A little housekeeping

Fans of me would probably already be aware of this but I believe it is possible that there may well be people who are fans of me and also completely bewildered, so here goes: Be sure to add sadclownillustration.blogspot.co.uk to your bookmarks and readers. It's packed to the gunnels with piping hot me on a daily basis.

Here you will find news about NEW AMAZING PRODUCTS at the Sad Clown Etsy store which I naturally hope you will all purchase in your droves, but as of this week you will also find a TOPICAL DAILY DOODLE from Monday to Friday. These are corruscatingly up-to-the-minute satirical sideswipes and NOT TO BE MISSED! Just observe Tuesday's blistering assault for evidence:

The continuing adventures of Jack the Ripper

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The past as seen from the future

Mrs. Hudson's dildo drawer

As I see it, it would have been very difficult for Doctor J.H. Watson to have a wank. An awful lot of of the speculation about the sexual mechanics of the living arrangements of Doctor Watson and his companion Sherlock Holmes has been dedicated to expanding the theory that they must have been bummers. I've never really understood why this should be. For a start, neither Holmes or Watson are homosexual gentlemen. For one thing, Doctor Watson spent a considerable portion of the early stories married to a woman whose name was Mrs. Watson, and I suspect that Holmes is asexual, perhaps as a function of a his undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome.

It's a sad reflection on how far society still has to go, to be honest. This line of reasoning, endorsed by generations of Daily Mail columnists, goes: The genitalia of any two men living together will as surely converge as their female counterparts' menstrual cycles, all gay men are opportunistic bottom rapists and Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson are two men who live together. It's a piece of glaringly inconsequential, retrograde, purience and one that has blinded generations of readers from giving enough thought to the real issue at stake. Which is, that it would have been very difficult for Doctor J.H. Watson to have a wank.

Sherlock Holmes: self abuse ninja

I'm unsure as to whether or not Sherlock Holmes would wank. I believe that there's every chance that he would not. As a creature of pure reason and logic, he may understand why people sometimes feel the need to wrangle out some knuckle children, but I'm not sure that he would necessarily be in touch with the necessary types of basic biological urge as the average man in the street. Or of the average man wanking in the street.

If Holmes was not a masturbator, it's a great loss to the culture. Because I believe he would have been truly outstanding, a self-abuse ninja. No locking the bathroom door for a solid, sweating, grunting, farting hour for Holmes; no wiping his wonger on the curtains. If Holmes knocked one out, it's fair to assume it would be done with such surreptitiousness and stealth that he could probably do it in plain view and no-one be any the wiser.

No so with Doctor Watson. Even people like us, the great unwashed, the people without any exceptional gifts in the field of deductive reasoning, even we are occasionally aware that someone in our vicinity is shaking hands with the unemployed. So quite what it must have been like for Doctor Watson, one can only surmise. Sherlock Holmes once deduced that Watson had decided to not invest in South African futures from a small smear of billiard chalk on his friend and colleague's hand alone, so there's very little doubt that he would be quite aware when Watson had been performing the old Low Five. Not for him the conventional signs: the locked door, the bead of sweat on the brow, muffled cries of "oh mercy" or gobbets of jilter on the knee. Holmes would know exactly when, where and why you had last had your special sock out.

It's things like that which would completely undermine your sense of self.

John H. Watson M.D. - knackers like
two tins of Fussell's Milk

Of course, if Sherlock Holmes did occasionally feel the need to clear the custard, Doctor Watson would, in theory at least, be ideally placed to be able to call him on it. As a medical doctor, he would know better than most the physiological signs to watch out for as soon as he suspected that the violin playing behind closed doors had stopped for a suspiciously long time. However, I think that Watson's mind would be so exercised with the sure knowledge that his friend knew exactly when he'd last evacuated (as well as trying to think up a foolproof way of getting away with it the next time) that there'd not be sufficient time, energy or inclination remaining to try and call the world's greatest detective on a visit to Mistress Palm and her five lovely daughters.

It's hard to imagine that the kind of hierarchy that this would create within their domestic lives could ever serve their friendship well, so I can only assume that - given the well-documented levels of security and satisfaction that both parties enjoyed - Holmes' discretion knew no bounds. Which is probably for the best, for only then might Watson - completely at ease, off his guard and casually sneaking off with the fruit bowl - be ripe to the killer, "lemon entry, my dear Watson?" zinger.

Obviously, they might just have been bummers.

Occam's Razor

Top 100 disaster movies: Titanic

Titanic (1997)

It's difficult to believe that Titanic is nearly 16 years old and therefore legally able to have sexual intercourse in the United Kingdom. Come the big day, I suspect that Titanic will most likely choose itself as its partner. It had that way about it, parping its own funnel. But then, films did that more back then. I think it would be hard to describe to someone too young to have been there exactly the kind of feverish hype that surrounded Titanic's release. Back then, we all thought it was real and screamed when things came towards the screen, of course. But I remember that I went to see it some time in the spring of 1998 in Brighton and the cinema was standing room only, something I have never experienced before or since. By the end of the seventeen hour long film, people who had sat right down at the front were walking out of the screening in the shape of swastikas, having done irreparable damage to their spines.

At the time I was obviously rather taken up with the hype of the whole film because I thought it was wonderful. I realise now of course that I had been played by the Hollywood system to a large degree. However, it would be wrong  - an understandable backlash against corporate propagandising of my malleable 18-year old brain - to claim that Titanic is not a film without quality. It's perhaps not our generation's Citizen Kane but then again, no ocean liners sink in Citizen Kane so its probably best to declare a score-draw on that front.

