Warming Up

I hope and assume all newspapers will be refraining from publishing on Monday as a mark of respect.  It just feels inappropriate to me that anyone should be reading anything on that special day. Especially stuff written by cunts. 

And the papers have been such champions of making sure that everything is appropriate and respectful that I am sure they wouldn’t dare be hypocrites about it, just because they would lose money themselves.

Our smoke alarms have remained quiet (apart from when I’m cooking bacon or have burnt toast) for other four years since this unexplained incident where the one outside our room briefly sounded for no apparent reason (it wasn’t the battery - not only are the alarms wired into the mains, but that also makes a different sound). Today the errant smoke alarm decided to fuck with us again. At about 7am, as we were getting out of bed a little bit late, it sounded for a few seconds. I was all ready to look for fire and get the family out of the house, but then it stopped. This time though it didn’t leave it there. It sounded off a few times over the next thirty minutes, even though there was no fire and then stopped abruptly. The kids were scared and Phoebe asked if we should get out of the house, but it seemed clear it was a malfunction of some kind. On one of the occasions the smoke alarm in the kitchen joined in in sympathy and I started to consider evacuation, but again they stopped quickly. 

It was a bit unsettling, but I was glad it was happening now rather than in the middle of the night, but feared that if it was (as seemed likely) a malfunction then it might go off intermittently for however long it took us to find someone to fix it. Our nights are disturbed enough by kids or my ancient bladder and so I didn’t fancy that. 

I tried to open the smoke alarm to maybe change the back up battery (even though I know the battery noise and this was not it) but I couldn’t work out how to do it and the ladder I was using was too short to get a proper look at the casing. I thought it might be dust and so hoovered around the gaps in the side. The alarm did not go off again. Maybe I’d fixed it or maybe the sprite that is causing this to happen was biding its time to make it happen when we were least expecting it. This house will never let us just relax.

We’ve been on a bit of a Steve Martin/Martin Short binge after getting into Only Murders in the Building and watched the Three Amigos again tonight. It’s not too long since we last saw it and it holds up and is a very enjoyable if silly film, which suddenly goes a bit surreal in the middle, before returning to relatively normal levels of unreality for the end. It’s strange to see Martin Short so young (though Steve Martin looked fifty when he was thirty so that’s less of a shift) and I don’t know if it’s due to my own perceptions of the performers but it’s easy to forget Chevy Chase is even there. He doesn’t feel very present even when he is. It was made at a strange time as John Landis was on trial for the Twilight Zone helicopter accident and the film had had lots of cast changes and apparently there was a couple of plots (one involving Fran Drescher) that were partly or entirely cut from the film. It’s probably a good thing as the opening stuff at the studio still takes up a bit too much of the action, but then again I don’t know if the film really needs the song around the camp fire (as weirdly enjoyable and comforting as it is) or the Singing Bush bit, which is just an unnecessary loop of the Amigos trying to get to El Guapo’s hide out (which surely everyone would know about and which they find by other means anyway). 

Short and Martin click though (or do I just think that with hindsight) and there’s not really anything in there that feels uncomfortable in the modern era. In fact, at the end, when Steve Martin says he will return for and Carmen asks “Why?” The film comes very close to the sort of modern day joke where the disparity of age between the male and female love interests is roundly mocked. It would be better if she wasn’t actually really interested in him at all. Though I did enjoy Chase and Martin’s clear jealousy when Short gets kissed by a more ostentatiously sexy mystery woman at the end. Even though they both found love too, they are annoyed to have been outshone.

Sadly, in my usual trawl of wikipedia to find out who is dead and who is alive I discovered that  Patrice Martinez who plays Carmen died four years ago and she was only in her late 50s (and so much have been very young at the time of filming). This is why you shouldn’t trawl wikipedia to see who is dead or alive. And then get sucked in to reading about the death of Vic Morrow and the child actors on the set of the Twilight Zone. The Three Amigos should make you happy. It’s delightfully silly, even if some of if feels a bit thrown together at the last minute.

A cracking start to the new series of RHLSTP with the interview from just 2 days ago with the wonderful, faux grumpy and slightly real grumpy Reece Shearsmith - so many great stories plus some actual magic. Listen here.