Shadows over Sheffield

Friday was the event the entire nation has been waiting for, the flag waving little patriots that they are! Yes, the whole country's collective breath has been held because on this Friday, GOAT LEAF played at the Corporation for the first time ever! This won't amount to a hill of spit for most of you, but for the band it a  major step forward from being a 'local' band to being a 'professional' band. They were supporting Corrosion of Conformity, so it was a really good opportunity to play in front of a bunch of people who had paid to see a band rather than just wander in off the streets as the entrance was free and they needed somewhere to carry on drinking and places with bands on usually have a late licence. One of the best things was the biography on the Corporation's website that described Goat leaf as 'a band from Rotherham'. I told them they should have that as a quote on their next album... Anyway, I had a good time, saw some old faces, got drunk (which I need to do more often right now, to be honest...) and ended up eating tortillas and homous backstage, where there were defiantly too many dicks on the dance floor.

Today I went to see the new Kenneth Branagh directed Super Hero film, Thor. There wasn't any surprises, but it did have Natalie Portman in it, that a gets a big thumbs up from me. Here is my review:

Set in the Catskill Mountains during the roaring 20's Portman (LEON, SIDEWAYS GLANCE, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA) plays Anatolia Groady, a middle aged sales clerk at the local Woolworths. With her life stuck in a rut, she makes the brave decision to begin importing seal fur from Canada. Seal fur being banned under the prohibition laws. The venture is a massive success and Portman is able to open a 'speakeasy', where well healed towns folk gather to wear fur and parade around without the watchful eye of the local Police force. Her counterpart in this is Arkright MacMollases (Robin Williams: ILSA SHE WOLF OF THE SS, ZOMBIE NOSH, DUMBO), a light comic relief character who tends the bar. The pair run the place successfully until a raid by the police sees MacMollases gunned down in a pitched battle. As MacMollases lies dying, Groady flees the scene, but not before emptying the till of the takings. A desperate flight sequence follows which is part real time, part dream sequence ala the autre movement of the 1970's. Groady is approached by a shell-suit wearing lizard in a particularly hard to watch hallucinogenic scene. The lizard (voiced by the ever brilliant Tom Bosley: NIL BY MOUTH, THE RIGHT STUFF, YOJIMBO) tells Groady she must go to California to seek her fortune there, throwing off the shackles of crime. She follows this sagely advice and within minutes of arriving in San Fransisco she discovers a gold mine, turning her life around, away from crime. She lives the rest for her long life on the profits of the gold. The classically scored soundtrack by Ted Nugent really brings this film alive and I for one would miss it for the world.

For no other reason than because I can...

I have also been toying with the idea of a new tattoo. I was forwarded the following examples of beauty and was wondering which one to go for. I like the first one for its artistic merit, but I think the second one has a stronger message.

Just leaving this here:

Harry takes her up the aisle

With the country on tenterhooks for the wedding of the Century tomorrow, I received the following text messages off the Evil Dr Clay this afternoon:

I couldn't sleep last night, i was so excited about the royal wedding! i don't think i'll get much sleep tonight either


I hope you've stocked up on tissues for the ceremony, i have! Not for drying my tears though!!!


If it rains on the royal wedding tomorrow i'm going to burn down a church to express my anger at god.


I hope there is a thunder storm and camilla parker 'whore' bowles is struck dead by lightning, it would serve her right after what she did to william's mum.


Then I received the following in an email from Clay: 

Fuck Christ

an accusation was levelled at me that the last post wasn't sacrilicious enough, so I'm going to readress the balance in this one for Easter Monday.

And finally for the Heathen in all our Hearts:

Bad Friday

This is the start of a long Easter weekend, with Friday and Monday both being Bank Holidays. That means half the country don't have to go to work, if you work in reasonably decent job like me, or if you're a brainless drone, stacking shelves and working in a menial dead end job, you have to remain at your position to serve us, your natural Overlords. This still doesn't stop the elite panic buying in the supermarkets. The shops are shut for one day! This is not the aftermath of a nuclear fallout where the population is reduced to bartering with their children and fighting over patches of untainted grass. It's two days, maximum, of closed shops. If we can't survive for 48hrs of no access to milk or bread then we're truly fucked when the balloon does finally go up.

'Well, what day will you be open?'

How did we get to this position? Well, we were fucked into a cocked hat by Jesus, back in the year 36BC, or something. Sit back and I'll tell you the story of Easter, to the best of my knowledge from what I've gleaned off of Wikipedia. Jesus was born in 000AD and grew up to become a carpenter by trade, or so I'm told. The baby Jesus performed miracles in the form of curing the obese, feeding the five and making Lazarus the star of a third rate TV show. He made a name for himself all across the Roman Empire, selling Holy vacuum cleaners (that Jericho dust is a sod to get out of the carpets) and plaster casts of the Eiffel Tower. The latter mostly sold in Gaul. His extensive Tax evasion brought him to the attention of the Emperor Julius Caesar who vowed to have Jesus brought to trial.

