All I knew about it was that it was another film from The Asylum, who made that truly awful Sherlock Holmes rip-off film, so I was expecting some something spectacularly bad, but this surpassed even those expectations.

To get some idea of scale of the badness, this is a small excerpt from Wikipedia’s plot summary:

The megapiranhas continue to move north, consuming two battleships and a nuclear submarine. They eventually reach south Florida, where they kill at least five Puerto Ricans on a beach and manage to blow up two hotels.

The IMDb has a page for ‘goofs’ where it lists continuity errors and other mistakes.  I think they ran out of steam on this film, or maybe the internet is just not big enough to list them all.  They listed some spectacular things like the mountains of Florida, the way the scientist manages to connect a small oxygen tank to power a helicopter when its fuel line was shot, or the presence of coral reefs at the bottom of a freshwater river, but still missed plenty.

My favourite bit was the idea that a nuclear submarine would have nuclear torpedos…

The biggest surprise was in the end credits, where it turned out that the middle-aged scientist with enormous breasts was actually Tiffany – yes; that Tiffany, the one who did I Think We’re Alone Now.

The thing is, I would thoroughly recommend watching this film, preferably in large groups where you can compete for spotting the biggest scientific errors, worst acting, or least special effects.   I have seen more realistic visual effects on home-made films on YouTube.   Some of them even made the efects in Blake’s Seven look sophisticated.  You haven’t lived until you have seen giant piranhas launching themselves out of the water to embed themselves seven stories up in a hotel wall.

Basically, the police an address more than 40 times in 18 months by mistake.  It seems they were getting calls to a house in Repton Grove but kept going to a house in Repton Road instead.  It makes you wonder what is going on at the house in Repton Grove to lead to 40 calls in 18 months doesn’t it?   And that is only assuming the police always go to the wrong address.  If they only get it wrong half the time there would be 80 calls in 18 months – about one a week.

Highlight of the story is this quote:

When my girlfriend rang Police HQ at Lloyd House the gaffer there said he knew all about it because they had seminars about not getting it wrong.

A whole seminar about telling the difference between one road and another?  How long can you spin that out?

I hope somebody had an interview a bit like this one…

Palin: the comic book

Some things are so absolutely bonkers they defy description, and I think that Steampunk Palin must be one of those things, though Comics Alliance have a go at it.

They say:

If you consider yourself a devoted gatherer of such oddities, your collection is not complete without it. But that does not diminish the fact that this book is insane.

I have quite a fondness for the steampunk genre, but I reckon I’ll be giving this a miss.  Apart from anything else the Palin character doesn’t even look like Palin except on the cover.

Do read the article.   It is unbelievably bad.  The Daily Mash tried to spoof it, but the original may actually be so bad it is beyond satirising.

All very encouraging for any journalism students out there because the message is that you only have to be this good to get a well-paid column in the Mail on Sunday.

The stand-out paragraph has to be:

There is now an angry queue behind me. Isn’t it interesting that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?

The ‘angry queue’, by the way, is there because Jones has been trying to pay the 50p toll for the Clifton suspension bridge with 30p plus a button.  She had already spent some time annoying motorists by standing around in the road where Joanna Yates’ body was found:

The lane is narrow. I can’t see how a car stopped here and a man struggled with a body without being beeped at and told to get out the way, as I was.

A nice touch.  Pure Alan Partridge.

• A project called the Apparat Organ Quartet, which is four people playing vintage instruments that have been thrown away and refurbished. Plus a drummer.
• One album scored for string quartet, percussion, keyboards, and electronics and another scored for brass, organ, keyboards and electronics.
• An album called IBM 1401 A User’s Manual inspired by the IBM 1401 which was apparently the first computer brought to Iceland in 1964.  It featured recordings of the computer in operation that his father made on a reel-to-reel alongside a 60-piece orchestra and electronics.
• A concept album inspired by Henry Ford’s failed rubber plant in Brazil.

It all reads like a fantastic invented character in a modern day Flann O’Brien novel and just goes to show that sometimes real life is rich enough that you don’t need to make anything up.

The IBM album has this tracklist:

• Part 1/IBM 1401 Processing Unit
• Part 2/IBM 1403 Printer
• Part 3/IBM 1402 Card Read-Punch
• Part 4/IBM 729 II Magnetic Tape Unit
• Part 5/The Sun’s Gone Dim And The Sky’s Turned Black

Not sure whether the last track represents the IBM 1401 experience or what, but the album title becomes clearer on track 2 which is basically somebody reading out bits of the manual over music and is a track to inspire absolute nerdgasm as it talks about properly latching the pins of the coils in the bakelite and making sure the wormshaft has no end-play.

I used to do a bit of work on mainframes, but nothing as mechanical as this machine sounds.

Very relaxing, but perhaps a bit avant garde and conceptual for me.  Having said that, if he ever follws it up with an orchestral piece about running CAFS on an ICL 2900-series I’ll be sure to have a listen.

Maybe I am just missing the Times crossword.  After managing to finish it two days on the trot I didn’t see it at all today.

The woman, whom police have not named, grabbed the closest object – a courgette from her garden – and threw it at the bear, causing it to flee.

Brilliant.  One imagines the garden contains all sorts of gardening implements and tools, but the first thing she manages to lay her hand on is a courgette.  I am now in a state because I know it reminds me of a comedy film or TV programme where somebody is being attacked and is scrambling around for something to defend themselves: they fumble around things like a heavy ashttray, letter-opener and poker and end up grabbing something soft and inappropriate.

It is bugging me because I really can’t remember what the film/show was and what the inappropriate obkect was, though I think I saw it again recently.  Help. Can anybody remind me?

An unfortunate photo from the Daily Mail website. You can click on it to make it bigger - the photo that is.

The Daily Mail website has a story about ‘Osborne’s plans to hit workshy’. Scroll down to the bottom and there is this remarkable image.

Not the first time I have looked at the DM website and felt like clawing my eyes out, and it won’t be the last I am sure.

He says that ‘the key message is friendship’.  So its a friendly 500-pound bomb?   He also said:

This jet is a messenger of honour and human generosity and a saviour of mankind, before being a messenger of death for enemies of mankind.

Todays trivia question: How far is Jerusalem from the border of Iran?   According to Google Maps’ brilliant distance measuring tool you can be just inside Iran and be 614 miles from the Knesset.

Just saying.

It turns out that it wasn’t even his own dog!  The man must be as brave as he is perverted – I wouldn’t even trust a stragne dog not to bite my hand.  The crowning glory of the story has to be the quote at the end:

A spokesman for English Heritage said: “This was a very rare incident”.

No kidding!  I can’t imagine them saying “I don’t know what the world is coming to, that’s the third one this week.”  Surely ‘rare’ is a bit of an understatement.

As for the flasher-by-proxy in Lewes… There is an obvious way to track down the culprit, but I doubt there will be many volunteers for that line of door-to-door enquiries!  Or indeed many volunteers to take part in the identity parade if any suspect is arrested.