PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Sensational Alex Harvey

   

Back in the 1970's I was a fairly big fan of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. They were a Glasgow band and fairly popular in the UK. Unless you lived in Cleveland you probably haven't heard of them in the US. The Wikipedia tells me the band did well in Cleveland but not so in other towns. UK records were easy to get in Winnipeg record stores and people I knew typically bought a lot of British bands.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was Alex Harvey on vocals, Zal Cleminson on guitar, Chris Glen on bass, Hugh McKenna on keyboards and cousin Ted McKenna on drums. They had several albums but I only bought their first five records, Framed (1972), Next (1073), The Impossible Dream (1974), Tomorrow Belongs To Me (1975) and Live (1975). I used to listen to them a lot. I think Tomorrow Belongs To Me was my favorite. I sure recognized more songs on that album's song list than any of the other albums. I can't remember when I got rid of the albums, maybe when I moved to Minneapolis in 1978, maybe later. I got rid of a lot of albums when I moved, partly to lighten the load and partly to generate a bit of spare cash. Normally I tire of albums quickly and move on to something new. They used to pile up, then get traded or sold to record stores, until I have nearly none left.

Since getting highspeed internet I can take a look back at old music I liked on YouTube without having to spend any money buying cd's or downloads. I was thinking about some of the songs I used to like by Alex Harvey. I liked his voice and I thought the songs weren't quite normal. Alex was born in Glasgow in 1935 and at age 19 he started playing in bands. First skiffle, then blues and soul, then rock and roll. What in that caused the TSAHB to produce what they did I have no idea. I enjoyed the music when it was new, heard it enough, then moved along. I could buy the CD's, but I'd have to spend 60-70 bucks and there's a good posibility that I might not listen to them enough to get value.

Here's a few of my favorites to give a listen to. There aren't a lot of different songs on YouTube but these are pretty much a good sampler of the band's music. . 

 Vambo

Vambo (Live)

Faith Healer

Tomahawk Kid

Sgt Fury

Framed

I Just Wanna Make Love To You

The Man In The Jar

3189 Heartlake Stables

I was tempted to pick up one of these while they're $34 on Amazon right now but I spent my LEGO money on those Holiday sets a couple of weeks ago so I'm holding off. It's normally a $50 set so that's a fair saving. Unfortunately it's only got 401 pieces and that's about 12.5 cents a part. The lower price on Amazon makes the part average about 9 cents. That's better but it seems high when you're talking about a set that's a third off. Makes it harder to want to spend money on the set.  It's an ok set and there are some nice parts that I would like to have, if I didn't feel I have enough of them already.

             

I like the horses and the cat. There's also a frog. I've already got the horse on the right from another set and I think I have one of the cat too. Mind you, you can't have enough horses at times. The 3 16x16 green plates are good to have. Most of the TwinLUGer's want them for Micropolis. They aid in making sturdy bases for MOCs. The pink hand truck is pure win. There are about 3 dozen various accessories and my fav is the pitchfork. Too many of the accessories are in colors that are less than useful at times. There's a bit of tan, pink, medium blue, lime green and dark red. The 8x16 dark red tiles are cool but I would rather have that piece in dark blay. There are 6 white fences but I don't need any of those. I stocked up on a couple of cups of them when they showed up in the Pick-A-Brick wall at the LEGO store a couple of years ago. Not that many highlights, certainly not enough to make me want the set very much. I'm starting to loose interest in the Friends sets. I did pick up some of the two poly bag sets that were on sale during the Valentine seasonal sale period at Target and I should post about them. Maybe later.

 

Russian Car Crash Videos

 

For some reason I totally enjoy those Russian car crash videos. Since the meteor exploding over Mother Russia last week had been in the news I had been hearing newscasters talk about how Russians use dash cams to record their driving around to keep from getting sued over fake accidents by the Russian mob. It happens a lot there, you know, what with Russia being a bit filled with criminals. Before the meteor I had been watching the the car crashes from the dash cams and in some preverse way I liked them. I have been talking to people about both and was surprised to find a lot of them hadn't seen these joyful attempts at driving. I say joyful, 'cause I think a lot of people are drunk, hopefully they aren't just totally fucking stupid. Not that it's only the Russians, they just seem to have the market cornered on dash cams. There are some really big dumbasses all around the world. When it comes to driving, no place is safe. Here's nearly two hours of world wide "what the fuck!"

