In Latvia the money is called Lats (and Santimi)

My friend Cheryl with a Ch (not a Sh) has recently been to Latvia (The land that sings!) and, like many people I know who go abroad, I badgered her into bringing me back some coins for my collection of foreign money. As such she joins an illustrious list of people like Allison, Abs, Viv, Irony Boy, Cath, Tez etc.


I’ll shortly be adding the Lats and Santimi to my big bottle o’coins. This is now gradually filling up but is already quite heavy. I like to tip out the coins occasionally and run my fingers through them like a mad miser. It’s weird to think that all this redundant or foreign cash is in reality nothing more than scrap metal. It’s a reminder that all ‘earthly treasure’ is transient and the money we work so hard to earn today is tomorrow’s incidental junk.

So there’s a nice little thought for the day…

What's in a name?

A few years ago four friends went to mid-Wales. They stayed in a cabin in a wood out in the wilds. One of the nearest villages was called Pantperthog.

Now, it’s probably supposed to be pronounced Pant-per-thog, but we called it Pant-pert-hog, which makes it sound like a happy frisky piggie!

It’s a sign!
I had my photo taken with the Pantperthog sign, probably because I’m a bit sad like that. Then a couple of years after we went to mid-Wales and discovered Pantperthog, we went to Moray in Scotland on holiday. We stayed in a place called Dallas, which apparently was the reason Dallas, Texas, was so named.

Dallas was so small it had no amenities, except a postbox. It didn’t even have a pub. But this being the highlands, it naturally had a distillery. In fact the Dallas Distillery is apparently one of the highlights of the Highlands Distillery Car Tour. Presumably if you’re on the car tour, you aren’t sampling the product at all the distilleries you’ve visited. 

Anyway, near Dallas was the little village of Knockando, which sounds a little bit like ‘No Can Do’. (I was hoping there’d be a nearby village called Knockanrun, but no such luck.) Still, I got a photo of me with the sign.

Pantperthog the googlewhack
I decided to call my blog ‘from Pantperthog to Knockando’ on a whim. I looked up and saw the photo of me with the Knockando sign pinned to my notice board and it struck me as a great name for a blog that probably wasn’t taken. And it wasn’t.

Then Cathy decided to try to find a googlewhack using Pantperthog as one of the words and she found one. I’m not going to tell you what it is because then that would ruin the googlewhack, but if you combine ‘Pantperthog’ with a type of long-necked African animal that eats leaves and comes in reticulated skin patterns, then you’ll find it.

Interestingly when Cath combined ‘Pantperthog’ with ‘llamas’ she got four hits. There’ll be five now.

Nacho Libre

Back in the days when I worked in minimum wage hell, I was a lowly minion in a cinema. It was around this time that I first became aware of Jack Black – mainly because we had posters up advertising Shallow Hal and I apparently bore more then just a passing resemblance to Jack, as he appeared on the poster (hugging Gwyneth Paltrow).

One of the naff ways the cinema tried to be ‘fun’ was that it made you have your favourite movie on your name badge alongside your name. It wasn’t long before some jokers ordered me a name badge saying my favourite film was Shallow Hal.

Recently Shallow Hal had its TV premiere and three people, none of whom knew about my minimum wage hell experience, said that they’d “seen this movie last night which really reminded me of you…”

Then last week, within a 24 hour window, my foster sister told me that she thought I ‘was’ Jack Black, a friend who I’m going to collaborate on writing a film script with told me we could do an autobiographical with Jack Black playing me, and my office’s resident filmaholic asked me what I was doing that evening, because there was this film he wanted to see with me called Nacho Libre.

So, I went to see it last night. What a disappointment. 

The thing that got me was that this was a huge missed opportunity. The basic premise is flawless – a monk, wanting to buy decent food for the orphans in his care, ignores the Church’s condemnation of wrestling, dresses up as a (masked) wrestler, and in this secret identity wins enough money to buy the orphans salads for a change. As a concept, it can’t miss. As a film, it did.

Jack Black is a good comic actor. I liked Shallow Hal, despite the constant annoying comparisons. I liked Orange County, which if you haven’t seen it, is just brilliant, mainly because of Jack’s performance as a hippy stoner. I liked Envy, where he outperforms Ben Stiller – no mean feat.

Admittedly he wasn’t great in King Kong, but then King Kong was awful. And I personally thought School of Rock wasn’t that good, although I know people who loved it to bits.

