Oh no! The Goblin's coming!

"Ach! That naughty goblin is on my tail..."


"He's gonna bite me on the bum!"


I was trying to say in German that my late cat Coco ...


... looked "like a furry black imp" ...


Or a sprite or a pixie ....


But the standard German "Kobold" means a goblin ...


Or even a hobgoblin!


And these are after the poor wild hammy!
"Ach! He's coming! And he sounds like a hobgoblin too!"


"I've gotta ping back to my burrow before he bites my bum!"


"At least he can't follow me down here, the swine!"

§ § §


MUSICAL INTERLUDE: PIXIE LOTT ~ MAMA DO



She ought to change her name: GOBLIN LOTT!

The Common European Hammy

FURRY FRIDAY


The European hamster Cricetus Cricetus is the biggest hamster in the world, standing one foot high on his haunches. His belly is black. He is very easily surprised... especially if he thinks a goblin is chasing him!


Common European hamsters live in Central Europe and West Asia. They love packing their pouches. They build deep, complex burrows with living rooms and special chambers for food storage, bathroom, bedroom and hibernation chamber. "Oh!" he says. "I hear a goblin!"


"Can't see any flying goblins...!"


"Where is the goblin? On the ground, you say..?"


"Hi there!" Casual hamster-style...


"Oh no, the goblin's back!"



Video: Common European Hamster Family
See how even baby hammies have varying personalities.
One is calm, the other won't stop pinging into that bush!


WISHING YOU ALL A WONDROUS WEEKEND!

Kipper Addiction

I HAVE JUST REALIZED I AM ADDICTED TO KIPPERS... haddock, mackerel... smoked fish of all kinds. this is terrible! What am I going to to?!

Like a clucking junkie this morning I trawled the supermarket in desperation along the chilled meats isles. Finally I found smoked mackerel with peppers all over it (coloured and black, yes you can even get chili-peppered mackerel these days)... my eye drifted along to haddock and then "kippers". There is no such fish swimming in the sea as a "kipper". It just means smoked herring. Tescos yesterday wanted £3 for 200g ie £15 a kg. Morrisons own were 78p for 200g ie £3.90 per kg or nearly a quarter of the price.

I took them home gleefully and indulged in my habit with toast, behind closed doors.

What am I going to tell Narcotics Anonymous? Hi I'm an addict and I'm addicted to heroin, crack (as was, gave that up January 1 2009), drink, the odd Valium and KIPPERS! Ukh. But they're so moreish....


NAOMI CAMPBELL was in a crimes against humanity court today. Hurrah! I thought. Finally the beautiful monster is getting nailed for her offences to fashion, music, novel-writing and film. But no, it was some silly case that she would inevitably answer no to, because no-one will admit in front of the taxman to a potentially multimillion pound gift, that the President of Liberia gave her a whacking great blood diamond.

She says no (quelle surprise!) But she did wake up in the middle of the night at the Presidential Villa in South Africa with two mysterious men standing over her (she didn't lock her door, what a tart!) who handed her a "bag of dirty stones".

Hmmm...

I bet she gets more in free gifts off her millionaire boyfriends than she ever earns on the catwalk or in front of a lens. I heard she only makes £2 million a year, which sounds fine and dandy till you realize her agency takes a whacking cut, then the tax man ~ 50%! ~ which can't leave more than about £700,000 a year. And how are you meant to live and buy a decent house on that!!

Those horrible "real housewives of New Jersey" were boasting of the value of their homes. Well one was. And I translated dollars to pounds and thought, hang on a minute one of my old houses was worth that.

Yes a standard £500,000 London home, housing the poor and destitute!

Illustrated: kippers, Naomi Campbell ~ mobile-phone lobbing queen of mean, Millennium Star diamond ~ 203-carat D-flawless!


Naomi Campbell talks cocaine addiction with Oprah Winfrey



Vauxhall Corsa: the new supermodel 1992 commercial
Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington et al... and a car

Slow Control

I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY. I'm fed up of complaining about myself as if I'm somebody else. I suppose this is the point. I'm trying to grab the controls to my life with both hands and steer in the right direction.

For so long nobody has been steering at all. The only way I've gone forward is in time, because time marches on. But in every other sense I'm going nowhere.

I think I'm going to go back to NA again. At least NA meetings are full of addicts who (somehow) cleaned themselves up and got lives back. I haven't a clue how any of them managed to do it, but somehow they did. I know NA works. I've seen it work. I just hope it might work for me!

