Friday 16 July 2010

All Hail Her Majesty

It's already been discussed on this blog that the Queen is hungry for the restoration of the monarchy. I'm not fooled by her sweet old lady act: she's after power on a global scale, and a new beginning for the British Empire. Take her recent trip to Canada, for instance. A perfectly innocuous diplomatic visit? This photo, no doubt taken at great personal risk, tells another story.

Pictured: Lizzie's War Face

See the determined glint in her eye? The set of her jaw? Clearly this is a woman channelling the spirit of her ancestors, ie big hairy German men who became King because they were damn good at hitting people with swords. That mountie in the background? Her rebel army commander, ready to sweep back through Canada and reclaim it as the maple syrup source of the British Empire.

Why mounties? Mounties, despite the silly hats, are rather special. They have international jurisdiction: if a well known and famous example of a Candian celebrity commits a crime, (sorry, Canada, the only famous son of your land I can think of is the unfortunately fictional Wolverine,) there is nowhere on the planet they can hide - the mounties will get them. So with these powerful allies, the Queen can arrest those who threaten the spread or stability of her new international regime.

It started in Canada. Be prepared. Be warned. The second British Empire is coming.

And Philip's going to be racist about all of them.

Friday 9 July 2010

Why I hate nature and it must be punished

Remember when you were six and used to grub around in the dirt, pretending to dig holes and tearing insects in half for the noise it made? No? Just me on that last one? I was a strange child. Anyway, in the last week, I had an opportunity to study nature and get back to that blissful primordially muddy state. Or so I thought.

Now, I passed my childhood in the magical far off land of Birmingham, a place not quite North and not quite South, and this means the pixies there must have been particularly hungry, as one thing I noticed which wasn't there in my childhood was ants. I was there to count centipedes and measure moss, which is exactly as thrilling as it sounds, but the trip soon turned into a battle against the forces of ant-kind, or, as we ended up referring to them, evil tiny unkillable biting bastards. There were adders in that forest. There were wolves. (In cages.) There was the malevolent ghost of Adolf Hitler (possibly). The ants were still the most evil thing there, swarming and biting and devouring all things. One intrepid explorer dared to venture near an ant trail with a particularly determined look in his eye, and the mass of black insects swarmed up him and stripped the flesh from his bones. Also, one of them bit me on the hand. One of those is actually a lie.

Anyway, this meant war.

We had to select a champion for our battle to reclaim the forest: we settled on a pill millipede we named, imaginatively, Pillipede. A giant of the bug world, he was huge, majestic, and armoured. If one man were to save us from the insect threat, it would be Pillpiede, in his gleaming exoskeleton. We placed Pillipede carefully, almost reverently, in a jar, and nurtured him lovingly. We prepared him for his big fight, giving him a rousing pep talk and a Rocky style training montage.

Yes, that millipede has opposable thumbs, why do you ask?

Pillipede, we judged, was finally ready to fight. To make his clear size advantage more fair, he would face three ant opponents, who were already in fighting spirits (the little fuckers bit all the way into the jar).

The ants were with the millipede. That's the most secret-spy-code-like sentence I've ever typed that wasn't secret spy code. It was time for the fight to begin...

A heated, if somewhat slow, battle began, Pillipede lashing out at the ants. Soon, a strange yellow liquid dathered on the floor. "Aha!" Thought I, "The ants are soiling themselves in sheer fear at the sight of our mighty warrior!" But as the fight continued, it was fairly clear the liquid was blood - and not ant blood. We began to face the unfaceable truth.

Pillipede was losing.

The ants, it was fairly clear, had won this battle by fair means. There was only one option left to us.

We would cheat. Pillipede was going down, but this was no reason not to take the ants with him. It was time to re even the odds a little.

We flooded the jar with water, hoping to let Pillipede show his as yet unseen amazing swimming skills and a talent for naval warfare. Unfortunately, this last shock was too much for his somewhat battered health, and he died. The ants?

They kept going.

