Humbug!

How's your Christmas going? Probably better than mine, I imagine. We had a cracking couple of days out at my folks' place, but since the minute we got home I've been laid flat out with a bastard of a lurgie. All those marvellous Xmas goodies? No appetite and couldn't taste them even if I did.

Not even humbugs.

Enjoy yerselves.

Late Entry In The Race For The Top Of The Christmas Charts

Nae luck, Leona. Here comes Scunner, Bearing Gifts.

And here's the live performance.


Pardon my idiom, but I fucking love these guys.

Whether the weather


I don't normally complain about the weather. Living in Glasgow there's no point, it's one of the givens of life. Every day you get weather. Sometimes three or four sorts. And I don't normally get the November blues either, when the nights fair draw in and you go to work in the dark and you come home in the dark. Generally speaking, I'm not a SAD type of individual.

But the conditions today are simply evil. We're, what, a week away from the solstice and I don't think I could honestly say we've had daylight the whole day. A bit less dark perhaps, a lightening of the sky from black to heavy grey, but that's as optimistic as it got. And the rain has been lashing without cease and the wind has been blustering back and forth tirelessly, screaming through the window glass, rattling them in their frames.

And in a couple of hours' time I'm going to be out playing football in it.

Baws!

Remix


It seems the video mash-up (cf the marvelous ThriftShop XL) has evolved a level of sophistication. Re-cut movie trailers that completely change the meaning of the film.

I was much taken by the recent BoingBoing entry on Mary Poppins as a horror movie, but my favourite is probably this one.

If anyone knows of any more of these, please point me in their direction.

Edit
Thanks to Rich for these.
Not seen Brokeback Mountain, but it seems to have struck a chord. This one, I liked though.


And... actually I see there are tons of these. I'll have to be selective. If I come across any really good ones, I'll share.

Rarities

There's something that happens so occasionally in my world that you almost forget about it entirely. Almost. Not quite. Because, like a cosmological event, when it does come round it leaves a long blazing mark in the memory, and a hook of hope that you'll see it, one day, again.

What am I talking about?

The new issue of Crimewave just landed.

If you don't know about Crimewave. Here are seven statements:

• I have never read an issue of Crimewave that did not make me seethe with jealousy
• It's produced by TTAPress - the people who bring you Interzone and TTA/BlackStatic - and it surpasses both magazines by miles
• It's the best Crime fiction magazine there is
  
• It's not a Crime magazine. The stories are about "crime" only in the way that life is largely about crime; the transgressions people commit against each other in the course of living their lives. The stories are about life
• The new issue is one of the most beautiful examples of book production I've ever seen. But then I always say that
• Crimewave is the only magazine I buy *knowing* that I'm not going to be disappointed.

Aye, a rarity, right enough.

Pirate Memory Games

Warning: this post contains half-baked and undigested ideas. Feel free to argue with or ignore as you will.

So, it seems the whole world is writing Pirate stories. I know of at least five GSFWC members who claim to have signed up for passage (Mr Duncan has of course already completed his, plus landed a leviathan of a sea shanty into the bargain; and I've read one other which is just brilliant), and of plenty of others further afield who are in the process of finding their sea legs and heaving to as well. So, it's probably a good job that the world and his wife are getting ready to publish all these pirate stories that are going to be floating around pretty soon like so much storm-wrecked flotsam...well, I know of at least two or three publishing venues dedicating themselves to nefarious sea-going adventures, and that seems like a lot - they won't be enough, and pirate stories will be washing ashore in all sorts of strange places over the next couple of years, but that's the nature of capturing the general writerly imagination.

Which is all good, because, of course, I too have a pirate tale to tell, and I think I have a pretty unique angle on it. But it's got me wondering: what do people really want from a pirate story? I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one who's first reaction to the brief: "Write a story with pirates in..." was, "Great! What can I do with this? How can I make it different?" Not by a long chalk. Because, yes, it's great that pirates are "in" right now. Pirates are fun (we have annual talk-like-a-pirate day fer chrissakes!), they're cool, they're rock and roll, and we have a lot to thank Mr Depp and his shipmates for in raising their profile. And I, like everyone else I know probably, amn't going to settle for a run of the mill seafaring adventure story. I mean how many opportunities to you get to write something like this? No, it has to be special...

I'm really looking forward to what variations all these cool writers will inevitably come up with on the theme, but I just hope that people are not going to be disappointed when they a buy a book of Pirate Stories and they find all this neat, out-there stuff instead of twenty-two Pirates of The Caribbean rip-offs. Are they, in the words of Little Britain's Mr Mann, going to be looking for something "a bit more piratey"?

See, I enjoyed the PoTC movies (yea, even in their disneyfication), and their antecedent, the marvelous Burt Lancaster vehicle, The Crimson Pirate is one of my favourite movies, but the more I think about this, what interests me is the yawning gulf that lies between the colourful, wisecracking, slightly-dangerous-but-that-just-makes-them-more-sexually-attractive jack tars of popular conception and Real Uncompromising Bastard Pirates.

You can tell I've not really thought this through, so I'll give it a rest for now, but it'll likely form the basis of my story, which otherwise is going to be clothed in the guise of an MGM Pirate musical.

Because when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, Pirates are fun after all.