Comics : Blake & Mortimer (1) : The Yellow "M"

Time to review books from one of my favourite comic series, Blake & Mortimer. I thought it best to start back at the beginning to the first book The Yellow "M" (though actually the 6th in the series in the original language) by Edgar P Jacobs.

Why are the Blake & Mortimer books so wonderful? And they are. Well one reason surely has to be because of the wonderful period and reality they are set in, Britain in the post-war 1940s (though it could be any time in the 30s or 40s) and with a large dollop of interwar period weirdness, occultness and classic mystery.

The Yellow M is a mysterious super criminal who is terrorising London, even stealing the Queen's crown! As Blake & Mortimer investigate the criminal they uncover the mysterious technology of the Mega Wave, mind control and murder!

As with all of the Blake & Mortimer books the story is intense, you certainly get your money's worth as far as word count is concerned! The plot is deep, intricate and complex though also reminds one of old serials with dastardly bad guys putting our heroes into peril after peril. Some have criticised these books for being too wordy, for explaining everything that is going on even when it is obvious from the pictures but this to me just adds to the classic serial feel. You can just imagine the narration by someone with a very posh clipped RP accent.

It is also so beautifully drawn in the clear line style. This isn't just a comic book, it isn't just a work of art, its a precious treasure. So precious the Yellow M would be sure to try and steal it...

• The Yellow 'M': Blake and Mortimer 1 (Amazon)
• Cinebook website

Hyper local paper

Its been years since i've received a free newspaper through my letterbox. I used to get one of the Sutton Coldfield free papers until they probably decided we were too poor in my area of Erdington (my Mum still gets it, but she lives near the High Street where all the elite hang out). So when i got home today and found a copy of the Tyburn Mail waiting on my door mat i was very surprised and pleased.

It appears to be an initiative by Castle Vale's hyperlocal Vale Mail to produce a newspaper for a wider area, including the Vale, Pype Hayes, Erdington Hall and Birches Green (where i am) and very good it is too. They've done a good job with this and i hope they are successful and continue with it beyond their planned 3 month trial period.

In between the gradual decline and fall of the national press, the faster decline and irrelevancy of the regional press and the rise of social media and online journalism is there a space for free sheets like this?

McLaren

The last few days i have been doing some training at the NTI in Masshouse in Birmingham city centre. It and the adjoining Eastside is a fast changing part of the city with new buildings going up and a station for the planned High Speed 2 railway project. One thing has remained unchanged throughout my life though and that is the McLaren building, one of the skyscrapers of Birmingham, according to Emporis only the 15th tallest now following recent new build, when i was a kid i thought it reached into the heavens!

An inglorious end

I have just started Project 024 which is a model of a Hannover Cl IIIa fighter bomber of the WW1 Luftwaffe. It is going to push me more than any other model to date i think because of the highly complicated camouflage which consists of a number of irregular polygons of colour. This is quite hard to explain but you can see the sort of thing i mean here. When my model is completed i hope it has a better outcome than this real one which came to a rather inglorious end.

TOTP (09/09/1976)

Jimmy Saville in orange is our host tonight, ABBA are number 1, will we see them live in the studio? Well maybe, more chance of seeing them than Elton and Kiki Dee anyway but more on that later...

Eddie & the Hotrods - get out of Denver
Might not be 100% on that title, i find it difficult to understand what Jimmy says sometimes. Anyway this is good old fashioned pub rock and roll and its glorious! Some of the audience are actually moving to the music too. Its a super high energy rock and roll thrash, proto-punk in a way. Tonight can only go downhill.

Twiggy - here i go again
The ex-model is back with her country hit, this time she is a studio and not 100% sure where the camera is.

The Wurzels - i'm a cider drinker
More country yokel novelty nonsense, having established people from the countryside are slow and obsessed with land and incest in their first hit this time we also find out they are alcoholics too. This steals the familiar tune from "Una Paloma Blanca" which is always a good idea when you want to extend your unwelcome stay as a novelty act...

Jimmy is surrounded by sailors and he introduces Ruby Flipper, who are only here once this week to perform Lou Rawl's "you'll never find another love like mine" with a vaguely Spanish air to their dancing frolics.