Jesus, laughing at the Romans. Little did he know what they had in store for him!

King Caesar sent the Private Detective Herod out to Palestine on a manhunt for Jesus. He was easy to catch as he spent most of his weekends trashing salesman's stalls at temples. Herod just had to follow the trail of destruction to get his man. It was in the great Dome of the Rock in Damascus that Herod caught up with Jesus. Herod launched his attack and got Jesus in a choke hold. Jesus proved to be a wily adversary and scissor kicked Herod in the back of the head, causing him to release his hold. Jesus seized the opportunity and fled for the door, but was brought down by a rugby tackle from Herod. The fight spilled out into the street and Jesus grabbed a folding chair on the side of the road. Using this as a rudimentary cudgel he beat Herod about the head until Herod was silly with concussion. The hubris proved too much for Jesus, for whilst he was flexing his muscles in front of the crowd that had gathered, Herod climbed onto the ropes and performed his finishing move, a flying pile driver. Jesus was knocked senseless and Herod dragged the limp body to the court house.

 

Jesus in court. The boot's on the other foot now isn't it?

Now, Tax Evasion was a serious business back in 73BC, so the Judge gave Jesus the maximum penalty: 150 hours of community service. No, I mean, DEATH! Yeah, the Judge put his black cap on and handed down the death sentence. There was no lethal injection back in the olden days, neither was there gassings, sledgehammers or firing squad. The many ways people are killed today. There was only one way to kill someone in 12AD, and that was Crucifixion. So this is how Jesus was killed. They nailed him up to two pieces of wood and left him there with his two mates, Romulus and Remus, to die in the hot sun. When he'd carked it, the Romans threw his body to the lions and let them eat it. There was something else about rocks and caves and some other shit, and a guy called Judas or something, but I forget it now. Anyway, that is why the shops are shut for two days this weekend. If you'd like to know more, then here is a short educational film I made to give you more details about Easter:

The Well of Souls

This past two weeks have been rather stressful. I have been up to my knees everyday in water excavating a sequence of Roman wells. I mention this as I referenced it in the last post and The Evil Doktor Clay wanted to know more about it. I live in fear of this man. I have seen what he did to the neighbours dog last time he was here at my house and I am unwilling to walk around with a limp for the rest of my life, eating baby food through a straw, so it is better to do as he asks than risk the consequences. Below are a series of photographs which illustrate the difficulties we've had and what we've found over the previous fortnight. If you don't like archaeology or find this post boring then I suggest you look at these old websites I built a decade ago:

Dorkshire


The Les Dennis Experience

For the rest of you with more than one braincell to rub together, let's take a journey into the olden days!

Gevi encounters mud...

...and wood...

...and good (weather)

Collapsed revetments

In situ preserved wattle

Berny's Votive Offerings...

More collapsed structures

Berny suffers from trench foot...

Drastic situations call for drastic measures...

welly and bag combo, it what they wear in Milan...

That's a big one...

DUCK OFF!!

Get Ducked!!

The last person to touch this before I lifted it was someone 1500 years ago... Ruminate upon that!

The last stake

A worked Saddle Quern

Another 1500 year old stake

 

The end of the well

 

And finally, I think Banksey must be in York...

Bring me the head of Yuri Gagarin

Today is the fiftieth year and one day anniversary of the first man in space. The one, the only Yuri Gagarin, the greatest dead man alive today! What do you mean, you don't know who I'm talking about? Where the fuck have you been for the last fifty years and one day? Have you been hiding under a rock? Yuri Gagarin is the name on everyone lips, his name is plastered on billboards fifty feet high! The news is full of him! Jesus, if you still don't know, then sit back and I'll tell you about one of my heroes, Yuri Gagarin (one of my other heroes is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon. That's right, second, not first. Second). But this post is not about Aldrin, it's about the ONLY Hero of the Soviet Onion, Yuri Gagarin!

