The Edge Of Madness

So I finally got off my arse and used the trial lesson voucher that Lana got me for my birthday.

Hired a Mini from a car club I'm a member of. I'm a big fan of the car club. Normally I'd ride up, but I still haven't got luggage on Floyd, so it's annoying getting changed at the other end. Nice drive up.

I've also finally got used to driving a manual, and now I'm loving it. I am revving a little too much sometimes though, bit of wheel spin. I've also got the hang of switching from 2nd to 3rd, which has made my life easier

Back to the flying. Bit of rigmarole as they hadn't written the expiry date on the certificate and it had expired. But since they hadn't written it in they honoured it.

Up we went, good fun, after 5 minutes, I'm turning the plan. Can't remember the technical terms, but banking and turning sound good. I had a tendency to keep pulling up & also watching the controls more than the actual ground. Prob from playing too many computer games.

Also I tended to turn a little too hard to start with. But hey, you've got to work out what you can and can't do.

Plane was a Piper Archer. Old plane, and too small to fit me.

Also I didn't really get on with the instructor.

So I'm still debating taking lessons. There's another school an hour away (all schools are an hour away) in Surrey I'm going to check out. Newer planes.

I think the goal of being able to fly your own plane by yourself is more important to me than lessons. But you have to do one to do the other.

Again, me commenting on search terms used to get to my blog.

can you see me know asshole shirt

Unless a lightbulb pops up behind your head when you have an idea, or you ran down the street in towel shouting "Eureka". No, can't see you know.

sperm donation ethically wrong

Depends. If you're just randomly donating sperm to strangers on the street, or posting it through people's letterboxes, then I can see that's wrong.

how much sperm can i hold

In your mouth? In your hands? Or in your balls? And why the frig do you need to know this?

I Don't Have Any Change T-Shirt

Yep, that's going to stop homeless guys bugging you. Great plan.

need to wear what kind of shirt to take photo for cabin crew

Huh? People refuse to get photographed by people wearing bad shirts? Man, I want to know what type of shirt you normally wear for people to refuse to let you photograph them.

average porkstar rates

While I'm fairly certain you were searching for pornstar rates, just had me thinking what would be the average rates for someone to shag a pig?

get someone's shirt out

Pull it out?

Stay tuned for the next update in a couple of weeks.

BTW, I'm getting a whole bunch more search traffic headed my way due to that whole t-shirt thing.

Few highlights.

Invasion continues to suck. But I finally worked out the "Volgans" are meant to be the Russians.

Dan Dare came back and the first few stories were passable, then back to suckville.

Mach 1 is really, really bad.

Judge Dredd continues to shine. I was thinking about this, it's one the few stories where characters are fairly realistic (yes a futuristic city with a hard as nails Judge is a little out there, but it's actually believable) and well written.

Harlem Heroes was passable, but you can see within the story the brilliance that "Mean Team" will be. Harlem Heroes finished up, with a new story Inferno. This was okay, as long as you totally ignored the plot and just enjoyed the artwork.

Shako. This was crap. It's about a intelligent polar bear who swallows a capsul containing some top secret poison gas the CIA is making. Then the CIA trying to hunt him down, but he kills everyone after him. Then the Russians get involved. Bah, pure crap. The biggest problem was it was impossible to have any empathy for any of the characters. The bear was killing innocents, the CIA wanted the nerve gas. Just a mess.

The other great introduction to the series is "Thargs Future Shocks". Starting from around issue 22. These are one off stories, that do two things. Give new writers & artists a chance to prove themselves and pack a quick twist punch. No hugely memorable stories, but fairly good.

A sneaky addition as well is the cover doesn't reflect any of the comic stories, but instead is a brief couple of paragraph story on the letters page. Prob to help sell copies, but I'd prefer the artwork of one of the stories on the front.

And finally from Prog 36, they finally put the credit of the Writer, Artist and Letterer on each comic. And while it's a bastard thing to say, 30 years later, apart from John Wagner (Judge Dredd), I've never heard of the other writers again. Most of the artists though, I've read many, many comics with their style (Bellardini, Gibson & Ezquerra).

