Tag Archives: mel brooks

Sunday 28th January 2024 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what the hell is going on here.

Back in the old days, like 6 months ago, I could sit down with a clean computer screen and in 4 hours bash out a radio programme all the way from the very start – like choosing the music – to the very end, like having it up and running.

So having dictated the notes last night, all that I had to do today was to edit them, assemble the programme, choose the final track, write, dictate and edit the notes for that and add it in. So here am I, it’s quite late in the evening and I’m nowhere near finished.

It all went wrong last night. What I dictated was, as I expected, total rubbish and having tried unsuccessfully to edit some of it, I gave up and re-dictated it.

But it’s hopeless trying to dictate anything here during daylight hours at a weekend. I lost count of how many times a motorcycle went past the window causing me to stop and after it had gone past, going back and re-dictating from a point farther back

Having edited it and halfway through assembling the programme I noticed a couple of places where I hadn’t gone back far enough so I re-dictated the segments.

Then I couldn’t make the tones of the new part match up with the old parts despite trying for hours. So in the end I ended up having to re-dictate it yet again.

Where I’m at at the moment is in the editing stage.

But at least I know how long the gap is for the eleventh and final track so that’s all ready and the notes dictated and edited. LOVE AIN’T FOR KEEPING is one of the most beautiful love songs ever and you don’t need me to tell you when was the last time that I played it to an audience

And it was an audience of one too.

But anyway, I digress … "again" – ed … I’m fed up to the gills with this blasted stuff that’s making me sleep, making me see all kinds of strange things when I close my eyes and totally churning up my brain so I can’t concentrate on anything.

More by luck than judgement I’ve fought off waves of sleep today but everything is turning into a total mess. I try to keep the notes on my whiteboard tidy so that I can follow them backwards if necessary, but that’s a total shambles too.

It’s all a total morass at the moment, and in years to come, people are going to look at the notes from this last week or two, shake their heads and say to each other "I don’t know what he must have been smoking when he was writing all of that, but I wish that he’d passed it around to the rest of us"

It’s like the time that the Cambridge boat sank in the middle of the Boat Race and everyone going round, pointing at the crew and saying "they were totally out of their scull".

Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … bed, I had something or a better sleep last night. Maybe that accounts for why I managed to go through the day without actually crashing out.

It was about 01:00 when I finally went to bed, and I awoke (but that’s not to say that I left the bed) at about 10:00.

It was a leisurely start to the day, as befits a Sunday, but eventually I managed to make a start on the dictaphone notes. We started off with the story of a small girl who was elected for some kind of competition because she could run so fast. She was taken to somewhere like the Centre de Re-education for a medical examination. There, she was confronted by a bear and then by a polar bear. When people asked about that, the answer given was that where she’s going she might actually encounter these animals so she’ll have to know what they are, what they look like etc and whether she could out-run them. While she was having her medical they were preparing the meals. The meals were very scanty, that’s for sure, but specially prepared to give the most energy from a small amount of food. They came to me and asked if it was true that I was a vegan. I replied “yes” so shortly afterwards they gave me a chicken salad type of thing which of course didn’t go down very well at all. Then the giri was made ready for this competition

That reminded me of the time that I was up in RED CANYON IN UTAH IN 2002.
A tourist there asked one of the tourist guides "is it true that a bear won’t attack you if you carry a clove of garlic in your pocket?"
The guide replied "it all depends on how quickly you can carry it."

Later on while I’d been asleep I’d received a mail from a friend about a group of people who had bought a field and were going to use it as a kind of forum for telling jokes. The jokes were going to be kind-of middle of the road jokes so that they could develop a kind of middle of the road humour that would satisfy most people about the political correctness of the modern world and those who are upset about the outrageous nature of some crude jokes. He went on to show some kind of complicated maths calculation that went down to something like the 3rd or 4th line of a multiplication problem. Much as I’m pretty good at simple maths I couldn’t get my head around this of something like 2/3 of 5/8 of 7/8 of 3/7 or whatever it was. Also in the field was an old school bus up on jacks that was going to be their office. All in all I thought that it was going to be a strange situation for anyone to be in to come to this place and maybe give it their support

This would be one of those occasions where I’d have to call on the services of my namesake the mathematician who told me once that three fifths of five eights was … errr … nothing

But actually this is quite apposite, especially as my teatime viewing at the moment is SPACEBALLS. It reminded me of the famous Mel Brooks quote that "good taste is the enemy of comedy".

