Day 24: Guilty pleasures - or old TV shows I still love even though they're a little bit terrible (requested by aardvarkinmud)

aardvarkinmud And lastly (cause I'm just brainstorming lol), what are your guilty pleasures? Particularly any tv shows?

I don't really do guilty pleasures, I just do pleasures, but let me tell you about cheesy 70s and 80s TV shows.

Now everyone has to admit that mostly, a lot of the TV shows when those of us who were born in the early 70s were kids were not exactly deep. You think Teen Wolf has continuity problems and doesn't quite make sense - oh boy, that program has nothing on some of the 80s TV shows. That, however, does not stop me really enjoying several of them.

The first thing that is abundantly clear is that they're not usually great for feminism. Some of them had a go, but they mostly weren't very good at it. As long as you accept this before you watch them you shouldn't froth too much in rage.

Manimal

I remember watching this a a child and I loved it then. It's about Dr Johnathan Chase, his friend Ty and Detective Brooke MacKenzie and their adventures. What makes it not a simple cop show is that Chase can turn into various animals which help in their crime solving.

It only has 8 episodes and the pilot is awful (we almost never reached ep 2 when we re-watched), but some of the other episodes are highly entertaining. These days the effects look terrible, but I remember being astounded as a kid and totally engrossed. We have this one on DVD and have enjoyed re-watching it.

Street Hawk

This is another one I loved during the 80s. It has its terribly cheesy moments, but I adored it. When I was young I never realised it only had 13 eps and I wish it had had more. I liked it better than Knight Rider.

It's about Jesse Mach, an ex-motorcycle cop injured in the line of duty which messed up his knee so he couldn't ride any more. The FBI come to him with an offer, they will fix his knee if he will agree to test out the new Street Hawk program; a very advanced and secret motor bike to be used in law enforcement. To prove the program he pretends to be a vigilante.

The only man who knows the truth is Norman Tuttle the man in charge of Street Hawk and the computers that power it. He does his very best to keep Jesse out of trouble, but of course this is 80s TV so he usually fails.

I haven't seen it in a long time, but it still holds a place in my heart. One day I will buy the boxset from Amazon.

The Invisible Man

Now I don't think I was old enough to see this when it first came out - 75 to 76, but I must have seen it in re-runs in the 80s. This one actually isn't as horrible for female characters as the other two.

David MaCallum plays Dr Daniel Westin who, with the help of his wife, Dr Kate Westin, develops an invisibility procedure which they test on bunnies. However, when the program is under threat and  it seems to have worked Daniel tests it on himself. Unfortunately it becomes permanent.

He and Kate agree to become the Klae resource, a team able to solve problems others can't. The most important point being complete secrecy. The pilot is kind of dark with them military being bad guys, but the rest of the show is much more light hearted. Daniel and Kate continue to look for a cure for Daniel, but that's only the background of a superpowered adventure show.

We have this one on Blu-ray and watched it all in about a week.

There are many more shows I could mention, but I don't want to write too much. So do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to TV shows?

AtoZChallenge 2014

So I've signed up to do the AtoZ Challenge again. For those who are unaware of it, the challenge is to post all the way through April, except for Sundays, with a post for each letter of the alphabet. Anyone with a blog can join in, just check out the AtoZ Site.

It was a lot of fun last year and I came into contact with lots of new people. If you are new to blogging or just want to expand your network, this is a great way to do it.

I think I am going to have a theme this year, but I am not sure what. I'm thinking vampires or vampires and other monsters, but I am still considering it. I have all of my draft posts created, they just happen to have nothing in them at the moment :).

Soph and I are also doing Drabble Erotic again this year over on Fantasy Boys where we do short stories or drabbles (stories of exactly 100 words) for each letter of the alphabet.

Day 23: Loving and loathing (requested by the4ts)

the4ts one thing you secretly covet and one thing you wished you'd never set eyes on, let alone acquired.

To be honest I'm not very good at secretly coveting things; I tend to covet them loudly. There is something I've found that I really covet. I already have a Wacom Cintiq22UX (bought when we were still DINKs) but I covet it's new sibling, the Wacom Cintiq 24HB touch.

It's plain beautiful and oh so expensive. This is on the list of those things for when I win the lottery. Rob can have his flash sports car and I want one of these :).

Something I wish I had never set my eyes on let alone acquired is Vampire Killer Barbys (1996) - it is quite possibly the worst vampire film I have ever seen and that includes Mama Dracula! It's terrible. It has no redeeming features. Even the music, which I think was actually the point of the film really, it awful. It's boring. This is a film that could not even be saved by fast forward.

