Happy New Year.

 For  the first time in ages I went to Greenwich park. I wanted to look around the meridian line and the clock museum but its now £18 to get in, and last time I went there it was free. 

They are renovating the grass areas to restore it back to the 17th century original, so it looks rough at the moment.  If you really like dogs and are a tourist then give it a go. Me, I'll not be going back anytime soon. 

Better times was had looking round Greenwich town itself. There are a few charity shops but none open on new years day.  The local Music Video Exchange is open and I manage to get a few good things in the bargain rails. This includes Body 2 Body Let's get Intimate and a hopefully not too smacked up Neil Hawaiian House EP. Oh and Freeman by big  Darryl Pandy.

Decade begins

Can't believe it's 2020 already. Where are my flying cars, jet pack and space travel?  Joking aside I hope all my regular readers, hah, enjoy a few happy and healthy new year and indeed new decade.

Chinese New Year.

Celebrate Chinese New Year Monkey, Newyear Felicitations, beneficial.  We could say it is Monkey Year or Iron Monkey God Celeb ration, for much prosper in the way we into the Auspicious much in the ways. 

Sinister Cupping Machine Chinglish

Hello readers, I hope you liked that intro, that was of course written in the traditional language of China "Chinglish" I have taken the liberty to add another example from the collection above to show you what I'm getting at.  I bloody love Chinglish, no disrespect of course but those who don't know English or have a tenuous grip on it can twist it in may's wost beautiful.

If you didn't know, today is the official new year celebrations up town involving fireworks and all the stuff I don't much like,  so with leave banking up, we decided to venture out on the Friday seeing as Saturday would be rainy and see what was occurring.  The answer of course is nothing much as it was cold out, so while I didn't see any Lion Dancers or Monkey Gods on the loose, I did get quite a good view of all the new year decorations up at China Town. 

Sun Wukong badass.

Streams of red lanterns hung everywhere and there were people out with camera's taking shots of it all.  Down by the fire station there was a series of displays detailing the Journey West aka Monkey! for those old enough to know the old show.  It displayed a potted synopsis of his greatest hits along with Pigsy, Sandy, Tripitaka and his horse in their quest to retrieve the sacred scriptures from India. I always thought the end tune said in "Condora" as a little kid but its actually Gandhara.  Pretty sure it was rerun on Sky One in the Mid 90's too.

This is a pretty good representation of it all.

Anyway I didn't see any Lion Dancers this time or Martial Arts as I have previous years but what I did see was pretty cool. I'll leave you with a photo of the big gate leading down to Leicester Square and of course to wish you Gong Xi Fa Cai.

Lovely.

Video Tat

Happy new year everyone.  I've been on a periodic rampage through a load of old VHS tapes, trying to see what can be salvaged, and what can be thrown out if anything.  It all started with a vague recollection that there was something odd at the end of some teen porn I had.  Not illegal strange but more like remnants of the program left over, an artifact of recording if you will.  It took a while to locate the tape in question and the remnant actually turned out to be a good 2 hours of footage.

So what do we have.  The first hour is some "golden showers" porn involving two actresses who could be anywhere from 18-30 due to make up and stuff, there are bits of another porno (I actually wrote porneo instead which I've realised is the most excellent thing ever) after this before breaking down into the real meat of this blog post.

Its the end part of  something called The Maternity Show with Blue Peter's Mark Curry as host.  There is a clip of two dwarves talking about pregnancy before a clip of Mark talking about old toys with an expert. This is the initial clip I thought was from Blue Peter as Mark used to be presenter and for some reason this was inflated into footage of the Blue Peter time capsule in my mind which of course it wasn't.  