Cliff Richard - i can't ask for anything more than you babe
High pitched low jinks, the Producers play around with some SFX though and we get multiple Cliffs on screen at the same time. Some people may want more than one Cliff Richard. I don't.

Bay City Rollers - i only wanna be with you
In time honoured tradition the boy band delight the girlies with a retro cover which is pretty awful but oddly passable.

Kiki Dee - loving and free
What? Kiki Dee is here? But not with Elton this is a solo song. She sits and sings a decent country tune. A fibre optic light features, perhaps it was new and funky back then, nowadays pound shop fodder.

Manfred Mann's Earth Band - blinded by the light
I'm happy to see this prog psychedelia make the charts, this is a repeat of their earlier TOTP performance though.

ABBA - dancing queen
Well ABBA arn't here live in the studio alas, its a stage performance somewhere and they are all dressed in blue. Jimmy interrupts half-way through as they are apparently out of time so the number 1 hit play us out. TTFN.

Comics : Star Wars #42

I enjoyed reviewing the old Star Wars comic i found in my loft so much that i bought another of the Marvel comic series on Ebay. Number 42 this time, which i did have as a childhood as oddly i remember Han Solo's buff body in one scene as he is stripped to the waist and having steam or some kind of vapour blown over him. Er... yeah moving on...

Set in between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back this has the Rebel gang stuck on some kind of massive space station. Luke and Leia and the 2 droids are on the run from a Senator Greyshade meanwhile Darth Vader is searching for a cyborg rival. In the exciting cliffhanger Han Solo is forced into a gladiatorial combat where he is shocked to find out his opponent is Chewbacca!

The highlight of everything is the cover though, and boy does Darth Vader look angry! I suspect The Emperor erased all his unseen episodes of Masterchef off his Sky Plus.

Spitfire Vb done

My latest model, Project 022, is a Supermarine Spitfire Vb and has just been completed... the varnish is still wet at time of writing! This is the 4th Spitfire i have done to date and like the Mark Ia i did a few months ago i am pretty pleased with the finished result.

Completing the Tame Valley

The Tame Valley Canal is the one i walk along most, as its close to where i work i tend to walk a short stretch in Perry Barr most days. However the furthest along the canal i have gone from one end of it at Salford Junction is up to the M5 aqueduct so today i started at Great Barr and finally walked the remaining 4 miles or so. The picture below is Tame Valley Junction, the end of the canal (or the beginning depending on your point of view). The photos i took along the Tame Valley can be seen here.

The canal joins the Walsall Canal at this point so i walked this for the first time (and can cross it off in my Ian Allan ABC of Birmingham Canal Navigations). I even did a short stretch of the Wednesbury Old Canal too, and the pictures from those two canals can be seen here.

When social networks attack

The big news social media wise this week are the changes to Facebook and the forthcoming even bigger changes. Taking the changes to the news feed first i can't say i'm that big a fan. I don't like Facebook deciding for me which of the personal news items in my feed is the "top story", surely that is for me to decide not a faceless multi-billion dollar corporation. Facebook's UI has also got rather clunky over time and the latest changes make this worse.

But Facebook hasn't cost me anything so why am i complaining? Thats an argument some people have presented, free service changes things so why moan? Well Facebook may be free in monetary terms but its not free in other areas of value : personal time, information, content. As a social network Facebook is very little without user generated content, generated by us of course. We've all spent a lot of time and effort in generating this content which attracts users to Facebook and hence eyeballs to adverts. Therefore i think its perfectly reasonable for us to complain when they change it!

As for the longer term changes, Facebook looks to be trying to become an entertainment hub. I can't say that interests me that much personally but it might work, it does sound rather Myspace-esque (and that worked well right?)

Locked out

Yesterday my Mum told me about how she forgot to close the inner door on her house when she went out and it swung wide open... luckily the outer door was locked. It reminded me of when i was a kid and i got locked out with the doors in a similar arrangement. Back then the outer door had a Yale lock and it slammed behind me because of an unfortunate gust of wind before i had remembered to lock the inner door... and get my key!

So i was locked out with the inner door unlocked and slightly open (though not too noticeable from the street). My Mum wasn't due to be home from work for hours so what to do? Well of course i did what every normal 13 year old would do in that situation and went train spotting. I used to go to Stetchford railway station a lot in those days and watch the express trains blast out of New Street heading for London Euston (and occasionally you'd get the odd freight train, saw a Class 58 once!)

