hardly listen to cd's anyway. Occasionally some of these songs turn up in my web browser. YouTube has been a great place to hear some amazing blasts from the past. There is software that lets you convert the streaming video into files you can keep and store for replay but I haven't explored that yet. I have enough crap to do as it is. Today I didn't feel like doing much after I got home from work. I'm still running at slow speed because of the cold that I have had. Most of the symptoms are gone but I'm sleepin' more than usual. I was hopin' as I got older that what they say about old people needing less sleep were going to be true. It doesn't seem the case so far. I guess I have to get older to live my dream and have more waking hours.

I started diggin' around on YouTube because I wanted to hear Train Kept a Rollin' again. I just dig that song. Some versions have Jimmy Page on guitar. He went on to Led Zepplin after The Yardbirds. LZ is not a band I listen to anymore. Heard it enough when I was young. I played Houses of the Holy hundereds of times, but haven't listened to it in over 20 years.

Maybe it's nostalgia but I did enjoy hearing The Yardbirds and that lead me to Max Frost and the Troopers. Every hear of them? No? Not surprizing, they didn't exist, except in a movie. The band and the song came from the movie Wild In The Streets. It's not a great movie but it's certainly of it's time. 1968. I heard Julian Bond on MPR today talking about the 1968 Election season in the United States. That was some fucked up shit that year.

Max's song Shape of Thing to Come has been a favorite since I had the single. That was about 1970 or '71. The guitar is great and the drumming makes me want to pound on something. I had a friend years ago who had to air drum when he heard certain songs. That's this song for me. Train Kept a Rollin' is the same way. Early blues rock was pretty primal and certainly all new and exciting. There's a version from the movie here, and a fancy video here.

I Had To Much To Dream Last Night by The Electric Prunes comes in two length's. 3 minute and 7 minute. That some how led me to the Strawberry Alarm Clock and their classic Incense and Peppermints. There was a link to Donovan's Wear Your Love Like Heaven. I haven't heard that in decades I bet. Then there was a link to The Classics IV - Stormy and Spooky. Dusty Springfield did a cover of Spooky. Sopwith Camel - Hello Hello. The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard. The Music Machine - Talk Talk. Arthur Brown - Fire. Johnny Cash - Ring Of Fire. Now I'm gettin' off the beam.

What I read in August 2008

I'm running a bit behind in reporting what I read. August was a pretty good month, 14 titles.

The Edge Chronicles 4 - The Curse of the Gloamglozer - Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. I've been enjoying these books. I like the art and story. Lots of characters and interesting and dangerous places to see. The first three books were about Twig and this book is about his parents. In this prequel we go back to when they were young and how they meet and marry. There's lots of political intrigue. Quint is left by his sky pirate father to be the apprentice to the High Academe on the floating island Sanctaphrax. The HA has a secret lab in the heart of the honey combed island. It's killing him, but hopefully Quint and Maris will save the day. It's never that cut and dried in the Stewart/Ridell universe.

The Land of the Elyon 1 - The Dark Hills - Patrick Carmen. I picked the first of these up on a whim. I kind of liked the cover. It sat on the shelf for ages and eventually the 2nd and 3rd books were added to the pile. There is a 4th and 5th but I haven't found them used yet. The first three are kind of a trilogy and can be read in a group. In this tiny self contained universe it seems that most of the people live in walled cities. They even have a walled road connecting the major cities. Alexa, our heroine, gets her secret wish, a chance to go outside of the wall. There's a secret plot going on. There's danger, a bit of magic, criminals and some other critters. The writing is good at times and draggy at others. Alexa doesn't sound like a kid very much. She sounds old and oppressed. Maybe from living in a walled city all her life. I wasn't sure that I'd re-read them again. The second and third books take Alexa into more of her universe. There are a lot of new characters and places to go.

     

My Father's Dragon/Elmer and the Dragon/The Dragons of Blueland - Ruth Stiles Gannett. I found this three book volume at Half Price Books and thought I'd take a chance. It's really aimed at the smaller set but the stories are fun and there are lots of dragons. The illustrations are pretty good.