There was more stuff on the dictaphone too but good taste notwithstanding, you really don’t want to read it, especially if you’re eating a meal right now.

So after lunch I attacked the radio programme, and that’s where I am right now, stuck in the middle of all of that nonsense wishing that I could get out of it

There was the usual series of breaks to deal with the pizza of course, and quite enjoyable it was tonight too, even if it was the wrong flour that I used. But that’s the problem – on line, I can’t order the flour that I really like so anything will have to do as I go by trial and error.

But now everything is finished I’ll go back to deal with the radio programme. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, once said "The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well"

However I feel more like the Duke of Marlborough on his way to do battle in Flanders. "God knows I go with a heavy heart, for I have no hope of doing anything considerable"

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Monday 16th March 2015 – I’VE FINISHED …

… painting the walls of the bedroom today. At least, I’ve done all that I intend to do.

painted wallpaper bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe plasterboard joints wre still showing through the second coat that I did on Saturday morning, and so that called for a third coat. I had to put some more white paint into the mix to make sure that I had enough paint, and now the colour is too light. Not only that, it’s rather patchy too and, even worse, you can still see the plasterboard joints.

Ahhh well, never mind.

I had a phone call from Cecile and that ended up with me being sidetracked for half an hour or so. Nevertheless, I had finished the painting by 17:00 and that gave me time to start the emptying of Caliburn.

That took about an hour and a half and there’s still a plie of stuff left in there for which I can’t find room at the moment. But it’s a long time since Caliburn has been this empty.

And I was right about some tins of kidney beans. I distincly remember buying some but you will remember that I couldn’t find them. Anyway, once I’d emptied Caliburn I found an IKEA bag with the missing articles – together with some Soya desserts, dated 22 December 2014. They went in the bin.

I had another chat with Cecile afterwards and then sat down to watch a film. Tonight’s film was the whimsical John Wayne comedy McLintock!.

A delightful film, even if the picture quality is very poor – due to the fact that it’s out of copyright and so the original studio copies have long been lost. All that remain are second- and third-hand copies, and we are lucky to have those.

It’s another one of these John Wayne films where everyone is intent on having a good time, on screen as well as off-screen, and the fight scene is one of the inspirations for the fight in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

It’s full of all kinds of memorable quotes, but you’ll need to buy the film to listen to them for yourself. Make sure you buy the full (122 minute) version and not the cut-down 90-minute TV edition, which cuts out half the plot, and don’t complain about the wretched quality because it’s all that is available.

For tea, I made another mega-curry of green pepper and lentils. There’s enough for three more days too which is good. It means that I don’t have to exert myself so much for the rest of the week.

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Sunday 3rd January 2010 – I’ve had a western day today.

Seeing as it was below freezing for most of the day I didn’t feel like going out. I have 6 more westerns to see out of that batch that I bought and so today it was the turn of Stagecoach, Man Of The Frontier and One Eyed Jacks.

Of course, Stagecoach is by far and away the most famous of them all. It was the film that catapulted John Wayne into the limelight back in 1939. Mind you, any self-respecting band of native Americans could have done us all a big favour. 60 Indians on horseback – fleet-footed Indian ponies at that – racing after a Studebaker (and in reality it should have been a Concord) stagecoach and 9 passengers with an all-up weight of three or four tons being pulled by 6 horses and not only could they not catch it, not a single one of the Indians had the intelligence to pump a pile of lead into the horses pulling the coach. But then, what would you have done with the remaining 1 hour 29 minutes and 30 seconds?

Mind you it was an exciting chase through the Utah and New Mexico desert across the foot of the Mokee Dugway across to Medicine Hat – a route that regular followers of my outpourings will have seen before.

One Eyed Jacks wasn’t anything like as bad as I expected it to be – in fact it was quite watchable. It starred and was the first film to be directed by Marlon Brando. After the film was released he complained bitterly that his film had been ruthlessly cut by the editing crew and it had destroyed the whole synthesis of what he was trying to achieve. He had a point but then again so did the editing crew – Brando’s version of the film was over 5 hours long! Imagine the “Director’s Cut” of that!

