The Cir-her-her-cle oooof LiIiIife!

Back in August 2004, I took a trip to that London place, you know the one, the Capital of England (And you thought that was 'E' right? LOL), that sits on the River Thames, where Kubrick filmed the battle scenes for Full Metal Jacket (The old Beckton Gasworks) and Ridley Scott filmed most of Aliens (Acton Lane Power station)

Was I visiting scenes from movie history? No, I wasn't, but in fairness it's quite difficult to wander around London and not see a location from a Richard Curtis film.  I was going to see a show, a musical, a professional terpsichorial display of the highest order. Otherwise known as 'The Lion King'.

Now I know that there are people out there who will be saying things like 'A musical? but that's how gay men spend their free time!'  Well, traditionally, perhaps they do, that and ordering multiple copies of the 'Queer as Folk' box-set from Amazon...  And, erm,a lot of casual bumming, obviously.

But, you know, in a mixed group, some of the 'West End Shows' can be really very good. I've seen a few and on the whole, if you can get a cut-price deal to go and see one, they're well worth it.

But on this occasion, we're talking about The Lion King.  There were six of us on the trip in total,  Mrs Dandy and Myself, my now-American artistic benefactor and her husband, and two more people, one male, one female, who were not at that time, nor have they ever been, before or since, involved in a relationship with each other... Just friends, OK?

As my job at the time involved moving around the country quite a lot and staying in hotels, the group trusted me to book somewhere for us all to stay.  Once I'd confirmed that everyone favoured a budget hotel, so that there would be more money left over for beer and other frivolities, I set to work, trying to find a budget hotel within walking distance of the Lyceum Theatre, in WC2, that had two double rooms and two singles.  Believe it or not, I managed it, Great looking place, All of the rooms were en-suite, Central location, easy walk to the theatre, £25 or so per room.

That should have rung alarm bells right? Yeah? - Not with me it seems.  We had a great trip down on the train, all shiny faced excitement, cans of British Rail Strongbow and talking slightly too loud,  When we arrived outside the hotel, it still looked great, it was quite a large building, that overlooked one of those nice gated private garden type things that you see sometimes on the TV.

We went inside, and frankly it was a bit dingy, the owners and staff were all natives of some unidentified Eastern European country and had raised surliness to an artform.  There was a little light confusion as to whether we'd already paid, which got everyone off on the right foot and we were all given directions to our rooms, which were spread at every possible corner of the building.  The directions involved a lot of pointing, and words like 'Go stairs two floor, turn *handsignal for left* three doors. toilet at both ends corridor'.

Now, being sharp witted, I picked up on this and said 'Aha! Excuse me, my good man, but the booking form clearly states that the rooms are en-suite!' and I waved the printout from the Internet under his bushy moustache.  He inhaled, and the paper disappeared into his nasal cavity, losing me all of my documentary evidence in one fell swoop, then he replied, 'Room have shower in, toilet at end of corridor.'

So we made a plan to unpack, then go for a beer and some lunch, said our goodbyes and went to our rooms.  We went up two flights of stairs, turned left, went down three doors and pushed.  The room was... Small, yes, that's a kind word... Small. There was a (barely) double bed and a long-dead potplant.  Most of the room was taken up by a hardboard box that stretched from floor to ceiling, that was covered in the same 'Early Mental Hospital' style wallpaper as the rest of the room and had a concertina door on it.  My curiosity finally got the better of me and I opened the door.  It was, of course, the much vaunted en-suite shower.  To say that it was a bit of a lash-up would be to despoil the good name of lash-up showers such as the ones that Colonel John Blashford-Snell made out of three bits of bamboo and a sloth, whilst trying to transport a Grand Piano up the Congo some four years previously (look it up).

It was whilst I was examining a particularly unusual piece of fungus, emanating from the shower drain (hole in the carpeting inside the box) that I decided that a quick trip to the conveniences was in order.  I left the room, made for the end of the corridor and gingerly pushed open a door with many panes of frosted glass in it (and one perfectly clear pane at face height, when you were sat down.) The toilet could not have been more Victorian if it had a hairy German bloke, wearing a T-Shirt that said 'I [heart] Saxe-Coburg and Gotha' and an unfeasibly large pierced penis, sat on it.  I attended to my urgent business and pulled the chain (as it had a high-level cistern, like back in the day) and nothing happened other than a faint gurgling.  I pulled a few more times, in the style of Ned Beatty trying to start an outboard motor, but finally gave up and went back to the room.