The Edge Chronicles 5 - The Last of the Sky Pirates - Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. The first of the Rook Barkwater books. Rook is a new Librarian Knight,  in the secret society, who's chosen to travel into the Deepwoods to study Banderbears. The Librarians are keeping the earth knowledge alive even though they are being hunted by The Guardian of the Night. There's danger, betrayal and plenty of action to keep my interest. Lots of weird critters too.

The Land of Elyon 2 - Beyond the Valley of Thorns - Patrick Carmen

The Land of Elyon 3 - The Tenth City - Patrick Carmen

      

   

More Adventures of the Secret Seven by Enid Blyton.  Contains Good Work Secret Seven/ Secret Seven Win Through/ Puzzle For The Secret Seven/ Secret Seven Fireworks/ Good Old Secret Seven. All five of these books came in one volume, which is printed in Czechoslovakia. I kind of wish I had the original books, I like the covers. Blyton wrote 15 books in the Secret Seven series. I don't think are as good as the Adventure series, but still enjoyable to read. I can knock one off in about an hour. Large type and about 110 pages each. The group of kids, there are seven of them and a dog, solve some crimes. If I could find more cheap I'd buy 'em.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - J K Rowling. After I watched the trailer for the Half Blood Prince a bunch of times I was driven to read the last two books again. This is the first of the two. I liked it all over again.

Science Fiction Sunday 18

I'm still working my way through my dvdr's and sometimes I look at a title and wonder what it's about. Luckily my failing memory keeps me from being worried. I popped in Anoymous Rex to see what it was about. Oh, yeah, now I remember. It's a Sci Fi Channel original that might have been a pilot for a series. It's a movie based on a series of books. Dinosaurs live among us and kill everyone who finds out their secret. It's hard to get sympathy for creatures who kill humans even if it's to survive. I checked it out originally because it has Tamara Gorski in it. She turns up in lots of genre stuff, especially stuff shot in Canada. She's was born in Winnipeg, my old home town. You might remember her from Bruce Campbell's Man With The Screaming Brain or Hercules, The Legendary Journeys. She often plays evil women. Still, she's not enough to make the movie great. It's just average, plodding to some end after a couple of hours on the Sci Fi Channel. I'm not sure why I kept a copy of the movie, other than I keep too much. I'm kind of scanning through parts to get to the end sooner. The main character is a private eye who works with Daniel Baldwin. Faye Dunaway plays a higher up in the secret dino council, so does Isaac Hayes. The dinos use some sort of holgraphic body suit that covers them up. It just makes no sense that a brontosaurus could get into the Chevy, or sit behind a desk, but there you go. There's disharmony in the dino ranks and some want to bust out of their holosuits and chomp down on the humans. Our hero puts a stop to that.

I first saw The Bed Sitting Room at a science fiction convention in the early to mid 1970's. It was when they still had film programs that were actually shown on film. You could rent 16mm copies of many things pretty cheap. I have a dvdr copy from an old tape. It doesn't seem to be out currently and while no copies turn up on Amazon you can buy it as a bootleg. You can see it for free, in 9 parts, over at YouTube. The 1969 Richard Lester film is based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. It's got a pretty interesting cast. The story is set in post-apocalypse Britian. The 20 or so known people are surviving as best as possible. No zombies though. And lately, I'm pretty bored with zombies. Can you say, "done to death". The war was quick, 2 minutes and 28 seconds, and left radioactivity about. Lord Fortnum is changing into a bed sitting room and is unhappy. Such a step down in social status. A yound lady gives birth to a monstrocity that dies. The police, both of them, hover about in their flying car, trying to keep the people moving so they don't present a good target for a possible renewed attack. Not for everyone, it's an odd ball.

Train kept a rollin'

 

Sean Kenney posted this marvelous train model on MOCpages. Besides the train he's also the creator of MOCpages. It's about two feet long and I thought it was great fun and worth sharing with some who might not see it. You can see The Yardbirds version of the song Train Kept A Rollin on YouTube, or this even earlier version, or this odd version from the 1966 film Blow Up. That's a great song, with an astounding back beat.

