Sky G(One)

Sky One is to close 20 years after it ceased to be relevant. It's being superseded by two new channels both of which are, if we're honest, too little far too late. If anything Sky Living was what Sky One was in the past few years, back before it became Sky Witless, but, as I grew up watching Sky its time for some memories, that I've probably aired before.

The DJ Kat show

With cool cat, DJ Kat, and Rod Hull's daughter it was an excuse to play a load of obscure and cheap cartoons such as the English version of Spoon Obasasn, and the full version of Super Mario Bros Super Show with Lou Albarno. Later gained a mouse puppet called Yummi Ticklemouse.

Card Sharps / Concentration / Jeopardy / Press Your Luck

American Gameshows were an early staple of Sky, Card Sharps is just a Rebranded Play Your  Cards Right with Bob Eubanks  rather than good ol' Brucie. Jeopardy is the Paul Coia version which no one remembers.

In Living Color.

Comedy show with the Wayans brothers and a little known comic called Jim Carrey. I wonder if he ever made it big? 

The Simpsons.

6:30 on a Sunday night, where you could watch the greatest show of all time, So much good writing and probably shaped me more as a person than anything else save Beavis and Butthead.

The X Files.

Never cared about the big two sci fi series Stars Trek and Wars. This was my jam with a strong female lead and Mulder who just didn't give two fucks. The show ended with season 9 as did any relevancy that Sky One was going to be decent again.

Fun Factory.

The weekend equivalent to the DJ Kat show, this was a cartoon block presented in the early days by Crocker the Crocodile and Snook the Seal. Later would scrap them entirely and just play decent cartoons such as Fox's Peter Pan and Ultraman.

Pokemon and Yu gi oh!

What you don't realize is that Sky One was the home of Pokemon from about 1999 onwards, Yu-gi-oh! was the final gasp of the weekend cartoon covering all the way up to the Darts / Eye of Timaeus story arc before it withered and died.

There was a few more things that I should mention, such as the original Flash series and Stargate airing but I think that was Sky 2 of all things.

Edit totally forgot about ALF and Sale of The Century, both mainstays of early Sky.

Cabin Island

 This is basically the Hardy Boys at Christmas. A trip out to the deserted Cabin Island by way of a gift from Elroy Jefferson, thanks to them recovering his car in the Shore Road Mystery.

As this is the UK and that was 16 books previously rather than a subsequent issue its a rather belated gift. Anyway it's not a bad book, they camp out on the island and have to deal with ghosts and look for not only Elroy's grandson Johnny but also a bunch of medals stolen by a former employee John Sparewell.

The main gimmick this time is ice-yachts, a flat beamed craft used for skimming over the ice of a frozen bay. Which begs to differ, how cold does Bayport get. Is it Midwest states cold I.E. 30 below C in winter or more like New York which I gather is more minus 5 or so.

You'll get two versions this time. The original is a PDF file culled from archive.org, so its a bit bigger than the usual small plain text PDF scan you are used to.   Ignore this we have sourced and scanned our own copy and its a normal sized PDF.

The UK text was hand typed as for most of the time my scanner refused to work, due to it requiring new ink. Yes that is a thing.

There are few differences between the two texts, in the original the boys are give rifles for Christmas with the explicit instructions to not shoot too many rabbits. I'm pretty sure it was mackinaw shirts and boots in the remake.

Also Chet is outed as someone who is all mouth and no trousers (he didn't worry against squaring off against bigger lads as long as someone was with him), as the boys face off against Ike & Tad, a pair of delinquent youths and owners of the Hawk, a rival ice yacht to the Hardy's Seagull.

UK remake here. Proper original here.

Edit. Those rifles they got for Xmas, basically are used for signalling and killing foxes. 

It's coming home

 Without any trophies, save for a runners up medal and or a participation badge.

I did, for my sins watch the second half and extra time and penalties, that is only because there was nothing of any use to watch apart from football.

I will say though it wasn't bad and we got a hell of a lot further than what we usually do. Also we have a new Gareth Southgate in Marcus Rashford who joins a long line of England players who've hit the post whilst taking penalties. Maybe they'll be an update of the old Pizza Hut advert with Sancho and Saka rubbing it in. Though its probably going to be a cold day in hell as we can't do humour now, and will be classed as racist.

There was a minority of racist comments, some, even from the UK, due to them missing the penalties, which provoked an absolute storm of anti racist activity. This included the mural of Rashford being defaced with slogans and then being defaced with more outpourings of love and support. I always thought it was weird, that I never saw what was written on it to begin with, 

And the only photo's I've seen, either blurred it out or just contain the after shots with the hearts and flowers. I can sort of see what it said, but I would like to see what it said.

Like I say there was an absolute swarm of anti racist types, as if you poked an ants nest and they all came out angry with them saying racism bad (it is) and taking the knee (which I don't agree with, though that is due to me hating all political point scoring.) You never really heard anyone take the mick or that, and apart from the few racist bits which were fucking minor compared to the anti stuff. 

Even at work among those who cared about football and Monday teatime was an absolute postmortem on the game. The consensus is we did well and have nothing to be ashamed about, 'cept that dude with the flare up his jacksy.

As for me, my message to the team is that of Young Mr Grace from Are You Being Served? and that is. 

You've all done very well.

VIking Symbols

So the Viking Symbol Mystery then. Or the Hardys trip to Great Slave Lake area in order to track down a Viking rune stone.

The stone in question is called the Horkel stone, and was brought by Leif the Viking on his one and only trip across Northern Canada. Along with a longboat and looted booty from Viking raids. The Great Slave lake is his final resting place... except Leif never existed. The closest they came was L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. 

