Casting Calls and Creamed Cabbage

Remember those times when you went out and did things and experienced stuff and made memories and such? I think scholars call it having a life. Well, it turns out I have one of them too, and seeing as the scheduled review of The World's End has been pushed back to next week so as not to coincide with The Girl Who Loves Horror's own review of the same movie, this gives me the perfect opportunity to strap you down and force you to listen to my inane crap until you're nothing more than a ball of blubbering mush.

Mr. Kubrick never did give me those home movies back...

It was my brother, Daniel's, 21st birthday this weekend so we all went through to Glasgow for a bit of a celebration. He got a camera, I was jealous. My mum, being the epic bargain hunter/hoarder/crazy person that she is, managed to pay for the hotel and restaurant entirely with Tesco clubcard points.

Meanwhile, my HMV reward points collect nothing but dust and regret.

The restaurant was bootyful and yes, you are about the sit through me telling you about my meal. Deal with it's delicious tedium. Chicken satay to start, then duck with creamed cabbage, dauphinoise potatoes and cherry sauce, and finally chocolate tart for pud. All of the oms and approximately fourteen noms. If you're interested in where this place is in Glasgow, it's called La Bonne Auberge and you'll find it on West Nile Street.

Across the road from The Acceptable Courgette.

Sunday was a little less tasty and a little more exhausting. Those of you keeping your ear to the grape vine (beware of caterpillars) will have heard about the open casting call for the new Star Wars movie that was on in Glasgow this past weekend, and seeing as we were through there anyway, Fiona and I thought we might as well give it a bash. Sadly that meant getting up at 6am to beat the queue. 

"Fiona, meet 6am on a Sunday. 6am, meet the human cornish pasty."

The whole thing was, obviously, a waste of time in the end, but it's always nice to be able to tell people that I auditioned for Star Wars. Give it ten years and I can ham it up to "I was in a battle to the death with the last three auditionees for the new Star Wars movie but I decided at the last minute, with a Bat'leth pressed against my fallen foe's throat and a Krull glaive lodged between my 5th and 6th thoracic vertebrae, that I would be the better human; I would fight against the Hollywood machine. I would live, goddamnit!"

"And that was when daddy snapped Batman's spine atop Amon Súl while thrashing out a sick bass solo. The End."

Then came lots of very tired shopping and some chai at a lovely tea lounge called Cup, where one of the waiters congratulated me on my (read: Fiona's) Adventure Time hat. Oh, how good it is to find kindred spirits.

The hard bit it getting them in the bottle...

And that was my weekend. Normal services shall resume as of next week, so until then, why don't you tell me what you got up to this week? Oh yeah, that's why, I don't want to know. Stay away from the comments, you filthy little Hobbitses.

"Move along..."

Me, Myself, and My Amazingly Interesting Life

Oi, you. Sit down. No, not there, that's my seat. Over there. Yes, there.

Scooch over.

Aside from a couple of posts about my new flat (a riveting series of posts that shall be concluded very soon) I've talked very little about the general goings on of my life, something we should all be endlessly grateful for because the last thing the internet needs is another person whining about their supermarket receipts and telling us how cute their pet vulture is.

She's great for cleaning up the children's organs I keep leaving on the lawn.

However it was inevitable that a day would come when I could no longer withstand the inherent human urge to force my crippling tedium on other people and/or I hadn't got round to watching any new films worthy of review yet, so you'd better get comfortable and read the words I'm going to speak at you good like.

First off, it was my turn to experience that special day of a person's life every year where you have the literal birth-right to be told you're wonderful and get showered with praise and adoration for not winning a Darwin award. In other words, it was my birthday on Saturday (rapturous applause).

"Woo. Go Ben."

I'm now a big 'ole 19, which means I've already wasted a third of Mozambique's average life expectancy watching TV and complaining about things, including TV. It's been a good run so far. To celebrate, Fiona (yes, that one again. I'll find a new woman soon to freshen things up a bit) and I went to see Henri-Georges Clouzot's fantastic Les Diaboliques at the local independent cinema type place. In true noir style, we dressed up and looked like utter fannys walking down the street at 11am on a Sunday in our finery.

Me caught off guard in a rare candid shot.

Also, I got a mango, so yay.

I would have taken a picture of the actual mango given to me, but it didn't last the night.

Secondly, before I levelled up (still no sign of learning Hyper Beam) Halloween happened. That's the spooky one with all the bats. I opted to go as the infamous Jekyll and Hyde (not that Jekyll and Hyde); the costume actually took a surprising amount of effort to get looking good. I've seen how some people do costume posts, with all the naming exactly what brand you used and such, so I've tried to do the same here. The costume itself looked a bit like this:

Making myself paper thin and headless was the tough bit.

So from top to bottom that's a Next tailored waistcoat (like this, but not), New Look braces (kindly borrowed from Fiona), some shirt from a charity shop, a 99p cravat from eBay, a pair of lovely, and now hopelessly ruined, brown trousers also from a charity shop and one each of some crappy brown Primark trainers and my darling brown leather Collezione wing-tip brogues.

To do the whole "tattered" thing going on on the right there, I used the tried-and-tested recipe of teabags (Tetley), a stanley knife (Tesco) and a lighter (Clipper). Boil up a nice strong pot of tea, pour one cup, drink it, pour the rest into a large bowl or tub and dip half of the shirt, cravat and trousers into it. Leave to dry then hang up each piece of clothing individually (or ask someone you moderately dislike to hold them up) and hack at the appropriate side with a stanley knife in a similar fashion to Norman Bates' mother when the TV signal isn't great.

Anything is better than another fucking episode of Come Dine With Me.

Once suitably slashed, take the clothes outside and set fire to them with a lighter in what we experts call a "controlled burn". This consists of lighting various portions of the clothing, allowing them to burn for a short time and extinguishing them before the fire spreads too rapidly. This is repeated until an authentic burned look has been achieved or you leave it for a little too long a couple of times and panic.

Once all of that's done you've got yourself a pretty shnazzy costume. Now for the makeup. I bought some pretty goddamn sexy stuff called Collodium which is used to make authentic looking scars and a set of blackout contact lenses to take care of the more striking aspects of my appearance. Those paired with some conservative make-up application (I don't know, nor do I care about the brands of these things), a generous helping of Brylcreem and a half-shaved chin produced a rather convincing face that had the limitless potential to be mistaken for a poorly done Two-Face costume all night.

"I'd like to play a game..."
"THAT'S NOT EVEN FUCKING TWO-FACE YOU HEATHEN."

The finished costume looks like this:

Just shooting the shit with Spidey.

And that was Halloween and my birthday. You now have an extremely intimate insight into my personal life, do with that information as you wish. If you would like to use it for blackmail, my people will be in touch with your people.