Remaking ‘The Princess Bride’ — WTF!!!

I’d like to say that this “Remake The Princess Bride? Inconceivable!” article came as a bit of a shock; i’d like to say that some twat actually having the audacity to even imagine remaking The Princess Bride is beyond belief; but i can’t say either.   Because it’s not a shock and it’s not beyond belief.   Because, as we all know, nothing is more sacred these days than corporations making profit.

If the film industry thinks it can make a little bit of profit then they will shit all over everything that anyone loves, respects, admires and/or enjoys.   The film industry, for the most part, does not care about quality, it’s nothing but a monster that continuously needs to consume anything and everything in its path to stay alive.   But, at the end of the day, it only does this if you, the viewing public, keep feeding it.   Ergo…

“DON’T FEED THE MONSTERS”

The Princess Bride is one of the most classic films ever made.   There is nothing in this film that leaves space for improvement.   It doesn’t need to be remade.   It stands the test of time as it is.   It will always be a fantastic film for all the family to enjoy, no matter what age or anything.   It is, quite simply, film making at its very best.

Seriously, if you haven’t watched The Princess Bride then do so.   Invite friends and family around to watch it with you.

And then, when you’ve watched the film and maybe want more of the similar, read the book!

Yes, the book complements the film perfectly.   But whereas normally i would suggest reading the book before watching the film, with The Princess Bride i would wholeheartedly recommend watching the film before reading the book.

But whatever you do, please don’t watch any remake of this film.   You’ll just encourage the film industry to continue shitting all over everything of quality that ever existed.

#5t4n5 #theprincessbride #tvandfilm

La Vuelta a España — 2019

La Vuelta a EspañaThe last of the year’s 3 grand tours, La Vuelta usually throws up a fun 3 week adventure around the roads of Spain and, although in some ways it was a little disappointing this year, it was still a good race in many other ways.

Having lost a few good riders and teams in the first week due to crashes, illness, etc., the GC race basically came down to Movistar v Jumbo Visma with Movistar seeming more than happy to settle for second place.   Although to be fair to Valverde and Quintana, they were raced in the Tour and then expected to come here and perfom against Roglič who had spent the summer doing nothing but get into perfect shape for this race.   If Movistar had held Valverde back from the Tour and focused him totally on La Vuelta and made him absolute leader from the start without Quintana in the team then, oh, how things may have been so very different.

In the end the main battle was the white jersey between Miguel Ángel López and Tadej Pogačar.   While everyone else seemed more than happy to just surrender to Roglič in the GC race, these two young whipper-snappers were most definitely not surrendering anything and were punching back and forth between stages all the way to the end with Tadej riding an awesome end to stage 20 that Miguel simply had nothing left in the tank to answer with.   With hindsight it did look like Tadej may have deliberately held back on stage 19 while Miguel went charging off, thus leaving himself a lot fresher for stage 20 than Miguel.

And while the big GC battle teams weren’t going full gas mental, the breakaways were usually left to have it large on most days throwing up some wonderful moments for a few of the pro-continental riders — which we always love to see.

All in all, yes, it could have been better had it not been for those early misfortunes, but it was still plenty good enough.

#5t4n5 #lavuelta #tv

Mindhunter — 2 Seasons

This series is based on the true story of the ‘Behavioral Science Unit’ of the FBI in the 1970’s.   This is the team that invented the term ‘serial killer’ and began the now fully accepted practice of criminal profiling.

It’s very interesting and very factual.   It’s like a documentary but acted out instead of narrated.

Season 1 was really good and season 2 doesn’t disappoint either.

Sadly, there isn’t going to be a third season.

#5t4n5 #mindhunter #tvandfilm

The Orville — Season 2

This show just gets better.   Everyone’s settled into their characters really well, the main galactic story line is ramping up, while the short episode stories are usually quite humorous while managing to keep a serious side to them — like holodeck porn addiction.