I swear to God, I will fuck you up

Yuri was born into peasant stock in Tunguska in 1908, his arrival was heralded by an explosion equivalent to thirty megatons that blew the entire region back to the stone age. The instant he was born, young Yuri was up and running, in fact he ran ten miles without even thinking about it. And this was even before he could walk. His parents finally caught up with him and fed him on a diet of beetroot and bear wrestling. By the time he was twelve Yuri could fight eight bears with one hand tied behind his back and one eye closed. After a vodka fuelled rampage in 1942 that resulted in the destruction of an entire village the authorities began to take notice. Yuri was drafted into the NKVD and sent to Stalingrad to help the beleaguered Russian forces dug in on the banks of the Volga. He single handedly re-took the hill of Mamayev Kurgin after punching Panzers into the stratosphere and kicking an anti-tank battery into the heart of the sun. Next Yuri was sent out to Kursk to help the Russian tank forces out on the steppe. He was, again, in the thick of the action, pulling the turrets off of Tiger tanks and breaking Panthers in two with his bare hands. By 1945 Yuri was leading the assault on the Reichstag in Berlin. Not only did he build a Fuhrer detecting machine between firefights, which he used to locate Hitler's bunker, he pummelled Hitler into submission and made him sign a ceasefire in HIS OWN BLOOD!

I will dig up your grave and I will wear your skin.

After the war, Russia was embroiled in a space race with the US and A, both countries desperate to get a man to the moon to snap up all the real estate. The US and A sent an entire zoo up into orbit, they sent monkeys, badgers and giraffes in a desperate attempt to win the prize. None of these animals proved any good at being able to navigate spacecraft and either they were killed by flying too close to the sun (the marmosets), exploding on take off (the Jesus lizard) or grew too intelligent due to the radiation and landed on Mars and slowly and surely began to draw their plans against us (the monkeys). The USSR decided against using animals with their lack of opposable thumbs to pilot their spaceships. They turned to the Hero of the Soviet Onion, Yuri. He jumped at the chance to beat the hated Yankee Imperialist Bastards. Bam! Yuri didn't need a rocket to get him up there, he just ran really fast then jumped really high and he was in space! As soon as he arrived in space he started whaling on all the Yankee Oppressor animals that were floating around up there as well. He punched a shark into Venus and smacked a mearcat so hard it caused a black hole that swallowed the entire Spiral Galaxy 28948. Before planting the Hammer and Sickle flag on the moon he took a bite out of it to ensure it was made of cheese. This important scientific data was brought back to Soviet scientists when Yuri's space flight was over.

Stand by for a Yuri style pounding...

After being the only man in space, ever, Yuri had made enough money from the TV rights to his life story that he never needed to work again and spent the rest of his life living in a massive fucking mansion outside of Moscow. He had trucks full of bears shipped in so he had something to fight during his lunchtime. Yuri died in 1968 when a swan he was chewing on got lodged in his throat and choked him to death. The Soviets knocked down the Kremlin to build his tomb which millions of visitors still flock to each year. Yuri, a true Hero of the Soviet Onion! You fleshbags aren't even fit to lick the dog shit off his boots. You think about Yuri's acheivements everytime you weep yourself to sleep.

I've been to space, what the fuck have you ever done? You useless fucking fleshbag!

Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter

Have you ever taken a journey into the darkness? A voyage into the lowest utter depths of depravity that humanity has to offer? Have you stared into the abyss and instead of pulling back, fallen into the maelstrom that is waiting to consume your humility and sensibility? No? Well, on Saturday night I did. This particular Heart of Darkness was centred in the tiny hamlet of Huntington and the den of iniquity that is Logan Josh's house. In order to celebrate his shuffling ungraciously another year towards the inevitability of death, Josh threw a 'party'. A 'party' in the loosest of possible descriptions. This was a homage to the Great Man, inasmuch that I am a little man, a little man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...The few were called upon to share this rapturous performance of the epic film Apocalypse Now. The dress code was 'full retard' and Josh did not disappoint. Mind you, every Saturday is only an excuse for him to 'Black Up' whilst drinking copious amounts of beer and squawking at the TV. This being his birthday party changed that outlook not one bit. There were just more people in his house this time.

They were gonna make me a Major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army anymore.

Moogdroog came along for the ride up the river and as the theme for dress up was the Vietnam war, decided to go as a victim of napalm bombing. Worried about the lack of taste in the costume choice, I told her 'this is Logan and Mrs Josh. They have NO taste!' Saturday morning was spent discussing the finer details of creating third degree burns with the ladies behind the counter of the Festival of Fun costume shop. Their advice was taken on board and we came up with a suitable look for Moogdroog;

We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

The party? I recall very little. I remember watching a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor and surviving. The bullshit piled up so fast in Huntington, you needed wings to stay above it. We were surrounded by Pagan idolatry, I used to think if I died in an evil place, then my soul wouldn't be able to make it to Heaven. But now? Fuck! I mean, I don't care where it goes, as long as it ain't there again. Only a mad man would construct a PBR in his front room. The horror, the horror.

Never get off the boat...