The rest of the tape is made up of Quincy which aired on BBC1 according to Wikipedia and Channel 4's Escape From Colditz complete with ad breaks.  This includes ironically sexist car advert where a prize tool rates off a load of mechanic guff that women simply would not appreciate, and more junk.  I did try and cam  the lot with my digital camera but there was a lot of flickering and the porno element would simply not be suitable for the professional people who do VHS recovery jobs.  I did have a have a dongle thing that copied stuff across except it didn't do anything.  Which was a shame.

New Year Round Up

Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new year.  Its a bit of a round up this time as I have a few bits of info and no overall theme.

People who often annoy us.

Do you watch Celebrity Big Brother the equivalent of pond dipping the z list talent pool, they have a line up that is semi interesting as it has both Liz Jones and Dappy in it this year.  Liz Jones is the archetypal cat lady / militant vegan, think Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses for mentalness and you'll not go far wrong.  Dappy is the little cunt who was in N Dubz, his only claim to fame is getting kicked in the head by a horse and suffering no mental damage at all.

Like Celebrity Jungle with Steve Davis I'm not going to put myself out to watch this as you know its dull as fuck but until I saw a brief bit of news online I thought this was some sort of wind up.

Further looking into this has a few more celebs such as Jim Nick Nick Davidson, Evander Holyfield, Lionel Blair and Sam Faiers from TOWIE.  Its on channel 5 if you really care enough to watch this shit but I'll be there a month or two later when CSI Vegas is back.

Identity Thief.

Possibly the worst film  I've seen in a long while, normally I don't do film but this is a comedy and so decided to watch it.  I really wish I didn't, its a modern comedy so there aren't really any good jokes in it just humiliation and swearing so you're distracted from the fact that it isn't funny.   At all.

Short precis, bloke has his Identity stolen by one of the fat slags, he decides to track her down after his card is declined and bring her to justice.  There is a bounty hunter guy and some drug dealers (X Files I Want To Believe's Amanda Peet and T.I (Texas Instruments)) but they're not troubling the plot any and in the end it all gets a bit syrupy as she's sent down and the guy gets back with his family, and is fucking awful every single minute.  I like my comedies like Airplane, hilarious, this didn't even make me laugh, once.  Its not the swearing, hell, for some folk thats just punctuation, but its not comedy its just laziness.  It means you can't write for shit and are relying on the gross out humour and swears to carry it.

End of the year show.

A few loose ends to clear up before we move into the new year. Mostly overlooked commercial stuff from Boxing Days uber review and a few reminiscences for you as well.

Our Award for best commercial house goes to a three way split, god knows how we managed to miss out on this last time, but step forward Disclosure for White Noise with Alunageorge, Duke Damont  and his Inner Cityish Need U 100%  and Breach Jack though not actually good enough to properly jack in my mind.

A brief apology to Smiley Virus as thanks to Mail ballyhoo I caught her song Adore You and its a really nice slow jam.  The video isn't bad and has a brief shot of her putting her hand in her panties (not masturbation) which brings up the whole pornification of pop all over again.  Its just a pity her skin is covered in rubbish porn tats, (see also Cara "monobrow" Delevigne whos underboob tats are so bad they look like she is going in for a pre op breast augmentation rather than body art) maybe you dig tattoos but to me they are just fucking shit.  To be honest you can see plenty of cam models / Amateur porn models (with or without tats) wank off online so the whole thing just relies a stunt, to sell, what is lets face it a track that could easily stand on its own without her "fingering" herself for the video not matter how brief.

They tried to get Ding Dong the Witch is Dead for when Thatch died, though to be honest I played that twice when Hugo Chavez popped his clogs back in January.

Finally Bastille Of the Night is an extremely weak pop cover of Rhythm of the night / Snaps rhythm is a dancer that is much more serious than cancer, and is so bad its actually more like contracting AIDS via your speaker.

Happy New Year

We do not have time for a proper post but will add a picture and add this: a happy new year to all our viewers.

More rubbish to come in 2013

Peter you lost the news.

We'd like to wish you a very previous happy new year.  Sunday's service will of course be in 2012 and next year we'll be all dead due to doomsday (lol) so without further ado we'll leave you with a few downbeat bits and pieces.

