Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)

 

3:21pm? It's a sign, folks!!!

 Living in a fantasy head space.

19/50

Slow Horses (2022)

 

Coping with Cope

 Note to self: Listen to more Julian Cope. 

18/50

Broken dreams . . . and stems

 I was loving this stem/flight set up and then one of the stems went and broke on me. I'm writing this post through red rimmed eyes.

17/50

Terriers (2010)

 

One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie (Souvenir Press 1978)

 

A Misspent Youth

Sonic players need coaxing along, some need a kick up the backside to get the best out of them. I needed both kinds of treatment in my callow days and I got what I needed. Born a Methodist, I graduated from schoolboy football playing for a team run by a Roman Catholic priest and another team which operated in a local Sunday pub league, and I don’t suppose you can have greater contrasts than that.

My Soccer travels have taken me a long way since the days when I was kicking a ball around for my junior-school team at Old Clee, Grimsby, but I like to think that f still get as much of a kick out of the game now as I did then, although my views have changed somewhat over the years, and especially in the past 18 months or so. Some people might say that I’ve grown up, at last; others would argue that I have found my right niche in the professional game since I joined Everton and came under the influence of manager Gordon Lee. Me? - I feel that I have learned as I have gone along, that everyone I have encountered in Soccer has taught me something, and that my own native intelligence has taken me to a point where I have matured.

In my early days in the professional game, I saw some youngsters who needed coaxing being given the kicking treatment - verbally, if not physically and the result was that they failed to respond. I’m still convinced that they probably had as much ability as myself, had they been handled in the right way, psychologically, but what happened was that they became afraid. They were afraid of doing things wrong.

High Fidelity (2000)

 

If you have a message, insert it here

 . . . No, I got nothing, folks.

16/50

Time After Time (1979)

 

Don't quote me on it but I think that T5 is putting on weight . . .

 Just doing some 2022DartsChallenge blog housekeeping whilst listening to Terry Hall's fey pop phase. (The Colourfield for you young 'uns.)

15/50

The Tao of Steve (2000)

 

Endless (D)art . . .

. . . see what I did there? Spotify sometimes delivers. List songs, I can take or leave them.

 

14/50

My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell (Vintage Books 1938)

Except for a period in 1931 when I got sick of the whole business and went to sea, working on a freighter which carried heavy machinery to Leningrad and brought Soviet pulp logs back, I have been for the last eight years a reporter on newspapers in New York City. In the summer after I left the University of North Carolina in 1929 I had an appendix operation and while getting over it I read James Bryce’s “American Commonwealth,” a book which made me want to become a political reporter. I came to New York City with that idea in mind. The first story I remember covering was a Jack the Ripper murder in a Brooklyn apartment house; an old woman had been strangled with a silk stocking and cut to death in her bedroom, the walls of which were virtually covered with large, lascivious photographs.

I was a “district man” at night for The Herald Tribune. I sat in an easy chair which had fleas in it in an old tenement across the street from Police Headquarters in Brooklyn hour after hour, waiting for something violent to happen. All the newspapers had offices in the tenement. When something happened the man on the desk at Headquarters would let us know and we would leave our tenement offices and hurry to the scene of the murder, or stick-up, or wreck, or brawl, or fire, or whatever. Then we would telephone the news in to a rewrite man. I covered districts for about four months. I covered Brooklyn, the West Side of Manhattan, and Harlem. I liked Harlem best.

In Harlem the reporters had a shack—the district man calls his office “the shack”—on the ground floor of the Hotel Theresa, the biggest hotel in Harlem, and we used to sit in the doorway in swivel chairs and look out at the people passing to and fro on Seventh Avenue, Harlem’s main street. There were four reporters in Harlem at night, three from the morning papers and one from the City News Association. My colleagues were veterans. The thing they disliked most in a reporter was enthusiasm, and I was always excited. When I got on the telephone to give my office a story—in the booth I used to try to balance the telephone receiver on my left shoulder the way they did, but I never succeeded—they would stand outside and point at their foreheads and make circles in the air, indicating that I did not have any sense. We would take turns making the rounds of the police stations. On the rounds we would sometimes drop into a speakeasy or a night club or a gambling flat and try to pull a story out of it. I got to know a few underworld figures and I used to like to listen to them talk.

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

 

'Mr. Bray, I'm ready for my close-up'

Excuse the weird camera angle but a stepladder was needed for this pic. One of those 180s where one of the darts in the T60 is obscured. Lovely grouping, I guess, but a pain in the arse nonetheless.

13/50

Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe (Wrecking Ball Press 2017)

This is a work of fiction and is an alternative version of historic events.

It has been manipulated, re-structured and embellished. Real people rub shoulders with fictional characters, some utter words from letters and scripts; others are gleaned from occasional references, newspaper cuttings, hearsay or fractured memory.

It is not the truth and exists purely within the realm of speculation.

Bull Durham (1988)

 

The Outlaws (2021)

 

Princess O'Rourke (1943)

 

Confession time . . .

I have no recollection of this 180 . . . but I'm sure it made me happy at the time. Still catching up with the 180s on the blog, still catching up with Julian Cope. 

12/50

Different days, different stem/flight set up

World Party? A bit marmite, to be honest . . . 

11/50

All About Eve (1950)