 

Sometimes it does seem like it's the road conditions that cause the accident but if it's icy, you should slow down, dumbass. Here's one from January 2013 that has a lot of poor skills on bad roads. There's a plane in there too. It sure makes me less interested in visiting Russian, that's for sure. I'm glad I hardly see this sort of thing in real life. Better to enjoy it on tv and feel good that the Russian body shop business is steady work. If you count the people selling dash cams, that's a couple of Russian business that might be making some rubles.

Science Fiction Sunday 221

 

The Chase is the last serial that Ian and Barbara appear in. It first ran on the BBC May 22 to June 26 1965 and between 9-10 million people watched each episode. It's no wonder the series has become ingrained in the British consciousness with that many kids talking about it at school the following week. Besides Ian (William Russell) and Barbara (Jacqueline Hill) on board the Tardis there's the First Doctor (William Hartnell) and Vicki (Maureen O'Brien). The six part story is written by Terry Nation and directed by Richard Martin. I'm still not a fan of Terry Nation's scripts and this one has some of the same problems I have with his other scripts. In his defense who knows how much that script got changed by the producers. Some of the interviews and things I read online point to much "hands on" by the producers. 

The Tardis crew land on a desert planet that has an underground city. There are tentacled monsters roaming the tunnels as well as the humanoid aliens that were once underwater dwellers. The once fish people have lost their water world to encroaching desert. Daleks are following the Tardis with their own time machine and they have murder on their mind. The Doctor and Barbara see the Daleks on their Visualiser and hear that the Daleks are sending an extermination squad after the Tardis. The Visualiser is only a one way device and the Daleks don't know that the Doctor has rumbled their game. The Daleks land on the planet and capture the empty Tardis. The Doc's gang are hiding out in the tunnels. They get caught a bit, escape a bit and giving the Daleks the slip they jump back into the Tardis and the chase is on. Their trip takes them to the Empire State Building in 1966, the Mary Celeste in 1872 and a mechanical monster filled haunted house in 1996 before they finally land on the planet Mechanus.

 

That's the Tardis crew with Daleks and once fish people on the left and the mechaDracula on the right. The costumes on the once fish people are pretty poor. Cringe worthy. The desert planet was a poorly built place on top of that, especially the outside parts, but the haunted house was kind of fun. The makeup and costumes on the robot monsters was pretty good. They built a bit of the Mary Celeste with a side of the ship and some water. One of the Daleks drops over the side of the ship. It just rolled off the deck, through a chain, and fall into the water. It's not like anyone was there to push it or anything. It's that lack of good story telling ability that bugs me about the series. The model of white city on Mechanus is pretty nice. That's it below right. The round robot guys below are the inhabitants of Mechanus. They fight the Daleks a bit later. It's a pretty goofy fight with lots of odd camera moves and superimposed images.

 

Of course the Doctor foils the Daleks hit squad and captures their time machine. That's when Ian and Barbara figure they can use it to get back to their own time and place. The Doctor gets all cranky but he goes along with their plan. In one of the interviews William Russell says it was the same way in real life. William Hartnell couldn't see why they would want to leave the show. The end of the show has a montage of the two of them bouncing around London, looking happy, glad to be home. Of course they are 2 years in the future of when they left. They have a lot of explaining to do. In some of the books Ian and Barbara marry and become professors at Cambridge.

 

There were some good number of extras, a whole disc full, that I watched. There several featurettes with cast and crew interviews on the serial. Doctor Who - Follow That Dalek is a collection of the Doctor Who Give-a-Show Slides toy. There's a nice featurette on Shawcraft. They were the hired company that made a lot of props and sets for the show. The BBC effects team was a couple of guys in a little room. The company wouldn't spring for more men and space so they went outside. Shawcraft mostly made industrial models. They show some in the video and they are pretty nice models. The stuff they built for Doctor Who ranged from pretty good to so-so. At times they seem like they just didn't have a good idea. I'm sure the low-budget didn't give them much time or money to complete their work well.

