Jimmy Page’s Trousers

ScriptFrenzy update:  92 pages.

That means I have to finish eight pages before midnight tomorrow.

As usual in my life, I’m taking it down to the wire and pulling out all the stops.  I’m mixing metaphors with abandon here to indicate the crucial timing issues at stake.

I  would say that I do my best work when cramming it in right up to a deadline, but as that’s all I ever do, I’ve nothing with which to compare it.

Eight pages.  I’m gonna do it or die trying.  Well, I’m gonna do it or get really dejected with my failure and blame my wife for not supporting me sufficiently.  I’m sure I can make it her fault if needs be.

My overtired daughter is currently upstairs, wailing that she ‘wants to be a real fairy’.

Bloody kids.

The first in an occasional series of posts in which I will share some of my ideas and unrealised inventions.

Rather than going to all the effort and expense of patenting them, it is my hope that someone will see them here and give me a huge pile of money in royalties so that they can make them. I’m interested mainly in easy money rather than any sort of work - you know, research, prototyping, testing, marketing, etc.

Without further ado then, I give you:

The TUBET [tyoo-bay]

Essentially, two double duvets, sewn together up the sides to form a tube. You put your bed through the tube. So, when your selfish partner turns over in the night, pulling the duvet with them, a fresh piece of duvet pulls up, from underneath, on your side.

I’ve even got a slogan:

“The Tubet: Say goodnight to cold arses!”

As I can see no potential flaws whatsoever, I throw the bidding open. I bet even sour old Peter Jones will be champing at the bit for this one.

The Tubet. Remember, you saw it here first.

Sitting on a public toilet seat that has been pre-warmed by someone else is an unpleasant experience. For me anyway. I’m unable to make-believe that nobody has ever used the toilet before me. The evidence is there, in all its alien warmth.

Worse even than this though, is seeing the person that warmed it exit just before you need to go in. Even if they’re not a filthy grot-bag with arse and thigh-centric skin diseases, I still know what they were doing in there.

I don’t like a warm pan and I certainly don’t like knowing who warmed it.

I was doing so well. So well.

Last Wednesday night, I reached 53 pages in my Script Frenzy work. As the day before that had been the halfway-mark, I was pretty much back on target. However, I managed to write myself into a plot-hole and I had no idea how to get out of it. Then add the following woes:

On Thursday, I drank a shitload of beer with my brother (somehow managing to pull a muscle in my arm). On Friday, Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers’ aunt stayed over and I got nothing done and. On Saturday and Sunday, I wallowed in self-pity at having no way out of my plot-hole.

The result? I’m behind again.

Last night, in bed, an idea. I have a tenuous, gossamer-thin, filament of a way out of my plot hole so, tonight, I’ll start hanging the entire weight of the second half of the script on that.

Crap.

I’ve just seen the inside of the Coke vending machine in work. It’s all grey and horrible and not even a little bit like the ad.

Once again, advertising has lied to me. Happiness Factory, my arse.

I feel another semi-drunk stream-of-consciousness post coming on. Can’t be good. Really.

It’s Saturday night though, you see. Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers has popped off to visit her folks and taken Baby Trousers with her. Free gaff! So I made a (spicy as fuck) chilli for dinner and settled down to have a few beers. After watching Pan’s Labyrinth on DVD (really good - really, really good), I’ve ended up watching the poptastic channels.

Had Bonnie Tyler on a few minutes ago. That video with the scary, flying, kid with the shiny eyes. Bleedin’ terrifying. Don’t they know I’m in the house alone?

Whitney Houston. Some set of pipes on her before she got shacked-up, knocked-up, and smacked-up with Bobby. Probably too far off her face to do much these days. I had a bit of a crush on her in the late eighties. Then again, I was in my late teens/early twenties and probably had a crush on everyone.

Four Non-Blondes. Jesus. What’s with the stupid hats and goggles anyway. She looks like some sort of weird cartoon character.

Now we’re talking. Bohemian Rhapsody. What more could a red-blooded, half-pissed man ask for? Not much, that’s what. Maybe a kebab. It’s lucky that those Queen blokes were talented ‘cos they’re not much to look at. A good line in white satin jumpsuits in this video though. Brian May’s got his guitar plugged in with a curly lead. You don’t really get curly leads much any more - for good reason. I kind of miss them though.

Oasis. Oddly, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the video for Don’t Look Back In Anger. I hadn’t realised that poor old Patrick McNee was in it. I could do all the obvious stuff about how Noel nicked his riffs and how Liam’s a wanker but I won’t.

‘Look Back In Anger’ - now there’s a good film. Anything with Richard Burton in it is good by default. And Claire Bloom was a fine-looking woman.

Don McLean’s on now (guess which song). I wonder if they’ll play the whole thing. It seems to be some sort recording of a live show. Huh, they played the whole thing. Who’d have guessed?

Peter Kay. Miming annoyingly to Amarillo. I’d better not get started.

Gloria Gaynor. How does something become a gay anthem? Why is Kylie a gay icon? What exactly is a gay icon? Does my heterosexuality preclude my knowing these things?