Gene Autry was another contender for the role of “The Singing Cowboy” (or “Cattleyouth as you have to say these days) and my mother, being the kind of woman that she was, made us sit through all of his films until we knew the lyrics off by heart. Funnily enough, I’d forgotten all about Man Of The Frontier (that’s not even a cattleyouth film seeing as it was set in the 1930s and is about the construction of a dam – a kind of Campbell’s Kingdom in reverse) until he burst into a rendition of “Red River Valley”.

And then it all came flooding back (well, we are talking about dams here). My mother proposed me to enter this talent contest when I was knee-high and told me to sing “Red River Valley”. But I was rebellious even in those days and was hurled off the stage and told never to come back, after merely singing –
I can sing all the songs by Gene Autry
But my singing is certainly vile
When I sing of the Red River Valley
Well the cowboys they all run a mile!

But we were talking the other day about coincidences in Hollywood. And one of the films that cropped up was of course the legendary Blazing Saddles. In that film the baddy was played by Harvey Korman and his sidekick was Slim Pickens. In One Eyed Jacks the baddy was Karl Malden who just happens to be the spitting image of Harvey Korman – you had to look twice to see any difference – and his sidekick was … errr … Slim Pickens. Yes – I reckon Mel Brooks owns the same Western collection that I have!

And that’s not all! In Stagecoach the coach driver was Andy Devine. And I’ve seen Andy Devine before – he was Roy Rogers’ sidekick in The Bells of San Angelo that we saw the other day. And in the 1966 remake of Stagecoach the stage driver was none other than Slim Pickens.

I did manage to get outside though and having found by coincidence a piece of gas pips that was of 32mm diameter I’ve assembled and erected my weather station. The anenometer goes round nicely and the rain gauge will have its work cut out as it’s snowing like hell outside.

In other news, you have all heard about the fraudulent election in Afghanistan – obviously Karzi has been taking lessons from the bushbaby and Florida. Despite the acknowledged widespread fraud, the parliament has shown some teeth by rejecting Karzi’s proposed cabinet more-or-less en masse citing ethicity bribery or money as the reasons for Karzi’s choice of most of them. However, the United Nations finds “the rejection of Karzai(sic)’s cabinet worrying“. So despite having tried to force the Karzi to work hard to outlaw corruption in Afghanistan, the United Nations – and hence the west – are dismayed that a corrupt and illegitimate puppet government would go so far reject nominees for posts where the nominee is either a fellow-tribesman or a significant sum of money has changed hands re the post. So a corrupt election “electing” a corrupt government led by a corrupt President with a cabinet stacked with corrupt ministers is acceptable to the west because it’s pro-western, yet a democratically-elected government next door in Iran is deemed to be unacceptable and a suitable candidate to be undermined, because the democratically-elected government there is anti-western.

The hypocrisy is staggering. You couldn’t make up a story like this!

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Friday 1st January 2010 – I’m blogging early this evening.

Yes, I won’t be up much longer as I’m going to have an early night – I’m shattered. Last night’s major revelling kept me awake until all of 00:45 before I crashed out, and I had a leisurely morning in bed until about 10:00. So I’ve no idea why it is that it’s just after 22:00 and I’m ready for bed.

It’s not as if I’ve done very much either. I’ve managed a stroll across to the barn to check on things over there but that involved dodging a deluge of snowy rain that’s been falling all day. Apart from that I’ve been up here doing not very much at all.

Christmas is of course not complete without watching “The Great Escape” on television. And for me, New Year always involves watching old westerns on DVD. You may recall that I bought a copy of John Wayne’s Fort Apache the other day but it wasn’t that I was watching. In Brussels at the Media Market in April I bought a boxed set of vintage westerns from the 1940s and 50s – 9 old hand-coloured “forgotten classics” and so I’ve been watching Vengeance Valley, Abilene Town and The Bells of San Angelo this afternoon.

The Bells of San Angelo is a “Roy Rogers and Trigger” western featuring a whole pile of singing cowboys. It’s as cheesy as anything you can imagine and I’m not sure whether, looking at it from today’s perspective, you could distinguish it from anything that Mel Brooks might put out. I’m not sure who might have ever considered it as being anything like a “serious” western but we are talking of the days before the idea of a parody had ever been set into anyone’s minds and when people were still scratching their heads trying to figure out what Hellzapoppin’ was all about.

