Arthur got a present last night as part of his Dad`s mini house clean out. Arthur`s dad collects antiques but not the usual sort of antiques that appear on the Antiques Road Show on TV, such as porcelain, paintings etc. No, Arthur`s dad likes antique machinery
such as telephones, typewriters,
cash regsiters and adding machines. He
has weird things like victorian medical equipment (electric shock machiones and UV healing tubes) and cool, massive items like a huge clock from a station that is over a meter in diameter and a cast iron flour mill for grinding your own corn.
Arthur`s Dad keeps all this stuff in his collecting room but, after 25 years of living in the house, the room had never actually been decorated and had become extremely shabby. So, after putting off the inevitable for about 20 years, all the floor to celing colectables in the room were moved to other rooms in the house or shifted into a big pile in one corner to allow the decorating to begin.
As part of this process, Arthur`s Dad decided (or was "persauded" by Arthur`s mum!) to thin out the colection a bit and get rid of a few things, which brings us back to Arthur`s present. In a slightly ironic twist of fate given Arthur`s recent eye problems, his gift was a piece of antique American opticians equipment. Originally it would have been mouted on some sort of armature or tripod but is basically is a device that goes in front of the eyes and allows the optician to dial up loads of different lenses to test someone`s eyes. It is a fantastic piece of engineering with loads of different lenses for each eye that are selected with various knobs and levers. Then there are other lenses that flip up and down to cover each eye as well.
Arthur had a really creepy nightmare many years ago involving this opticians equipment. Arthur was kidnapped by some evil monks that each wore these opticians eye testing devices over their faces. Each monk also carried a spiked incense ball
that would put everyone to sleep just long enough for the victims to be strapped into aircraft ejector seats and then brutally sliced up with very sharp knives by a strange grinning man in a wide brimmed who had no eyes but kept big, furry tarantulas in his empty eye sockets...
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Arthur suspects he is falling to pieces at the moment. Her seems to have visited the doctor more in the past few months than in the last 10 years! The latest minor disaster to befall him is a floater (No snigering now, Arthur is not talking about poo).
A few weeks ago Arthur began to notice a little black dot at the edge of his vision in his right eye. Sometimes he noticed it and sometimes he didn`t. But it slowly bacme more and more obvious and started appearing right in the midlle of his line of sight. And wherever Arthur looked the dot went too, moving around in a very annoyiong manner.
A quick trip to the doctor and optician confirmed this dot to be a floater. Although the name would suggest that this is poo in the eye, it is in fact some cells inside the eye that have broken away and are floating around. Fortunately the optician said that Arthur`s floater had come from his iris and wasn`t anything to be worried about (just bloody annoying). Had it come from the back of the eye then it could mean a detached retina, which would be very bad. Whilst floaters can be a sign of other eye conditions such as glaucoma, the optician did all the tests and confirmed it was none of these; he said that floaters can often simply be caused by sneezing too hard which, given Arthur`s tendency to sneeze a lot in bright light, sounds like a likely culprit...
The optician said that it may well settle down after a while and get stuck at the bottom of the eye and thus be pretty much unnoticable. Until then it`s just going to be there. Best of all there`s nothing that can be done about it; Arthur is now stuck with this bloody black dot for the rest of his life. Still, it will go with the permanent ringing sound in his ears caused by his blocked, narrow sinuses. Now all he needs is some nerve damage and a loss of taste and smell to complete the "buggered senses" full house.
Arthur went to the cinema last night to see Poseidon. Most reviews hadn`t been very flattering to this film but some had said that if you just take it as a dumb, special effects extravagnza then it works perfcetly well. And indeed this was the case. All the characterisation was got out of the way in the first 15 minutes then, with no obvious reason or build up, the big wave hits and in a flurry of excellent effects, the ship is flipped over and it`s action and cheesy disaster movie peril from there on in. All the usual boxes for such films are ticked along the way (sacrifice to save family, unlikable character who gets it in spectacular style etc. ) but it works perfectly well as a summer blockbuster. Just don`t expect anything with characters you actually care about too much. Saying that though, Arthur was surprised at how brutal and unflinching the film was when it came to showing people dying; there were lots of bodies, people drowning on screen, electrocutions, burnings, falls, impalements and alike which aren`t usually seen in even the most action packed throwaway-violence summer films.
