Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: odd stuff

  • On Happy Endings

    Well, there’s happy endings and happy endings. When Robin Williams was making Mrs Doubtfire there was studio pressure to conclude the story with a reconciliation of the divorced parents and a restoration of the broken family unit. Which probably would have prevailed (as the same reconciliation fantasy did in both versions of The Parent Trap)…

  • Cricket and Me

    I don’t ‘get’ cricket. Never have. And it seems I’m not alone. I was in London’s Natural History Museum around the end of last year. In one section there’s a wall display bearing a montage of cartoons that illustrate various explanations for the extinction of the dinosaurs. One shows an enthusiastic diplodocus with a bat.…

  • You’re Kidding Me

    WTF – Torchwood Babies????

  • The Steampunk PC

    Alas, it’s a one-off. The screen is a converted Dell monitor and the keyboard’s a rebuilt IBM. I’ve no idea what the typing experience is like, but how Goth is that? The handiwork of Steampunk obsessive Jake von Slatt. See how it was done, and more projects like it, here. The Clockwork Steampunk Stratocaster is…

  • Myths of the Movies

    Much-namechecked mate Steve Laws tells me that as children, he and his brother once dismantled all their fireworks to create a movie-style gunpowder trail. They lit the end of it, and… phfft. Instead of the combustion burning its way steadily and dramatically down the trail, the entire line of powder went up in the same…

  • Judgement Days

    I don’t know who’s been handling the job in recent years, but back in the day I used to help out judging the Manchester Festival‘s amateur film competitions alongside Norman J Warren, director of Inseminoid and Satan’s Slave. The field ranged from pitch-perfect recreations of 50s American SF on 16mm by the Spence Brothers of…

  • Silent Witless

    My friend David Mace writes that he just received an unsolicited flyer sent out by British Gas with the following strapline: Make sure you and your family are safe and warm from Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Seriously, to anyone who thinks that ineptitude in simple grammar doesn’t matter – it does. Because whatever your excuse for…

  • Nostalgia Corner

    There was/is a chocolate bar called Topic, whose ad jingle went, “What has a hazelnut in every bite?” “Squirrel shit!” we’d shout back at the TV.

  • The Living Dead at the Manchester Festival

    One of the most heroic spectacles I ever witnessed on a public stage was that of Stephen Laws conducting an interview with Jorge Grau about his life and films. That’s Jorge Grau, director of the cannibal zombie classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue… kind of apposite because this was at the annual Festival…

  • Of Robots and Heroes

    While we’re talking about the old-time stuff, and recuts and mashups, and harking back to this earlier post… I still have my Super-8 print of the 1942 Lewis Wilson/Douglas Croft Batman serial, which was only available as six 200 foot silent spools… back in my student days I cut them all together, put a mag…