This parody is just as good as TNG, DS9 and Voyager as it brings something to the genre that those 3 couldn’t because they always took themselves so seriously.   Being a parody, The Orville absolutely does go boldly to places that the real Trek series couldn’t go to, and that’s good.   It’s what i was hoping for in the post Voyager universe — a bit more grown up story lines, like yeah, people are going to be just as fucked up in 400 years as they are today, they’ll just have different toys to get fucked up with.   Instead, all we got from the Star Trek label was immature garbage in Enterprise and Discovery which, quite frankly, have been a step backwards and a dumbing down of the franchise.   Fingers crossed, Picard will, once again, come to the rescue.

#5t4n5 #theorville #tvandfilm

The Orville — Season 1

Shows how much i keep up with current TV shows, i only just came across this.   So it got a good binge watching.

For those who really enjoyed Star Trek TNG and Voyager but were always a little annoyed that no one ever went to the toilet, swore, gossiped, got hangovers, smoked spliffs, etc., then this is for you.

It does have its serious sides like TNG used to have, but mixed amongst it all is just normal people with the normal work complaints, bizarre quirks, habits and things.   Even the replicators have “Cannabis Edibles” on the menu.

So i’ll definitely be watching season 2 when i get some time spare to binge it.

#5t4n5 #tvandfilm #theorville

Perpetual Grace Ltd

One absolutely whacky, strange, weird, but brilliant piece of television.

They didn’t skimp on the acting quality: great casting, great actors and great acting all round.   Everyone suits their character and plays them extremely well.

The cinematography is excellent.

The script is awesome, fun, twisted, bizarre, yet all making complete sense at the same time.

All in all, it’s just perfect.   Get watching now.   There’s only 1 season so you can binge watch the whole ten hours on your next rest day.

Get it…
Get the rhythm…
Get the rhythm…
There ya go…
There ya fucking go…

#5t4n5 #perpetualgraceltd #tvandfilm

Klapa Sinj — A Beautiful Name

Klapa is a style of a cappella music from Croatia.   I found out about it because it’s the music that inspired the “Music of the Mazg” in Robin Sloan’s book Sourdough.   Robin stated on Goodreads that the tune below, “A Beautiful Name”, was his favourite song.

Click here for the playlist for the whole album, Lipo Ime, should you be so inclined to wish to listen further.

#5t4n5 #klapasinj #music

Marie Antoinette’s Big Fuck Up

This follows on from “Scottish Privilege” and “£4.50 Doughnuts”, so if you haven’t read them already then go and do so first — else i’ll get really grumpy or something, and you wouldn’t like me when i’m really grumpy.

In English speaking countries there’s an urban myth that during the French revolution someone mentioned to Queen Marie Antoinette that the peasants were starving and she reputedly responded with “Let them eat cake.”

Of course, we love that one in England; anything to diss the French will always cheer us up, no end.   Anyone who thinks frogs and slugs are food seriously needs to try eating some cake instead.

However, in French, her reputed statement was “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” which means: “Then let them eat brioche.”   You can read all about the whole episode by clicking here.

If you did click there and read the wiki on it you’ll soon get to thinking that she didn’t actually say it, but that it was a pure propaganda stunt by the peasants to stir up animosity against the royalty.   Or maybe it was just some bored English bloke deciding to have another bash at our favourite neighbours.

Anyways, history lesson over and fast forward to the UK under the bootheels of the Tory party austerity measures.   Are the ruling classes of the UK going to make the same mistake as the French monarchy made and see the peasants rising up against them and chopping their heads off, or are they going to do something different?

Yes, you guessed it, they’re going for a different approach: that of aspiration.

After all, the last thing the poor peasants of the UK need to hear from Mandy Android is this:

Firstly, the ignorant, mono sylabic, tabloid oiks — which make up the vast majority of the UK population — wouldn’t know what the fuck that meant; and secondly, even if they did manage to translate it correctly, they wouldn’t be too impressed anyway as they don’t know what a brioche is — coz mcdonalds don’t sell ’em, init.

But they eat doughnuts.   Everyone likes doughnuts, especially the poor, downtrodden masses of the UK.   I checked while in Tesco yesterday and they’re still 79p for 5 from the in-store-bakery.   Probably cheaper at Lidl and Aldi, but i’m way too classy to be seen in those type of places with the sort that frequent them.