Friday NIght Movies 413

Death Sushi is another film influenced by the Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes. It's directed by Noboru Iguchi who did a slight bit better with RoboGeisha, Mutant Girl Squad and The Machine Girl though none of them are really films that I want to watch repeatedly. I'm not much interested in seeing his poop comedy Zombie Ass though it a goofy title. In DS, a young woman leaves home after her sushi chef father tells her she's not any good at making sushi. She takes a job at an Inn and gets bullied by some asshole businessman. There's a third rate sushi chef at the Inn and his sushi gets tainted by a virus from a suppoedly dead biochemist. He used to work for that asshole businessman but the officers of the company pushed him out and now he's interested in getting some vengence. His virus makes the sushi come alive, grow teeth, fly, and kill people. The young woman has to fight the sushi to save herself and 1 or 2 of the others. After the slaughterfest she returns to her father with some mad choppin' skills. Not as interesting as one might hope. It drags a bit and makes little sense. Occasionally there's a laugh or two. Not one I think I need to pick up.

Even draggier than our first movie was The Assassins. It's a 2012 Chinese costume drama about the last days of Cao Cao. That's about 200 AD. It's got Chow Yun Fat as Cao Cao, the King of Wei. He's pretty much running the government and has the sad and weak Emperor under his thumb. There are people in the court, including the Emperor, that want to kill him. There's an elaborate plot where the children of people that Cao Cao killed are kidnapped and forced to train as assassins. Ten years later they force the teens to fight to the death. Then they get a chance to go kill Cao Cao. We follow a couple of them as they get close to the King of Wei. There are some attempts on Cao Cao's life but they all fail. It's a sad film with little good happening to anyone. Another sterling reminder that ancient China is a real shit hole. If we had time machines it would serve as a good reminder not to go there. It looks real pretty, there are a lot of nice sets and costumes, but it's all melodramatic and dull. It put half the room to sleep and while I wasn't one them I sure was skating on the thin ice covering lake Morpheus. Another one that I wouldn't need to buy.      

3Doodler

 

I heard about this on MPR Marketplace this morning while on the way to work. It's a 3D pen that writes in the air. Then I got to work there was a mention on The Presurfer of the pen. They had a Kickstarter page and they were looking for $30,000. It was at $900,000 when they did the story, not when it aired this AM, now it's up to $1.2 million. It's kind of neat thing but not sure I would need one.

What I Read In October 2012

I need to catch my ass up with all the book posts from last year and February is nearly over. Last October I read 14 books. Four were collections of comics and two were collections of art.

   

Samuel Blink And The Forbidden Forest by Matt Haig was something I found at Half Price Books. I liked the cover and the book sounded interesting. It was. Samuel and his sister Martha go live with with their aunt Edna after their parents die. She lives in a house on the edge of a small town in Norway. Edna's house in at the edge of a forest and Edna tells the kids to stay out ot the woods. Uncle Henrik disappeared there 10 years ago. Magical things happen before Martha enters the forest, Samuel follows,  they find out what happened to their Uncle. It turns out to be a pretty good story and well told. I'm keeping it.

Walt Kelly's Our Gang 3 & 4 are the last two of the series that Frantagraphics has, so far, failed to finish. These 2 volumes collects the stories that appeared from 1945 to 1947. The 4th collection came out May 2010 and so far no new ones and there's nothing on the Frantragraphics website. It was supposed to be part of a 7 volume set. Still a good couple of books for the Kelly fan and I'm glad to have them especially since I got the 15 dollar books for a ten spot each. The unfinished set thing seems to have happened to me before. Several times. You start buying the reprints of some series and it stops being issued before they finish the series. It's always a risk, if it isn't all released already. Mind you there aren't any shortages of finished sets. It would be nice if they finished the Our Gang series though.

   

The King Fisher Treasury Of Monster Stories chosen by Jane Oliver was a nice little collection of short stories about monsters. I got it in the clearance section at HPB for about a buck. It was a quick read and well worth it.

