Let It B

To Be Honest, "B" Is Being Entirely Too Complimentary
"E" would be more relevant.  
     "What is the drunken old rascal babbling about now?" I hear you querulously quibble.
     Pausing only to point out that this is tea, I shall explicate.
     I have recently rediscovered an old hard drive that contains a great many cheesy Fifties sci-fi films, which I simply have to watch as - er - as - for research.  Yeah.  For research.  Some are better than others, or perhaps, given the milieu, "less bad".  "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" is probably the best of the bunch so far, and I am now watching one of the worst: "From Hell It Came".  Art?

Not strictly true.

     I am only 10 minutes in, and am already suffering.  The print quality is pretty dire, which does not help, and the acting is <ahem> very wooden.  Pretty obviously the production values are low, as in bargain-basement sub-cellar sump low.  Art?

     The villain of the piece is a walking tree, which is animated by nuclear fallout from a nuclear test shot; probably the only time ever that nuclear fallout helped something get better ...  perhaps they ought to have called it "On The Beech".*
     I think Art had better show what this Titanic Terror Tree looks like.  

Did I say "E"?  Make that "Z".

     Apparently this walking willow* is possessed by the spirit of a wrongly-executed prince, who was stabbed in the heart, killed and his body buried.  Quite how stabbing someone in the left lung equates to puncturing the heart is beyond your humble scribe. 
     As you can see, the film poster lied.  The film is in black and white,  the monster looks nothing like the one depicted, and it comes out of a grave, not Hell.  This last might be splitting hairs, but I do like my film titles to be accurate, if possible.  It will be interesting to see what feeble excuse the scriptwriters come up with to explain why this ambulatory ash* cannot simply be burned.  "It's made out of concrete"  "It has a screen of anti-matter" "Petrol does not exist".
     As I said, calling this a "B" movie is elevating it well above it's deserved niche.  Note that it only gets 3.5 on IMDB, and tug your forelocks in acknowledgement that thanks to my sacrifice, you don't have to watch it.
     What's that?  You expected this post to be about a track by this band I strongly suspect you're making up, "The Beet Elles"?  A quick Google search doesn't bring anything up for them.  "Let It Be" is the track in question?  Rubbish!  I think you should let it go.
     Now that's the Intro over, let's roll the motley up in a carpet and beat it with sticks!**

Killer plants: this is how it's done!

An Adventure
Only a minor one, perhaps, yet it still occurred.  On Tuesday evening the snows fell over Bablyon-lite*** and - very unusually - the gritters were not out.  This is a rare oversight by the council, as normally they are hot stuff (forgive the irony) at predicting icy conditions and sending the gritters out.  Art?

Art, you bafoon!

     <sounds of an electric cattle-prod being used in the background>
     Really, I don't know why we continue to use him on the BOOJUM! staff.  Oh, no, wait a minute, yes I do - he works for a plate of coal a day.  Okay, shall we try again, Art?

The wonderfully named " Freddie Salted" in action

     Lack of gritters meant that the roads were allowed to get snowed-up, and there's too little traffic at night to thin it out or wear it down.  So, on Wednesday morning this is the scene as seen from my bus stop.  Art?

The evidence.  Those are my footprints.

     As a result of this, I had to keep moving at the bus stop or risk frost-bitten feet.  The rest of me was toasty-warm, mind, because of my newly acquired feather coat.  Of course the bus was late, by 15 minutes.  The service that runs at the same time over the same route but which runs from Shaw, next town over, hadn't turned up at all, so there were football crowds of folk getting on at every stop into Manchester.
     I got into the Dark Tower 20 minutes late, and showed Ania the above photo as evidence of what had delayed me.  Not on a whim, she's the Team Leader.  Being Polish, she wasn't that impressed by the horrifying sight of as much as 2 inches of snow.

She has a point: a mild winter's day in Poland

     To top that, a few minutes later she came over and confirmed that, yes, this was January 17th.
     "Actually, Rob,^" she informed me.  "Today is your day off."
     What the heck.  Sometimes, life's a beech.*


*  Expect a lot of this.
**  Only to get the dust out, honest.
***  Oh alright - Oldham.
^  My  Sunday-best name, especially when I am working around humans my fellow humans.