I had just enough bus fare to get there (well to be honest i was a little short for the return leg) though i had nothing to write the numbers down on me so had to remember the names of the locomotives that went past. I'm sure i forgot a couple. I suppose this was good memory training in hindsight.

After a couple of hours of having Class 86s and 87s blast past me at 100mph i went home to time to meet my Mum. She let me back in the house and that is the end of story. Since then though i've always been paranoid about being locked out and haven't been so again...

Up north

I've just spent a couple of enjoyable days up in Lancashire, one of my cousins getting married yesterday in Ashton-in-Makerfield just outside St. Helens. A highlight was the view out of my hotel window though. In the field were a number of old horses, one of the horses (i am sure) looked me in the eye and then squatted down slightly to wee. I consider this horse (the one on the far right below) to a true honest critic of my work.

It was nice to go up, the only problem being the rain which was on-and-off all day, it doesn't always rain in the north of course. Just most of the time.

TOTP (28/08/1976)

Noel Edmonds is back to present the latest pop sounds... well latest in late August 1976 of course.

Manfred Mann's Earth Band - blinded by the light
Its everything you imagine some refugees from the psychedelic 60s would be. Proggy rock with keyboard effects, the odd screaming guitar chords. The keyboardist is in a sailor suit by the way. The audience look suitable bemused and revert to that uncertain bobbing dance mode when they don't really like/get the song.

Ruby Flipper are going to earn their money tonight, being on no less than 3 times! This time to the Bee Gee's "you should be dancing". They perform this with some scantily clad disco to the delight of many Dads.

Robin Sarstedt - lets fall in love
Or lets follow up a novelty hit with another odd bit of old fashioned crooning. This gets uncomfortably close to club style territory.

Acker Bilk - aria
Clarinet! Green waist coat! Bowler hat! It sounds like the theme tune of a downtrodden 70s detective series. Quite nice though...

Chi-Lites - you don't have to go
For some reason the Chi-Lites' song is accompanied by an old cartoon which bears no resemblance at all to the music, its like watching TV with the sound off and the radio on in the background. The cartoon (Page Miss Glory) is wonderful though, all jazz age art deco but not sure what it has to do with the Chi-Lites...

Ruby Flipper are back in different skimpy outfits to jiggle around to James & Bobby Purify's "morning glory".

Cliff Richard - i can't ask for anything more than you babe
Cliff, never one to jump on a bandwagon of course, has a song with some BeeGees-esque high notes. Not one of his best songs though, sounds like it should be track 7 on an album and should have stayed there.

Gallagher & Lyle - breaking away
Nice bit of soft rock, some kind of joke going on between Noel and the band but it falls rather flat like most of these things.

Elton John & Kiki Dee - don't go breaking my heart
Are they here live at last? No of course not but no one can stomach the video again so instead it all becomes a rather formless but lovely dance in the studio, Ruby Flipper leading the way and Noel staying in the audience to chat up young girls. Its all a bit formless and chaotic but really this is why you love this show! TTFN!

Page Miss Glory

The jazz age in a cartoon.

A matter of reading the label

I use goat milk not cow milk, and i am unique in that at work (i like to be special). Therefore i buy my own milk instead of using the department provided cow juice which is fine... until people start using my milk depriving me. I've tried putting labels on the carton (as obviously the supermarket's own "Goat Milk" label isn't sufficient) and i've even sent out an e-mail to the department asking people to not use my milk.

But yesterday my new bottle was still half-empty by the early afternoon, and that wasn't because of me! This upset me a lot but also shows how people don't read the label(s). I've actually seen people in the past take my bottle of the fridge and use it without a glance, its a good job it is actually milk in there and not urine isn't it?

My new idea is to go three dimensional and add a tag to the handle, maybe people will notice then but i'm not holding my breath.

Micro Life (9) : Apple iMac

Working at a web design agency exposed me, for the first time, to Macintoshes. At first i thought they were rather aloof and strange with their big monitors and tendency to crash all the time but then i started to get used to the Apple way and found it was good. A friend showed me, on his 7200, how to stop thinking the Windows way and to think the Mac way with drag and drop and other amazing GUI thrills. I was hooked and it was time to buy my own Mac.