So instead of the government handing out barrow fulls of Brioche to the hungry masses, or simply giving them enough benefits to afford to buy their own brioche, they have deliberately fucked up their benefit payments and created a country where the poorest have to sit at home, staring forlornly at their 68″ plasma tv screens, while watching rich cunts shoving £4.50 doughnuts into their faces, while they have to rely on whatever tinned and packet shite the food bank gave them yesterday.

Obviously, this is far better for the peasants than simply giving them brioche as Marie may, or may not have, suggested.

Why is it far better, you may ask?

Well, because it gives the peasants something to aspire to.   Think about it.   What else, other than their 68″ plasma TV screens and 12 hours of day time TV, do these people have to look forward to every day?   If you dangle the carrot of aspiration in front of them, of being just like Judy and getting to go to London to buy £4.50 doughnuts, then they’ll soon be getting off their arses, getting really good jobs and jumping on trains every weekend to get at those doughnuts.

It just makes so much sense.   It certainly worked for Margaret Thatcher who used ‘buy-your-own-council-house’ as her carrot of aspiration for the oiks, which got them all out from in front of their TV’s and getting jobs so that they could get a mortgage and be slaves to their jobs until their mortgages were paid off because they’d now be homeless if they didn’t pay the mortgage.

The oiks didn’t seem to concern themselves with the fact that they could have continued living a job free lifestyle, watching day time TV and been guaranteed to be able to live in their council house for the rest of their lives if they didn’t buy it because housing benefit would always cover the rent.   No, they chased that carrot of aspiration all the way into corporate slavery and worked themselves into an early grave and their houses were sold to the highest bidder to pay for their old people’s home care bill.   The highest bidder being a buy-to-let property magnet who now rents those houses back to poor people on short term 6 month leases at 5 times the rent the original council house would currently be rented to them for if it were still a council house.

So yeah, aspiration.   Do you dream of being wealthy enough, or even pretending to be wealthy enough, to buy £4.50 doughnuts?   If you’ve already bought your own council house then maybe this is the next aspirational step for you.   In the meanwhile it’ll keep the masses downtrodden as they drool at the thought of getting one of those doughnuts one day instead of rising up and overthrowing those that keep them downtrodden and eating slightly stale, food bank doughnuts instead.

Seriously, people, quit aspiring to the shit they advertise to you in product placements within Judy Murray stories that aren’t worth publishing.   It’s all designed to keep you enslaved to the system.   If Marie had known then what the ruling classes of France know now then she would have opened a few tourists shops at the Palace of Versailles and offered expensive tat to the peasants to give them something to aspire to affording — which is exactly what the French government are doing at the Palace of Versailles right now.

Instead of tearing down the gates of Versailles, storming the palace, stuffing your face in the kitchens and nicking whatever valuables you could fit in your pockets; you can now aspire to buy a ticket — starting at 20 euros — to walk through open gates, wander around anywhere you’ve got a ticket for (look but don’t touch), pay a load more euro to eat brioche and drink coffee in the cafe and then spend even more euros buying a shit load of tourist tat on your way out.   Which doesn’t leave much change from 200 euros for a peasant family.   But at least you won’t have to put up with Judy Murray as they don’t take Scottish play money.

Anyway, fuck aspiring to pay for it, revolution was much more fun and much more cheaper.   Storm the doors of the boutique doughnut shops and help yourselves — the police won’t stop you as they’re too busy with all the climate change demonstrations.

#5t4n5 #scottish #doughnuts #privilege #socialaspiration #thoughts

£4.50 Dougnuts

No, i just can’t let this one go.

After my previous post on ‘Sottish Privilege’ in which i have a little rant about Judy ‘my-son-can-bat-a-ball-better-than-your-son-can’ Murray and her obscene financial excesses, i decided to dig a little deeper into what makes a doughnut cost £4.50.

So apparently, what makes these doughnuts so fucking special is that they’re made in Reading.

They make them in Reading, fresh every day, and then ship them into London through all that poluted traffic, adding to the already overloaded congestion and pollution that London suffers from while delivering these daily to their 10 London shops, so you can have a super fresh doughnut experience.