EDIT: Well I looked up who wrote Mach 1. Amazingly it was Pat Mills, whose work on Slaine, Nemesis the Warlock and ABC Warriors I loved. And who also wrote Invasion, which again I do not like. And Shako, which sucked. Fuck, thankfully he gets better as the years roll on

So as I said I've got about the first 1100 issues of 2000AD, the comic.

This is going to be one of those running reviews as I read through them. It started in Feb 1977, and came out at the rate of 1 per week.

I remember reading a couple as a kid, and the only comic I ever regularly bought was Best of 2000AD Monthly, which was a collection of the stories from the weekly comic.

To start with, the major stories so far are Invasion, Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Mach 1, Flesh, and Judge Dredd.

One of the annoying things is that there is no mention on each seperate story as to Artist & Writer. Annoying.

Invasion is a story set in Britain in 1999 (22 years in the future). England has been invaded by a fictional Asian country (where all the members are actually white Europeans). England lost in 48 hours, and one man, a former lorry driver is the head of the resistance. He starts off with a double barrel shotgun, before moving onto a pump action shotgun. And yep, he mows down wave upon wave of Volgan invaders. Pure pulp, but with some interesting bits. One funny bit was a small background image of a sign talking about the Channel Tunnel. This was a few years before it was offically even planned out, which was interesting. But the worst part of this story is the main character, a former lorry driver is now an unbeatable resistance fighter, with reflexes of a snake.

Dan Dare is crap. But the artwork is brilliant. And I recongnised it as Belardinelli, who later did the artwork to one of my favourite series, Ace Truck Co. More on that in the coming months when I get to it. Dan Dare is pretty much a Buck Rogers type comic.

Harlem Heroes is interesting. It's about a type of basket ball they play with jetpacks. Not brilliant, but not crap.

Mach 1 is the worst strip I have ever read. I'm having to force myself to read it. It suffers badly from superman syndrome. The main character is a sort of super secret agent, that has been augmented by biotech. As such he is 50 times faster than any man, almost indestructible, and has a computer in his head working out possible plans of attack. No empathy at all for a character with no enemies.

Flesh is set in the future and the past. And is fairly interesting. 23rd century and they've got time travel. So they've got back in time to harvest Dinosaurs for meat. Pretty cool, it's a western style set in the past. And they kill off lots of characters.

Finally Judge Dredd, who appeared in the second issue. What can I say? I've never been a huge Judge Dredd fan, but the vision described here is brilliant. After one issue you've got a sense of the size of the city, the problems facing the judges, and what a judge can and can't do. And while Judge Dredd is almost a superman, he's not. He misses, he makes mistakes, he collapses from exhaustion.

What's also interesting is reading the letters page. There was an interesting letter there talking about environmental damage especially to the ozone layer, and how we had to start being green....and this was in 1977.

I'm going through them at the rate of about 1 every 20 minutes or so, so don't expect a speedy review. The stories I'm looking forward to coming across are Nemesis the Warlock, Ace Trucking Co, Strontium Dog, Sam Slade Robo Hunter & ABC Warriors. I'll prob post up some short reviews as I go through story arcs.

I have a list of things to buy when I'm rich. It's a fairly short list actually.

• An original Simon Bisley Painting - around £1000-2000. He's a comic artist, and the first time I read Slaine, the Horned God, my jaw hit the ground at his artwork. And the artwork in Batman vs Judge Dredd was also one of my favourites.
• An original Larry Elmore painting. He was one of the major artist for the Dragonlance series, and his painting "Death of Sturm" is still one of my favourites
• A Shadow over Mystara arcade cabinet. Loved that game

Anyway, I was browsing through some of Simon Bisley's artwork, came across a blog post talking about 2000AD, and how the bloke had bought a complete collection on Ebay and was reading through them all. So I decided to take a look on ebay.

And I found out you can actually commision a painting of your choice by Simon Bisley. Now that is damn cool.

To get the first 800 odd issues, it was only around £250. Bargain. So I bought it. Now of course the downside is that I had to drive 3 hours to pick them up....and they weighed 55kg, but hey, pretty cool.

I haven't started going through them yet, stage 1 was to put them all in order. Expect a blog post later when I start reading them.