I did already have an old SE by then but i couldn't do much with that. The thing about Macs of course is that they are a bit more expensive than PCs and as i was probably only on about 14K at the time buying a new Mac, new monitor and all the other paraphernalia was a bit daunting. But then Apple introduced the iMac which was an all-in-one computer with monitor and networking already built in. So i bought one.

This was the original iMac of course, PowerPC equipped and running at a speedy 233Mhz. I think it ran Mac OS 8.1 out of the box though 8.5 came fairly quickly afterwards. For the next few years it gave me trouble free  computing, though was short of grunt for the move to OSX (i did experiment with OpenBSD at one stage) though did serve OK as a web server even if it took about an ice age to boot up.

I upgraded to a faster iMac in the early 2000s though i have kept this original iMac to the current day. It hasn't been turned on for a while though and is kept under my desk, so i end up accidentally kicking it several times a day.

The Micro-Life series will end at this point but to conclude this iMac was superseded by a 350Mhz dark blue iMac (which my ex-wife made off with), then i returned to the dark side for some reason and bought a Dell PC (which i still have) and finally a couple of years ago returned to the fold and bought my current Macbook. Over the last decade i have also bought or been given dozens of old Macs and other old computers, many i still have and you can see them here.

My current Macbook has a Dual Core processor running at 2.1GHz and 2GB of RAM, my first computer the ZX-80 has a Z80 processor running at 3.5MHz and 1KB of RAM. So there has been a bit of progress over the last 30 years.

Moving post-politics into issues

I joined a political party over a year ago but as yet haven't attended a meeting. The most i have done (apart from pay the monthly dues of course) is put a poster in my porch window during the local elections. So why is this? Am i just totally lazy? I think there is an element of laziness in this but the main reason is because nothing has so far engaged me.

Meeting to discuss taxation policy or to group read a socialist tract leaves me cold. I'm starting to come to the realisation that party politics themselves are leaving me a bit cold. I have a great interest in political issues especially foreign policy and the environment but these seem to be above party politics, they are pan-national and outside of the old left-right paradigm.

Lets face facts, the three main political parties are pretty much the same anyway. Their policies do not vary that greatly and the personnel at the top are all cut from the same cloth, often coming from the same schools. None of them really speak for me, but a local campaigner aiming to prevent the tarmacing over of green fields does.

So i am moving post-politics and into political issues. I shall keep my membership of the party active for now but i doubt i will be changing my behaviour towards them much (its nice to get a Christmas card from the leader) for the foreseeable future.

The mysterious drone

Many times as i lay in bed at night as a kid and beyond i would hear a far off drone. Some sort of aircraft of course but with the otherwise peace of the night the drone felt so alone. I would listen to the drone until it faded away and wonder what plane it was. As it seemed like a smaller propeller plane i imagined it could be a light aircraft, maybe some specialist transport link running late at night. Maybe even MI5 or the US government.

Then a few months ago i was in the garden on a light night when i heard the drone again, and as it was a clear night i could finally see the source of this drone. It turned out to just be a propeller regional airliner flying high above, maybe flying into East Midlands Airport. Some of the romance has now been lost. My imagined secret mission has turned into the last flight out of Belfast of the day. How disappointing, sometimes its better not to know everything and keep some mysteries alive.

Grumman Gosling done

Project 021, the Grumman Gosling, has now been completed and has joined the fleet as can be seen below.

A new adventure begins

Next month will mark a year since my final exam of my BA History with the Open University, and as that degree is safely out of the way (i got a 2:1) its time to move onto the MA...

I registered for the course back in April ready for a start in October, that did seem a long way away when i registered but now i am just a few weeks away and yesterday i received my course materials... and there seems to be a lot to read!

Hopefully i don't have to read all of it as there is a choice of module later on in the course, this part of my MA will be a 15 month course too not a 8 month one like the BA modules were. Maybe i'll make a start with reading the introduction at least at the weekend.

The end of a teletext era

The West Midlands digital TV switchover has begun, i had to retune my Freeview box this morning over breakfast (by the time the muesli was ready to eat it was done). BBC2 has apparently gone from analogue already, in two weeks the switchover will be completed and analogue TV will be gone for good. Not that that bothers me so much as analogue TV looks dreadful on a widescreen TV, what does bother me is the loss of Ceefax.