Friday was also a similar inebriated experience. I met up with Kirky and Posh Bastard from my stint in Tanzania. They had organised a drink together and had tried to keep it quiet from me, but I found out about it and decided to spoil their fucking fun. I did it in fine style by getting drunk and insulting both of them until they cried like babies, just like in East Africa. After stumbling about town for about an hour I found myself at Moogdroog's house whereupon I battered down the door and argued with her friends about absurd Great War myths. Again, job well done.

WRONG!!

This week at work, Gevi and I have been encased in a metal panelled fence as we work out the sequences of Roman wells. It's like a breeding pen and we are the subjects of some great experiment to see what is produced when two people are locked up together in terrible conditions for long enough. As the ground workers pass us by we scream 'they don't feed us!' at them, then continue rutting like dogs. One day this dig will be over.

The horror, the horror...

Caves of Forgotten Pretentiousness

So the Evil Docktor Clay was in town yesterday afternoon with his brother. They tipped up at my house and both began systematically beating me with a short length of rubber hose. They took it in turns and laughed like drains the entire time. After this ignoble entry, we walked down to town for the real reason he was in York for the afternoon, that is, to see the new Werner Herzog movie; Cave of Forgotten Dreams. All in glorious 3D! Like we were actually there! We paid our entry but in the fluster of getting the tickets and 3D glasses it slipped our attention that we'd been sold up the fucking river by the student behind the counter and he'd given us seats so far back in the theatre they were in the projection booth facing the fucking wall. I blamed Clay for this outrage as he wasn't watching what was going on, he'd already brought his own 3D glasses and had less on his mind than me. Anyway, we got in the theatre and saw that the place was empty (this was probably something to do with my insistence on arriving about six hours before a film is about to begin. I like to get good seats and prefer to wait for ages rather than end up on the front row in a crowded cinema staring up at the screen only to end up walking out like the hunchback of Notre Dame after two hours of spinal realignment). We looked around ourselves and realised that we'd got the worst seats in the house but as it was empty we made a beeline for the best seats, right in the centre of the theatre. We sat quite comfortably for five minutes, shooting the shit and talking about various pressing issues, like what is best, muffins or crumpets, when a couple arrived and made their way up the rows and straight to the fucking seats we were sitting in. There must have been over two hundred seats in the fucking theatre, so the chances of them having the exact same seats that we'd decided to sit in must have been about 0.5%! I, again, blamed Clay. Shamefaced we trudged up the stairs to the very top of the cinema to take our rightful places.

Yeah, this is mine, Z1

How was the film? Well, as you would expect from any Werner Herzog movie, it was pretty fucking pretentious. He was interviewing a French archaeologist who had done a laser scan of the entire cave that involved millions of laser plotted points and gave a graphical representation of the cave complex and all the paintings that lay therein. Werner asked 'What about these points? Do they have a memory, lives, heartbeat?' The archaeologist (who was previously a fucking juggler and a fucking unicyclist, regular readers will already know my temperate opinions on such people), fumbled through an answer about memories or some other shit. Do you know what I would have said? I would have answered 'NO, OF COURSE THEY DON'T HAVE A FUCKING MEMORY! OR A LIFE OR HEARTBEAT!! THEY ARE COMPUTER GENERATED POINTS IN A PROGRAMMED GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION OF A CAVE, YOU STUPID FUCKING HIPPIE! GET BACK TO THE 60'S AND STOP HAVING ACID FLASHBACKS IN MY OFFICE!!!' Yeah, that's what I would have said.

 'Does it breathe?'

'No, you cunt. it's a map.'

The film was full of nonsense like this. There was one point where Werner was telling us that there was the footprint of child and wolf side by side. He postulated on this; 'Was the wolf stalking the child, did they walk side by side or were the prints made with thousands of years between them? We will never know!' No we will never know, but I'M GUESSING THE LAST FUCKING THEORY IS THE CORRECT ONE!! WHY EVEN BOTHER SAYING IT? WHY WERNER? WHY?? I'M GETTING ENRAGED JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS!! There was also this crazy Perfumer who was dragged into the caves to smell the past. Now, call me cynical, but WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT ABOUT?? How can you smell the past? ARGHH!!! THE HATRED IS BUILDING UP INSIDE OF ME!!! The guy looked crazy as well, he looked like a bull about to charge, you know what I mean? That bovine way of crossed eyes and barely concealed taurine fuelled rage.

'I can smell the past'

'No, that's just bullshit...'

The paintings themselves looked like they'd been done by six year olds. Six year old tards. And they'd not even been coloured in properly. Some looked like potato stamp paintings that kids do in primary school. I was enraged. It was being touted as a prime example of human cultural and artistic beauty. But they were no 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps' I can tell you.

Shit

Good