The bottom drawer: a hamster story

THIS IS A TRUE STORY, that happened about 14 years ago, to my late hamster Hammy.

Hammy was my best golden hamster. He lived in a large cracked old fishtank. He looked like a cartoon character.

He loved running. The standard hamster wheel was far too small for him. So I bought him a special rat wheel with a one-foot diameter. On this he could sprint at full-tilt.

All day long Hammy slept very deeply. When I dared introduce my hand near his nest, he would wake up furious, chattering and gnashing his teeth. Sometimes he even sprang up like a poisonous snake. Then he realized the hand was just mine, and he sniffed at it, and calmed down. Of course he was also hoping for titbits!

Every day at six o'clock he got up, washed his ears, did a wee, ate, drank and then jumped on the rat wheel and ran and ran and ran almost constantly till past six in the morning!

I worked out, he ran at least EIGHT MILES or TWELVE KILOMETRES per night! What a furry athlete!

Sometimes he got off the wheel and ran around it to see where he was!

One evening I let him out to ramble freely about the carpet. He loved this. He was a bit dur though, because when I put his wheel in the corner of the room he ran up to it, jumped on and started trotting again! This particular evening he decided to go exploring behind my bottom drawer. He was having a great time scurrying back there.

When I put him back in his nest, he packed up his bedding in his pouches, then scrabbled against the glass to say, "Let me out!" He ran behind the drawer and began preparing his new bed there.

I put him back in the aquarium, where he packed his pouches so full he looked like a golden football with eyes. "Let me out!" So I set him on back on the carpet and he sprinted to his new nest.

When Hammy's new nest had grown absolutely colossal, I realized, "Oh, he can't live here!" So: back to the fishtank.

He was absolutely furious! He scrabbled and scratched relentlessly at the glass, pouches full, ready to make his new nest even more enormous than it already was. (I'd actually put the nest back on his old bed, but Pandable wasn't too hot on such technicalities.) When he realized he was back in the tank for the evening he sprang on the wheel with great irritation and pinged at top speed for mile after mile. Every now and then he got off and seemed bemused: no drawer, no new nest anywhere to be found. I felt so sorry for him.

I was reminded of a saying:

The best-laid plans of mice and men go askew.

Which comes from a poem by Robbie Burns.

Perhaps Burns should have added, plans of mice and hamsters too!

Diana

FINALLY, having leafed through endless Diana tomes. Morton (interesting, but skewed) Burrel (insufferable hagiography) Colin Campbell (interesting) Brown (anti) I finally found one that appears to give a rounded account. Clayton & Craig, Diana: Story of a Princess. It's a very sad story. I think a lot of us felt sad with her. Not for, but with.

When she died, the country went nuts. That week, Britain ran out of cut flowers and newsprint. The shops were almost empty ~ everywhere. Nobody wanted to buy anything. Newspapers reported on nothing else. Television played endless tributes, discussion etc etc.

Here from pp315-6, describing the last working trip Diana made, to Angola.



We went into one particular ward with children. And there was a little girl who was clearly in a terrible condition. She'd gone to fetch water and had stepped on a mine and basically had her entire insides blown out, and everything was sort of hanging out. It was horrific. And the hospital said that she wouldn't survive ~ they were just making her as comfortable as possible. You could see that she probably wouldn't last, maybe even that day.

After Diana moved on, I stayed and just asked the girl a few more questions, because I thought I would write about her. And she said to me, "Who was that?" And it was quite hard trying to explain Princess Diana to somebody who didn't know. And I said, "She's a princess from England, from far away." And she said to me, "Is she an angel?" And I found that really moving. This little girl probably died a few hours after that ~ I know she died ~ and it somehow seemed nice that that was the last thing that she saw, this beautiful lady that she thought was an angel.

DIANA: THE SECRET TAPES
The tapes in question were the audio tapes on which Andrew Morton based Diana: Her True Story. The tapes in these extracts are videos of Diana practising a speech on addiction. It doesn't start till 5 mins into the part 8; she is being coached by the actor Peter Settelen. William and Harry are in the background, (part 9) Diana keeps reprimanding them for laughing and not sitting still.