I presume that they don’t do this because there’s anything special about Reading — trust me, i’ve watched ‘Beautiful People’ — but because its cheaper to make them there and then ship them into their 10 London shops than it is to make them truly fresh in their shops in London.

Surely, at £4.50, you’d expect someone to stand in front of you and make it especially for you from 100% organic certified ingredients that have been lovingly fertilised with unicorn shit and pixie wee and watered with rainbow tears, but no, you just get a doughnut made in Reading sometime last night from ingredients that i can’t find published anywhere on their website.

One would think that if they were truly proud of their obscenely expensive boutique doughnuts they’d publish a full ingredient list on their website, but no, they don’t even state what kind of oil they use other than its some kind of vegetable.

But, not to worry, if you want to save some money you can buy a box of 6 for £24.   Yeah, it’s actually really real, me and Judy ain’t making this shit up.   They’ve got 10 shops in London, so one can only presume that there’s plenty of people, fucked in the head enough, to be buying them.   Although, when you think about it, all that pollution from delivery vans delivering to 10 different shops every day in London does have most people fucked in the head enough to be paying £4.50 for one single doughnut.

So, anyway, i thought i’d look at Tesco and see what they can do for £4.50 in the way of nice cakey things…   So, for £4.50, at Tesco, i can get 990g of mini gingerbread men, that’s basically a whole kilogram (let’s not quibble over 10g).   Yeah, really, a whole fucking army of your very own mini gingerbread men for £4.50.   So Judy and her friend, i’m presuming she was buying two doughnuts to share one with a friend, but maybe she’s just a greedy person and was hoping to devour them both herself.   After all, who the fuck am i to be judging the feeding habits of a nation who eat deep fried, battered pizzas with chips as a snack…

So, if, and it is a big if, we presume one of her £4.50 doughnuts was for a friend, then Judy and her imaginary friend could have, instead, gone to Tesco and got a whole army of mini gingerbread men each and played Warhammer with them and when you killed your opponents you’d get to eat them too — now that’d be so much more fun than 2 fancy, made in Reading, doughnuts.

Tesco in store bakery also sells doughnuts fresh baked every day, ‘in store’ — not shipped half way across England — @ 79p for 5.   Yes, a whole pack of 5 fresh baked doughnuts for 79p.   So you can have 28 1/2 doughnuts for £4.50.   So Judy, and her maybe imaginary friend, could have had 57 doughnuts between them and had such a mental sugar rush that a big fight (that Conor McGregor would have been proud of) in the middle of the street would have ensued over who got the last one — now that would have been headline news worthy of any tabloid and even possibly made the BBC front page.

Moving on: for other sources of cheap doughnuts, simply pop along to your local food bank and wait until someone donates a packet of doughnuts and you’ll get them for nothing.   And if you’re really lucky, they’ll be from some rich, Scotch cunt who paid £4.50 each for two and couldn’t manage the second one after their Pizza Crunch breakfast so decided to give it away to the peasants.

There should be a [sic] somewhere in the previous sentence, but i didn’t put it in because i felt it destroyed the flow of the piece, so i’ll leave it to you to think about where it should go.   Answers on a postcard.   And for the fuckwits who can’t make out what i mean by [sic], this whole thing is wasted on you anyway because you obviously suffer from Dunning-Kruger effect, and right about now you’ll be getting all fucking righteous about everything and attempting to engage me in a tedious exchange of emails in the vain hope of educating me out of my ignorance — and stupidity — while all the while not realising it is you, yourself, who is the utter fuckwit here who is so fuckwitted that any attempt at educating you is a total fucking waste of resources and time: that’s what eating pizza crunch suppers does to your brain.

And people call Margaret Thatcher evil — at least she didn’t allow boutique doughnuts on her watch while the oi palloi went hungry.

Fuck it, it’s 7:04 and Tesco has been open for over an hour.   You see the sacrifices i make so that you can have cutting edge journalism with your breakfast?   So, anyway, it’s well past time for their in store bakery to have my 28 1/2 doughnuts and army of mini gingerbread men ready for a dining room table top battle — at least that’s my day sorted and £9 well spent.

And no, i’m most certainly not finished with this topic.   Click here for the next episode.

#5t4n5 #scottish #doughnuts #privilege #thoughts