The invisible bald patch and the consolation of shaving

Taken on an economic level, the act of shaving probably occupies thousands of hours in a lifetime. Those are hours that could be productively spent in other occupations, like plucking nasal hairs or scratching on waking.

Reluctant fingers

Fingers shouldn't have to learn that much. They have enough to do without having to relearn four or five different keyboard configurations every couple of years. My spellcheckers correct or highlight the errors, but the irritation remains.

Movie night: Caldera

A young woman, trapped in a lusterless reality, finds mystic nature. The conflict is interesting: a medicated existence ensconced in technology versus the spirituality of psychosis. It comes with a nod to Terry Pratchett. Eleven minutes from Evan Viera.

Happiness, tin camping mugs and second hand yo-yos

There has always been something African about making do with less. A board game can be made with a couple of stones and a bunch of pits scooped out of the sand. A toy car can be made from wire and tin. A toy ox can be made of clay.

Animals, stupid people and safety warnings

The road is nice and flat, compared to most pavements. If you chose to walk in the road and got run over, would you demand that the road be dug up?

Movie Night: The House

Slightly overacted, but a fair piece of New American Gothic. Ten minutes made on a shoestring by Seraph Films.

Longevity & health: drinking blood vs. potato chips

An article I just read tells me that potato chips, bread crusts and roast potatoes also cause cancer.  You got that right. The substance mentioned as the main culprit is called acrylamide. You play with your life and your medical aid fund if you swallow that stuff.

Blankets and other winter joys

'The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence', but at least I have shorts to keep my knees cold, and my blanket to remind me how much I love winter.

Movie Night: Angst

Emiel Penders paints life as a series of mishaps and fears, with a happy resolution in this rather lovely six-and-a-half minute animation.

Father's Day, Will Smith and M Night Shyamalan

I wanted to write something about Gobabis, but it won't come. It makes me sound like a stuck record. It makes me feel depressed. There's always some barracks lawyer in the wings waiting to mess everything up. "No, the group areas act was never a way of getting around the Christian principle of  love, or at least acknowledge and respect, your neighbour."

A note on web privacy and sharing posts with the CIA

Even if you can prove that you don't peer through the window when your wife is in the bathroom, it won't endear you to the neighbour who catches you leering through the window when his wife is in the bathroom.

Movie Night: Harvest

Writer's block, a field and a scarecrow. What could possibly go wrong? 14 minutes from Robin Nevitt.

Movie Night: U TURN

Ghosts hitchhikers. There's a lot of potential for corniness in the thing, but this one comes across as different, and fairly creepy. Five minutes from Snap Judgement Films.

Movie Night: Alpha

Sometimes sex drive switches everything we have learned off. A wry observation in six and a half minutes from Nicolai Slothuus, Matthías Æ. Bjarnasson, Christian Munk Sørensen.

Unruly vegetables, dumb bureaucrats and mutant man-eating plants

Sometimes bureaucracy gets so out of hand that the sight of an unruly plant is enough to shut down the brains of minor functionaries in search of awards and advancement for being overzealous in a lobotomised kind of way.

Movie Night: The Cathedral

I'm not going to attempt to describe this for fear of spoilers. It's a pastiche of SF horror ideas, and visually very rich. Six and a half minutes from Tomek Baginski.

The new breed of villain

The villains in James Bond and Indiana Jones stories share similar traits: they want power or wealth. Those are rapidly becoming 'old-skool'. The new breed of villain has simplified things. His or her coda is summed up in one easy word: 'destroy'.

Movie Night: Plurality

Here's a short dystopian scifi move. The ultimate network uses DNA as its basis. Everything is controlled. Everyone is known. What could possibly go wrong? 15 minutes from Dennis Liu.

Movie Night: Oceansize

Here's something fairly grim featuring what looks like a cross between Cthulhu and black oil. Have fun. About 8 minutes from Romain Jouandeau, Adrien Chartie, Gilles Mazières and Fabien Thareau.