The Troll Witch And Others - Hellboy 7 by Mike Mignola collects several mini-series and one shot comics. The Hydra and the Lion, The Troll Witch, Dr. Carp's Experiment, The Ghoul, The Vampire of Prague and Makoma. The first 4 stories were illustrated by Mignola and were first published in the 4 The Dark Horse Books of... that were published between 2003 and 2006. The Vampire Of Prague was illustrated by P Craig Russell and Makoma was illustrated by Richard Corben. A nice collection of stories. Other people illustrating Mignola stories would get more common place as time past.

Hellboy Junior is a collection of Hellboy parody comics that were originally published as a couple of single issue comics. There are some pretty silly things in there and I enjoyed reading it. It's only 64 pages so it's barely a book but there you go.

   

How To Cheat A Dragon's Curse - Hiccup 4 by Cressida Cowell is another story with Hiccup the Viking and all the other Viking kids. There's some villians and a great Pirate girl. A still enjoyable series. I keep looking for the later volumes but so far no luck.

The Entropy Effect by Vonda McIntyre was a pretty poor book. Not a keeper. Wish I hadn't spent that 50 cents on it.

Heroes Of The Valley by Jonathan Stroud on the other hand was a much better book. A young teen guy lives in a medieval type society in a valley that is their whole world. Really, all the people live in this huge valley and they never travel anywhere and no one ever comes to visit them. They never travel past ihe ridges that surround the valley. There are legends of monsters. They don't go there. There's murder and our hero is right in the thick of it. There was usually something happening of interest. I'll keep this one but not the next.

Buried Fire by Jonathan Stroud just wasn't of interest to me. I did read it and then put it on the going away from here stack. I would recommend Stroud's later Bartimaeus Trilogy. Those were really much better in every way.

 

The Art Of Harvey Kurtzman by Dennis Kitchen and Paul Buhle is a nice big book I got for about 8 bucks at Half Price Books with a 50% off coupon. It's still 45 bucks on Amazon. It's a nice large book with plenty of art to look at and a fairly nice overview of Harvey's life and career. He was sure talented but he had a hard time with his career, at least until he started doing Little Annie Fanny for Playboy. It's pretty entertaining.

Norman Saunders by David Saunders is another huge art book with lots of color painting by Saunders. It too was cheap, 10 smackers, at HPB. Saunders was a pulp guy who painted lots of magazine covers and paperbacks. He later worked at Topps painting the images for the Mars Attacks cards and Wacky Packages stickers. His son wrote the book and he puts in lots of family pictures and history. Nice. 

 

Star Trek - The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah was a much better Star Trek book than the one I had tackled before. It was well worth the 50 cents I paid for it. Kirk, McCoy and Spock are on Vulcan. There's murder at the VA. Kirk sets out to solve the crime. It's harder on Vulcan. They are so logical they don't understand why anyone would murder. Some people are doopy, huh. It was one of the better ST books that I read. I didn't keep it but that's ok.

FableHaven 1 by Brandon Mull is the first of a series of 5 novels. Seth and Kendra are a 10 and 16. They go visit their grandparents and discover that there's one of those secret universe's out there. Lucky for them, it's one that will kill them. The grandparents are the caretakers at a large, super secret preserve that is home to lot of mythical creatures. It's a place for them to be hidden from the humans. Some of the creatures are fairly harmless and some would kill you for a bit of amusement. There are even some in magical prisons on the preserve. Seth is a bit of a jerk who keeps butting into things. His sister is more level headed. The book was fairly good and I thought I would like to read the rest.

Fourteen books. Not a bad month with some ok reads.

10229 Winter Village Cottage

The LEGO store has these sets for 30% off. It's a $100 set in the US and it's got 1490 parts including the 8 minifigs. Normally that would be about 6.7 cents a part. I know a lot of them are small but that's still a nice price. With the 30% off it's just over 4 cents each. Yahoo! I was sitting on a $100 gift card that I got from a guy at work. He had asked me to build a LEGO model last January for a program at the Minneasota Science Museum. I also had $5 in VIP points so I figured I would get 3 of them. It's been a slow period for clearance sets and I had hardly found anything of note lately. I wound up with 3 hundred dollar sets with a total of 4470 parts for about $115 of my own money. Over the weekend I bust all the bags open and sorted out all the parts. After going through it I thought it was a nice parts pack, especially for the kind of parts that I like. My major motivation was the large number of white plates in the set. There are 122 plates of various sizes, including 4 of the 8x16 plates that are used in the base of the house. I could always use a bit of a rejuvination in my white plate stock. The other white pieces in the set are also handy and in good quantities.

