Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: odd stuff

  • All Your Past Are Belong to eBay (2)

    I undertook to say something about this, so I suppose I’d better… It’s the Adventures of Robin Hood annual, published by Adprint in 1961 and based on the Richard Greene TV series. It was a typical children’s annual of its era; a yearly one-off publication for the Christmas market, in large format with shiny board…

  • For All Your Academic Needs

    The Alabama Pacific University Online. Accredited by the NAAUCU. “Members of the NAAUCU are institutions whose standards do not meet the overly drastic and unreasonable demands of the recognized accreditation boards.” Affiliated institutions include The Sports University of Central Kansas (“e-mail disconnected while we figure out how to teach over the internet”) and The Boston…

  • All Your Past Are Belong to eBay

    See this? It’s Yoshiya’s Action Planet Robot. A wind-up clockwork tintoy modelled (unofficially) on Forbidden Planet‘s Robby, it’s one of the iconic tin robots. There are plenty of them about, and recent reproductions can be had for just a handful of change. Back in 1999 someone discovered a horde of unsold warehouse stock and began…

  • Furious Fred, the Butcher’s Ted

    Have you ever noticed how, whenever a drama features a small child’s drawing that has to play some part in carrying the story forward, you can tell that a child didn’t do it? (This one’s real. Jack the Ripper, drawn by my daughter, when she was aged about six. She’s twenty-one now. We used to…

  • Things that Make You Go ‘Whu?’

    Made by the Fleischer studios in 1931 and featuring an early appearance by Betty Boop. In this incarnation she has a deep voice and dogs’ ears. The Bum Bandit? If you can get your head around any of this, you’re doing far better than I am.

  • Frodo and the Camel

    So my cousin Josh is working behind the bar of The Elusive Camel, when in walks Frodo. (I have family in Australia, on my dad’s side. To avoid complication we all refer to ourselves as cousins, regardless of generation or degree of actual relationship). Josh was over here for a few years, working and touring…

  • Well, it works for me

    Sometimes it doesn’t take much to brighten my day. For all I know this may be common knowledge. But it was news to me when I heard it and made the connection a couple of weeks ago. Michael G Wilson, stepson of Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Executive Producer and sometimes co-writer on the Bond movies…

  • Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn

    I can’t remember when I last walked into a bookshop and paid full price for a book. Well, I can, because it was this afternoon. Before that, I mean. This afternoon I was in London with a train journey ahead of me and nothing to read on it. The Tube strike was in full swing,…

  • The Joys of Research

    From the front page of a microfilmed 1903 newspaper in the Historic New Orleans Collection… not exactly the reason I was there, but too good to ignore.

  • Because we’re all out of Piano Players

    Did you hear the story about the British director Mike Figgis? He arrived at Los Angeles airport on his way to take up a TV job for Fox/Sony. When asked the purpose of his visit, he supposedly said, “I’m here to shoot a pilot.” As the story goes, it then took him five hours to…