On the other hand, Vengeance Valley is a much more interesting film. The plot revolves around an unmarried mother giving birth to a child out of wedlock and how much of a risque topic was this for that period? Especially as the film treats her with sympathy and reviles the doctor who refuses to treat her until he “has a request from the father”. But it’s quite interesting from my point of view as the film opens with a narrative about the loneliness of being high up in the mountains with nothing but the eerie wind whistling through the pines. Now have a read of this page that I wrote in 2002.

The prize for the most significant film however nust be given to Abilene Town. It’s an early Randolph Scott film and features a conflict between homesteaders and the cattle-barons. it introduces the concept of the “good” and “bad” sides of the main street – an idea that was developed in Kirk Douglas’ Gunfight At The Ok Corral. What is even more interesting is that there is a scene inside a music hall with a dancer and chorus line and as soon as you see it you will immediately say Blazing Saddles. Not only that, the film ends with a confrontation between the pacific citizens and rowdy cattle hands, just as in the aforementioned. And when towards the end of Blazing Saddles Cleavon Little invokes the name of Randolph Scott, it all becomes clear and you know precisely on which film Brooks based much of Blazing Saddles.

Not only that, in another one of those moments that can only be described as coincidence, I mentioned the music hall scene, that was absolutely horrendous, and a perusal of the full cast list reveals that the choreography (if that is what it was) was by Sammy Lee. No wonder he only lasted a handful of games as manager of Bolton Wanderers if that was the best that he could do.

And there are three items of news that have caught my eye today. Firstly, relating to the mysterious affair of the underwear bomber, we have an announcement from the UK Government. Now who reading this blog is surprised? Of course you will be saying that the British Government had no connection at all with the supposed detonation or not of this weapon (although if course anything is possible in this modern age) but you can see that they cannot pass up an opportunity to remove some more civil liberties from their citizens. What do you do if you need a gipsy’s towards the end of your flight? Of course the Brits will take it lying down as always – no-one in the UK has any backbone any more. It reminds me of the OUSA Executive Committee meeting when they learnt that I had been elected to a position within their august body, and a shiver ran round the whole meeting looking for a spine to run up.

But you’ll note that the UK Government targets Yemen in its prognostications. Those ideas are developed further elsewhere. So having targeted Iraq and having a good go at Iran they are now having a go at a third state in the area. No wonder the whole of Islam feels under threat from the west. All they really need to do is to have a good go at Syria, which will no doubt be forthcoming in early course, and they will have ringed and surrounded the chief culprit in the whole of the Al-Qaida network – namely Saudi Arabia. Of the 19 hijackers of September 11th, 15 were Saudis. They were trained by a Saudi, led by a Saudi and financed by a Saudi (who just happens to be a big pal of the Bushbaby’s daddy) and so the western world invaded …. errr …. Afghanistan. Of course with the west getting half of its oil from Saudi Arabia it was never likely to tackle Al Qaida and Bin Laden on their home territory in case Bin Laden’s dad, the fourth-richest man in Saudi Arabia, cuts off the western supply of oil. And as more and more of Iraqi oil is sold to the likes of China and Angola, then the west’s dependency on the spiritual home of Al Qaida for its oil is not likely to end any time soon.

Thirdly, it appears that the UK National Health Service is about to collapse underneath the weight of the drunks and binge drinkers in the country. So sozzled has British society become that the Brits are totally shameless about it. Someone on a certain Social Networking site not so long ago posted with pride that she didn’t remember anything after 11 o clock on one particular and woke up next day at 1:30 in the afternoon still in her clothes and shoes, so she must have had a good time, and she can’t wait to go out and get wrecked again. In fact so sozzled is the UK right at this moment that the answer is staring them in the face and they are too p155ed to see it. All you do, to solve the crisis is to put an extra 50p tax on the price of an individual drink, or £4:00 on the price of a bottle, and give all the extra tax raised to the NHS.

Problem solved.

Mnd you, knowing the NHS as I do, what they will do with the money is to engage thousands of extra consultants to advise on how to spend the money, and when they send in their bills the total will be about exactly the amount received, so nothing at all will reach the front line and the NHS will be back where it started.

No surprise there.

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