You get a cottage and a small building that I can only wish was an outhouse. There's a truck, a sled and an igloo. All the minifig costumes have been in other, mostly holiday, sets but they are costumes of a generic nature which I find more useful than something specific. Here's the description from Brickset which I think came from the LEGO site.

Get cosy in the Winter Village Cottage!

Continuing the winter series, build the Winter Village Cottage for a perfect holiday home. Seat Grandpa snugly by the fireplace with his newspaper as you help Dad to put up the tree, then bake a feast in the kitchen with Mom! When it's time to stock up the storage shed with firewood, bring the kids for a ride with Dad on the sledge watch him cut the wood with his chainsaw deep in the forest. When the snow gets really deep, clear the road with the snowplough, take all of the kids skiing or build an igloo to play in. There's no cosier place to spend long, frosty nights!

• Includes 8 minifigures: mum, dad, grandma, grandpa, 3 children and snowplough driver with assorted accessories
• Features cottage, storage shed, igloo, streetlamp, sled and snowplough
• Accessories include kitten, owl, fireplace with LEGO® light brick function, chandelier, Christmas tree, wreath, gifts, armchair, kitchen appliances and bed
• Storage shed features tools and firewood elements
• Igloo features fireplace and removable roof
• Rare elements and colours included
• Detach the snowplough to store it in the back of the truck!
• Make the fireplace glow with the LEGO light brick!
• Decorate the cottage!
• Fetch firewood with the sledge!
• Drive the snowplough!
• Cottage measures 6.7” (17cm) high, 9.8” (25cm) wide and 5.5” (14cm) deep
• Storage shed measures 4.3” (11cm) high, 2.7” (7cm) wide and 2.7” (7cm) deep
• Igloo measures 2.7” (7cm) high, 2.7” (7cm) wide and 2.7” (7cm) deep
• Snowplough measures 2.7” (7cm) high, 7” (18cm) long (with plow attached) and 2.3” (6cm) wide

I like that they put rare elements and colours included as a feature. There are a few odd parts that only appear in a few sets or in small quantities but hardly anything is really rare anymore. The rarest might be the 2 clear headlight bricks which have only appeared in 7 sets so far. Four of them are large sets and one of them is that limited edition LEGO store set. The other two are smaller size sets. Still, it's safe to say that there might be several hundred thousand, or even over a million, of that rare piece out there. Mind you the cost of the part on the secondary market helps reflects the rarety. A black headlight brick starts at a penny and the trans headlight starts at 25 cents. It really depends on what you can do with them. Sometimes I need to have a part in order to think of a use for it. I didn't bother to build the set but I did look at the instructions to see where those clear headlight bricks went. They are the back window on the slow plow. Here's a look inside the house.

We can only hope that everyone doesn't have to share the same bed. I like parts of the place but not the whole thing. The rooms look pretty nice but the interior of the roof fails. I could see that the interior of the roof might be painted white but then what are those brown and dark blay plates supposed to be. Still, I'm not picking this up to make a little cottage for a scene so I really shouldn't care what it looks like. I can do better on my own anyway. I do like the sticker sheet. It makes a wreath for the door, grandpa's newspaper and a 2x4 size picture for the wall. It's got a moose. Beside the nice big stack of white plates there are some other nice large lots of pieces. There are 203 tiles, most of which are the 1x1 size. There are 40 each of white 1x1 and the dark blue 1x11 for the kitchen floor. There are over 2 dozen of the round 1x1 tile in various colors, including transparent kind.

 

Since I'm a fan of the medium blue color it was nice to get 173 parts of that color in each set. There are 46 of the 1x1 brick, 35 of the 1x2 brick, 19 of the 1x1 plate and 23 of the 1x2 plate. There are plenty of smaller amounts of other colors, black, tan, both blays, green and dark blue. The reddish brown is another color that is well represented with 217 parts. Not much red or yellow or blue. There are 63 cheese slopes, including some 1x2 size. There are 40 of the tan 1x2 brick bricks. I've been massing enough to make a house. Now I'll use them in the fairy cottage for the comic con. All in all a great set for the parts I wanted and with that free 100 bucks it was a great bargin.