Speed bumps, borders, Angolans and Namibians

We could solve all the nationality issues with a couple of speed bumps, especially in front of my house, so I could go out in the mornings and amuse myself by watching the boy racer become one with the birds, and the pilots at the airport, as his turbo-charged bike launches him into the air.

Movie Night: Doll Face

Here's a twist on a twist. Seven minutes of fun with stalking and knives from Colin Campbell.

The benefit of spiders

Taking the spider's point of view, if they are capable of thinking about anything other that eating, breeding and running away in terror from the havoc of feather dusters, and deadly cats and humans, life must be quite tough, and the struggle for survival must be extremely desperate.

Movie Night: The Silent City

A group of soldiers come under fire from what appears to be a dead sniper. Anyone remember Gunnar from Rogue Trooper? Seven slightly violent moments from Dr Documentary.

Insert horizontal slut upside groove B with grey widget perpendicular.

The world is full of people who do things by the book, meager souls who cannot see delight in the potential. Like Paul Kruger's rumoured denial of the existence of the giraffe because it wasn't in the Bible, they are blinded to wonders and the future, since none of it has been written down on paper.

Lack of emotion for the Boston bombing

Violence spreads like a virus. We have seen it with shootings. We have seen it with bombings. It happens all over the world, and the phenomenon is inevitable in the USA as well. There is no point in being shocked.

Movie Night: Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty

One word. 'Wicked'! Six minutes from Brown Bag Films. Another word. 'Brilliant'.

Movie Night: Cargo

Here's something thought-provoking and sad for parents. If you knew you were about to turn into a zombie, what would you do about your infant? Seven minutes from Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke.

The pleasures of strange news

For a start, perhaps these silly stories are a good way of maintaining the collective sanity. Who wants to read a serious news story about yet another hike in the price of crude when you can skip all the stress and go straight to the story about a burglar who tried to open an account while he was in the process of committing a robbery?

Zen verbiage and a recommendation

Right now, I am frustrated by a lot of what I read. The current horror genre décor has a Zen-like quality, somewhere between Ray Bradbury (no disrespect intended) and the interior decoration of one of those swanky restaurants that serve haute cuisine on exquisitely presented plates but ultimately a beggar's banquet with only three bite sized morsels that would not even satisfy a starving Ethiopian.

It leaves me quite frustrated as I enjoy words, and really don't want to have to fill in imagery and thoughts for the writer who omits them to please editorial fashion. (I'm a bit of a lazy reader.) As far as this new 'quiet horror' thing goes, it leaves me wishing Robert Aickman were still alive and writing.

That being said, I recently got a copy of Cemetery Dance with a view to submitting something, and the mix and style is just about perfect, so I'm going to recommend it if you also want a bit more verbiage and good variety. Here's a link...

Hagfish slime, and the quality of recent inventions

I'm adding emoticons to my list of very important inventions. I'm sure historians can't be bothered with the emotional quality of communication, but I really think they are incredibly important.

Movie Night: Evacuation

Fear the men in white with the funny guns that go 'pop'. People have to flee a city as baddies hunt them down. 21 minutes of found footage and unrelenting grimness from Micah Mahaffey.

Aunt Amelia at Dinner

My story, 'Aunt Amelia at Dinner' has been published by the rather cool, Red Asylum. Download the free PDF magazine here...

Movie night: Shadows

Here's some creepiness and horror with school kids. Enjoy. 15 Minutes from Moon Eye Films.

'Thou shall not kill', and its loophole

This is how to do it. Get a degree. Go into politics. Get elected. Be seen with very senior religious figures. Then, and only then, start setting up a moral platform that incorporates a number of religious and social aspects.

Makeup and meerkats

Makeup is an aesthetic that requires the canvass of the right face. Most ideas about how to use makeup seem to come from fashion magazines. In fact, I suspect, it's only fashion magazines, because there is a shortage of items on the topic in magazines about industrial equipment and finances.