I'm Batman Cake

 

My old pal Mitch sent me a link to this cake. Yes, it's a cake, a 300 pound cake, and it was make for the launch of the LEGO Batman video game. Even the minifigs are made of cake. It's from a site called Topless Robot which seems to be a site devoted to comics and such. Great looking cake, huh. Thanks Mitch.

Friday Night Movies 191

Both Joe and I brought copies of the Target Exclusive of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Joe had seen the movie in the theaters and still went out and bought one, so you can guess he liked it well enough. I bought it not having seen the movie before hand. I just don't go into theaters much anymore.I watched it last sunday evening. I felt like crap from a cold, part of the reason there were no movies last week, and wanted something new to pass the evening mindlessly. There are some good special features in the two disc set, so it kept me going between supper and bedtime. I enjoyed the movie enough to feel I hadn't wasted my money, and the Target Exclusive comes tied to a nice 80 page hardback book with lots of great photos. A lot of people did not like poor Indiana's return to the silver screen but their complaint's fall on my deaf ears. I didn't find Indiana's stunts much less believeable than some of his stunts in the first movies and it's nice to get to escape from the real world. Have you seen the RW lately, that's some fucked up shit right there. If you haven't seen the movie, it's 1957 and Indiana gets caught up, literally, in a hunt for a paranormal skull by some nasty murderin' Russians. There's a good cast, they all do a good to great job. I even liked Shia LeBeouf in his roll as Mutt. What, you got a problem with that?! Just kiddin', he does make a nice LEGO minifig. They all do, especially that Kate Blanchet as Irina Spalko. Great hair on both her and her tiny plastic replica. She's got a great name, and she's so nasty, she'd stab you in a motherfuckin' second. Great locations and CGI to fill in the blanks. Not the greatest Indiana Jones movie but certainly better than out next cimematic selection.

Greg has a knack of getting some amazing films. This was not one. He reads about them. He read about Death Bed in a book. There was a whole chapter about it. I'm thinkin' after watchin' it I'm going to be hard pressed to write a paragraph about it and I know I'm mostly going to be complaining about this movie which makes everything look good. The writer and director, George Evans, makes Ray Dennis Steckler look good. This was  his only movie. It was shot in 1972 and it took that guy 5 years to bring it to the public. Luckily for us it's only 77 minutes. It sure seemed longer, and it put Mike into such a deep sleep that we had to poke him with a stick to wake him up. The subtitle of the movie is The Bed that Eats and that's what it's about. A cannabalistic demon bed that keeps Audrey Beardsly locked up in a magical painting. You can see a trailer at YouTube. It contains a good sampling of the awfulness, including the amazing shooting the bed with a gun scene. YouTube has a clip of Patton Oswalt talking about it. He has some of the same complaints that we did. It's crap, you can't get around that, yet it gets a 4.9 on the IMDb. Unbelieveable. I voted it a 3 and I was being generous. It's poorly acted and it never got released back in the 70's. At least until someone put it on DVD without telling the director. Who are these people who think they need to make that sort of thing available to the public. We should get some regulatin' going on in the movie industry. Just cause it sounds like a movie doesn't mean you have to actually make the movie. There's some nudity but that is not near enough to making me like the movie. To be avoided unless you are like us and feel some need to see all the horror films that are out there.

Idlers, Timewasters and Cake Sniffers

I was poking about and found this site that lets you, or me, upload a photo and have it print in pieces so you can have a larger image to stick up on your wall. It claims up to 20 meters in size. I used to have a color copier at work that enlarged an image but no where near that large. My new one did not have the same feature. I miss it. Occasionally we would like to have some posters made, and the large format inkjet printer that the engineering people have is not so good. I am sure there must be software out there that does the same thing but I don't have any. The site is called The Rasterbator. Terrible name but there you go. You can also download a version of it.