Musical Interlude

MEN AT WORK: DOWN UNDER
Big George was going on about this at 3 in the morning last night (on BBC London radio and if you click, the times are wrong: 2am-6am) and it reminded me how much I like it.
I remember it popping up from nowhere and hitting number one.
And I like the distinctive sound thing intro whatever at the beginning.
I did try and tell the Pandable story but I'm turning into Charles Dickens. Never using one word when 125 will do... so it'll have to wait till tomorrow and the heavily redacted version.
Anyway; the song:



Men at Work article, Wikipedia. Apparently the intro is a flute. Strange kind of flute to me, but there you go. A court case was held over this years later and it was ruled that although the "riff" was lifted from a song called Kookaburra, it wasn't an inherent part of the song and the plaintiffs were thus entitled to only a 5% share of songwriting (which probably adds up to a lot).

Oriental Style Chicken Curry £1 etc

ICELAND "ORIENTAL STYLE CHICKEN CURRY" tonight. Boil int' bag (but of course). And only £1. Much nicer than yesterday's noodles, which were a bit "school dinners". Very pleasant indeed.

The me-shaped hole yesterday means not only that I felt I had a place on the shelves, but (and this really surprised me) I could find nobody else writing like me. Most extraordinary.

I deleted a big rant about the state of modern publishing, but I deleted so much of it, I deleted my main point too, ha-har!

Well the Goods Train of Entertainment trundles on, I can't go on about it. Writing's for writing. Not writing about..!

Well this is a nonpost. Tomorrow I'll tell you a true furry story about Pandable my old hammy, which is really entertaining.

The mysterious illness I have had for over a fortnight is still diarrhoeaing out, intermittently and unpredictably (as I'm sure you wanted to know). I'm so tired. I'm not in my sick bed but a sick armchair. I slept in the sick armchair, like a pensioner, all day. Ukh.



MUSICAL INTERLUDE

In the VIP. It's not called "clubbing" for nothing. A club really is a club. Like any other social group you have inner and outer circles. Nightlife is hierarchical and full of snobbery. Do you stand in the endless line, or swan right in? Do you pay? Get a comp? Or best of all, are you on the Guest List?

Then once you get in, are you just one of the common, vulgar herd, or in the "proper" room ~ the VIP room.

I avoided such clubs like the plague!

In the VIP:
WIDEBOYS & MAJESTIC (IN THE VIP REMIX) FEAT B-LIVE and BOY BETTER KNOW



The Streets: Fit (But You Know It)
He wrote an entire album about Ibiza party isle memories. Kicking off with this track ~

Me-Shaped Hole

I HAD a £1 Chinese chicken and noodles from Iceland. Boil int' bag. Hubble-bubbled away for 40 mins. Considering even a lunchtime combination box, a cheapie, is £3 minimum, for £1 this was amazing.

I checked out my nearest bookshop and found a glaring me-shaped hole where my books should be. Books plural, because I have a wealth of ideas.

Yes the project is moving at last! Like a creaky old goods train, it has shuddered to a start. The hoary old locomotive is belching diesel smoke and trundling wearily onwards ~ bringing cartloads of entertainment to the world!

Sorry I've not been visiting any of you very much at all. Nothing personal. But I must focus. I'm still not feeling too fantastic. My energy reserves are low and must be wisely invested. Talent ~ as I was banging on the other day ~ is not to be wasted!

Got to run. I hope you're all keeping well. Take care of yourselves. Just for a change, I'm trying to take care of me!

Who knows? One day this Me-Shaped Hole might be overflowing with amazing tales!

The most beautiful cows in the world....

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY

Jersey cows come (of course) from the British Isle of Jersey, in the English Channel, which is nearer to France than the UK.


With beautiful eyes...


The milk of these cows...


... is world-famous.


"Moo!"


"Moo!"
"Moo!"
"Moo!"


A tiny calf says: "Moo!"
(They love lowing!)


Aren't they gorgeous?

WISHING Y'ALL A WONDERFUL WEEKEND!

Ill (yet inspired)

I'M not feeling well. Not at all. Every day I'm in bed early, drained, exhausted and sick. Last night Valium Marilyn and I went down the pub and got bladdered enough that she proposed marriage. But I felt so bad I had to leave before ten o'clock to go to my bed.

Today I was supposed to go to counselling. I hobbled to and from my methadone chemists already and the phone rang. My counsellor asked what time I wished to come in. I said midday, then regretted agreeing to anything. I wove my way home feeling as if I might keel over any second. Then I went to bed, phoned the Centre and said I was not up to coming in.