I've mentioned it once before in one of these posts, but I have to underline exactly how bad it is. There are no characters because the acting is so bad. The sound track is awful. I couldn't figure out what was actually going on, even with the subtitles. I think it was just band comes to castle, band gets eaten, but I couldn't actually be sure. I really wish I had never laid eyes on this movie and I don't say that very often.

What do you covet and what do you wish you have never seen?

Day 22: My favourite books (requested by starr_falling)

starr_falling what is your favorite book (or books as I know it's hard to pick just one)?

This is an easy one. By far and away my favourite books are The Belgariad by David Eddings. This probably isn't the first time I've mentioned them or told the story of how I read the series, but here we go again :).

I was a teenager when I read these and I have loved them ever since. I can take these down off the shelf and read them in a weekend when I am feeling nostalgic and they never fail to make be smile.

When I read these I actually started with Enchanter's End Game which is book #5. I bought it in a second hand shop and didn't realise it was book five in a series. That, however, did not stop me enjoying it immensely. Things made a lot more sense once I'd read the others, but it is so well constructed that I could still enjoy it a lot without having read each book in the series.

After that I read Pawn of Prophesy (#1), Magician's Gambit (#3), Castle of Wizardry (#4) and finally Queen of Sorcery (#2). There was no deep reason for skipping #2, it was just I couldn't find it for a long time and I really wanted to read the whole series.

The Belgrariad is a classic tale of peasant boy turns out to have a huge destiny and has to run off and have adventures. In this case our hero is Garion, or Belgarion as he becomes known once it is obvious he is not a normal young man. Along with his Aunt Pol and the old storyteller who sometimes comes to the farm where Garion lives, who turn out to be the great sorcerer Belgarath and his daughter, the sorceress Polgara, Garion has to fight sorcery, narcotics, kings, queen, emperors and even Princess Ce'Nedra who is supposed to be on the same side.

This is a series that is chock full of plot and world building, but also has the most wonderful characters. We journey with Garion from innocence to understanding of the complex universe in which he lives. As he loses his innocence so do we and it is the most magnificent journey. The books also have strong male and female characters with give them a great balance. Nobody in these books is perfect, even Aunt Pol, who seems all but unshakable most of the time, isn't without her weaknesses.

These books are why I love sword and sorcery so much and I will never, ever throw away my copies.

There is a sequel to the Belgariad called the Malloreon which I also enjoy, but it's not as good as the Belgariad.

What are your favourite books?

Amber's new furniture :)

Since we have a new sofa, we thought is was only fair that Amber should have some new furniture as well :). Well, that and if she has something in the front room to play on and scratch she shouldn't attack the new sofa.

Here are some piccies of her exploring the three level cat tree with the hammock when Rob has just put it together in the kitchen. In the background of some of the piccies, to the left you can also see parts of a really tall scratching post that we bought this morning as well so she can have a good stretch. That will be headed upstairs so she will then have something in each room. If anyone is interested they all came from Pets At Home.

At the moment they are both in the old dining room with  her existing scratching post so she can get used to them. We also sprayed them with cat nip so she knows they are all hers :).

Day 20: My Favourite Anime (requested by aardvarkinmud)

aardvarkinmud Favorite anime? Any ones that you'd want to try but haven't yet?

This one is easy, my favourite anime is definitely Weiss Kreuz also known as Knight Hunters in the US.

Florists by day, assassins by night - I kid you not. In the above picture we have Weiss, our heroes (Aya, Omi, Ken and Yoji) and their arch enemies Schwarz (Crawford, Schuldig, Farfarello and Nagi).

Weiss spend their days running a flower shop as cover for their night activities as assassins for the Kritiker organisation. They deal with the bad guys that the law cannot touch in a very permanent way.

Weiss Kreuz is divided into two phases, Kapital, which was the first incarnation and Gluhen which was a revamp where they redrew the characters and ruined it. I'm only really a fan of Kapital, although I do have both on DVD :). In case you are interested I have written quite a few WK fanfics and you can find them all listed here on livejournal or here on Archive or our own.

Aya is by far my favourite character. He's a cold, hard bastard a lot of the time, but that persona just protects his vulnerable core. To most people he appears to only care about his sister, who is in a coma. His real name isn't even Aya, that's his sister's name, which he adopted when he set out for revenge. His real name is Ran. His main wish is to kill the man who murdered his parents and put his sister into the coma, which is why he joined Kritiker. To say he's a little irrational about the subject would be putting it mildly. He is the oldest of Weiss and his weapon of choice is the katana.

My second favourite character is Schuldig. He's a psychotic German telepath. He loves to play with people and he loves to taunt Aya.

