Watching paint dry

"The Moonstone", mentioned in my last blog but one and one of my favourite books, has a central plot point involving the length of time paint takes to dry. So does my favourite cartoon, ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks (the episode "Safety Third"). I always say the later seasons are the best, with the snappy dialogue and perfect characterisation that I love so much, but this is one of many first-season episodes which stand up alongside any of the rest of the series. There's a wonderful conversation between our heroes of the type I've had (in the role of Simon) many times before. Some people just don't want to do sums themselves...

Don't touch it! The paint won't be dry for fifteen hours!

Oh, man! That's like ten at night!

Alvin, if it's two in the afternoon now, what time will it be in fifteen hours?

Erm, 12:30? No, 11:15! 6:35!

Stop guessing!

Just tell me!

Figure it out!

Tuesday!

T-Tuesday? What?!

I thought it was a trick question.

I know! I know! Eight o'clock!

You're not even trying!

Okay... think out of the box...

No, no! Think IN the box! Right in the centre of the box!

Is that a clue?

Five in the morning! It's five in the morning!

And this scene is followed by the greatest ever example of Simon's habit of talking in his sleep. "I've had enough with all these egotistical unicorns! I've had it up to here!" Alvin, sneaking out to steal the car at five in the morning, promises to take care of the unicorns, and Simon responds "Rub peanuts in their faces."

See, this is why I love Simon so much. Perhaps it's a little hard to explain.

You kept that quiet!

 Someone told me today that she'd seen me on TV ("Superhuman Genius", of course - did they really show it yet again?) and was shocked to recognise me! This is someone I've known, in a professional capacity, for about three months, and I was doubly shocked to learn that I hadn't previously mentioned my illustrious TV career!

I mean, it's the first thing I tell people, as a rule. Am I getting less boastful in my old age? Clearly I need to work on that.

June 21st, 1848

 A couple of weeks ago I found this treasure in the lovely second-hand book shop in Worcester.

£2.45 for what the back cover rightly calls "three gripping novels by Wilkie Collins". I'm a great fan of Wilkie, and definitely had to snap this one up when I saw it. And having read the two later, shorter novels first (having only previously read them on Project Gutenberg, which is nice in its way but not as good as having a real papery book in your hands), it was only today I came to start on The Moonstone.

And a very appropriate day it is, too, because I'd entirely forgotten that Rachel's birthday party when she receives the eponymous diamond happens on June 21st! I only mention this trifling circumstance because* this is exactly the kind of thing that Gabriel Betteredge would find in his Robinson Crusoe and take as an absolutely certain prophecy of the future! I'm confident that at some point today (better hurry up, it's half past seven already), someone will present me with a diamond worth at least twenty thousand pounds. Or something equally coincidental anyway, like maybe I'll get caught in the rain, fall into a fever and be unable to pass on important information until a plot-convenient moment. Or just do a memory stunt along the lines of the one that forms the climax of the novel.

This "Great Classic Library" was published in 1994, and seems to have been a great way to get some of the more obscure works by great authors into your hands. I'll have to collect them all!

I suspect the choice of which novels to include in each one was dictated as much by page count as by any objective judgement of quality. This Collins compilation is in the wrong order - My Lady's Money came before The Haunted Hotel and Mr Troy the lawyer from the former makes a cameo appearance in the latter, referring back to it. But I'm surprised I haven't come across these volumes before at some point in the last thirty years, and I'm going to have to find space on my bookshelves for them!

Or rather, buy some new bookshelves. My existing ones are full up at the moment, and any new acquisitions have to be wedged in on top of the rows of books. And these are really hefty things - 680 pages in the one I've got! Ooh, maybe someone will give me a bookcase as a present for Rachel Verinder's birthday today! The prophetic powers of Robinson Crusoe work in mysterious ways!

* That was an in-joke to entertain any other Wilkie Collins fans among my readers. His narrators are forever saying "I only mention this trifling circumstance because..." whenever they talk about something they have no reason to mention but which is important for the reader to know in order to make sense of the rest of the story. The existence of a dust-heap, described in minute detail in "The Law and the Lady" is a personal favourite.

Metamorphosis

 The world of American superhero comics (currently a horribly barren place in terms of entertainment, almost without exception) has been enlivened for the last six months by the long-awaited return of Metamorpho!

One of my all-time favourites, of course. And this series, unlike the other modern-day resurrections of the Element Man that I briefly moaned about in my excessively lengthy recounting of Metamorpho's glory days some years ago, is done exactly right! A loving homage to the works of Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon, written by one of the rare and special people who knows what makes them so great!

And that writer is Al Ewing, who is ALSO one of the even more vanishingly rare people who gets my very favourite obscure superhero, Manikin! The man is so in tune with my preferences, it's (pardon the pun) Stagg-ering!

This series is maybe more outright comedy than the classics of the sixties, but, well... I honestly can't remember the last time I laughed out loud four or five times while reading a single issue of a comic! And Metamorpho #6 accomplished that - I urge you to go and check it out; you won't regret it!

Not least because Prince Ra-Man shows Rex a potential future in his mind's eye - in the form of a PERFECT pastiche of Fletcher Hanks's Stardust!

