October 2021 - End of month review

We are now ten months down, past Hallowe'en, the clocks have gone back, and it feels like the end of the year is nigh. October was another busy month. I had some big meetings in work discussing possible changes, which prompted some very passionate discussions. Thankfully I had plenty of football to take my mind off things, including my first ever visit to Frome with its delightfully named stadium.

Other football-watching trips included Flint in North Wales and Merthyr Tydfil. In Flint I think I saw my long-passed paternal grandfather in a photo on the clubhouse wall. I attended seven games in the month - a new record for October. 

There were also some other milestones, including my 50th Barry game (a 3-0 defeat at home to Newtown), my 10th Grange Albion game (a 4-0 defeat at home to Aberdare Town) and my first ever Futbology badge for the first game at a new ground, which was also my 75th football ground that I've visited. (And blogged in detail here.)

In terms of another milestone, I posted my 394th blog post on my blog called Point 394. That felt very meta. I have been working my way through a large consignment of baseball cards and managed to post every day in October. 

Life is starting to get back to normal... ish. I went on my first trip to the tip in a year and a half. This sign amused me so much I took a photo. "Swmpas" is my new favourite Welsh word.

Another bit of normality was a cinema trip. I saw the new Dune movie with my friend Bryan. I am still processing my thoughts on it and will blog about it when I have time. 

I engaged in a bit of retail therapy as well. Playmobil have released their version of the A Team with their iconic van and I went and bought one. It's fab!

I also succumbed to temptation and bought yet another kit that I don't really have time to build - this time of a Treeman player to bulk out one of my Blood Bowl teams.

(Yes I bought him mainly because of the squirrel on his shoulder!) 

Although, really, technically, I should now buy the correct team who would have a Treeman player in their team. But I have several teams who have never actually played a game yet...

One other thing we have started doing is sorting through my late dad's stamp collection with a view to selling it on behalf of my mum. It was very disorganised and needed quite a bit of work just getting a rough idea of what we have in the various boxes. We have managed to reduce the bulk of it down quite a bit - originally we had two full car loads of philatelic material. 

I find it interesting seeing how much stamps have changed over the years. They are little time capsules that reveal a lot more about their cultural milieu than people might expect. For example, I found these stamps that were issued in 1979. This wording would not appear on a stamp today.

I'm going to keep some of the stamps. But not this one!

Face Man to the rescue

A few years ago I met the actor Dirk Benedict, aka Face Man in one of my favourite TV shows growing up, the A-Team.

Following the rule of 'pics or it didn't happen', here's a pic

One of us was super excited

You can read about when we met here.

But anyway, I have started a new job and very close to my office is a charity shop that has a regular turnover of toys. I've bought some Matchbox trains and a big bag of Duplo. Yesterday I went in to have a look and see what they had in and there was a vintage 1980s 5" action figure of Face Man.

Well I duly gave a pound to charity and took Face away. He fits nicely on the little ledge next to my desk (now that I actually have a desk) and will keep me company. He seems very happy to be my new buddy.

Good to see you!

When I was a Weetabix

Back in the early 80s, Weetabix breakfast cereal was marketed using a collection of anthropomorphic wheat biscuits called the Weetabix Club. Like many multi-character gangs in the comics of the time, these were basically sterotypes. There was Brains (the brainy one), Brian (the normal one), Dunk (the naive one), Crunch (the hard one who wore bovver boots), and Bixie (the girl).

The Club were the stars of short comic strips – found on the back of packets and also printed in regular comics as adverts for the breakfast cereal. Comic strip adverts were quite common at the time. I remember half-page mini-series promoting The Goonies and the early-80s Biggles movie, among others. They’d run for a few weeks alongside the ‘real’ comic strips.

You could, as a buyer and devourer of Weetabix save up tokens and join the Weetabix Club yourself. (The devouring of Weetabixes by hungry children was something that was never discussed in the comic strips, funnily enough.) As a member of the Club you received freebies and could send off for other Weetabix-branded goodies. For ages I had writing paper with the gang members on, and I also had a bright yellow Frisbee I’d sent off for.

I’ve mentioned before how I grew up in a Christian family, and although we weren’t allowed to have Ice Magic dessert sauce due to its occult potential, our family wasn’t quite as strict as some. One day a slightly stricter family came round to our house for tea and I was sent out to play with my brother and their two boys.



Also prohibited!

  We soon hit a problem. The trend at the time was to ‘play’ the TV shows that were popular. There were four of us, which was perfect because we could play A-Team. Unfortunately, the other two had never seen the A-Team, didn’t know the catchphrases, and didn’t want to play (understandably). It turned out that they watched very little television – The A-Team was considered too violent, as was Knight Rider, Danger Mouse, Thundercats, well, pretty much everything.

They didn’t like reading either, so we couldn’t play any comic characters. They weren’t allowed to play soldiers. As you may have guessed, their parents never took them to the cinema. The only possible play-characters we knew and they knew were the Weetabix Gang.