This has nothing to do with drugs. If you remember my story you'll remember I had chronic fatigue syndrome YEARS before heroin addiction. Heroin seemed a wonderful cure for this and the depression that has dogged me for years. Heroin came second. Something Maple Syrup, for example, the druggieworker I sacked, refused to understand.

I have the feeling that this counsellor will likewise assume I'm not coming in because I was too drugged/couldn't be bothered/that type of reason.

These professionals annoy me. It's all nodding yes yes yes to all my problems. Yet when when my problems interfere with THEIR convenience, sympathy's quickly out the window.

I'm off sick and yet I'm not even allowed to BE sick. Well the world can go to hell...

None of this will stop me doing what I have to. I can write in bed. If my head's swimming that badly I have to shut my eyes, I'm still capable of typing. I can type eyes closed, by touch.

I don't want to say much about my project. It's for doing, not talking about.

And I cannot see that it will make me megabucks.

Somehow my comments (Wednesday) got on to the theme of publishing advances. As I said I really cannot think about how little I might get. Or how much writers are paid at the top end of the profession. It's devastatingly offputting.

Literature in an art; publishing is a business. I'm in the business of writing. The ins and outs of royalties, advances (if they even exist, I wouldn't know) and the blah blah blahs... these do my brainbox in whenever I turn my attention in that direction.

So I'm resolutely NOT thinking about how little I'm likely to be paid.

I am ever more fed up with heroin and methadone and addiction to them. But I cannot quit into a vacuum. Which is why I stated that I'm NOT into giving up the drugs and all right now.

As I see it, just about anything I can do will be better than nothing. Accomplishing a dearly held childhood dream might be just about the best thing I could ever do.

What's the saying...? The longest journey begins with a single step.

Whenever I think of my story, I feel inspired. I still feel horrible and depressed. Physically I feel ill and exhausted. I am going to bed early because my head's swimming. Not with drugs, with exhaustion. But I have this tale inside me of such amazingness, it DEMANDS to be told!

I have been stuck in this morass for years and it's killing me. It's time to move on.

My only hope is that this first step might be followed by another... and another...

... then one day I might look back and find myself a thousand miles away from the mire I'm stuck in now!

Flying Donkeys!

Foal flying along the ground...


Fuzzy trotter-donkeys!


What's the saying... stubborn as a..? What? A greedy swine who insists you drag along a load five times too heavy, then looks surprised when this happens..?



The famous Russian parasailing donkey...

... poor swine!

Wasted Talent

A TALENT was originally a weight of silver or gold and hence a sum of money. The word entered our language via the Parable of the Talents in the Bible. (Matthew 24:14-30; Luke 19:12-28.)

Spiritual interpretations aside a Talent is something valuable which it's up to us to use and not take for granted. Talented people have made the world a lot of what it is. Talent can change the world again.

Talent should never be wasted.

I was wondering why I felt increasingly uptight about what I saw as other people's "waste of talent". Michael Jackson who could sing so well hardly ever really showed off his voice. He was also a more than capable actor (see yesterday). But he never starred in a feature-film. MJ was said to have a thing about ET, and he knew Stephen Spielberg. Imagine what could have been achieved if Jacko and Spielberg had got together...

As we all know, Michael Jackson's career was all but ruined by child abuse allegations. He achieved more than any other musical star of his or any other generation. And yet...

He died in a drugged-out haze.

If you want to hear him singing a song named Morphine, click here.

Whitney Houston's voice was one of the wonders of the world. (Far better than Mariah Carey. Screaming an octave over top C is not a talent. That's like having extra long fingers or a third nipple. That ain't music, that's freakery.)

I'm more than amenable to middle of the road music, though it's not always my favourite. The only Whitney song I really like, from the first half of her career is the Dolly Parton cover I Will Always Love You. This morning (for some reason) I had Saving All My Love for You swirling round my head when I was buying Value Thin Bleach (20p) from Morrisons...

In the 1990s, having made her name and fortune, she went R&B and did put down a few tracks that are not only memorable but good. (One Moment in Time is memorable, but just did not do it for me.)

She was recently on tour in Europe. The press coverage was nearly all the same. The voice is gone.

The word is, she lost her voice to crack. Though she famously declared to Dianne Sawyer: "crack? We don't do that. Crack is cheap. I make two much money to ever do crack. Crack is whack."

A phrase that has come back to haunt her...