Another all-time favourite superhero of mine. Seriously, Al Ewing seems to be writing comics personally tailored just to me right now. Rex doesn't quite get it, though...

And of course the comic ends with the traditional plea to the readers to keep Metamorpho alive, and maybe, just maybe, he'll one day get his own ongoing series again!

Please all write into DC Comics en masse, demanding it! Or, even better, buy the trade paperback - out in September! Available to pre-order now!

I for one welcome our new machine overlords

Adverts for AI that can "bring your old photos to life" are all over the place at the moment. And I scoffed at the obviously-not-really-animating-old-photos videos the ads showcase... but I couldn't resist trying it out on one of the sites that lets you get a free sample without openly harvesting your personal data and using it to take over the world. I stuck in the oldest photo I'd got on my laptop... 

... And what came out is, I have to admit, a work of true wonder!

Yes, it doesn't look remotely like Granddad (the years really fall off him as he walks along!), and there's weird stuff going on with the hands, and what's with the woman in the trouser suit it invents in the background, and yes, AI art is a terrible thing and should be destroyed by fire - but I'm really impressed by this! Cleethorpes in 1950 brought to life, albeit a scary artificial fictional kind of life!

It's fun to play with, and I don't honestly care as much as I probably should about helping to train AI to take over the world. It'll be a visually interesting kind of world, at least.

Memory takes you places

 With the Europa League final happening in Bilbao as I write this, I can cheerfully say that I've been there once, in my capacity as a Memory Man.

In fact, Spain is one of the seventeen countries I've visited specifically because I take part in memory competitions, which just goes to show it's a hobby that's really widened my horizons over the last 25 years. Some were to compete, some were to appear on TV because memory champions are cool, some were for weirder and still memory-related reasons. And since I always have to stop and count on my fingers to recall what the seventeen countries are, here's the definitive list in no particular order:

Ireland - a TV show

France - at least three memory competitions

Spain - a very fun promotional video for the Guggenheim Museum

Germany - countless memory competitions! Also once went there to have my brain scanned, and at least once for a cool TV show.

Austria - at least one or two memory competitions

Switzerland - being a work of modern art in an exhibition!

Sweden - multiple memory competitions

Denmark - one or more memory competitions

Turkey - a memory competition, or rather a Memoriad with other things as well as the memory

China - three world memory championships and two awesome TV shows

Korea - a cool memory competition

Japan - multiple TV shows and some more brain-scanning as part of the trip

Bahrain - two more world memory championships

Malaysia - just one world memory championship, but still possibly my favourite one ever

Canada - a nice memory competition

USA - three Extreme memory competitions! And I've had my brain scanned there too.

Brazil - an early exotic trip for a TV show

I think that's everywhere I've been for memory reasons. Though I've probably forgotten something.

That stupid looking robot with the big hands

 I'm sorry this blog has been a little neglected of late - I've got a new job which (touch wood) I'm even kind of enjoying at the moment. I'm sure it won't last, but it's keeping me occupied, anyway.

I'll think of something not involving old comics to write about here at some point, but for now, please enjoy the classic saga of the stupid looking robot with the big hands, which ran through the Transformers comic in early 1986!

This is Transformers №43, dated 11th Jan '86. The Trans-Formation page on the inside front cover told us every week what was happening in the Transformers adventure, the back-up strip, or anything else relevant to the comic. And it was enlivened by Lew Stringer's Robo-Capers strip at the bottom of the page!

So, before turning to the Transformers story itself (a fill-in adventure by James Hill rather than regular writer Simon Furman, in which the smallest and weakest Autobot, Bumblebee, goes off on his own and gets victimised by the evil Decepticons), we can laugh at the capers of the aliens and their robots. The running, very loose, storyline of Robo-Capers involved the king of the aliens and his inventor, trying to come up with new and deadly killer robots, but most episodes were stories like this one which just involved comical interludes with a robotic theme (often not with the aliens at all).

A follow-up to this story appears in №51, dated 8th Mar. Or partially appears, anyway...

It somehow got printed without the black, just leaving bright colourful splodges at the bottom of the page!

Obviously, a lot of people noticed and wrote in to the letters page (which was hosted in character by the Decepticon Soundwave - or while not exactly "in character" to the way he acted in the comics, then in a wonderful bantering and chatty evil way that everyone really loved!) and in №58, 26th Apr, we got an apology and a corrected Robo-Capers!

 One hopes Lew Stringer got paid twice for this one. And it's kind of appropriate that the corrected second strip now appears before the reprinted American Transformers story in this issue, a fill-in adventure by Len Kaminski rather than regular writer Bob Budiansky, in which the smallest and weakest Autobot, Bumblebee, goes off on his own and gets victimised by the evil Decepticons.

The editorial also promises that Soundwave will take care of the people responsible for the mess-up, a promise that Soundwave himself reiterates on the letters page, And sure enough, in №59, 3rd May, we get "a somewhat satisfactory epilogue" to finish off this strange saga!

I love it when something strange like a printing error has a knock-on effect on the contents of future stories!