Wednesday, December 05, 2007

I've Got The Internet Again Now, Thankfully

During the long, dark, lonely evenings when we didn't have broadband, the lovely Mr BC and I took to amusing ourselves the only other way we know how: by building things out of lego.

I'm quite worried that the lego has revealed a Dark Side of me that I hadn't previously suspected. Some recent 'vignettes' that just seemed to build themselves in my hands include:

1. A paraplegic who is learning to walk again. He's struggling along those walking bars towards the pretty nurse. In front of him, behind the pretty nurse, there is a mirror, and in the mirror, where his reflection should be, is a grey ice demon.

2. A naturalist, examining a spider on the fronds of a flowering shrub in the park. Unbeknownst to the naturalist, the spider is radioactive, and the radioactivity, filtered through the naturalist's magnifying glass, has caused a grey ice demon to break through on to the physical plain, intent on wreaking destruction (this signalled by raising his arms a bit and going 'auuuggghhh').

3. A horde of villagers who have gathered in a clearing in the woods with pickaxes and flamethrowers, intent on burning down the new modern art gallery, whose bold modernist lines and liberal use of Luxcrete have offended their more conservative aesthetic sensibilities.

4. An injured man being cut out of the wreckage of the modern art gallery by a fireman with an axe. (This may be the injured man from vignette 1.)

Also: 5. An entity that is one-third human, one-third machine and one-third reptile: the human brain controlling the long reptile arm, which operates the machine, which acts as the human's body.

I'm thinking Jeff Goldblum for the naturalist, Bruce Willis for the fireman, and a cameo from Zaha Hadid as herself. If anyone's interested in auditioning, there are several minor roles, mainly as road sweepers, spacemen and fruit sellers.

18 comments:

Smat said...

any parts for some gay hairdressers? They come with their own ice cream parlour!

patroclus said...

I miss that ice-cream parlour.

Sarah said...

Can I be a space-woman?

Tim F said...

I once started to make a high diving board from Lego, but changed my mind half way through and turned it into a gallows. I then proceeded to hang my Tom Baker dr Who doll with his scarf, over and over again.

Lovely to have you back, btw.

patroclus said...

Sarah: Gladly, but that's the thing - lego don't seem to make girl figures any more. When I was growing up I'm sure there were (almost) equal amounts of lego girls to lego boys. Does anyone know if this is true?

Tim: Did you fancy yourself as the Master wreaking revenge, or was Doctor Who hanging himself? Or were you trying to make the doll turn into Peter Davison Doctor Who? (And if so, did it work?)

Tim F said...

No, I wasn't the Master. But it was a proper gallows, with a hangman (I think it was the Lone Ranger), a trap door and so on, so it wasn't suicide. And this was in the days when we thought TB would be the Doctor forever and ever, and Peter Davison was still a vet in a tank top.

Dave said...

Glad to see that living in the real world hasn't affected you.

Anonymous said...

My brother once hanged my Action Man from my bedroom light fitting with a soap-on-the-rope, pierced through the torso with several darts - of the Jocky Wilson variety, not the pygmy type, none of those being available in Essex.

No Lego was involved, although I can categorically state I had the largest box of Lego ever. It's waiting in my mum's attic until Dexter becomes old enough to play with it, and not lose all the bits.

Occasionally, when I do the lottery, I mark up the numbers in the shape of the space ships I used to make with that Lego.

Oli said...

Do Lego issue an official grey ice demon, or is he an amalgam of other parts?

llewtrah said...

I built towns out of my lego, and strange monolithic structures. I wonder if Arthur C Clarke started out with Lego before writing 2001?

cello said...

You have Lego people who can talk??!! Well, make noises, then (unless 'auuuggghhh' is Pictish for 'Excuse me, but could I just ask you...')?

If you get bored with paraplegia in the hospital you can create some horrific wounds by melting the figures ever so slightly in a candle flame. My nephew used to do it when he was about 12.

Can I bag any role with a horticultural bent please?

Thank God you're back. I've had to work so hard.

patroclus said...

Dave: The real world is far stranger and scarier than anything I could ever conjure up with lego.

Wyndham: Ooh, if you find out you have any girl lego figures that you and Dexter don't want (especially the one with the red hair in bunches) I'm willing to swap them for ice demons and stuff.

Oli: I'd like to say the ice demon was standard issue, but the sad reality is that it's the ghost from lego Harry Potter wearing Santa's beard from last year's lego advent calendar, with a jet of water from the lego fire hose on his head.

Llewtrah: I loved building lego towns when I was little, but now whenever I start building anything, it always seems to turn into a tableau of a Daily Mail news story. I'm not sure what this says about me, or about the Daily Mail, come to that.

Cello: I have sad news about Pictish, having finally come to terms with Dr Richard Cox's analysis, which demonstrates fairly convincingly that 'Pictish' was in fact Old Norse, and therefore never actually existed. This has put me all out of kilter, as I was saving the resurrection of the lost language of the Picts for my retirement. On a brighter note, there are plenty of horticultural roles on offer, including spider-catcher, topiarist and roof gardener (this is not a euphemism).

Anonymous said...

I've regressed to Duplo. I specialise in making lions with many mouths that eat elephants with no eyes. You can see why mother nature in all her wisdom decided this setup wouldn't be ideal for longevity of the real world food chain.

Oli said...

"It's the ghost from lego Harry Potter wearing Santa's beard from last year's lego advent calendar, with a jet of water from the lego fire hose on his head."

Glad to hear it. I much preferred the pre-licensed era when Darth Vadar was the Black Knight from Castle Lego with a motorcycle helmet on, and one of those translucent sticks for a lightsabre. Ah, happy days.

Anonymous said...

so i'm thinking douglas bader meets spiderman meets wickerman meets the snowqueen. get working on that script straight away!

Occasional Poster of Comments said...

>>roof gardener (this is not a euphemism).<<

One of my Dad's friends was for a while the Head Gardener at a mental hospital; which surely should be some kind of euphemism.

Anonymous said...

I've currently got some dinosaurs, robots, reindeer and a robot dinosaur having a fight on top of my tv. I'm hoping to get the playmobile ghost for christmas, that should sort them all out.

So Pictish is just Norse? How disappointing. I saw some tombstones in Sweden over the summer which reminded me strongly of Ogham stones so I suppose I'm not that surprised. Pah though. I might kick something in sympathy.

Dave said...

The title of this post was tempting fate, somewhat, was it not?