I could give legions of examples of hugely Talented people who made careers in average films, throw-away music... whatever, whatever.

This is not to mention the endless multitudes who can sing, act, create in various ways (I'm focusing on showbusiness because it's common ground. Y'all know what I'm talking about. "High" art I often find not only pretentious but irrelevant...)

I once lived in a house in a bourgeois suburb of London that wasn't posh but "happening". Television faces drank in the local pub. I passed actors and musicians in the street. At one point I sat opposite Annie Lennox on the top deck of the bus. A car once zoomed past with comic actress Maureen Lipman's head (for some reason) sticking out of the passenger seat window. I dunno who she was looking for. One time Phil Mitchell from EastEnders was at the bar. Certain friends kept ribbing me to go up and point out that Phil ("the hardman of Albert Square and a nasty drunk) was on the waggon. I didn't dare. I subsequently heard stories about this actor, more than once, waving £20 notes at the homeless and snatching them away... Mark Fowler (another EastEnders character ~ EastEnders is, or was, Britain's most popular TV programme, with top episodes attracting Royal Wedding-style 20,000,000 viewing figures)... Yeah Mark Fowler. He gave me £1.67 when I was begging outside Sainsbury's.

My point being that everyone in my house and many people in the area all around it, all wanted to make something of themselves. In a short space of time we had two actors, a singer, a yoga teacher, a maker of luxury furniture (it was just under £1000 a dining chair) and a trainee Alexander teacher were all in this house. I was the writer.

What makes me sad is that the singer, who I think did have beautiful warm, pure voice was a lush. She came in drunk most nights. She hung out with people one of the famous pirate radio stations. This was 1996, when the UK style of garage was all over pirate FM stations, soon to emerge overground. She could have been one of the UK's first "urban" artists. I handed her a Madonna biography hoping she might take inspiration and a few tips, because I could have told her more about the music business than she seemed to know. You need an experienced manager, being an obvious one. Madonna took Michael Jackson's old manager. The singer gave it back complaining Madonna was a tart and then mentioned she couldn't see her manager that morning. He was signing on the dole. Then I despaired. This girl hadn't a clue. She thought talent was a passport to automatic success, it is not. What's that phrase about 1% inspiration 99% perspiration..?

None of the people I knew from that time are now famous. Our actress got into a Spice Girls video. The Spice Girls were the phenomenon of the moment. A week later Oasis phoned wanting her to play violin (that is presumably mime) in a video...

So it was all exciting. But in the end not one of these people made a name for themselves. The person with the most drive had the least talent (a sad mismatch). The actor downstairs did get a speaking part in EastEnders though it was only one or possibly two episodes. As far as I know they all gave up and do normal jobs.

Which leaves me, feeling uptight about the paths other people took when they "could have done so much more"... what's the saying? One finger points forward, three point back?

I've lost an entire decade to heroin. The time before that was an odd-crossover period lasting maybe three years when I dabbled increasingly and at two points got myself tiny habits. But I knew what I was doing was not good. I had seen the utter despair of dead-end addicts. I knew the local beggars, "ticket touts" and homeless.

I was buying used one-day travelcards for £1-2. (I think they were £2 before 8pm or some set time; £1 thereafter.) Even the homeless lived by rules. These ticket touts congregated at tube stations. When a train emptied out it was "Finished with your travelcard?... Finished with your travelcard..?" Then people came in "Do you want a travelcard?...Want a travelcard?" You could go anywhere in London free on bus, train or tube until about 2am. A travelcard then cost £3.50, so to get one for a pound was a bargain. It meant I could go visiting in Hackney, Stepney and West Hampstead, where I sat round drinking red wine, eating middle-class Bulgar wheat veggie type food. I wasn't vegetarian but only knew how to cook veggie. I hated the thought of handling dead flesh...

... Anyway. It was through these ticket touts, who were all junkies, that I got introduced to heroin. I saw the life, I saw the misery. I wanted to try it to see what the fuss was all about (I had tried it once years before but took so many other drugs including acid that night, I had no idea what was doing what...) So I tried it, and still wondered what all the fuss was about. It certainly didn't seem worth going homeless for. And I couldn't understand why they didn't just stop doing it but they were like automatons. Get up, probably feeling a bit sick. Use. Feel OK. Go out. Beg. Score. Beg a bit more. Score again. Go to tube station for early evening rush hour. Sell travel cards. go down West End. Beg up huge amounts of money. Score from late night dealer, heroin and crack. Pipe late into the night. Knock self out with huge hit. Sleep till late morning. And so it starts again.