And thinking of graphic violence, Arthur also saw a couple of inappropriatelty placed adverts before the film. The first was a road safety advert showing a motor cyclist going very fast (to the tune of Crash by the Primatives) and ending up in a head in collision with a car. This was then followed by an advert for a motor cycling game on the XBox 360 which extolled the virtues of racing as fast as possible! Arthur found this amusing enough but then later on during the same set of commercials it happened again; this time there was a road saftey advert showing aspiring young actor Scott Smith getting knocked down by a car trvaelling too fast. This was then followed by yet another XBox 360 advert, this time for Project Gotham Racing 3 which is all about driving as fast as you can around accurate reproductions of various cities across the world. Arthur himself isn`t particualry offended or bothered about this but found it amusing that someone could be so stupid as to put such commericals together without realising that some people could find such things inappropriate. Maybe a letter to the cinema will result in some free tickets...
Over the years Arthur has collected many books, comics, magazines and alike. In years gone by Arthur bought everything he could but since movie memorabillia became more popular it just wasn`t possible to get everythinhg and still be able to afford to live. Plus Arthur realised that if he gave up buying hundreds of magazines about films, instead he could put the money towards big speaks, amplifiers, video projectors to actually watch the films he was reading about... However there is one magazone that Arthur still buys on a regular basis and that is Cinefex. Actually, calling it a magazine is doing it a dis-service. It is more like a small book that is published quarterly. It is designed for people in the movie special effects industry and has very high quality and technical journalism. Whereas most movie magazines feature adverts for Buffy statues , Lord of the Rings replica weapons and other movie buff merchandise, Cinefex has adverts for special effects house (Such as ILM), computer imaging software packages and alike. It is a good read for those wanting to know how speical effects work is done and always has lots of great colour pictures.
Arthur started buying the magazine back in the mid 80`s at around issue number 35 and has bought every issue since (it is currently at about issue number 105). A year or so ago he set about getting back issues so he could have a complete set and after some frantic eBay bidding he is almost there now, only having 2 issues left to go. Yesterday Arthur got 2 of the rarest (and most expensive) issues through the post from America: Issue 9 about Bladerunner and Issue 8 covering Tron and Silent Running. These were in fact a bit of a bargain only costing £50 the pair(!) Arthur has seen individual issues go for up to £75 in the UK. This just leaves issue 3 (Empire Strikes Back) and Issue 10 (King Kong retrospective) to get. Arthur expects to have to pay £30 or £40 for each of these but it should be worth it to finally have a compelte set of this excellent effects magazine/book/publication.
Arthur has been suffering from a bad case of Dog`s breath for the past few days. His tongue has felt all furry and the inside of his mouth has tasted like an old sock. This happens every so often to most people but this morning, quite by accident, Arthur discovered the casue of his current halitosis attack.
He was peering into his mouth to examine a mouth ulcer that was starting to appear when he spotted soemthing odd at the back of his mouth. Opening a bit wider he saw a white blob of "stuff" nestling in the various folds of skin right at the back of his mouth next to the dangly thing that hangs down in the entrance to the throat. It was either a lump of food that had bceome stuck there and had gone off or a lump fo half digested food that for whatever reason had popped back up and got stuck there and gone gone off. Either way it was rotting food in Arthur`s mouth and it had to go. Arthur tried a few pokes with his finger but this caused him to gag being so close to the back of the throat. However it had become slightly dislodged with all the prodding and with a few sharp, rasping coughs/puffs of air from his lungs, the blob sprung forth from its hiding place and landed on Arthur`s tongue.
Taking it out, it was strangely smooth yet organically wrinked (like the surface of the brain) and furthermore had a really, really bad smell (Arthur made the mistake of having a good, up close sniff). After giving it a quick squeeze and breaking it in half to discover its texture (kind of like a rubbery bean) Arthur dropped the whole stinky thing into the toilet and had a quick poo on top of it just to let it know exactly what Arthur thought of it. One clean of the teeth later and a quick swooshing round with mouth wash and Arthur`s mouth was lovely and fresh, just as it should be.