What is great about WK is that the bad guys all have powers, Schu is a telepath as I already mentioned, Crawford is a precog, Nagi is telekinetic and Farfie is a berserker who feels no pain and is very difficult to stop. Weiss are entirely out gunned because they have no powers at all, and yet they never stop fighting.

Kapital does not have the greatest animation in the world, but it has the most wonderful stories and characters. I love WK and I can watch it over and over again. There is a little bit more information about it in this post if you are interested.

An anime which I haven't seen yet, but do want to take a look at is Bleach. I have part of the first season on DVD that I picked up cheap somewhere and I will get round to watching it eventually.

What are your favourite animes?

Day 19: Books - 'yay, give me more' and 'oh, why did I read that?' (requested by the4ts)

the4ts Name at least one book you wish you'd never, ever read and one book you would happily read over and over again.

Very Happy I Read

Let's start with the good stuff.

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to twist this one a little because someone already asked me what my favourite books that I can read over and over again are, so what I'm going to do is talk about a book I have just finished that I am really glad I read. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and I will undoubtedly pick it up again at some point in the future.

The only way to describe this book is Viking werewolves(ish) in space. It's a Warhammer 40,000 book and it's called The Space Wolf Omnibus by William King. I bought it in a Cancer Research charity shop for £1.80 and it's the kind of book I tend to buy just to have a look at it. I wasn't sure I was going to like it. The fact is I enjoyed it so much I searched out the second omnibus and bought that too (it's in the post as we speak).

The book is a set of three novels about Ragnar, a young Viking from the world of Fenris. When the first book opens as far as he knows his whole world is the islands on which the Viking tribes live, but when he dies he starts a completely new life, or rather, when he almost dies.

Ragnar is taken by the Choosers of the Slain and in the first book he trains to become a Space Wolf. Space Wolves aren't actually werewolves, but they have been implanted with the gene-seed that gives them wolf like characteristics, but I still think of them as werewolves in space :). We see through Ragnar's eyes and all his confusion at the new worlds and new possibilities opening up before him.

In the second book Ragnar is a Blood Claw, the lowest rank among the Space Wolves and we are allowed to live his first off world mission with him.

Then in the third book Ragnar is just seasoned enough to almost be a Grey Hunter and we see him go to war with the whole chapter of Space Wolves to retrieve one of their sacred relics from the forces of Chaos.

As far as I am concerned each book was better than the next. I enjoyed the first book, but I found Ragnar's ignorance of everything around him a little jarring. Then the second book is exciting and had me continually coming back for more, and finally the third book I didn't want to put down.

The only thing I could have lived without were some of the battles. They became a little repetitive in places (but that's probably just me - I'm not much of a battle person :)) and I have to admit to skimming through some of them for the important plot points and not really taking much notice of the rest. However, there is plenty of other, much more interesting stuff around the battles, so this isn't a big issue for me. After all it is called Warhammer, so I had to expect some epic battles :).

Ragnar is a great character. He has doubts and flaws, but he's still a fantastic warrior and he's especially good when teamed up with his friend Sven, because they play off each other really well. In the first book he's more alone and isolated, which is part of why I think I prefer the later books, because Sven is there as well.

These books exist in a very interesting universe that I find fascinating as well, which really helps keep me interested. They have good characters, good plot and good world building. The way Ragnar learns everything gives the reader a way to learn everything as well, which is a very useful device. I am looking forward to when the new omnibus arrives.

The one thing I had to wonder though ... with all these hot blooded males, what about sex? Ragnar is attracted to a female character at one point, but it never comes to anything. I had to wonder what happened to their sex drives. Also, a very male orientated book, simply because of the setup there are virtually no female characters.

Wish I had Never Read

It's difficult to come up with any books I wish I had never read because I'm the type of person that if I start reading it and don't like it I stop reading.

However, one does come to mind. When I was a teenager I had a much higher tolerance for nasty horror than I do now. I remember going through the whole horror section of the school library as well as picking up books from second hand shops.

The book I wish I had never read is Slugs by Shaun Hutson and this isn't because I think it's terribly written or anything like that. It's because there are parts in it that have haunted me since the day I read them. This book has fantastic horror, but I could totally have lived without those mental images for the rest of my life :). I'm not going to share because I don't think you really want to know.

As for bad books. Mostly the only one's I've finished that I wish I had never read are short story eBooks. I'm not going to name any, but I have found that some are simply boring. I tend to download a lot of short story free eBooks to check out new authors and there had been a few that I would never look at again. My favourite genre for these is horror and I like ghost stories and demons and stuff like that (rather than the animal horror like Slugs :)) and some of them just aren't scary and others don't seem to understand that even in a short you need a story. It isn't enough just to throw words onto paper.

