What *do* you do with a drunken sailor?

Hmm, not an apposite post title that, but what the cowing hey, as the Brummies might say.  Before they beat me up for glib regional stereotyping like I was a panellist on some lazy BBC current affairs quizshow.  Or any BBC panel show.  Or any BBC comedy.  Or any Channel 4 etc. etc.

So, Spring is here and with it new horizons.  No longer is life work and then darkness.  The world lives again and with it groweth mine ambitions and joys.  I find new things to excite me and entrance me.  Not entrance as in a way in, but entrance as in put me in a trance.  Or maybe I do meant the other thing.  Ah language you multisided many-faced whore.  How dost thou give such deep and ambiguous pleasures to your users?  Soft, my darling, soft.

I’ve come across a few lovely things of late.  A webzine called Crossed Genres, which I’m thinking of submitting to.  I might well try for the upcoming issue on gadgets/artifacts because Philip K. Dick used to do that sort of thing very well with his various mood gadgets in his short stories.

Daniel O’Mahony’s enlightment-esque novel Newton’s Sleep is available free online from Random Static, which is wonderful as I’ve been trying to lay my hands on a copy for ages.  Daniel is a Doctor Who fan writer who writes nicely intricate and intelligent novels that are worth your time.  (Now if only Andrew Cartmel’s Prisoner novel Miss Freedom was so easy to lay one’s hands on!)

I’ve been watching black and white episodes of Callan, and falling in love with being British all over again.  I don’t much care for a lot of the trash culture we’ve developed, but I like our folksy eccentricities, even if a lot of it is middle class indulgence.  It’s unlikely, for example, to come across a working class Wiccan.  But I digress.  Callan is one of the best spy shows ever because it’s so very moral.  Spying is highly immoral, but Callan is a man who cares about what he’s doing and seeing him tortured and twisted out of shape is a wonderful thing.  (I’ve also bought myself the Fantomas serials, French silent era crime fiction featuring a dastardly criminal mastermind of what would become known as pulp traditions, but I’ve not watched any yet.)

I also watch Inglourious Basterds the other night and was pleasantly surprised.  I’m not excessively fond of Tarantino, mostly the subject matter doesn’t appeal, but I enjoyed this because of the stylings which reminded me of seventies westerns and war films.  And Brad Pitt doing some caricature work, like some cartoon of Charles Bronson (the actor, not the criminal).  But I think it was probably the cartoon Nazi, Hans Lander, that was the most interesting performance as if he’d walked off some hard-edged version of ‘Allo ‘Allo.  The ending was too over the top to be entirely satisfying but it reminded me to cast further afield for my inspirations and to write with more fun in mind because I once was very good at dialogue.

I just bought the penultimate volume of Urasawa’s Pluto, the mature readers version of an Astroboy tale.  Very much looking forward to consuming that morsel.

And finally finally finally I’m going to get around to joining the British Science Fiction Association, which I should have done ten years ago, but twenty pounds sounded like a massive amount for a subscription.  Oh how callow a youth was I then, that I thought twenty pounds a lot of money?  Well, I kind of still do.  Sigh.