It was then that I noticed that the doors didn't have numbers on.  You know that scene in every single film set in a hotel? The one that sort of zooms in then back out again down the corridor full of doors?  Well, let me tell you, that actually happens.  I went from door to door, listening carefully to see if I could heard the sound of Mrs Dandy silently complaining about the room.  But I could not, so I chose a door at random and opened it.

It was then that I noticed the urine-soaked corpse of a tramp.

No, seriously.

He was a tramp, he stank of urine, and he was dead... Probably - If he wasn't, then he was sleeping so deeply that his chest wasn't moving at all.  Now, I've seen enough horror films to know that if you go down, alone, to the reception of a hotel run by unidentified Eastern European types to say that you've just discovered a dead body, then you often find yourself being served to your friends for breakfast the next day.  So I backed out of the room, apologised (OK, so he was dead and couldn't technically hear me, but that didn't mean that I shouldn't be polite) and closed the door.

We all met up again in the lounge, had a long pub lunch, told everyone the story of the toilet and the tramp, then went back to the hotel to get ready for the evening.

The next few hours or so passed by quickly and will remain undescribed to spare the blushes of my dear wife.  Suffice it to say that there was no bar, or indeed mini-bar, so we had to resort to the old fashioned way of passing the time with only a bed and a dead plant for company, and it was only due to one of our party knocking on the door and asking if we were ready that reminded us of the time (and it seems that answering 'give me about thirty seconds and I will be' will earn you a slap from your wife)

We went to the theatre, had a great time, then came back to the hotel and had a few drinks in one of the rooms that had a working balcony until the early hours of the morning.

Breakfast was an interesting affair, the advertised Full English Breakfast turned out to be a single sausage and a piece of bacon each, calls for beans and/or tomatoes and toast fell on deaf and slightly frightening ears and in true tabloid style, we made our excuses and left.

The trip to the railway station was fairly uneventful, apart from not being able to find the tickets, going back to the hotel to look for them and then finding them in one of the ladies handbags and having to run to get the train.  And we put the whole sorry business behind us.

Until just over nine months later... The MicroDandy was born...

Take me to your Lederhosen

I'm feeling self-referential this morning, so I'm going back to a subject that's close to my gizzard.

Alien Abduction...

People who know me and/or have visited Dandy Towers will appreciate that the first floor library is mainly comprised of Science Fiction books, a smattering of Horror, many, many 'Fo' dummies' books and an English to Dutch phrasebook. I like a getaway from reality to be a getaway and how much further can you getaway than to the thirteenth bifurcated throne-room of Emperor Fun'dun'kmant'ine the Socially Inept who happens to command a fleet of ten thousand gravity-powered, cloakable, Star-Killerons and is father to the shrew-gratingly beautiful F'nurk'ma'chewb'utfutnut, whose attributes are both talked about in and visible from, low orbit.

I'm not biased, I like everything from the high space opera stuff as described above to the 'It was Earth all along' shock twist in the tail, OMG I'm so original, genres. I've been reading this sort of stuff for the best part of forty years and I've read pretty much all the basic stories, and some of the not so basic ones, there can be some stuff you really have to think about, like;

Boy meets girl, girl turns out to be thousand year old alien and runs away. Girl meets other boy, boy dies bravely in intergalactic war, boy revived by enemy soldier. Spaceship turns out to be the killer, girl turns out to be the spaceship. Boy turns out to have imagined the whole thing, Both boys are the same person. Girl is one of the boys' Grandmother, but not the other's.

You see, with my training and experience, I understand all that - I mean, it helps that I wrote it, but still... You'd think I'd be immune to all the associated Sci-Fi tomfoolery. But the whole Alien Abduction stuff does tend to put the wind up me a bit - I can read about it, no problem - I've got many books full of accounts from people who claim they've been abducted, taken aboard your actual spaceship, by your actual aliens and either been viciously subjected to vicious experimentation or given a bit of a tour and had a lovely chat about the threat of impending thermonuclear war and dropped off with only an itchy sub-dermal implant to remember them by.

I think I might just be a bit gay about the idea of being being anally probed - Hang on, that might not be right, I mean I'm really not a fan of the whole idea.