So, finally, with a set of characters we all knew, we started playing. I was Brains, naturally, as I was the one with glasses (I told you it was about stereotypes – brainy people wear thick specs!), the others were Brian, Dunk and Crunch. The game was we were looking for Bixie, who had been kidnapped. We roved the large field next to our house looking for ‘clues’ and avoiding possible threats for most of an afternoon.

I’ve told this story to a few people, but none have yet credited me and my pals with any ingenuity in finding something we could all play. Most people just laugh at how tragic we were. Maybe I was, and maybe my claim to fame is that along with those other three boys we are the only children to pretend to be wholewheat breakfast cereal for an afternoon.

A plus for the A Team (movie review)

The thing about those shows you adored as a kid is that when you watch them as a grown up they are often howlingly bad. Knight Rider, Thundercats, Airwolf... even The A-Team isn’t quite as good as I remember it as a kid.

And the thing about remakes and ‘re-imaginings’ is that they can vary so much from the really quite good (Star Trek last year or the first Transformers movie) to the horrifyingly shameful (Starsky and Hutch with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) to the plain bizarre (Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes).

I guess when you take a much-loved children’s TV show and update it into a big-budget film there is the potential for so much to go wrong. Generally though, The A-Team got the mix right. There was humour, plenty of ridiculously over the top action, sequences where the team improvised some gear from whatever was lying around, and we finally found out why BA is afraid of flying.

There are some gripes. Part of the original Face Man’s charm was that his sexual conquests were only ever hinted at in the scripts. In the movie they are referred to more explicitly (nothing too explicit, thankfully). There are a couple of scenes where the main action retreats off-stage. You don’t see how Hannibal manages to handcuff two snarling Rottweilers together, for example.

Also you have to stay right until the very end to see the cameos from Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz, when those would have worked in the main cut of the movie. And if you’ve seen the trailers you’ll know the van gets mashed. Well, that happens quite early in the film, which is an odd thing to do to a merchandising icon. Also, sometimes the CGI looks a bit ropey.

But overall, this is a remake with a decent budget and a bit of class. Some stand-out moments include a heist in Baghdad, a 3-D movie that comes to life, and the first time Murdoch meets BA and Face. There are occasional drifts into more thoughtful areas. BA struggles with whether he can renounce violence. Face asks Hannibal if he could ever betray his men. But the deep stuff doesn’t go too deep and descend into pathos.

I had a feeling I would enjoy this film before I went, but was apprehensive too. Bad remakes are painful to watch. This, thankfully, was a pain-free trip to the cinema. I’d recommend it.

Jongudmund’s rating: 8/10

The most awesome blog post about birthdays ever (or: The Night I Met Face Man)

The good thing about having your birthday on Good Friday is a long weekend to recover. Plus, being holy, I also got to go to church on my birthday with the added bonus of it being shorter than the average service. (Not that I mind going to church normally, but it was my birthday.)

The party started on 1 April when I had a job interview with some folks I've done quite a bit of freelance writing for, and then got a phone call to ask if I wanted it. Of course, I did. The guy offering the job was really glad. "I got the man I wanted," was what he said.

Now I know I shouldn't take the fact that my entire team has been downsized and outsourced in any way personally. But it has felt a bit like all our hard work has been reduced to 'Yeah we can get a couple of people to do what you do for nothing.' I'd be lying if I said my confidence hadn't taken a hit. I'd also defy you to go through the same process and not feel any rejection. Do feel free to try.

But knowing that now I'm going someplace where I'm wanted has lifted me.

In the evening we went to see a boyhood idol of mine, Dirk Benedict, appear as Lieutenant Columbo at Cardiff's New Theatre. I was very excited, much to the amusement of my wife and our friends who came with us. Thing is Dirk Benedict was Face Man in that most awesome of TV shows The A Team. I liked him as Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica too, but for me he will always be Face.

We did something afterwards that I've never done before - queued at the stage door like excited groupies. We were first in line when he came out and I was tongue-tied. I wanted to tell him how huge a fan I was when I was a kid; how when we played A Team in the playground there were always arguments over who would be Face, and so on.

But I didn't. I laughed at his jokes, stammered a request for a photo, and got him to sign a flyer. Then walked away knowing that I had put my arm around Face Man and got it on film.

Truly a memorable 'birthday eve': new job, meeting Face Man... how could my actual birthday measure up. Surely all I was destined for was an anti-climax.

Well, no, actually. My birthday was great too, but this blog post has gone on a bit long, so I'll tell you about that some other time.

A Team movie 2010 - a must see trailer at least

I wanna see this now!

Lunch with the A Team

One of the (many) benefits of working from home is TV at lunchtime. Today I got to watch the second half of an A Team episode on Bravo before getting back to writing.

The weird thing was Bravo had it tagged as a 'new episode'. New to Bravo, maybe, but given the show is over 20 years old it seemed a very strange thing to do. I suppose there might be some poor sap somewhere who can only receive Bravo. In which case he must wondering what the next enthralling episode of this amazing new action series will be about!

Hannibal wouldn't have allowed it

Shock news of the day. Face Man has entered the celebrity big brother house.

Dirk, how could you? That's an even worse sell out than becoming a rubber duck!