I’m not a huge fan of his band, Tenacious D, although I will admit the video for ‘Tribute’ is funny (especially ‘he asked us “Be you angels” and we said “Nay! We are but men!” ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh’), but the album is ropey at best, with too many ‘spoken word’ segments. Unsurprisingly, there’s a Tenacious D movie in the works.

So, where did Nacho Libre go wrong? Well, firstly the script was poor. It felt as if the actors were improvising. There were lots of standing/sitting around scenes where not much happened. To make scenes ‘funnier’ the director had the brilliant idea of having Jack’s character Ignacio, sitting on a toilet while talking to someone else. Literal toilet humour.

Ignacio and his tag-team partner get beaten up a lot by a variety of dwarf wrestlers/ women wrestlers/ bizarre character wrestlers. He falls in love with a nun who seems to spend most of the film combing her hair while wearing a long nightdress. 

I’ve reached the conclusion that there are only so many times you can watch Jack Black getting beaten up in a wrestling ring without it getting deathly dull. That number is somewhere between once and twice. After that, it’s just boring.

Ignacio is a bit of a dunce, and therein lies another missed opportunity. This could have been a powerful comedy drama with a hint of ‘liberation theology’ as a monk takes his calling to stand up for the poor and dispossessed seriously, flouting pious religiosity to become a folk hero. Instead he comes over as a pathetic, misunderstood clown. There are nods to the dramatic. Ignacio asks ‘What is the gospel?’ with the questioning attitude of many who have discovered that religion talks the talk but does not walk the walk. But that’s about it.

Ultimately, the biggest disappointment of Nacho Libre is that it could have been so much better – a great concept, a great comic actor, a huge marketing push.

Therapeutic Philately

It’s kind of an open secret that back towards the end of last year I wasn’t feeling too good. I took six weeks off work and started on some medication. Which meant that earlier this year I celebrated my 30th birthday feeling like a bit of a cliché: a writer on Prozac. How original.

One of the things that helped me get my head straight was rediscovering philately – stamp collecting to those who have an aversion to fancy words. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the most reproduced image ever in history is the portrait of the Queen by Arnold Machin that appears on UK definitive stamps. People often call them ‘Queen’s head’ stamps, but their technical term is Machin definitives. I spent a number of hours sorting through boxes and bags of stamps and compiled all my Queen’s head stamps into the right order in a large album – making sure my Machins matched.

Cheap therapy
The thing about stamp collecting is that it requires a lot of concentration, but isn’t actually very important in the long run. It’s time-consuming, but if you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world. And therein lay the secret of why it was so good for me – at a time when my head was running with itself in terms of crazy thoughts, something so mundane could keep me enthralled and prevent me from stressing out.

I’ve kind of kept up with it this past year. Recently through a couple of chance finds I’ve become quite interested in stamps from the South African colonies before the Unification of South Africa in 1910. Considering these small bits of paper are up to and over 100 years old, they’re quite easy to find and, best of all, cheap. The other day I noticed the following stamp for sale on eBay, hard-to-find and consequently not cheap.



Head’s up
I just love this stamp. I didn’t bother bidding for it because it was pricey. But it makes me laugh, because it goes to show that we are all human. 

I don’t know if anyone showed King Edward VII, who was a keen philatelist and took a personal interest in designing the Royal Mail’s stamps, but if they did, I wonder what he thought of it?

Errors are big business in stamp-collecting. Mainly this is because they’re rare. When an error is discovered, the remaining stock is usually destroyed. They don’t tend to happen so much nowadays, anyway, because of the computerised printers that are used (although some Machins got printed a couple, of years ago without £ signs on). This kind of error is possible because the plates were assembled by hand, and each section of the stamp was printed seperately.

My point – and I do have one
It would be interesting to know what happened to the hapless printer (let’s call him Bob) who loaded the central image the wrong way up on this stamp. I can imagine Bob came in for some flak – maybe he was ‘investigated’ by his managers. You can bet Bob’s mates would have ribbed him mercilessly: "Hey Bob, you on the printer today? Don’t forget to put the King’s head in the right way up! Har har har!"

But the irony is that Bob’s cock up is now worth quite a bit, whereas all the printers who paid attention and never screwed up produced stamps that are worth only pennies now.

I don’t want to spoil this story by drawing a lesson from it, but it’s worth adding that I sent out a press release yesterday about an event that’s coming up. It was a beautiful press release – the headline was great, the quotes were great, it ran together nicely, it was concise and to the point.