It's a hard film to watch again. This is not so much due to the poignancy of the story or the strength of the memories of my fallow youth, and more to do with the fact that it's really long. I would estimate that it must be at least six hours, although having just checked on Wikipedia I have discovered that the actual running time is 3 hours 14 minutes. And Leonardo Di Caprio is only dead for about fifteen of them.

Harsh again. My distaste for Leonardo Di Caprio is again forged by those times, in the heady days of the end of the last century, when he was being sold as our generation's Valentino. Di Caprio has gone on to be a very impressive, likable and versatile film actor, a lot of whose work I have enjoyed. And yet, upon seeing his name in the credits I still get the twitch. Titanic's psychological impact on me runs deep. As DEEP AS THE ATLANTIC OCEAN? Probably not.

Kate Winslet in Titanic: standing next to a peculiarly inaccurate mirror

My problem with Titanic is that, like many movies of the disaster genre, it is basically a tired old romantic potboiler, given a gravitas it perhaps hasn't earned by the inevitability of the lovers' demise. As if someone had made a porno based on John and Jackie Kennedy's last trip to Texas (which, incidentally, would probably be a better film). Titanic, of course, also dips deep into the old upstairs-downstairs class-based shenanigans so beloved by insane British people.

Treasure hunters (oceanographic explorers? well-equipped aquatic thieves?) find a safe in the ruins of the RMS Titanic. When it is opened, they find a jewel as big as your fist and a nudey charcoal sketch of a lady. It turns out that its subject is still alive, aged 208 and living in the United States. She is flown out to the explorer's ship where she tells the story of her trip on the doomed liner. It's a story of high-society, arranged marriages and ludicrous amounts of privilege. But nevertheless, they can all be shot through by shagging an Irish ragamuffin, on the boat as a third-class passenger having won his ticket in a dockside poker game and in the right place at the right time to prevent Little Miss Snooty from jumping to her death in a fit of wealthy pique.

And there you go. There's the trouble. The story of the fateful maiden voyage of RMS Titanic will be told for as long as there are humans to tell it. It is poignant enough, and tragic enough, without having to go all macro and examine just one or two sets of relationships. As far as the film goes, it tells the nuts and bolts story well: the special effects which were at the time completely groundbreaking in terms of their scope and their cost still hold up well and it remains very much the landmark for any future films of this kind. Quite whether the films that come after it need to so slavishly follow the generic tradition of doomed love is another matter, but of course they will and another part of us will die inside.

I think a better ending would have been that they discovered that Rose's amour from that night had not perished in the Atlantic as she had thought but was later saved by a passing boat. And yes, we've found him and brought him out to the ship. He's 206 years old but he can still get a hardon, it's Jack. A round of applause and a jokey reference to the fact he's off to ride her sideways would have made the wheelbarrow-load of Academy Awards seem so much more richly deserved.

I give Titanic SIX out of ten disaster points.

Top 100 Disaster Movies: By Dawn's Early Light

By Dawn's Early Light (1990)

If I were to make a nuclear war film, I would call it Zugzwang. This is because I am more intellectual than you. In the game of chess (oh yes, I'm going there), there will occasionally be times where one player cannot possibly do anything but harm their position but are nevertheless compelled to make a move. Having to make a move although it will be ultimately disadvantageous to you seems to me to be the defining quality of any nuclear conflict.

During the breakup of the Soviet Union, a rogue group of separatists have gotten hold of a nuclear missile and with some malice, launched it from a NATO base in Turkey towards the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. This sets all the Soviet-era nuclear response protocols - some of them completely automated, mind you - into action, meaning that there is an immediate and unstoppable retaliatory response on targets in the United States. The American President, who for some reason is Martin Landau, thought that the world was well and truly past all of this shit and is forced into taking countermeasures when an atomic bomb explodes in Washington.

During his subsequent flight out of the danger area, another bomb explodes too close to the helicopter, causing it to crash and blinding the President. With the commander-in-chief presumed dead, the American military assume control of the situation, cunningly finding the country's most old-fashioned and hawkish gun-totin', red-hatin' elected representative to assume political control and give full legitimacy to Rip Torn's view that the best thing to do now would be to bomb the entire USSR out of physical existence.

The President, found in a wood and taken to a rescue centre, must now desperately try and resume control of the situation by telephone alone, before everything is lost. Ultimately he manages to win over a hard-bitten military commander, played by James Earl Jones, whose airborn military control centre is flown into Air Force One before any really big buttons can be pressed.

James Earl Jones in By Dawn's Early Light: a definite candidate for any no fly lists.

I thought a lot about my wretched history of dismal defeats on the chessboard as I watched By Dawn's Early Light. It is a chilling reminder of the kind of counter-intuitive moves born out of nothing more than political and military expediency that have to be taken in extremis, as well as a critique of the dangers of intransigence. But mainly, I thought about how James Earl Jones was also on the B52 bomber that sneaks through Soviet defences to drop its payload in the film Doctor Strangelove. What with that, this and Darth Vader, it's a wonder that anyone allows the man to leave the ground at all, so bleak are the consequences of his being at altitude.

By Dawn's Early Light is an arresting watch and one which is still relevant over twenty years later. I give it SEVEN out of ten disaster points.