I was never into West End begging ~ around theatreland and the tourist spots. You got endless hassle from police. Some people begged inside the actual underground stations down there, but again you were liable to get arrested. I begged in the suburbs where you got less money, but hardly any hassle. And the dealers were all nearby.

Someone once pointed out to me that what had started out as a joke "I got drunk with the homeless" had turned into a reality. "I am homeless. Plus I'm a junkie." I did feel strangely accepted by these addicts ~ as I never really was by the shoplifting and prostitution contingent (they were a totally different crowd). Even in rehab shoplifters looked down on beggars. What's that saying now...

Rich man, poor man, beggarman ... THIEF!

Everyone I knew who begged did it for the same reason: they didn't want to steal. Or sell their body. (Though judging by the state of a lot of them, they'd have had a job doing that anyway...)

SO! All this happened. And now I'm here. And I still have some talent. And I got keranged round the head with three ideas in two days.

Because Talent is not to be taken for granted, not to be wasted. A waste of talent is a crying shame. So is a waste of a life.

I will not go on about what I'm doing or want to do because I've done that before and nothing happened. So I'm just doing it.

Gotta go, it's quarter past five in the morning and I need a drink...

My Love Is Your Love 1998 ~ already she's sounding hoarse...
Contains the line: if I'm homeless on the streets, and I'm sleeping in Grand Central station it's ok if you're sleeping with me....
Thank God that never became a reality.



"Crack is whack... to Dianne Sawyer"



To Oprah. The heavy drugs started after The Bodyguard (explains why she followed the biggest hit of her career with... nothing). "I was freebasing cocaine, but only with weed in a joint". Then she mentions heroin and cocaine speedballing. (I used to luuurve doing that. That's why it took me two years from deciding to give up crack to actually doing it 100%.)



Fascinating Link of the Day: Michael Jackson's Unreleased Material

Michael Jackson: dead genius

HE WAS SO TALENTED. Not just as a dancer, but as vocalist: his voice was amazing. If you compare some of the few recordings where he sings genuinely sweetly with his normal style, you hear how ANGRY he was... At what? Who knows.
One talent we don't ordinarily associate with Michael Jackson was his ability to act in a totally naturalistic manner.
Yes, perhaps he was playing versions of himself, but haven't legions of Hollywood actors, who neither dance nor sing, made long careers doing the same ..?
Apparently in his 20s, when he was still goodlooking, Michael wanted to make a career in the movies but was put off by his music management, who perhaps thought they would lose their cut to film agents.

Here's a complete Michael Jackson actor's filmography

1979: The Wiz 136 mins. All-black remake of The Wizard of Oz costarring Diana Ross. Michael plays the Scarecrow, but most of the time you can barely see him under a half-tonne of ridiculous makeup...
1983: Thriller 14 mins.
1986: Captain Eo ~ 17 mins. Originally shot in 3D and shown in Disney's theme parks in California, Florida, France and Japan to packed houses. It's now available online (you can watch it here). But don't expect much. The script is seriously dire.
1987: Bad. Scorsese-directed. Like Thriller the video falls into two parts. For the first 8 mins he plays a late-teenage student from a rundown neighbourhood in New York being taunted by Wesley Snipes about his "posh" school and for not being "bad" enough. Second part is an extended performance of the song, with acapella ending...
1988: Moonwalker 89 mins. Opens with "isn't Michael amazing!" retrospective, then Michael has to rescue three children from the evil Mr Big (who threatens to inject one with heroin ~ ironic, considering how MJ died). Includes songs Badder (parody of Bad), Speed Demon, Leave Me Alone, Smooth Criminal, Come Together. Was cinema-released in UK and Europe. Straight to video in USA.
1996/7: Ghosts 40 mins. Considering his squeaky-clean image MJ had a weird obsession with all things creepy. MJ plays a "weirdo" living alone in a creepy mansion and the town Major, who wants rid of him. He performs 3 songs: 2 Bad, Ghosts and Is It Scary
... and that's it. Such a shame he didn't do more...

Here's BAD. The part you haven't seen is probably part one. Now tell me Michael Jackson can't act!


FULL 16-MINUTE VERSION OF THE VIDEO
Directed by Martin Scorsese:

Part 1
Here's an 8-minute self-contained short film. No music (that's in part 2). Michael playing schoolkid named Darrel...