Take me to your Facebook: the artificial intelligence among us

The output is a variable result. For instance if you add two and two together on your computer's calculator, you get four. The output can change however, depending on various circumstances. For instance, it you use a spreadsheet as well as I do, two and two might add up to B3:C3+G8 and a whole lot of swearing.

Movie Night: Chubby Mermaid

How does one begin to describe this? Demented might be a good place to begin. It's sort of manga and it's actually, very, very clever about body image in its own manga way. Just over 11 minutes, from Emezie Okorafor.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-03-22

On the menu tonight... two servings of ash, real head transplants, monsters washing up on beaches, lovely bones, children's book designs and the origin of the smiley face.

Movie night: Tong

Tong, a lovable inventor, develops a disintegration ray to save humankind, but it doesn't work out quite as expected. Nine minutes from Talantis Films. French with English subtitles.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-03-15

On the menu tonight... giant mosquitoes, really fearsome spiders, strange tales of taxidermy, life without adjectives, humans and monarch butterflies on the brink.

Uncle Offbeat predicts the end of civilisation

Next time Uncle Offbeat predicts something, you listen nicely, you hear. Uncle Offbeat listens to those heretics in white lab coats, and when scientists get nervous Uncle Offbeat gets nervous as well, no matter what anybody, and especially not anybody called George W., has to say.

Movie night: Replay

A young boy in a post apocalyptic world discovers the ghosts of the past on a reel to reel tape deck. Eight-and-a-half minutes from Talantis Films

Mindset Cafe: 2013-03-08

Tehran battles giant genetically mutated rats, return from death sometimes possible, great tits can be deadly, the secret art of Dr Seuss, awesome poetry and more cool Lego...

Decaffeinated: early steps to finding out who I am

Life is like wearing black trousers in a room full of white cats. It's impossible to move without picking up some cat hairs.

Movie night: Lady Ice

Lady Ice shows up bringing death and cold destruction. The story is complicated by relationships, emotions and a pet. Seven-and-a-half minutes from Liron Pe'er.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-03-01

My browsing has been patchy during the week so the offering will be brief, but there's some tasty stuff on today's menu. Take a look...

Fear of maths and the need to belong

Give a kid a bag of sweets with instructions to hand them out. The division becomes remarkably precise. Tell a kid to slice up a chocolate cake, and that the largest slice will go to his or her arch-nemesis, and the exercise of geometry becomes amazingly accurate.

Interesting times

It's been a year of personal turmoil and a large amount of work. I haven't updated this blog much in the last few weeks, but I'll begin doing so from now on. I find I'm in a much more comfortable place now, with a future that is starting to look more relaxed than it has for a long time.

Movie night: Get Out

A lunatic, who lives in imaginary worlds, refuses to leave his padded cell, in spite of his shrink's misperceived attemps to get him out. It's in French, but the images are quite eloquent enough. Seven minutes, and the ending is a surprise.

Voting in the US for non-US citizens

So what's the point of this riff? The fact of the matter is that politics and issues have gone global, not just between politicians squabbling between one another, over tables at international gatherings, or with terrain and military forces as their playing pieces. Global politics is now the playing field of the ordinary Facebook or Twitter citizen.

Fun with paranoia

Of course, if no fear exists, it is easy enough to manufacture one that suits your specific purpose. In the words of advertising giant, David Ogilvy, “If you want to sell fire extinguishers, start a fire.” If you want to sell health bread, ask mothers if they are feeding their children well enough. If you want to sell bizarre Swedish ‘performance enhancers’, ask a man if he is well endowed. If you want to convince people to vote for you wherever ‘here’ is, ask your voters if they really trust a bunch of people half a world away.

Movie night: Bad Egg

A little bird topples an egg from a nest and unleashes a bit of a nightmare. An award-winning four minutes from Big Animation.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-02-08

Humanity's oldest known ancestor, mini flying Cthulhus, deadly dragons (with a gruesome picture) and bad news for African forest elephants.