Ahhhh, Kylie. Lovely, lovely Kylie.

Bleedin’ Coldplay. Yellow, of course.

Pah, I’m going back to thinking about Kylie.

Mmmmmmmm.

I’ve just posted a vague and rambling comment over at Clarissa’s. One of the things I arsed on about has inspired me to post a directed, no, a very directed post at a particular subset of our modern society.

So then, this post is directed, firmly and definitely, at people whose house alarms go off for no good reason.

To be clear, ‘for no good reason’ means, when no fucker is actually breaking into your house.

Now, if anybody reading this has come home, on more than one occasion, to hear their alarm wailing or to see from the panel that it has activated at some time over the course of their absence, I offer the following advice:

Get it fucking sorted.

Seriously.

In the first instance, if your system false-alarms more than once or twice, you might as well knock it all off with a hammer and sell it to gypsies for some magic beans. That’s all the good it’s going to do. One or two false alarms and all your neighbours will cease to pay any attention to it. Your house may well be in the process of being emptied by twelve burly blokes in stripy jumpers, driving a high-backed Ford Transit with ‘SWAG’ painted on the side, but all your neighbours will think is “there’s that fucking alarm again - why don’t they fix it, the worthless bastards”.

That’s the most compelling argument to get it sorted. There is another though - neighbour annoyance.

Now, if you’re an alarm-falsely-ringing person, it’s entirely possible that you couldn’t give a rank, foetid, shite about your neighbours. Probable, even. To you, however, I pass on this entirely true tale of woe and warning.

I once shared a common, semi-detached wall with a couple that travelled a lot. Often this was great. I got to play some loud music whenever they and Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers were away. Hurrah. Decidedly non-hurrah, however, when their house alarm went off for no reason.

Many of you may be aware that, in a lot of house alarm installations, there is an external flashy-noisy box on the side of the house and that there is also an internal noisy-beepy-sireny box. This internal box, in many badly installed systems, continues to make lots of noise long after the external box ceases. If, for example, you happen to live in a semi-detached house next to one of these systems that activates falsely, with nobody to disable it, you may well spend an entire weekend without sleep as its incessant wailing can be clearly heard through the common wall.

It is worth noting, false-alarm people, that a weekend of no sleep due to (even) an internal siren, may well cause an, otherwise sane and law-abiding, person to be found in your back garden with a screwdriver and a breaking-and-entering-intent when you eventually return home.

Actual B&E was narrowly avoided by a fortuitous return. It should be a lesson though, that I was on the premises and fully ready to prise open a window and hammer the shit out of an internal alarm box.  Two days of ceaseless noise will do that to me.

So then. If not for concern for your friends and neighbours, than at least for selfish motives of property preservation, get your fucking alarm sorted. Seriously. You know who you are. It’s not going to cost you a fortune. Look in the phone book and call an alarm guy. Adjust the sensitivity, change the timer on the external box, make sure there’s a timer on the internal siren. Do this. Do it you lazy, selfish bastards.

For those of you interested in my ScriptFrenzy journey (and I realise it’s incredibly unlikely that any of you are), I am now twenty pages in. In an odd quirk of mathematics, this means I am also twenty percent finished - aren’t sums funny?

So, one fifth of the way there in output but somewhere more than that in time.

Lets see… Nine days out of thirty… That’s 30/9… No, no… 9/30… Multiplied by 100… Carry the one… Reciprocal venn diagram… Is a function of two trains leaving a station… Solve for X…

Thirty percent, people. Almost a third of the way through in time.

So that’s me with 20% of my output produced in 30% of the available time. This has been a maths-heavy post which has made me tired, so if anyone wants to work out how far behind I am, feel free to post in the comments.

Remember to show your workings though.

Once again it’s Friday and I’m posting, late at night, after a bundle of beers.   Regular readers may well think they have noticed a trend of sorts.  To them I say, bollocks.  I don’t have a problem, I just love the beer.  Yummy, yummy beer.

Anyway, Script Frenzy kicked off on April 1st .  I am eight pages in which, considering I’ve only written on two evenings, isn’t too bad.  Odds are pretty fair that, on a reasonable reread, I will find that at least 87.5% of those eight pages are utter shite.  Still, I am actually writing stuff.  This is a good thing.  While I’ve written a number of shorts lately, I have yet to tackle the mother of all screen-writing, the feature-length script.

So, eight pages.  A minimum of eighty-two to go.  Doable.

Probably.

I still have some gaping plot holes with no real ideas of how to Polyfilla them up.  While I’m happy enough with my main character and his journey, there are cavernous expanses of uncharted, unknown, unanswered doubt throughout his jaunt.  I have dots in an arc shape but I lack curvy lines to join many of them.  What I wouldn’t give for a couple of curvy lines.

Melpomene, I need you now.  You’re the only one for me, babe.  That Thalia thing was just a fling.  It meant nothing.  Less than nothing.  Come on.  You’re still my girl Mel, aren’t you?  Hello?  Mel?

Aww crap.