Part 2



Link: Michael Jackson List of Unreleased Material (fascinating...)

Keeping Mum

A KINDLY GANG-MEMBER from Da Local Baby Gangsta Crew let me have some drugs on tick today. I paid half and owe half. I only had money to spare because all plans for today fell through, leaving me at a loose end, exceedingly "peeved", to put it mildly and in need, so I thought, of a chemical emollient. (Not an exfoliant, that gets off hair. An emollient. That soothes.)

O man the effort I put into today. All for nothing!

I was supposed to see my Mum. I got up, crystal clear. Cleaned myself up as best I could, physically speaking. But to be frank I just looked like a heroin addict on a daytrip.

I had checked train times and prices etc etc etc. I had the option of going in and out of London or taking a long couple of bus rides across town. The bus rides seemed cheaper and got me to a station further up the right line.

So I took this bus. Got to station. All was silent. The ticket machine utterly refused to take my £5 note. Not that it was bulimically constantly regurgitating the thing. I think this machine was anorexic. Its mouth refused even to open.

By the way I know someone who used to work on the Eating Disorders Helpline in Norwich who said that without exception bulimics verbally spewed and spewed, while anorexics were barely willing to open their mouths and thus said barely anything at all... Isn't that fascinating...

So anyway this ticket machine refused my money, which hardly bothered me. I chucked 10p in the Permit to Travel machine. This meant I was covered if an evil ticket inspector chose to pounce on me like a barn owl on an unsuspecting harvest mouse... as frequently happens on London suburban trains. If he queried whether or not the machine was in fact working, I would just tell them to check CCTV. Britain does not have the oft-stated 4 million cameras (surely it's many more than that now as that figure's a decade old) for nothing. For once I might use one to my advantage. I do not trust ticket inspectors after having the most almighty altercation with two on a platform having been told my ticket, which I'd checked in advance was good for it, was invalid on my chosen route. Something, incidentally, which tended not to happen before rail privatization. The worst ever move by the Tory party, in that particular line of activity. I got my money back and a grovelling apology. I always do. Or did. When I could be bothered with such things.

Anyway long story short, I got to the interchange station to find it surprisingly quiet. I hadn't taken the train, I'd walked because it was so near the other one (but wrong for the bus). I thought I'd let the train take the strain. In the end my feet did. And this station was empty with almost unreadable electronic notices saying something I could not understand. It transpired the entire line was down, and if I did want to see my Mum I'd have to take two trains in the wrong direction, with no guarantee how long they might take.

Full of misery and fury I phoned her and said this is impossible. So we had to leave it for another day. Such a shame as Branzy my step-Dad wouldn't have been there earwigging in every word. In other words we might have done something else except discuss 25 topics I don't care about, skating merrily over life's surfaces, yet barely scratching them.

I went directly to the nearest cyder-selling shop and got two White Stars. Well I wasn't gonna need this money for train fares any more. Poured them into Lucozade bottles to spare myself disgusted glances. Jumped on bus. It was well over an hour till I got home, and then I phoned that heroin dealer who "kindly" ~ if you wanna call it that ~ provided that lump for half price.

If I don't cough up tomorrow I get a bullet through my brainbox!

Anyway all this just goes to show, I'm stone cold sober and it still goes mammaries up. Oh what a day ...



Illustrated: selection of ultra-modern British trains. Especially the top one.
Very top pic: HM the Queen mysteriously riding public train (no wonder she looks glum)...

The tubby little dormouse!

THE HAZEL (OR COMMON) DORMOUSE Muscardinus avellanarius is the only species in this tiny tubby rodent family native to the UK.


Adept at climbing...


... and often to be seen scrambling about hedgerows in the most impossible-looking positions...
(perhaps they get tips from Cosmopolitan magazine)


They love blackberries!



Going for a clamber in the shrubbery...


They are the tiniest tubby rodents we have, after harvest mice.
And doesn't this one so enjoy being captured and held!


They're most active in autumn, fattening themselves for the Big Sleep ahead...


The dor- comes from the French dormir ~ to sleep.
They build tiny nests and sleep the whole winter through...


They do sleep so deeply ~ more like a coma ~ these normally ultra-alert rodents becoming utterly insensible...
... and a canny photographer might show...


... how daffodils are obviously their first choice for a bed-down...!

WISHING Y'ALL A CHEERY WEEKEND!