The future is history

The importance of nostalgia lies in recognizing the value of what you once had. Today nostalgia is being replaced with a contempt of what has become obsolete. At least cars still have wheels, but how long will that last?

Movie night: Lutins

Have you ever felt that your home has a soul of its own? In this six minute production, a homeowner and a sprite battle it out for a home.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-02-01

Bigfoot in the swamps, the secretary who became a king, I'll never be Hemingway, love of my kindle, scorching weather and the scent of dead writers.

The demise of stamp collecting and other edifying stuff

Whatever happened to the business of hobbies? When last did you hear the word, and what are they nowadays? I mean, do you get stamp collectors now and, given the whole thing of e-mail, from where do they get their stamps?

Galileo Galilei and and how to find believers

What is interesting to note is that Galileo’s arguments and a couple of monumental blunders by over-zealous fanatics ensured that Galileo’s ideas would become a scientific milestone that interested everyone, rather than yet another inaccessible academic tome ignored by students.

Movie night: Deadtime Stories

A babybat has the power to see monsters. This was a pilot made for MTV, which never got legs, to the best of my knowledge. Just under eight minutes from Michael Dougherty.

No point in complaining...

Due to unusual circumstances, I don't have the brain for a Mindset Cafe this week, so here's a column for you.

Time management... how it manages me

How do I make my meetings on time? If someone doesn’t tell me to get a move on, I average all the clocks out and try to get there ten minutes before that.

Why blame Lance Armstrong? We should blame ourselves.

In terms of 'winning is everything', everyone who does not win becomes an 'also ran' or a 'loser'. If 'winning is everything' then 'how you played the game' is an artificial add-on at best. Lance Armstrong's doping showed the chasm between the two ideas.

Movie night: Behind Closed Doors

Closed doors keep in what is behind them, but they can also hide scary things. Just under six minutes from Button Films.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-01-18

Eldorado, free will is a myth, dark heroes, 'Alif the Unseen' and what is possibly the most mind-numbingly revolting medical transplant imaginable...

Travels in my head

In spite of the absence of bookshops, traveling in my head has major benefits. The tickets cost nothing, the flights are short and the service is great. More importantly, I can visit places that are unaffordable, impossible to reach or that just aren’t there. With a little bit of effort, I can even imagine smells and sounds. I haven’t yet got textures right.

Movie night: Father and Daughter

A daughter says goodbye to her father, but finds him again at the end of her life. I know, given masculine stereoptypes, that I'm not supposed to enjoy this sort of schmalz and should look probably look for something with horror or barbarians wielding swords, but I do, so the hell with that. Just under nine Oscar winning minutes from Michaël Dudok De Wit. Bonus: It's beautifully observed and executed.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-01-11

The climate apocalypse, urban heat, chocolate makes you clevererer, Benin celebrates voodoo day and return of the Black Smurf.

14 signs that you are peculiar on Peculiar People Day

To mark Peculiar People Day on 10 January 2013, use this list to flatter yourself. If you answer 'yes' to one or more of these things, pat yourself on the back for making life interesting for mundane proles.

The importance of the monster under the bed

There seem to be two accepted ways of dealing with children's exposure to violence. The first is to shelter them from it by insisting that they watch 'My Little Pony' until they are earning their own way. The second seems to be to just hand over the Rob Zombie version of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and let them get on with filling their receptive little minds with gore.

Movie night: The Old Lady and the Spider

An old lady befriends a spider in this American folktale, and in return for her kindness and friendship, the spider makes her a gift to rid a girl of her nightmares. Four-and-a-half minutes from Alexis de Jesus Costa.

Mindset Cafe: 2013-01-05

Something on spirituality, writing fairypunk, the best sci-fi of 2012, environmental resolutions and cool optical illusions.

New Year's resolutions and why I want the old year to continue

Imagine a very important business decision taken when the entire company, from the cleaner to the CEO, is totally twatted, completely confident that it can all be done, and the boardroom curtains are on fire. That could shape the future of the company, but probably not in the way that the Board of Directors expects.