I'm a member of a car hire club, so it's pretty easy to get a car for a couple of hours. This was the 3rd time I've driven a manual car. I'm actually getting better, only stalled twice. Though I did have a tendency on the highway to drive in 4th all the way, as I wasn't confident about changing through gears to overtake. And Lana had some white knuckle fun whenever I was merging, as I tended to really gun it

Got to the blokes house, good bloke. Had 3 dogs, all rescued from a shelter. Some of those fuckers who dump dogs are bastards. He was telling us about how one was a breeding dog, pedigree, who got dumped as it had one funny coloured eye. And another was pretty badly beaten as a puppy and as such didn't like tall men. As soon as I sat down, the dog totally calmed down.

On the way there, we had seen a bunch of signs for a safari. And with all the time in the world, decided to try and find one. Stopped off for a pee break, and low and behold there was a brochure advertising the safari. West Midlands Safari Park. It was about 3pm, little unsure of when it shut, tried calling, couldn't get through. Decided to head down on the offchance. The following is dictated to me by Lana, as she enjoyed it much more than me

"I thought I was very clever finding this place by following the map, and working out how to get there. But it turned out that Brad wasn't listening to me and pretending that his GPS couldn't find the place. He said he did it to keep me occupied so I didn't bug him. I think he just likes annoying me.

Got there around 5 and thought it was shut. It was open until 10pm, and we only had to pay half price. This was because of the Summer August school holidays late opening times.

At this place you get to drive around and look around at the animals from the car. Most of the animals are just wandering around. Brad was very happy with that as he is too lazy to walk most of the time. You aren't allowed to get out of the car, and for the non aggresive animals you can keep the windows open.

As soon as we drove through the gate I saw a rhinoceros as it was the biggest thing there. I was very excited. Turns out we could buy food to feed the animals, but we didn't realise earlier.

A zebra scared me by sticking his head through the window looking for food. It was very cool, I patted his nose, it was dry.

Saw some wolves. Tasmanian white wallabies. White tigers. Cheetahs. Lions.

There was only one male lion for a bunch of females. Had to keep windows shut for those ones.

The coolest animals there were the wild African dogs. They looked very pretty with big elephant ears, and bright orange black coats. They were very sneaky. A pack of them surrounded a car in front of us, while a couple of them stood in front so it wouldn't drive off. The rest of them pulled off the mudguard and ran off. The guy wasn't happy, but the dogs were. They were playing with it as we drove off.

One of them stood just outside our window, and I really wanted to touch him. But I didn't.

And a reindeer came to our window and licked my hand twice. It wasn't a reindeer, it was a deer, some kind of deer.

Then there were about 5 giraffes. There was a big queue to see them. The car in front of us had a sunroof open, so the giraffe stuck his head through the roof and they feed them food. Wish we had some food to feed them. Giraffes are my favourite animals, so I wanted one to come up to my window so I could pet him. Instead one came to Brad's window and Brad got to pet his nose. Brad said he was very bristly. I wasn't happy as I wanted to pet the giraffe as well.

So when a giraffe walked by, I patted his leg. He got scared and jumped and almost knocked the mirror off the car. And the woman yelled through a megafone at me not to touch the giraffes legs.

And the rhino's scared me, because if they charge at the car, then they could easily turn it over, as they were twice the size of the car which was pretty cool.

After driving through the park and looking at the animals, we went to see all the rides and games they had in the other part of the park. Saw some reptiles and poisonous frogs which looked bright and interesting.

Tried to win a soft toy by throwing a ball into some cups. Sucked so much, the girl took pity on me and gave me 5 extra throws. Still only won a small one.

Saw the sea lion show, which was cool. Only the sea lions refused to jump or do tricks in the water which was funny. One of them was very fat and looked like a worm. He was doing funny tricks on the ground.

It was very cool and exciting. Wish I could have a pet giraffe on my farm."

Yeah, the park was pretty cool. Road was wide enough so two cars could pass by each other, so no real waiting. And due to the fact we went pretty late, it was fairly empty.

So for a random side track on a road trip, good fun. I only wish there were monkeys. After doing some searching found another safari that has monkeys. They do say the monkeys just sit on the car jerking off though, which will be hilarious

Here's some pics taken on my phone, slightly bad unfortunately. As I said, unplanned trip, make do with what you got

Safari Pics