Becoming Human

Did you enjoy Being Human, the story of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost who live together?

If you did, can I strongly, strongly recommend this -- Becoming Human:

Like a mad cross between Being Human and Misfits, this new web-only series is available in bite sized chunks by clicking here.

On this showing it is absolutely Tip-Top Quality Teen Crud. Highly, highly recommended.

Topsy turvydom

Everywhere I looked, there were images of men lying around in their swimming trunks.

Or, sometimes, standing:

Truth be told, it felt to me like I had stumbled across some important cultural trend:

Gorgeous boys, posing delicately for our viewing pleasure. Then, luckily, I found a shot with boys lounging around without their pants, and I knew everything was normal again with the world:

Thank goodness for that, eh?

PS: for the purposes of this blog, "pants" has the English English meaning of "underpants", not the wilfully perverse North American "English" meaning of "trousers".

Sale now on

I can't say this question has been keeping me awake at nights but, being a naive sort of chap, I have idly wondered why sex shops don't actually demonstrate some of the more obscure-looking products they sell. And then I stumbled across this cache of magnificent photographs:

No, fine men though they surely are, they're not really my cup of tea at all. But it was the next image that grabbed my attention:

First the willing (I hope) volunteer is bound to some sort of stick. And then he's hoist into the air:

See? Now we know what the product is for (sort of) and how to use it. And the hoisted chap is smiling gaily, unlike our next willing (?) victim:

I'm not surprised there's a look of apprehension on his face, because next thing we know he's completely bound and being lifted onto some sort of table...

... where hideous-looking electrode-y things are applied in a frankly rather menacing way to bits of skin while someone is playing with his winkie and he lays there with a look of open terror in his eyes:

That's just got to smart.

Actually, I'm now certain that sex shops should not demonstrate their wares.

Although that bamboo chap did look rather contented, laying there among the handcuffs, whips and chains.

What a strange world we've created.

John Barry RIP

One of the strongest movie themes ev-uh by the film and tv composer John Barry:



And which of us can't now see Sean Connery walking out of the water in his pants?

Flashes of inspiration

An unrelated trio of images which might be filed in the category of "quick flashes":

What would I do without World Naked Bike Ride? It is now the cultural epicentre of my very existence.

Perhaps that's because not enough men are prepared to lounge around in my sitting room, exposing their genitalia to my greedy eyes.

Which seems strange, when you think about how willingly some men do exactly that in public spaces. (And that first chap in this sequence is one of the loveliest flashers I've seen for an eternity.)

Keep on running

The Clayton Type 1 must have some claim to being the least successful locomotive design ever commissioned by British Railways.

Introduced in 1962, these machines were intended to be the standard design of engine for freight trip working -- local freight, generally moved fairly slowly across the network at the beginning and end of its journey.

That type of work disappeared almost before these engines were brought into use, making them pretty pointless.

But they suffered terrible teething troubles, too. They were hopelessly unreliable, the complexity of managing the controls for two engines in one diesel-electric package proving beyond the primitive rail maintenance facilities of the time, and that was before fuel feeding problems were dealt with.

BR ordered more than a hundred before giving up on them as a bad job, and most of them were disposed of after only a handful of years in service. It was a terrific waste of cash.

Because of their appalling records, almost none of them were sold as working engines to private industry: but this one was. Ribble Cement succeeded where BR had so spectacularly failed, and their Class 17, after a couple of trivial modifications, gave robust service for several decades as an industrial engine on their private works railway.

Which is handy for us, because it means it survived until the "preservation era", and it now lives on a preserved (museum) railway in Buckinghamshire.

I also happen to think it's one of the most successful pieces of industrial styling that BR commissioned.

How low can you go?

I think it's one of the great conundrums of our time: just how much lower will the waistband of men's trousers plunge?

I confess, at first I thought this fashion (like most "fashions") was utterly ridiculous, but I am now very fond indeed of the sagging waistline and the exposed pants or flesh that results. I really don't want this trend to end.

Chocky

I have a soft spot for John Wyndham's "cosy catastrophe" novels of the 1950s and 60s and, as a 12 year old boy, Chocky (1968) was one of my favourites*.

The story of a 12 year old boy who is apparently "possessed" by an apparently benign alien intelligence, it was unusual science fiction because it was written from such a small-scale, human perspective (a whimper rather than a big bang).

Wyndham's work is almost insanely middle-class, reflecting the mores of his era (everyone seems to call each other "darling" in a way that sounds absurdly affected to modern ears), so much of the dialogue can, today, seem stilted.

In 1984 a children's tv series was made from Chocky, and I watched it, for the first time, over the weekend.

Given the low budget, low production values and dismal special effects of the time (and the inherent woodenness of child actors), it was, strangely, an affecting piece of work.

Dated tv of a dated novel sounds like no fun, but it stimulated all those fond memories for me. Very nice.

*Not my first favourite, though...

... that would be The Chrysalids (1955), featured at some point or other years ago on one of the blogs.

And I had a choice of two book covers to illustrate that thought but couldn't choose between them. So you get them both.

The original "classic" typography to the designs of Tschichold is utterly wonderful, but I also like the relative subtlety of the modern illustration: you know something's wrong but have to look twice, and it so neatly fits the book.

Decisions, decisions.

Neat and tidy

Well, that's nice: a pair of photos of a pair of civic-minded chaps on litter patrol:

You see, gay nudist beaches need to be cleaned-up, too, though not in the ways that our dreary-minded officials tend to think of first.

