Thursday, March 17

Send in the clones...

Mes Amis

Hey, hey we're not quite the Monkees... The beautiful thing about having a day off work is that you can watch shitey TV all day and Channel 5 is, naturally, the best for truly bad daytime TV. Today's morning film was The Monkees Story starring a cast of very scary lookalikes (except the drummer - the one with the curly hair - who I know I recognised from somewhere else) in a pretty typical biopic. But the crowning moment of creepiness was when the Monkees found themselves floundering, looking for a new direction. In comes their manager with the idea of doing a movie and he's got the guy to write it. The Monkees look at the guy and say, "Hey, I know you, we've met you before. Jack Niclos, right?" At which point the dude in the bad wig pulls down his glasses and says in that creepy voice, with a toothy, crooked grin; "Nicholson." What was so strange about the two minute Jack Nicholson part was the way the poor actor kept slipping between a normal voice and the Jack voice, so you were never quite sure if he was getting it right... But it was a hell of an odd experience watching it because everyone (except the drummer) bore a creepy resemblance to their real life counterparts...

We Used To Kiss on the Lips, but Its All Over Now... Its a musical theme today. We all know (according to an Elmore Leonard novel I read years ago) what happens when you play country music backwards: your truck flips back onto its wheels, your dog comes back to life, you stop drinking and your wife comes back. But when you play it forwards, well, scientists can at last tell us whether it really does depress us to hear these guitar picking, lyric drawling songs woe: We contend that the themes found in country music foster a suicidal mood among people already at risk of suicide and that it is thereby associated with a high suicide rate. You want to know more? The abstract is right here but you have to join up to read the full report.

Anyway, mes amis, till next time

Au Revoir

Russel

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