First not so Great Western Livery

First, let me thank NERDS who post with such unbridled enthusiasm subject material such as First Great Western's new livery photos. Without them, I would have actually needed to do some work finding this:

It's a "what were they thinking" moment if ever there was one.

Minimalist, snappy, and stylish as it may be, to me the harmonious, paralleled lines suddenly parting ways seem to represent a severe derailment. You might have thought, given this country's public transport safety record over the last decade, that more thought might have gone into this new corporate identity. Happy New Year............

Did you get an N64?

Was your Christmas like this?

I hope so!

Grubby

The final toastal installment...

Thanks to my partner in toastal krime, Jerome (right) for this pic, taken c. 1999.

On a serious note, should I be worried that my very real fingerprints are up on the net?

Playing the Saw: An Epigram

Do you remember how grandpa used to play the saw
To us kids, until the early hours?
Good God! The stench!

Savage Love

I was chatting with my students the other day, and we ended up talking briefly about an old piece of mine, The Savage Years. It dawned on me that despite having a web-ready PDF of this, I have never put it online, so here it is.

It should print off quite nicely, albeit rather largely, onto A4 or American Letter sized paper.

Clearly taking Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris as a starting point for linguistic enquiry, I decided to write a piece of work which used repetition and duration as ways of examining the nature of the sentence, and what happens during the course of repeated assertions.

Interestingly enough for me, the writing process produced the enquiry. I found myself considering the instability of the biographical of the child-now-adult TV and movie star. Rather than being about him, the poem became about projected statements of fact. Subsequently, his name almost becomes an expletive as the poem progresses (literally, as the name flips between subject and replacement object).

I think - I hope, that the sheer length of this piece prevents it from becoming a cheap gag. Instead, the repetition of the formal structure of the statement attempts to drum home truths which conflict, and compound their tensions by projecting them onto one unwitting subject. Whatever, it was a lot of fun to write. I'm working on another, "To Don't List", which is looking at the nature of negative statements...

Santa Claus is Making You Frown

In much the same way that a swift kick in the face at least reminds you that you are alive to feel the pain, so too are we greeted with the joy-cum-horror of the forthcoming festive season, with these pictures of children being terrified by Santa Claus.

Currently there are 69 of these beauties up, and some of them expose an advanced degree of insight on the part of the kids, who seem to be able to look beyond the fat, jolly, white-bearded exterior and see directly into the drunken soul:



In all seriousness, there are some excellent "what were they thinking?" examples here, of images terrifying enough for adults, let alone the children who are not old enough to see the funny side of sinister:



What I love about collections like these is that because of their thematic continuity, by image 20 or so, the pictures become increasingly comical for reasons I can't really explain. It's almost like it feels that the pictures have become a challenge for Santas to traumatise children and look! Here's the moment we succeeded!

Hey John, what do you think about Brussel Sprouts this year?

PLC

Rolling eyes and folded arms for sobbing mediocrity