We acknowledged our defeat - the forest was theirs. We buried Pillipede, a true hero, in the leaf litter, but under heavy observation from the forces of ant-ness. We had fought, and we had lost.

We left two days later, never to return.

Wednesday 7 July 2010

Dire Warnings.

You know when you hear someone say something and you immediately know that everything is going to go terribly wrong?

So, I have this friend. And unlike most sentences which begin "I have this friend", they aren't pregnant, and this isn't a veiled way of me asking advice. No, seriously, I'm not pregnant. At all. No matter what you might hear. No name is given here, to protect the anonymity of the living and the dignity of the dead.

Anyway, my friend is a very nice person who I'd happily trust with a highly valuable camel, but has one terrible flaw. As terrible flaws go, it's not overly dramatic. They're not addicted to gambling, they've never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and I'm fairly sure they haven't got a heroin habit (by which I mean injecting nasty substances rather than wearing a cape and preventing supercrime. That wouldn't be a flaw, that'd just be awesome.) The flaw they do have is cooking.

Now, lots of people are just bad cooks. They cook food that tastes disgusting, or that is badly burnt, or, in extreme cases, makes restaurant critics spontaneously combust upon just smelling it. My friend, however, is not just a bad cook. They're a destructive and unpredictable cook. The food is good, when it survives unharmed, but the preparation process... Cooks cheese on toast? Kitchen accidentally set on fire, if only temporarily. There are some who say that they once managed to make a whole chicken just disappear from an oven after accidentally invoking black magic instead of preparing a marinade. I read the webcomic Questionable Content, (which is really very good, despite what I'm about to say) and back right at the very beginning, one of the characters managed to burn down their house while making toast. I used to assume it was just a badly done plot device by an inexperienced writer to get the character in question to move in with the lead.

Then I met my friend, and suddenly I'm not so sure.

But, moving on, the event which I mentioned earlier, which is so utterly terrifying?

My friend plans to cook bear shaped biscuits.

Biscuits. Shaped like bears.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. My friend is the sort of person who lives in an increasingly whacky fifties sitcom. My friend is the only person I know who could possibly end up accidentally in a gay pride march. My friend is going to make biscuits shaped like bears.

At some point or other, they will gain a soul, accidentally, in the cooking process. Tiny bearlike biscuits, beating their fists with rage on the oven door to be let out. Biscuits that bite back, launching themselves on their attackers and savaging them in a generally ursine way. Tiny biscuits with all the pent up rage and malevolent evil that lurks in a bear's black heart. With the possible exception of Paddington.

It's going to be like a heavy metal album cover telling the story of the gingerbread man. So be prepared, internet. Be prepared for a day of bears.

Sunday 4 July 2010

Writing a big budget Hollywood action film - how hard can it be?

So then, Hollywood. We meet again. I have a project for you that requires your rising stars, your expert directors, and your copious amounts of magic explosions. Oh, and the ghost of Don LaFontaine.

The Scene? A top secret military facility, where they do military things.

The year? 2012.

The situation?

A highly intelligent Combat robot, capable of impersonating a human, has broken out from its containment facility. The robot has turned against its masters, and is living among the other soldiers in the base, picking them off one by one.

Only one man is capable of identifying the robot amongst the recruits - computer programmer and excellent robot recogniser Alan Turing.

The problem?

Alan Turing died in 1954. And only one man can get him back - the whacky scientist with a time machine who's too much of a loose cannon to be trusted with such an important task.

Prepare for a time travel horror based thought provoking hilarious buddy comedy that elaborates on the ultimate differences between man and machine.

Also, naked women and explosions. But not combined, because that doesn't work unless you prefer your women as a thin red mist sprayed over several walls.

I'm very hopeful for the project - I've had a lot of interest. Well, everyone I tell about it says "Oh, that's... interesting..." and then walks away quickly. I even talked to Steven Spielberg about it! He didn't say much, other than "Who are you?" and "How did you get into the backseat of my car? This is a moving vehicle!" but I think there's real potential here.