Here is a fascinating craft project from Frank Key which presupposes ownership of a Pippy Bag.
What’s a Pippy Bag? You may well ask.
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Dave has the most patient friend. Rather than ring the doorbell to hurry him up, the guy channels his frustration into artistic expression.
I’ve been writing scripts and animating for Lady Geek TV. It’s an app show specifically aimed at women and trying to show apps which make a practical difference. You can find all the episodes here. or subscribe via iTunes.
…the milk is UHT, but at least in Hell the tea is hot.
The May issue of Word Magazine has a feature on the best and worst kids’ cartoons of all time. Imagine my delight, then, to find that the Amazing Adrenalini Brothers came in at Number 2, just below Sponge Bob Squarepants!
Actually, I’m not entirely sure the 20 are in rank order, but still, to be in the company of Roobarb, Pocoyo (which won the Bafta in the same year we did), and Tom and Jerry, for goodness sake, is very flattering indeed. (Even more so because the magazine is actually a really good one.)
The review says that the show “… used to be a really good reason to get up early on Sunday and watch CITV.”
There’s something sinister about this photo, but I can’t work out what it is. It seems to herald a confluence of painful events, what with the manholes, and the coffee, and the car bumper, and the weird dark thing floating above the girl’s head.
Thanks to Frank Key of the always interesting Hooting Yard for originally drawing my attention to the Jubilate Agno, the sprawling and epic poem by Christopher Smart, and largely written while he was in a madhouse. It contains a homage to his cat Jeoffry and contains the lines “For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command”. You can hear Frank Key and Germander Speedwell reading the entire poem in this podcast.
The image above, incidentally, is by Louis Wain, and it is often claimed that his series of cat paintings are testament to the increasing disorder of his mind, a view which is contested by, among others, his biographer Rodney Dale. It has been said that Wain painted conventional cat pictures long after he had disappeared irretrievably into his loonball psychedelic cat freakout, and that rather than schizophrenia, he had Asperger’s Syndrome.
You can get a covert thrill of anarchy in polite conversation by pronouncing the word “Asperger’s” as “ass-burgers”.
We Were Puny, They Were Vapid by Frank Key
The brand-new pamphlet from Frank Key, of Hooting Yard on Resonance FM, is out at Lulu.com. I’m delighted to say that I provided some of the illustrations for the story The Book of Gnats.
The blurb from the book reads thus:
“Read separately, each story makes a perfect bedtime story for the lumbering neurasthenic orphan hidden in your attic Taken together, the tales shed an eerie half-light on that realm where gnats and phlogiston and fences collide.”
Here I am all dressed up as a U-boat captain for the Blitz party in London’s vibrant East End, with my girlfriend dressed up as a wartime nurse. Not sure under what circumstances we would have met, maybe if she were working on a bends ward. The pipe is my own.
A German TV channel was filming there and were very interested in my costume… maybe they were doing a piece about the English obsession with World War 2.
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I can’t imagine what nightmare parallel universe Zuccato’s woefully misguided “Z-kids” come from, but they’re obviously way too cool for school.
I can’t begin to describe how many things are wrong with this advert (at the rear entrance of the Finchley Road O2 Centre) but simply glancing at it I can feel my “hate hump” (link contains swears) filling to bursting point.
The eyeless girl seems to be flipping some kind of meaningless gang sign, while the eyeless boy’s mouth looks like it was once a smile until the corners were thickened and turned down to give him a sullen, adversarial air. The tagline claims that the new Z-kids menu is “scrumdiddlyyum”, a rip-off of the Willy Wonka “Scrumdiddlyumptious” name parsed through 1950s street slang, like the kids are about to recommend a “hotdogerooni” or a “shake-ola”.
I’ve just checked out the Z-kids website at etruscarestaurants.com and it looks like I was right. The kids look more benign on the website – the boys mouth is smiling and the girl is holding a lollipop, and the introductory text offers “A big, warm, happy WELCOME to the new Z-kids site.”
So why the decision to gangsta them up? I plan to ask Etrusca Restaurants to explain their marketing strategy via their handy online feedback form…