There is a digital teletext available but compared to old Ceefax its rubbish. Although i tend to only read the letters page on p145 these days i've always loved teletext as an information retrieval system. When i was a kid (talking primary school here) we couldn't afford a TV with teletext, it was one of those amazing luxuries only the rich cool kids could have. Luckily one of my friends' (who in hindsight was neither rich or cool) parents did have a teletext TV and, as we were a load of plane spotters back then, we used to look at the flight departures from Heathrow page with an awe that is usually only reserved for the presence of a deity.

If you did not have a suitably equipped TV however there was a way for people to still get Ceefax. The BBC would display "Pages from Ceefax", a collection of pages running on normal TV and accompanied by a stirring selection from the testcard music archive. This helped me develop speed reading skills as the viewer had no control over the display of pages and had to read them before the BBC decided to move onto the next page.

Sometime in the 80s we did get a teletext TV of our own and now we were in control! We could read news, sport, TV listings when we chose. This was the start of my very own information revolution, well over a decade before the web. It is amazing how it is taken for granted now but viewdata truly was an amazing system and its a shame the UK did not develop it to the extent as some European countries did (there was Prestel of course but we didn't).

I loved viewdata so much i actually created my own viewdata system running on an RM 380Z for my GCSE Computer Studies final project. My system displayed train times (i was a train spotter by then natch).

The great thing about teletext systems like Ceefax is that once you remember a small amount of information, i.e. key page numbers, then its a very fast and flexible way of viewing information. I will likely remember the important index page numbers like 101 (news) and 340 (cricket) for the rest of my life. Digital teletext relies on having to navigate menus to get to information that you can jump to immediately in an analogue system. So its much slower and the available information much less... that is progress i guess.

Its not all over, the first app i bought for my iPad was a teletext viewer so i will be able to read Italian and Singaporian teletext at least for the near future. London will keep analogue TV until next year so next time i'm visiting my sister in E6 i'll have to see if i can get a final Ceefax fix...

A lifetime of toilet roll

In the bathroom i began wondering, as you do, how many toilet rolls the average person uses in a life time. As i am a geek/weird i decided to work it out. By observation i have found that on average i use 1/3 of a roll a day. Over the course of a year this works out to 120.45 toilet rolls. According to official statistics the current life expectancy of a Briton is 80.1 years thus that works out at 9648.05 rolls in a lifetime.

Now obviously this contains a few assumptions. I've been using myself as a model but i am an average sort of bloke so its seems reasonable. Of course over a lifetime there are times you will use more and less toilet roll but we are talking averages here.

For a bit more fun i decided to see how far these toilet rolls would stretch if placed end to end. Measuring one of the rolls in my house i found the length of the tube to be 11cm. Thus 9648.05 rolls placed end to end would stretch for 1061.28m. This is a bit of a disappointment, just over a kilometre, i was hoping it would reach the Moon or something like that.

As a challenge my friend asked me how many double decker buses these toilet rolls would fill. An interesting challenge indeed, on the internet i found an advert for an exhibition double decker bus with an advertised floor space of 41m square. I thus calculated the available volume of a bus to be 82 cubic metres. This contains a few assumptions of course. For ease of calculation i used 2m for the height of the space on the 2 decks. This is more than it actually is but of course the floor space doesn't include the space for the driver and the stair well so you can add these. I think 82m cubed is a reasonable figure.

Now how much space does a toilet roll take up. Well of course a toilet roll is a cylinder but for our purposes we can assume it is a cube as when the rolls are placed side by side you can't fit anything in the space between. My model roll is, as i have already calculated 11cm long, and indeed it is 11cm wide too. Thus our roll is a cube with 11cm sides. Thus our roll has a volume of 1331 cubic centimetres which works out to 0.001331 cubic metres. A bus can therefore contain 61607.81 toilet rolls which means a single person's entire lifetime of toilet rolls can be easily stored on one double decker bus.  In fact 6.38 people could store their toilet rolls on a bus. So thats good to know.