You know how in the horror films, you've got the soon to be victim, running through the forest in the middle of the night, being pursued by (If it's a decent director) a half-glimpsed monster, when she comes across a rickety woodshed, forces her way inside and slams the door. She immediately feels safe, even though we've previously seen it tear a train apart using only its nipples and eyebrows. Well, you don't get that respite from alien abduction, most abductees are asleep when they're 'taken'. You might get a bright light and a wooooo-wooooo-wooooo noise if'n you're lucky, but that's about your lot until you wake up in a white room full of the little grey dudes with the big black eyes giving it the old 'This might sting a bit' routine as they plunder your nether-regions with a nuclear powered eggwhisk.

And that's the other thing... If you'd asked a bunch of kids in the '60's to draw you an alien, you'd have got a mix of wild and wonderful pictures from two-headed parrots to octopus footed centipedes and everything in between. Do that now and the chances are you'll mostly get the picture that most of you just thought of (OK, apart from you people who misread 'AN' alien as 'THE' Alien) - You know, the little dudes with the pear shaped heads, massive black eyes and no visible genitals, known by one and all as Apple Store Employees... Erm... I mean Greys.

It's something I've been thinking about for a while, is this image being drummed into us? Are we being made ready for a big 'reveal' by a conglomeration of Western Governments? So that when the curtain is pulled aside and it turns out that we've had Zarp and Plurb from Zeta Reticulii coaching the direction of mankind's development since the Roswell crash we all just go 'Ah, right you are then'?

I read recently that according to a recent study even young babies recognise pictures of Greys as being a 'thing' rather than just an abstract shape. This brings up another two questions;

1 - Why are they able to do that?

2 - Why would anyone be doing that research?

I think we should all be desperately worried - Either that there's an alien invasion going on by stealth - Or I'm as mad as a donkey wearing lederhosen on a tightrope.

Either way, no-one's sticking anything up my butt, without at least buying me dinner first.

Tell Merrill to Swing Away

Has anyone got a film that effects them emotionally?

I don't mean 'I cried at the end of <Insert any film except Twilight>'

I mean from when you hear that it's on, through watching the opening titles and right up until the 'No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture, soundtrack available on Geffen Records' message, your heart would pound and you would have feelings of excitement / fear / happiness / dread?

I would like to admit that have an unreasonable fear of the 2002 Mel Gibson vehicle - Signs, by M Night Shawaddywaddy. I don't mean I don't like to watch it, I watch it whenever it's on - It's just that I watch it from behind the sofa, with a pillow in front of my face and my fingers in my ears. And for a great portion of the film I'm actually looking at the fireplace, just underneath the TV rather than at the TV itself.

For those of you who havent seen it, it's about a Reverend, played by Aussie Mel, who loses his wife in a particularly grizzly car accident, this proves to him that God doesn't exist and he loses his faith.

(Ah, yeah, I'm going to assume that as the film's ten years old, if you were going to see it you would have done so already - So, as my fictional friend Melody Pond might say, beware *SPOILERS*)

He lives with his son (Asthmatic), his daughter (Who can't finish a whole glass of water due to some OCD-like deviancy) and his brother (Mad, but good at Baseball) on a farm in Pennsylvania. Where they suddenly start finding crop circles. Queue alien invasion, flashbacks, tinfoil hats, Cameo by the Writer/Director (M Night Shebopaloola), fingers being cut off, messages from beyond the grave and the eventual realisation that having Asthma, OCD and being a bit mad, but good at baseball, might one day save your life, and that living with people like that can restore your faith.

Nothing there that's particularly scarey, It's no Hostel, certainly. And I don't have these feelings about any of M Night Shamalamading-dong's other films, The Sixth Sense had some 'Made me jump' moments, I'll freely admit, and Mrs Dandy worked out the twist about ten minutes into the film, as she will gleefully tell anyone who will stand still long enough. Unbreakable was, erm... Well... a bit rubbbish in fairness, even with SLJ being a major character. The Village was OK, and I didn't see the twist coming in that one either. Devil was fairly good in a 'stuck in an elavator' kinda way. And The Happening wasn't a bad flick, all considered, a decent premise and no feel-good ending - which is strange for a US made film.

