Next Week, On "Who's Your Favourite Baldwin?"...

I tweeted recently that we had had our inaugural game of “Who’s your favourite Baldwin”... and that Daniel was the winner.

I need to elaborate. Smurfy found this in Wikipedia:

In 1998, Baldwin was found running naked through the halls of New York's Plaza Hotel shouting "Baldwin!" and was arrested for possession of cocaine.

There’s nothing in that that sentence that isn’t good, but there is a fair amount that is baffling.

Yelling your own name… as though you have just won something. Brilliant. Makes the copper’s jobs a bit easier, too.

Arrested for possession of cocaine. While naked. Where was he snorting it from? Brilliant.

Again, from the same reliable source:

Baldwin starred on the VH1 reality television show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, filmed in 2007, but left the show after the fourth episode. His stated reasons for leaving included having a prior commitment to an acting job and the others' behavior interfering with his recovery, but it is eventually revealed that he left because of inappropriate text messages he had sent to Mary Carey, fellow patient in the same treatment group as him

The only thing that’s not so brilliant about that is we originally read it as Mariah Carey and fell about laughing for about fifteen minutes. Can’t explain why. It’s not as funny when it’s not her, but as he seems to be living in a fantasy land so, you know, goose, gander, Baldwin.

Enemy Mine

If you’re going to have a nemesis it’s important to have a good quality one. Take me for instance… I have a proper one. I loathe and detest my nemesis to a level where I actually lose sleep over them. I stay awake, just to get in a little extra loathing. My nemesis is able to affect my life. He can make it good or bad. I'm pretty sure I can affect his.

I have talked to my nemesis every week, for at least an hour, for the last three years. I always talk to them on a Wednesday. That’s important, that is. You’ve got to have regular contact with your nemesis. You can’t just see them every now and then down the street or at school reunions. You’ve got to know them nearly as well as you know yourself.

I know my nemesis so well that my hatred is not pure. Sometimes, I feel a little sorry for them. Sometimes, I even see their point of view. That’s the way it has got to be with a nemesis. There has to be a little yin with the yang. There has to be some dependence on each other. Something that binds us inexorably across the fields of space and time. There has to be, let’s face it, a little love smattered through the deep, stinky veins of hatred.

I get shaky and angry for about 12 hours before I talk to them, and I feel an almost pathetic sense of relief when the phone call ends - and that’s where I want to thank my nemesis. Because, I talk to them on a Wednesday and after it’s over, I almost feel like the weekend has started. Everything else feels easy.

Thank you nemesis, for being such an unholy thorn in my side that I am able to relish at least two days of the working week. If and when our relationship is over, we'll keep in touch of FoesBook.

Sound Wedding Advice

My dear mates Gooby and Gooberella are getting married soon. This put me in mind to communicate one of those simple old bits of housewifey wisdom.


Something Gary Oldman
Something Gary Numan
Something Gary Borrowedman
Something Gary Blueman

A Book What I Read

You read a Steven King book for a few reasons:

You’re stuck in a flat on the 37^th floor by the one-night-stand who accidentally dead-locked you in - and it’s the only thing in the bookshelf to keep you entertained until they get home.

You’re in an airport in Soviet Uzbekistan and you found one of the books chocking up the wheel of an abandoned Tupolev and you’ve eight hours till the next flight out.

Bubba from the prison library hands it in through the bars.

Whatever the reason, you don’t read a Steven King book to be enlightened or delve into any larger philosophical realms. You read it to pass the time in a slightly more interesting way than trying to pick your nose until it bleeds.

King’s latest, 11.22.63 has a premise and tries to delve: Save the world by saving JFK. It also plods into the murky world of conspiracy theorists who are still certain of magic bullets and Lee Harvey Oswald’s incompetence.

He’s tried something less ethereally spooky and more down the straight Sci-Fi lines than his normal stuff by doing this time travel book and he’s not that good at it. His strength with the supernatural, spooky and gory sort of overwhelms his ability to have a bit of logic and internal sense to a world that is being affected by time travel. He was trying to be serious and really, he’s better at the semi-amusing possessed cars.

To be fair, it’s a tough trick to pull off, particularly around an event that is so well documented and scrutinised. Subsequently, he has too much source material to work with. There are huge chunks in the middle of the book where our hero is surveiling Oswald that simply don’t need to be there. It’s well known that Oswald moved around a lot and there was a lot of life’s messy backwards-and-forwards in his increasingly dysfunctional marriage. Even if our hero’s movements do dovetail in with these events to give the appearance of a story that is believable and logical, they do not make for good story telling. Real life shouldn’t interfere with a Steven King book and there is far too much of the mundane in this monster.

Like the last book from him, Under the Dome, the covers are far too far apart and I wonder if editors aren’t afraid to edit King. I wonder if there is such an aura around him now that no-one but the most foolhardy attempts to tell him that quantity is not necessarily quality. Also, like the last book, there is absolutely no deeper explanation as to how the enabling “magic” happened. It’s akin to a doctor saying, “In an unlikely turn of events, you have contracted Pernicious South American Bum and Gum Rot” and you asking, “How is that possible? I’ve never been to South America?” and him saying, “I have absolutely no idea in the world - but it sounds awesome so I’m sticking with the diagnosis.”

There are elements of the book that are likeable (the main character’s voice is pleasant. The female lead, if shallow, is ok) but King makes a mistake he warns against in his own advice on how to write. He “tells” rather than “shows” on too many occasions.

If you ever want to be beaten over the head with a repetitive phrase, this is the book for you. He must have typed the words, “The past is obdurate” a thousand times. Again, in the quantity is not quality way, repeating things endlessly does not necessarily make them true. It just gets people to agree because they can’t bear to hear it one more time. Writing a book about repeating the past till you get it right, is not necessarily the right thing to do either.