And it's always nice to see people helping out themselves. I'd help them out, too, given the opportunity. Really, I would.

Pereira's prick

Anyone who knows anything about modern architecture will immediately recognise the setting of this photoshoot as San Francisco:

The distinctive pyramid-shaped building is the Transamerica tower, a rather aggressive architectural intervention in the skyline which acquired the nick-name, after its architect's ego, of "Pereira's Prick".

Which is why it is all the more surprising that the only hard-on our photographer shoots of his hunky model is one where his erection is horizontal, rather than vertical and echoing Pereira's massive exuberance.

I'm finding it difficult to get too worked up about it. Our model, while overly endowed for my delicate jaw muscles, is clearly a hunky boy of considerable wit and charm, and is therefore more than able to hold our attention against the architectural jewels of the city-region.

His willingness to get his winkie out -- in what is a photogenic but I imagine rather unpleasantly sharp-edged environment -- is especially admirable.

And maybe he realised there was, in fact, nothing to be gained by trying to compete with Pereira, a battle even his monstrous winkie was doomed to lose.

Tragedy

Sad news from Germany, of a crash involving a freight train and the HarzElbeExpress:

This rather grandly named train is, in fact, a small diesel multiple unit service usually operated by 2- or 3-car Siemens Desiros (these are unrelated to the Desiro trains Siemens manufactures for use in England; I think they just liked the name):

Truth be told, the HarzElbeExpress is just a glorified tram (if you like, it's a modern version of the nineteenth century US interurban system), as one glance at the decaying state of the track bed will tell you:

The amounts of personal space and levels of comfort in these super-trams are vastly in excess of anything you will find on even the most prestigious of the latest generation of Britain's long-haul expresses. How damning is that?

It appears that around ten people have lost their lives which, obviously, is immensely sad. Although about the same number of people will be killed in Britain every single day in road accidents, a fact we treat as being of utter banality.

Manning up

I wish to apologise for so royally fucking up in my recent post about Stuart Manning (I misidentified him as Robin Causse).

By way of compensation here's a post consisting entirely of Stuart shots.

Which, let's face it, is no great sacrifice on our part.

Stuart is unquestionably a sex god. Oh, yes:

He's a soap star of some flavour (no idea what: I never watch them), but a couple of screen grabs appear to show him in a delightful homoerotic fun:

Maybe I'm missing out by not watching soaps...?

Being a soap star, Stuart is obviously in some weird symbiotic relationship with various sleb mags and photographers:

But I don't begrudge him that at all, when images such as this are the result.

Stuart Manning: he appears to be a very nice man indeed.

I thank you.

Reminiscipackage 2

A second tranche of the delightful set of photos from late 1970s/early 1980s British Rail, mostly in and around East Anglia. Starting with a brutish Brush Type 4 -- a Class 47 -- on an InterCity express at Ely:

British Rail (or, as it then was, British Railways) introduced a standard design of passenger carriage in the late 1940s. By the 1960s technology had long overtaken it and BR developed a second standard design, what became the Mark 2:

The Mk2 is said to be the coach that launched InterCity -- it was the bedrock of the new standards of comfort on which the premium express service was launched. But BR had developed dozens and dozens of Mk1 catering vehicles and these had a long service life ahead of them, so these lumpy-sided vehicles were marshalled into the long rakes of smoothly curved Mk2s:

Times were, of course, changing, and a full meal service was declining in popularity. BR responded by developing a variety of buffet and "mini-buffet" concepts in the Mk1s:

Their toasted bacon sandwiches were far in advance of modern "premium" dining on contemporary British trains.

Over to the Southern Region now, for some multiple unit fun:

When the new Rail Blue livery was introduced in the mid-1960s, only express carriages were intended to be two-tone blue and pearl grey: everything else (locomotives, multiple units, suburban carriages) was to be all-over blue.

After a while this was thought to be too oppressive, and all-over blue vehicles (other than locomotives or non-passenger stock like parcels vans) were, for the most part, subsequently repainted into two-tone livery.

Not everything went two-tone: with one exception in Scotland, the Class 105 diesel multiple units only ever appeared in all-over blue (apart from the green in which they were first released, of course).

It was into this rather drab world that BR launched a new generation of rolling stock, starting with the production version of their new electric multiple unit for dense suburban services:

The 313 proved to be an exceptionally reliable design (they're still in intensive use today).

A little spartan for my tastes, their vandal-proofing resulting in a rather hard-edged passenger experience, but they are extremely efficient bulk people-movers.

By far the biggest break-through came with the roll-out of this, British Rail's High Speed Train which was branded the InterCity 125:

Like the Mk2s before it, this represented a step-change in the premium express service offered by BR. A 25% speed increase, and an extraordinarily smooth ride in air-conditioned comfort.

BR experienced dramatic growth in passenger numbers on HST routes where, at last, it had a weapon to take on the new motorways.

So successful were they as a marketing tool that BR tried to introduce them onto almost every non-electrified InterCity route (including some where their high top speed could not be used, thus negating some of the advantages). "The network is spreading" was a potent slogan for this design icon.

And, to finish, a single shot of another piece of standard British design -- the Leyland National:

No matter where you were in the UK, the chances were that before long you'd see one of these (usually in leaf green or cherry red livery). For me they are hugely evocative.