Someone once suggested it was the Baby Monitor bit, where it was discovered that you could hear the aliens talking to each other with clicks and whistles using a baby monitor, but only if they were quite close. Or that it was the scene where they catch an alien on video from a kids birthday party, and it just goes about its business, not caring that it had been spotted. I understand that quite a lot of people don't like that bit.

Maybe it was the way it was depicted realistically, the whole 'This could quite easily happen' vibe you get, or I get at least. I don't know

All I do know is that it scares the willies out of me, but I really want to watch it now, I wonder if it's on?

The Catholic church does not make mistakes

OK, the title is a quote from Dogma, a great movie by Kevin Smith, it was said by the character Cardinal Glick, played by George Carlin, an even greater person who is sadly no longer with us.

If you've not seen Dogma, or heard of George Carlin, then go and do some research now - In fact, go and watch as many of Kevin Smith's films as you can - They're all great, sweary, but great. When you've gone that, Google George Carlin... I'll wait, it's worth it, believe me.

Done? Good weren't they? - You know the stocky chap in the long coat and the backwards baseball cap in the films? That was your actual Kevin Smith! - Hardly a Hitchcock style cameo - But if you're gonna make great films, then I say why not star in 'em too?

Anyway, enough frivolity, I'd like to talk to you about God (was that the sound of a hundred *back* buttons being pressed?). I don't neccessarily mean your actual Judeo-Christian, Monotheistic, Capital G type god, it could be your multi armed, blue coloured one, or your elephant headed one, or any one of a thousand different deities that people have blamed stuff on for the past few thousand years.

As the more eagle-eyed of you will have spotted, I am a regular church-goer and I believe in a supreme being, I have Faith. What I don't got is Religion.

"But if that's true, why do you go to church?" I hear the four people who are still reading this say.

There are a number of reasons really, Mrs Dandy is a confirmed Anglican Religionite, and there are some nice, friendly and most of all odd people there, but mainly it's because I enjoy running the mixing desk (this is the 21st. Century people, it's not all massive organs and people going Ah-ah-aaaahhhhh in a angelic fashion now) it makes me feel like Rick Wakeman - It also gives me the chance to poke fun at the fundamentalists...

OK - That will have made some hackles rise, so let me explain what I mean by fundamentalists - I take the word to mean, someone who believes that the Bible (or any religious text pertaining to a particular belief system) is infallible, an historic record rather than a book of moral stories and hints and tips on how to live a better life.

This becomes so all-consuming to some people that they forget all about the 'Be Excellent to each Other' stuff (See, Bill & Ted, George Carlin again - Isn't it amazing how this stuff all fits together - I don't just throw this down on the page you know?) and concentrate on the 'Thou shalt not' and 'Righteous smiting of the unbeliever' stuff. In short, they get caught up in the Dogma (Oh my Gods it's like I've got a plan for this thing, right?) - The words of the text themselves rather than the meaning.

There're also people who just go to church because they want to be seen to be important, the kind of people who like to slip into everyday conversation 'So, I said to the Vicar....' They really ruffle my cassock - These are the people for whom I really hope there is an afterlife, 'cos they got a big old shock coming to them with the whole rapid downwards motion and the fire and the pitchforks and the 'Oh no it burns - freunlaven!'

On a different note, if you'll pardon the pun, there was a song sung a couple of weeks ago called 'Our God is greater' - Inoffensive little song, quite jolly and stuff. But it got me thinking, greater than what? Is it kind of a religious football chant? Should religion be so confrontational?

So what do I actually believe? Do you really care? Do I care if you care?

I believe that the state of the world we live in is not ALL down to chance - That there's a guiding influence. I'm not a creationist, I believe in evolution, but I have no problem with the idea that the evolutionary system has been pushed in a particular direction at different points in history.

I don't believe that there's neccessarily a plan for everyone, or anyone for that matter. But I do believe that there's something greater than us that on occasion, helps out - I don't mean in the 'God bless Mummy & Daddy and please can I have a Pony' way. I mean in the 'Holy Crap my brakes aren't working, we're all gonna die!' way - Although they do say that everyone becomes a believer in situations like that.

It could all be luck, I don't profess to know - It could be Aliens, Gods, Goddesses, a giant bowl of spaghetti and meatballs reaching down with his Noodley Appendages.

But as far as I'm concerned, there's something there... After all, if there wasn't there'd be times when I was just sat in the car talking to myself - And that would mean I was mad.