I think that's a very good reason for having free short stories, that way you can test a writer and see if you are going to enjoy their books before leaping into a full novel. I find it very useful. Along with the bad I have also read some really good books.

So, do you have any books that you have been really glad you read, or that you wish you had never seen? I'd love to hear about them.

Recipe: My Mummy's Steak and Kidney Pudding

Sorry this took so long, took a while to get dear Mama to write it down. Now she tends to just throw things together so the quantities are estimated, but they should give you the general gist.

Ingredients

• 12oz - 340g - 1.5 cup self raising flour (to make self-raising flour from plain [all purpose] flour just add 2 teaspoons of baking powder for each 150g/6oz/1 cup plain flour. Thank you Nigella.)
• 6oz - 170g - 3/4 cup suet (for US peeps who can't get suet easily this thread on britishexpats.com might help)
• Some water
• 8 lambs kidneys
• 450g  approx 1lb  braising steak (any steak will do as long as it will cook down)
• 2 Beef Stock cubes or about a pint of strong beef stock

Instructions

1. Mix the flour and suet and water to make the suet crust - it should be handleable, but not dry.
2. Line a 1.5 pint (0.85 ltr or there abouts) ceramic pudding basin (like these) with the pastry, leaving enough pastry to make a lid for the top. The easiest way is to just go at it like plasticine, but you can roll it if you like. This is not an elegant pudding - as I said in my entry about it, it's a spoon out of the bowl type of pudding, not one you turn onto a plate :).
3. Dice the steak.
4. Core the kidneys (the stringy white stuff in the middle needs to come out - it is horrid to eat) and chop into large chunks. (You will need a very sharp knife because kidneys are slimy to handle).
5. Put the meat in the pasty case in layers.
6. Mix up your stock (either dissolve the stock cubes in water or melt you normal stock so it is liquid) and pour over the meat until near the top.
7. Season with a little salt and pepper, but be careful your stock may be salty anyway.
8. Seal on the suet pasty lid. If you moisten the edges it should stick easily.
9. Cover the top in tin foil or grease proof paper making sure to leave a gap above the top of the pudding.
10. Place into a large saucepan or steamer and steam for six hours.

This is absolutely lovely served with mashed potato and veg with lots of extra gravy.

Day 18: My Kind of Pictures (requested by aardvarkinmud)

aardvarkinmud What pictures do you like to look at? 

This question really made me think and I wasn't sure why kind of pictures to talk about, so I've divided it up. First of all I'm going to talk about paintings, then abstract images and then photos.

Paintings

I'm very much a lover of classical art. Rob and I have been known to go to the National Gallery and spend five hours going round the older sections with the audio tour. I love just sitting and looking at the paintings while listening all about them. I love epic paintings that tell a story and I find some of the early religious work absolutely beautiful. Below are some of my favourites.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche 1833

I remember seeing this painting when I first visited the National Gallery on a school trip when I was seventeen. I stood in front of it for ages and it made a huge impression. I have never forgotten it and I have to go and see it every time I go to the gallery.

Samson and Delilah by Rubens

I love the colours in this one. There is so much stillness and tension as Samson's hair is cut.

Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Piero del Pollaiolo

This one has so much going on and the aspects of all the men firing arrows as Saint Sebastian as incredibly interesting. I know that it all has a meaning because I listened to it last time I was in the National Gallery, but I can't remember exactly what it was. All I know is you can go barely a room in that section of the gallery without coming across another Saint Sebastian; he seems to have been a very popular subject.

The Death of Actaeon by Titian

Another tragic painting, but with so much life and interest.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

I love this painting for all it's detail and emotion. I saw it in an exhibition at the Tate Britain. The fact that the model was ill because she lay in the water so long for the painter to finish the work and her father charged him for the doctor's fees just add to it's realism.

Abstract Images
I'm not much of a fan of abstract art, but I do rather like Jackson Pollock. The way he used colour and shape is simply fascinating.

I find a lot of abstract art boring (and this is just my opinion, I know some people really enjoy it), but I could look at a Pollock for hours. Abstract art with something of an organic feel is by far my favourite when it comes to paintings. However, I also like computer generated art. I love fractals.

I find the endlessly repeating patterns restful and intriguing. The fact that you get fractals in nature is also fascinating (and tasty as in the example below :)).

Photos

Now I'm going to be shallow :D. I've done the arty bit and I do like to look at arty photos too, but one of my great joys is looking at photos of my favourite actors. Guess who's first!

Tom Hiddleston in rehearsals for Coriolanus

Dylan O'Brien from Teen Wolf

James McAvoy from Children of Dune

Tyler Hoechlin from Teen Wolf

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock

I could go on, but we'd be here all day :).