For some unknown reason, we can't have nice things anymore, Adobe won't support Vista 64bit so you won't hear truly excellent radio unless you of course go looking for it.   NHK have stopped their support for NHKWorld SD, which means I'm left rudderless at lunchtime without me daily dose of NHKWorld (it does survive in HD format but my TV is not HD.)  Which leaves you with a quandary, where do you go for gentle news and magazine format TV.  

French news in English from France24 (pronounced Vingt Quatre rather than Twenty Four), isn't half bad, and reminds me a bit of old MTV Europe before it lost its soul somewhere in the late 90's.  Their arts program is run by straight haired Kate Humble lookalike Eve Jackson and is pretty darn good. 

Regular European news is provided by nondescript tv channel Euronews it does the job without being remotely interesting.  Best thing ever was a broadcast of Jean Michel Jarres concert for the wedding of the prince of Monaco.  Worst thing calling Brian May, Brian Man, in a tribute to Freddie Mercury.

Fox news seems to broadcast Fox and Friends First Live, a bizarre mix of robots masquerading as presenters and a right wing bias for each and every story.  I don't care about republicanism or the soulless automatons who present it, so its often switched over in a hurry.

China has two news channels that are bland beyond words, and Russia seems to thrive on something called the Keyser report.  Which leaves Arabic slanted news al Jizzura (Al Jazeera) and the soon to be fucked Press TV which is just weird.  Owned by the Iranian government it adds mainly arab issues such as a march to celebrate Ashoura in London and various other pork barrel issues and relations. By that time i've either finished my lunch or Piers Moron is on CNN which means its time to move on.

We'll leave you with the news that Berkeley University have unearthed some recordings from telephone pioneer, Alexander Graham Bell.  Its most interesting, do have a look dear.

Haniwa De Go

Back in May we wrote this.

"and finally you're not allowed to take photos in arcades anymore we may actually write more about this, as it seems entirely wrong headed and petty.  We have very poor footage of Haniwa De Go by Taito in fact we'll definitely do more on this as there's precious little information online about this at all.

Oh and we'll try and make it a double bill with unlicensed Mario too."

Mario got his day in the spotlight back in May, but Haniwa de Go got forgotten about, lingering out in the darkness... Until now.

A trip to the Trocadero, proved to be the catalyst for this rebirth of sorts.  The previous location had a ban on taking photographs of the machines for reasons unknown, and after a few visits there it was demoted to being broken and finally disappeared to be replaced by a Coronation Street coin pusher {which is shit}.

Skip forward to the new year and we took our camera up town to photograph the chinese new year, and decided a trip to the Troc' would be a fun diversion before we got down to the serious business of photographing the festivities.  Up on the top floor they had Haniwa set up and accepting 10ps.  We broke out the camera and filmed us playing through about a pounds worth.

We don't know the name of the Namco game but theres some cracking Engrish on  the front there.

Overview. 

Haniwa De Go is a coin pusher style game from Taito, the aim of the game is to move around  the board by timing your shots so they roll into the moving pink coin slots.  They trigger the rolling dice on screen and you move about, sometimes you get a chance to collect bonuses or OOparts (the main feature of the game) and this in turn gets you more coins to the lower (and indeed more traditional) coin pusher 'penny falls part' of the game.

Instead of directly dropping it down via the slots you have a choice of 6 slots to place your coin, (three each side) and if it falls into the moving slots you go onto the map screen as explained above.  If not it joins the rest of the coins on the main pusher, and if it gets pushed down onto the lower screen then there's a chance that it could fall down and  pay out onto the main slot (in time honoured tradition it won't, it'll just hang there defying gravity). Anyway to watch us play some rounds and even trigger a bonus have a look at the clip below on Youtube, courtesy of the bearorbust empire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0kX3_LvdYg