Science Fiction Sunday 220

 

The Ark is the 23rd serial and it's from the 3rd series. It was first broadcast March 5 - 26 1965. William Hartnell is still the First Doctor. Peter Purves plays Steven Taylor and he was making 30 quid a week back then. Jackie Lane plays Dodo. She would stop working in front of the camera and become an agent. The previous serial introduced Dodo Chaplet to the crew when she entered the Tardis and was whisked off 1966 Earth. Dodo would prove to be a fairly unpopular character with the 1960's audience and the BBC wanted her gone. She would be abuptly written out of the series in The War Machines. I sure don't care for her much.

The Tardis arrives in a spaceship from Earth about the year 10,000,000. The Ark is on a 700 year journey to another planet. The Earth is going to be bathed with solar radiation and made uninhabitable. The Ark is filled with escaping humans and their animals. The sets are pretty good this time, filled with plants and props. The space scenes of outside of the space ark aren't very good. Along the voyage the humans rescue the Monoids from their dying planet. The Monoids have pretty crappy costumes with face covering long hair and a ping pong ball, with an eye painted on it, stuck in the actor's mouth. At first they don't talk, using their hands for signing. The human costumes are kind of silly, panties and ribbons of cloth dripping off of fancy collars. And that's just the men. The humans are in charge but later the Monoids revolt and take over. Soon after the arrival of the Tardis the humans and aliens start getting sick. They're all getting Dodo's cold. Yet another reason to dislike the Tardis crew, huh. Sure the Doctor can cure them but that's just cleaning up his own mess. Too bad Dodo didn't stay in the Tardis. Thinking their work is done the gang boards the Tardis and takes off. They materialize 700 years into the future still on the Ark. The Monoids have taken over and enslaved the humans. Now it become one of those revolting rebel stories. There's even a ticking time bomb on board the ship to add some tension. I liked a bit of it but not a winner in my book. I don't find Dodo or Steven to be engaging companions, the scripts still have the characters do some goofy things, and it's dull at times.

There's are the usual handfull of extras. I haven't listened to all the audio commentaries yet. DW Fan and comedian Toby Haddoke, actor Peter Purves and serial director Michael Imison chat during the 4 episodes. I might finish listening to them before I return the disc to the library. I did go through the featurettes. One is about HG Wells and his ideas as they apply to Doctor Who. I not buying all of it and I got bored before the short ended. There's a short about creatures who only appear in one serial. The Monoids haven't come back yet. There's a good reason. They sucked, big time. The featurette on Riverside Studios with Peter Purves and Michael Imison was pretty entertaining. That was the second studio the show was shot in. It was bigger than the Lime Grove studio and much better equiped. They couldn't get a full size police box in the Lime Grove elevator so it had to be smaller than the real thing. They would move back to Lime Grove after a while. Once again, the BBC does the dumb thing. 

Friday Night Movies 412

Seven Psychopaths is a 2012 British black comedy starring Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson and Tom Waits. Colin's a screenwriter who's got a title for his new screenplay, Seven Psychopaths, but he's short of a story. His friend Sam is a dog kidnapper. Sam and his gang steal dogs and return them when the owner puts up a reward. Sam steals Woody's dog. Woody really likes his dog and when he goes looking for it, people start dying. The script is clever and amusing. Mind you, you need to like jokes spattered with blood. It's different enough to stand out and should appeal to the off beat crime film fans. It's written and directed by Martin McDonagh. It's his second movie, In Bruges was first. He's also written some award winning plays. At one time he was the only guy to have 4 plays going on at the same time in London's West End since William S. I can't imagine ever seeing his plays but I might see his first movie.

Frankenweenie is a Tim Burton stop motion animated film about a kid who re-animates his dead dog. The movie started as a short that Burton did when he first worked at Disney ages ago. I have that on some dvd or another. It fun enough and so is the full length movie. It's got a bunch of fun scenes and horror movie parodies but I just wasn't too taken with it. I probably wouldn't bother buying one.