It only exists in the story as the great McGuffin that everyone wants along with a book on Runes written by an English professor from the London Museum (which one is never specified, although we secretly hope its the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill). 

You get the whole gang tagging along this time, not just Chet Morton, but Biff Hooper and Tony Prito. Also Mr Hardy, too, takes to the great north in order to track down the crims.

There is also a French Canadien called Pierre Caron, who mainly tags along to settle his feud with Albert Dulac. Mostly says bon tonnerre. Its not a bad mystery and the boys get to learn how to pilot a float plane so they can land on the lakes around the area. 

The UK edition brings a few minor edits and expands (or mostly explains) the text in a few places. The next book is called the Missing Chums, where, we know it as the Missing Friends.

You can read it here.

Necrolog: Near

 Did a brief updating to my old whatever happened to Byuu, blog post last week, before I really knew what happened and that.

For those of you late to the party, Near as he was known took his own life last week thanks to an online hate via an old lolcow post up on Kiwifarms. 

Whether you think they are all a bunch empathy free cunts or class them as far right trolls these are the facts of the matter. Personally I like my humour edgy but even I draw the line here.

My own dealings with him are via Twitter, where he would post emulator updates on Ares, Higan and occasionally the meds he was on, oh and black metal, but no one is perfect.

I put up the whatever happened to Byuu post due to his last hiatus, and it seemed that all was well after he returned. Then after a few weeks of emu news, more radio silence and finally the awful news last Sunday.

I never really knew him personally, only through works. Emulation stuff, such as MSU1 expansion for SNES, BSNES emulator and its multi system offshoots, Higan and Ares.  Beat patching, and the whole, rescan the Super Nintendo Cart catalogue for accuracy sake. I wonder if people will still bother him for that one Pachinko revision that he dumped.

There is a longer and better written post with proper pronouns and that doing the rounds, though I can't find at the moment, we have a thread at RHDN if you'd like more.

Creationist Corner.

 A few weeks ago, I picked up a few books to read, the good Bill Hicks biography and as it was 2 for a quid a book on Creationism from a guy called Harun Yahya, complete with someones wedding photos stuffed in the pages, (this is why it was bought initially.)

The biography was good, and pretty much told me all I needed to know about one of the best comedians ever. Darwinism refuted however...

Let's get this over with, I fully believe in evolution, materialism and that the universe is unimaginably old. No, I do not know where life came from or how the universe began, I just know it doesn't have a designer, or that things are irreducibly complex.

That over, I will say, this book is a boring, shallow and contradictory pile of garbage I have had the displeasure to read. It's one differing feature being that Allah is the creator rather than the Christian God is new, but the arguments are the same. 

There is the eye and bacterium flagellum being held up as the pinnacle of irreducible complexity.

The old Junkyard 747 reconstruction hypothesis is given a run out. And in some magical serendipity IFM is playing Scrapyard by Tangerine Dream in the background. More on serendipity later.

We're spared anything on strata, focusing on various animals that have stayed the same despite millions of years without a shred of irony that they too have evolved. I quote from an old Digitizer video I saw, but it boils down to this: You are a crab, your daddy was a crab before you, hence you will always be a crab.

Finally we have the secret bit at the back, explaining that Allah dun it all. With quotes from the Quran to back up his "evidence" just like what Christians do with the Bible.

My favourite quote is that we are all shadows in a world where only Allah is real, which just reminds me of the Plato's Cave argument, rewritten by an Islamic apologist. 

Finally as we always have a few books on the go we have the current issue of Fortean Times open when finishing it off and there is an update about a certain Adnan Oktar, cult leader, sex trafficker and all round weirdo. Wiki has him sentenced to 9000 years in jail, whereas FT puts it at the much more modest 1000. That's a millennium in prison, and a Turkish prison at that. 

Oh and if you are wondering what is the link between the two. Harun Yahya is of course Adnan's pen name, which he pumped out a string of awful creationist literature, some of it aimed at kids.

 

Yellow Feathers and Curiosity Shows

Another book is up for your pleasure. This time it is the Yellow Feather Mystery, one of the top tier Hardy Boys adventures, and we've finally found another old show from The Children's Channel, on Twitter of all places.

The Curiosity Show

Along with Round the Twist and Kaboodle, this was the third part of the Aussie show trilogy to air on Cable back when I was small. While I remember fuck all about Kaboodle, I do remember the Curiosity show, two guys, who made things and games such as tip-cat (which my grandad, who was down at the time, said he used to play.) and some sort of berry that made everything sweet (Synsepalum). I also forgot what it was called. 

It didn't help that the That's Incredible bit from the Fast Show is a direct rip of this (more like affectionate homage.) and for years later. I'd think about the show, but without a name, it would be foolish to search.

Scrolling twitter midweek, and there is a clip of the familiar presenter showing an optical illusion. I scroll down the credits and there is a name. A good 35 years after I've seen the show, I finally have a name for it all. Best of all there is a Youtube Channel, and the original guys have the rights to it all.

Yellow Feather Mystery.

This seems to be an afterthought, after I found this, but we have finally finished typing up the latest book.

Both issues of the Yellow Feather Mystery, are classic Hardy Boys and can easily rank up there with the old, Les Macfarlane stories. 

The boys have been tasked with regaining a will for a Greg Woodson, whose grandfather ran the prestigious Woodson academy, a school that their father went to. A missing will and a shadowy character called the Yellow Feather seems to be out to stop the boys from succeeding. Its also one of the only stories I've come across where Chet seems to be heroic. He has an Ice sled in this as it's the depths of winter, and comes to the boys aid in the final chapter.

Anyway both Original and UK remake are available here and here.