Of Hidden Gold and that

Are you wanting something to read? Something about looking for hidden gold in Montana and involving the Hardy boys detectives. Then we have something for you.

Hope the intro wasn't too lame for you I could have gone all pseudo-intellectual on you. A veritable Jordan Peterson style word salad, that while seeming intellectual is actually nothing but bollocks. (Also I'll be getting to the Crisscross shadow in due course, you don't have to go to those guys, unless you like the trainwreck of an introduction they put up there.)

Anyway Hunting for Hidden Gold, one of the original canon and a Leslie Macfarlnae to boot, it was rewritten in the mid sixties to be more action packed, and yeah, it still holds up.

Commonalities between the two include a protracted journey to Lucky Lode / Bottom, an encounter with Timber Wolves and a cave in caused by crowbar. Apart from that, though, its two different books.

The original is best, and while there are some questionable elements in this (African american's and their depiction's mainly,) this isn't a problem.

I'll suspect I'll get comments about this, but as it only pertains to the original, they're absent entirely from the remake. But there are some black characters in the original. It's slightly spoilery but here goes, the first encounter on the train is with the porter, they find out that someone they trusted had put  them on a train to Indianapolis instead of Montana. He get's the guard and it all works out.

The next encounter is different and has a bunch of guys riding to the rescue in an old Model T Ford, accusing some bad dudes of running over their chickens, they come to the Hardy's rescue. I'll not apologize for liking this, its hard to follow, though, as they all speak in ebonics. But I got the gist of it.

The remake, while not a patch on the original isn't that bad and stands on its own as a decent version.

Anyway you can read these two here and here.

More Tapes

Still in lockdown,  Have decided to go through my VHS collection (minus the Pron,) to see what can be kept and salvaged and what cannot.

Today's videos are two from the early 90's it turns out. The tape labelled three Saturday shows has some football highlights from  the Rumbelows cup, with Ian Wright as today's studio guest. America's top 40 with Casey Kasem (Shaggy) and some awesome shade thrown at him by the presenter and the Onion Field as the featured film.

Our other choice VHS contained Streetfighter II Anime which I thought was a rip from Bravo but turns out its just taped onto an existing blank tape and when it runs out we have the back end of an unknown film from the BBC and Some Channel 4 kids programming.

Which is boss as it contains the last half of Mork and Mindy, an episode of a Bill and Ted cartoon (never knew this existed,) A white fang cartoon and best of all The Finder aka Finders Keepers.

This is based on a children's book by the same name and is Australian (same vintage as Round the Twist.)

Actually pretty good, and is the stand out find here. A little blond kid takes part in some intergalactic gameshow. He can find things with a magic beeper and the episode I saw they had a time barrier which accepted lost things from the real world. They have an archive here of episodes, up on youtube which I recommend you do.

Finally we had some stand out ads. A few celeb shots for British Gas, Boom bang a ban Burt Reynolds on gas fires and Gangster Bob Hoskins for cookers.  A few music promo bits which are going to be a bastard to pass (album collections for Madonna and The Pogues and a lazy comp for carnival greats which include tequilla and the Lambada).

Obscure standouts are Mitsubishi (fax machines) Geosafari (edutainment cringe) and Texas Instruments (graphing calculators which is a surprise.)

Oh and a nice primary coloured Channel 4 logo that looks like it's made out of paint.

A final note, we've switched videos from the DVD combi unit to a sharp standalone video and its getting better results, a few tapes are playing now including the 3 shows one which was a right bastard in all machines previous. We can see my cousins kids school play, from back in the 90's rather than listen to audio as previously done.

Gypsy Girl and ads.

We've been attempting to digitize some old tapes via OBS screen recording program, with the main aim of getting some stuff that my aunty had digitized from 8MM film of various family bits and pieces onto disk or file, edited and put up on Youtube.

For a trial run decided to take a run at a tape that contains (Deep Breath,) Halloween H20 and Sky West and Crooked aka Gypsy Girl.  A star vehicle for Hayley Mills and a lot of old actors from TV, not limited to, Lovejoy's Ian McShane as a gypsy kid in love with Hayley. Catweazle aka Geoffrey |Bayldon as the vicar and Annette Crosbie as her mum, better known as Victor Meldrew's long suffering wife Margaret in One Foot In The Grave. Apparently up on Netflix, so give it a watch, it's worth your time.

Its a good film and proves that she could indeed act, she plays a sketchy, spacy mentalist type of girl obsessed with burying every dead animal in the church yard. There's a laugh out loud bit where she finds a dead bumble bee up a tree and presents it to the vicar for a Christian burial.

Ads itself are interesting too. There is a spot for Ebly a wheat alternative to pasta, something called BB Soda which seems to be the year 2000's version of Tab clear, (born 1992, died 1992) and a few spots for Southend on Sea and a your shout on Crown |Green bowling, by two lads from Streatham Hill.

We also have a tape from Channel 4's the human body from 1984 and the tail end of money matters which is cool. This is based on the book, Body Machine by noted heart surgeon Christiaan Barnyard, and seems to be on reproduction from what I've seen.

Will have to redo them though before I put them up. They seem to be using the laptops internal mic to draw sound rather than the TV itself, which is annoying as I can be heard commenting and at intervals, taking the piss. Maybe routing the sound through audacity may help, or more likely poking at the sound settings in OBS which maybe less a Heath Robinson way of doing it.

Edit. Turns out you can mute the internal mic and just have audio from the capture box instead.

Coping with lockdown.

The corvid 909 / SARS 2 Electric Boogaloo lockdown crisis is playing havoc with all my plans.

There's no junk tour as all non essential shops are shut and you can't go out anyway.

Stuff I liked doing was browsing in Smiths and when I went Saturday there were signs up saying don't read the magazines do to Corbyn 101.

However I've found a way around this as several sites are dedicated to putting up pdf scans or rather rips of current media so I can read my favourite magazines and put them back on the shelf, just as downloads from a file host site instead.  It's only until lock down is lifted and we won't choke any more. 

Now to find a downloader that actually doesn't want me to sign up to some free plan or shiet.

 On video news I've hooked up the VCR and am going through my video collection via Obs and video capture.

So far I have found, a schools program which is dull, really dull, and has piss poor tracking issues.

An even worse tape that has Thames news and looks suspiciously like the Day to Day, except this is the 80's.

A vintage tape full of football from the 70's to 80's. A bit of Liverpool at their best, Arsenal with George Graham in charge and Tony "Donkey" Adams on the sheets. They are playing Sheffield United if anyone cares. And finally a bit of Brian Clough at Forest before the tape wisely shuts itself down.

Finally a bit of Channel U XXX a station full of hip hop trash mixed with the phone lines may actually dump the ads from this as the birds on here look genuinely ropey. We're talking sub readers wives level here. That is if I can stomach non stop hip hop from people who should be either a crime statistic or behind bars.