Day 17: The trials and tribulations of crazy cat ownership (requested by dracavia)

So sorry, I totally forgot to do this yesterday.

dracavia: The trials and tribulations of crazy cat ownership.

I think all cats are a little crazy, or at least they do not think in anyway shape or form along the same lines that humans do :). Of course some cats are 'more challenging' than others.

For those who don't know, my husband and I have a five and a half year old F2 Savannah called Amber and we've had her since September. She's an ex-breeding queen and she was very nervous and skittish when we first got her because she wasn't used to us. This is her in her super model pose:

She's much friendlier and relaxed now, but she's what you might call eccentric :).

She sleeps in a cat bed on our bed every night, which is the first of her eccentricities. At first she just slept on our bed and the cat bed was in the room where we first kept her when she arrived as her safe place, however, we moved it when we discovered one of her interesting habits. She cleans her teeth on the side of her cat bed by chewing it. This can be very distracting in the middle of the night because it makes a huge row - the bed is covered foam. Not much of  problem you might think and it was fine until she mistook my husband's foot for the side of her cat bed when she was just laying on the duvet. She has very sharp little teeth and an executive decision was immediately taken to move the cat bed onto ours to prevent any more blood being shed :).

Mornings are also very interesting. Because I work from home she bonded with me first since I'm there most of the time. Rob gets up first because he has to travel to work and Amber, without fail, pointedly ignores him, even though he puts her food out first thing. She stays in bed until I get up.

Then, once I have been on the exercise bike and had my shower, we have to have our bonding time. This usually consists of me sitting on a chair in the kitchen or the floor in the old dining room and giving Amber a big love while she head-buts my legs and weaves all over the place purring very loudly. If she does not get this she meows, a lot, and boy is she loud. She also goes for the weaving around legs trick, which if I am headed anywhere vaguely fast means I am likely to fall over her, so bonding time saves me landing on my face :).

She talks a lot. When we come back to the house she talks. When anyone else enters the house, she talks. When she wants something, she talks. She even has a meow for 'I just took an enormous dump in my litter tray, please come and clean it'. I kid you not.

She's only allowed in the garden, not generally outside because Savannahs have the instinct to range widly and she's likely to get lost if she roams. So she has a cat flap. Whenever she goes out and then comes back in during the day she will very gently meow as she returns. I then call back and she bounds up the stairs to  my desk to make sure I am where I am supposed to be. Then she heads back to bed downstairs.

I'm pretty sure she has no idea where her tail is most of the time. She knocks things off with it all over the place and she is the clumsiest cat I have ever known. I thought Bijou (one of our previous cats) was bad, but Amber really doesn't seem to take into account her back end :).

Amber loves to play and her favourite toy is what I think is supposed to be a mouse, but it looks like a bear to me. It has a bell and used to be part of a cat teaser, but she chewed it off the string many moons ago. All her other toys she destroys, but this one she carries around and jumps on and throws around, but never chews. She puts it under things so she can leap over them and dive underneath and pounce on it. She hides it so she can find it again. She puts it on my boot, puts her front paws on my boot and scoots it across the carpet at speed. It's adorable. She loves that toy.

She also loves my boots. They are leather and when I leave them lying around she sits on them. Levi (our other previous cat) used to like shoes too, but he would explore them and then leave them, Amber likes to use them as a bed and, yes, she has chewed them. Luckily I have an every day pair and a good pair - she is only allowed near the every day pair and she seems to have given up on the chewing of them now.

Amber is one of those cats where everything has to be on her terms. If you pick her up, she gets down, but she is quite happy to bounce over the sofa while I am sitting on it. We haven't reached lap sitting heights yet, but I have high hopes. However, she has one weakness: cat treats :). If you give her cat treats she will let you do anything. That's how we gave her her spot on wormer and de-flea-er - we just put a small pile of cat treats on the floor and got her while she was eating them. She's offish with new people, but give them some cat treats and she's right there. It would be embarrassing how easy she is to bribe if she wasn't so lovely ;).

Amber is definitely the most eccentric cat we have had. Levi was so laid back he was mostly horizontal and Bijou was slightly nuts, but she was everything you'd expect from a cat whereas Amber is much harder work. However, I wouldn't change her for the world. We love her dearly and she is such a character and a great companion for me during the day. She keeps getting better and better with people and she is very loving, especially to me. Cynthia, the absolutely lovely lady that gave her to us put it like this, because Savannahs are part wild cat (Serval), dealing with the F1s and F2s as compared to a regular cat is like the difference between a pony and a racehorse.