TV Theme Music is a site that lets you listen to or download over 7400 TV themes. I downloaded several for me that I didn't have. They have some odd things. It's an amazing assortment of stuff from all over the world. I listened to the theme to The Sweeney, a show I hadn't seen in over 30 years. They have different versions of several themes. Well, worth checking out is you are into TV themes. I learned about this from a series of interviews with Don Rosa. Poor Don had recorded hundreds of show themes on audio tape over the years, each with an introduction. His pal put them on cd. Now you can make your own collection with the click of a mouth button. Nice, huh. If you want to hear the Don Rosa interview click here.

Nothing for Cake Sniffers.

TCBX

TCBX stands for the Twin Cities Brick Expo. It was last Saturday Oct 18 in a church in Bloomington. Stein Settergren, our host, goes to that church and he arranged to use of some of the space to host big LEGO displays. It was part of the reason that I haven't blogged for a bit. I bought a shit load of my stuff, and as you know, a shit load is more than one man can carry. I packed my Saturn with everything that I could fit in there and headed over to set up Friday mid-morning. It took a while to set up, most of the afternoon. I did take a break for lunch at the Old Country Buffet in Burnsville. A bunch of us stopped at the LEGO store afterward but they didn't have anything I needed at that moment. It always a good idea to check the Pick-A-Brick wall frequently as things come and go, and odd parts tend to go quickly.

 

That's Brian Kasprzyk setting up his Colonial Port. No one was sure how to pronounce his last name, but we are sure he's a darn good builder. It's about 10 by 12 feet. SL, remember, more than I can carry. He also brought his Cathedral. You can see it on MOCpages. It's underrated there, deserving more than 3.5 smiley faces. Some guy commented: "I really like the shape but I think it would look less menacing built in white rather than grey. Why not knock up another one in white to compare?" Unbelieveable!

       

Dave Smith came from Wisconsin, thanks to a mention of the TCBX in Fascinating LEGO Model of the Day, and he brought some of his work. I love that cat birdhouse, and I really like the large versions of the Minifig, as did many of the visitors. I am guessing that there were more than 300 visitors. Pretty good for an event that was advertised pretty much by word of mouth. The two blue houses are by Dave Savage. It's his boyhood home in minifig and miniland scales. Nice, huh. The crab ship is Max Braun's, and he can't wait to take it apart. I had a couple of tables to put about 30 of my moc's on. Roy Cook sent his Hall of Justice. You might remember it from the Fallcon.

       

Dan Siskind brought some WW inspired MOC's. There was the huge Train layout by the GMLTC people and a smaller, but cuter, Duplo Train layout by Judy and Bill Payne. You can see many more pictures of the show on my Brickshelf page. There are 140 pics in some order. I had a good time and we are all hoping to do it again next year, but bigger and better.

A Bad Day In Micropolis

 

 I finished up two of the modules that I wanted to build. They will go into Micropolis, adding to the misery of the day. They'd be happy to have the stock market fall on 'em. Giant ants and giant sharks are much worse. The shark came from the new Agents set. I like them quite a bit. The ants came from the Indian Jones sets. I like them also.The shark will hold a minifig in his mouth and the ants are huge in the minifig scale. In the microscale they are huge. Chomp, chomp. Run! You can see more pictures at MOCpages, here and here.

LEGO at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Judy had a big build at the MIA yesterday. It was 11 to 4:30. I got there later than I wanted to and got some crappy pictures. I think the tower picture is the only one that turned out fair. There were big tables set up and lots of bricks to play with. Lots of kids there. The goal was to build a large rainbow with some greens for grass and hills underneath it. Some sky tossed in there. There were also Duplo and Quatro bricks to build with. Many stacks and walls to take down later. It was fun building something huge and not having to deal with it at my house. Earlier Judy and her husband Bill built a Saint Louis Arch. That slowed the process down and left not enough time to finish the rainbow. It's still pretty big, and heavy. It was bowing the table. The other side of the rainbow is the reverse of this side. There's even a pot of gold and some cute little pumpkins. It is easier to take it apart than build it. I did notice that. I'd have to encourage Judy to do something like this again. It was fun, especially for me and all those who showed up, but it's a huge amount of work. Much totting and lifting. Yay, Judy and Bill. And thanks for the bling.