Micro Life (8) : Tulip 486DX-100

Now we are in the PC age in my weekly recounting of my past computers there might be a sense this Micro Life series is getting a bit boring now? But stay with me as there is a twist soon. Last time i wrote about my lovely Unisys 386 that introduced me to the world of GUIs, 32 bit computing and even CD-ROMs! However by the time i had graduated i needed a more powerful computer and finally had a salary so could buy one. So i went down to Morgan Computers again.

I ended up with a 486 by Tulip Computers. Another nice solid box, though not my first choice actually. I first took home a no-brand PC box which had a faster specification however this lasted precisely 22 minutes before it conked out. I was offered another one but didn't like the rather flimsy system to be honest so got the Tulip instead. This had a 100MHz 486DX processor, i think the hard drive was 500MB and 8MB of RAM.

For the next couple of years it gave me trouble free computing. The monitor did blow up at one stage though so i bought a hernia-inducing 17" monitor instead. It was fine... but i was now working at a web design agency full of funky Mac boys. It was time to switch...

Micro Life (8b) : Macintosh SE

To be honest the story does get a bit complicated now, as i had money at last i was able to have more than one computer at a time. I'll just stick to my main computer in this series but i think the first "incidental" computer is worth a mention. I bought a Mac SE from Cash Converters for 50 quid, as you do! There wasn't a great deal i could do with this ancient Mac especially when i discovered there was a flaw with the floppy drive which meant, while it could read floppies it formatted itself, these floppies were unreadable in any other Mac. So my first Mac was an island... well until i got my hands on some more old Macs later on and installed a Localtalk bridge on a Mac IIci so i could access floppies on the SE over the network.

TOTP (19/08/1976)

DLT is our host tonight and after he fools around with a mirror we have the chart rundown, and our number one is... Elton and Kiki! Will they be live tonight? The suspense is killing me.

Hot Chocolate - Heaven is in the back seat of my Cadillac

Hot Chocolate is always good value, though not that keen on this song of theirs though which is a bit of a repetitive funk stomp. Errol Brown has enough chains around his neck its like he is a prototype Mr T.

David Dundas - jeans on

David is back again, though it looks like a repeat of his previous performance with Ruby Flipper. David has a tiger in his tank, though i prefer BP.

5000 Volts - Doctor Kiss Kiss

DLT is sad that this song has stalled at number 8, i’m sad too for a related reason. Linda Kelly’s miming really does need work.

ABBA - dancing queen

ABBA are back with another modern classic. Music video not live performance though.

Bryan Ferry - the price of love

Another music video, is this MTV or something? Usual Bryan Ferry fare, decent tune and lots of beautiful girls.

DLT loves doors he is happy to inform us, and with that he introduces Ruby Flipperwho are here to interpret Wings’ “let ‘em in” through the medium of dance. Why doors? Well of course there are lots of doors opening and being knocked. Let ‘em in see? Genius isn’t it?

Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - here comes the Sun

Another repeat as we have Steve and co.’s performance by a castle again. The BBC short of cash this week or something? Psychedelia, mod-ish strutting and bongo drums anyway in the most unholy mixture in the galaxy until i mixed Lidl German vodka and Irish cream.

Jesse Green - nice and slow

DLT says this tune comes to the charts via disco. Well you can dance to it though it has some flute and a guy in a cowboy hat playing guitar too. The 70s were great!

Twiggy - here i go again

Twiggy is back, looking lovely but her vocals are a bit suspect in this country rock or folky song. A bit shrill at times. Overall though its a pretty decent song.

Elton John & Kiki Dee - don’t go breaking my heart

You have got to love Elton, at number 1 for what seems 30 weeks and he still hasn’t turned up to play this live. So the usual video. TTFN!

Worcester

I haven't been to Worcester before as far as i know and as its only 30 minutes on the train away from Birmingham i thought it was high time i did. What a lovely place Worcester is indeed, the river Severn, the compact shopping area, the mixture of architectures and of course the wonderful Worcester Cathedral.

I was particularly interested in the tomb of King John which is there. You can't beat a King can you? I did find the crypt awkward though i could really sense some spirits down there, so was glad to get out! You can see the photos i took here.

Grumman Gosling

The latest model project the Grumman Gosling is really starting to take shape now. Its not that good a kit though but should look half-decent at least when its finished. Here is the current progress.