The only thing I forgot to tell people about was the date.

Jesus Songs

Occasionally I get it into my head to put together a mix-tape. Recently I’ve had an idea for a ‘concept’ album of ‘Jesus songs’ – i.e. songs which namecheck Jesus in the title. 

Having a good trawl through my music library has thrown up a few interesting songs to include. As I’m probably never going to put the tape together, I thought I’d just list them here and that would be just as good.

Jesus Christ Pose – Soundgarden
I’ve never really ‘got’ Soundgarden. I mean they’re OK, but I can’t see what the fuss was about. My sis-in-law really likes ‘Black Hole Sun’. Again, I’m not too bothered. I’ve got this on a Kerrang compilation CD, although ‘Vanilla Radio’ by The Wildhearts is a much better song off that CD.

Jesus of Suburbia – Green Day
I personally think ‘American Idiot’ is the greatest pop-punk album of the 21st century, and definitely Green Day’s best. I know for hardcore ‘Dookie’ fans that’s tantamount to blasphemy, but there’s more variety on American Idiot and musically it’s streets ahead. This song is the second one on the album and divides into five parts, each one telling another section of the story. The refrain “the land of make-believe that don’t believe in me” continues the disenchantment of the kick-off track on the album, also called American Idiot. Later on, in another song which wraps up the story, they sing “the Jesus of Suburbia is a lie”.

I Have Forgiven Jesus – Morrissey
I’m not a huge Morrissey fan, although the first gig Cathy and I ever went to as a couple was Morrissey at St David's Hall. This one is off a recent album. I like it in a way, as Morrissey magnanimously forgives Jesus for screwing him over by giving him the potential to love, but nobody worthy of loving. Typical Morrissey ego, really.

Personal Jesus – Depeche Mode
Only one thing to say about this: Marilyn who? It’s got to be the original Dave Gahan snarl for me. Everything about this song is perfect – driving rhythm, slightly sinister vocals, edgy chords. 

Hard on for Jesus – The Dandy Warhols
I’m not sure about The Dandy Warhols. I really liked ‘Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth’, and the cover of ‘Hells Bells’ on the ‘Bohemian Like You’ single is quite probably the best cover ever, but I’ve just never got round to buying any of their albums. I’ve got this song on a free CD that came with a music magazine. It’s OK. Interestingly, I’ve heard the phrase ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’ used by some Christians to derogatorily describe sickly lovey-dovey Christian worship songs. This is just the next step on, really.

American Jesus – Bad Religion
I’ve got this as a live version on a cassette single called ‘21st Century Digital Boy’. It’s an attack on fundamentalist American Christianity. So, naturally, I like it.

Jesus is Just Alright – The Doobie Brothers
While not one of the Doobies’ better songs, this still sounds pretty cool. DC Talk covered it – perhaps the first time a Christian band has covered a song about Jesus that was made popular by a non-Christian band. “We just liked the tune” is apparently the Doobies’ take on it. I think the Doobies are onto something here. Most people don’t have an issue with Jesus; he’s alright, it’s his followers who give him a bad name.

I think that’s about it. Obviously there are other songs out there, but I don’t think I own them (‘Jesus Christ’ by the Longpigs springs to mind – ‘Who?’ I hear you ask). Matt the designer suggested the country song ‘Drop Kick me Jesus(Through the Goal Posts of Life)’, but we don’t know who that’s by and we only ever had a dodgy copy that we found on some random website. Of course, I could use songs that namecheck Jesus in the song (‘Oblivion’ by Terrorvision, ‘Rewind’ by Stereophonics, too many U2 songs to list), but that would mean the track listing wouldn’t look as cool.

However, I do need a few more tracks to make a complete mix-tape, so if you have any suggestions leave them in the comments.

Why are first blog posts always so lame?

Hey everyone I've got a blog... and the world sighs collectively as yet another person with nothing to say enters the giddy realms of blogging. Well, this isn't my first ever blog post. I've been a contributor to other blogs, run my own typepad blog etc. I just wanted somewhere to write.

So why a blog? Why indeed? I think Mr Scott Adams answer that:

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought
process much like this:
1. The world sure needs more of ME.
2. Maybe I'll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
4. I know - I'll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn't involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
6. What? It's called a blog? I'm there!

So there you go. One post in and I'm passing off someone else's creativity to entertain people. Welcome to the journey from Pantperthog to Knockando!