That bastard was a saint. A SAINT. The bastard.

So I may have mentioned the Catholicism here on the blog - it's a real and unironic part of my life even if I'm as ambivalent towards the church as any sensible person should be when it comes to monolithic, rich, powerful right-wing organisations run by people who put themselves above the laws of man as a matter of principle - and I may have mentioned the living in Northern Ireland thing, and the working class thing - although I gather there are technically now seven rather than three classes, so just whatever the class is where you can't afford university but you can afford to eat regularly, that's what we were - so I guess it is probably expected that a Northern Irish working class Catholic might have an opinion on the passing of Margaret Thatcher: I think she is burning in Hell right now, and that's a hard thing to celebrate.  Unless you're a Klingon or something, and even then I'm pretty sure you're only happy if someone is burning in Hell if you're drinking wine from the skull you've just hacked off their body with one of those crazy boomerangs Klingons have after a lengthy fight where you've been shouting "kerplunk" at them because they don't just go around celebrating when they hear any old baggage has dropped off the perch otherwise the whole planet would be legless all the time.  Don't get me wrong, they're clearly not a people who have their shit together, but that is not how they roll.
So no, I am not particularly happy that an old woman is dead now as some seem to be - street parties in West Belfast, apparantly - as it basically just means more prayers than usual for her poor damned soul

I was pretty relieved when I found out it was a naked Asian guy and not an angry trout

Took a chunk of my evening to read John Allison's lovely Bad Machinery: The Case of the Team Spirit collection of the first story arc from the spin off of the spin off from his first - largely unreadable - webcomic outing Bobbins, and I highly recommend it if you're looking for a good all-ages mystery.

ONWARD - to the micro brew pizzatorium!

I started into watching Space Precinct again last week after giving up on the dreadfully dull Walking Dead halfway through an episode - to narrow it down for you, it was that one where they just talked in circles at each other for what felt like forever in between some splatter effects.  The last of the big model-based sci-fi shows, I honestly struggle to see why Space Precinct is considered any worse than UFO or Space 1999 bar the lack of any really innovative plots, and it's arguably helped by the actor-y bits being stuffed with bad writing that is indistinguishable from latter-day parody of sci-fi and/or cop shows to the point I think a tight edit of the average episode could enable it to masquerade as a half hour comedy, or Charlie Brooker could just bung his name on it as is and people would be none the wiser.  Until they started laughing.
Once you settle into the flow of things, though, there's the odd decent episode in there even if a lot of it is completely barmy and illogical in that way Gerry Anderson's live action shows usually were, but it sticks to it's schtick of cop show tropes in a sci-fi setting doggedly even when it makes no internal sense: like the two-part finale being a traditional "end of the world" sci-fi plot the lead coppers have to foil and their captain says "Do you buy this man's story about intergalactic conspiracies?" and their captain is a effin' alien with eyes on stalks and he's looking out the window of his office in a space station at the time - I mean, I'm not reading this scene wrong, am I?  In this context this character cannot simply say "intergalactic conspiracy" as a baseline mark for something only a nutjob would believe, because from his point of view as an alien who is also a policeman who works in space, he is just talking about organised crime.
Some of the high-concept episodes are remarkably well-paced, and the viewer reaches the same conclusion at the same time as the characters do, despite being aware of sci-fi cliche in a way the characters are not - in the time travel episode, for instance, there's no hint of time travel or even time travel tropes until relatively late in the episode, and the episode with a cloning subplot has a similar eureka moment for genre-savvy viewer and stock genre character even if it does leave you with an unfortunate moment of fridge logic when you cotton that three babies are murdered during the course of the story and no-one seems to care.
I do love the theme - maybe not as iconic as UFO or Space 1999's opening fanfares, but it's hysterical and screeching when sci-fi tv themes at the time - and since - were ponderous orchestral arrangements, and married to the patented Century 21 THIS EPISODE montage of all the action scenes from the upcoming slice of retro-futurist cheese in the title credits that is so damn good that it was one of many things Battlestar Galactica stole in its entirety without an ounce of shame - and who can blame them?

I graduated MIT and then had a horrible accident and lost half my brain

Following up on my laying out why Star Trek V was better than the JJ Abrams reboot, I will now explain why Breaking Bad is not as good as 90210.  Actually, no, I won't do that because it is patently not true, but I would totally give that bullshit a run for its money if I ever tried to pull it on you.  I'd probably point to stuff like BB's meticulous season arcs and say this wasn't as fun as the approach 90210's writers take as they are now clearly writing stuff that is both based on whatever they last saw on the internet and just to amuse themselves, with the actors having gotten to the point where I think they're drawing on their own reaction to how stupid they think the scripts are to motivate their characters - there's this bit where someone finds out that their mate has been banging the stepmum of the guy who hates him at college and his reaction is pure "THERE ARE 30 MILLION PEOPLE IN LOS ANGELES THAT COINCIDENCE IS COMPLETELY LUDICROUS" but his dialogue is just "whoa.  What you think about those waves, brah?"

But to be clear, don't watch 90210.  Watch Breaking Bad.

They make shoes for your penis THEY'RE CALLED PANTS

Stoopid anatomoo.
I should really stop watching Star Trek V: The Final Frontier one of these days, but I am old enough now to just come out and admit it is probably one of my favorites of the Treks, as despite the short-changing we get on the FX and the nonsensical and mostly-improvised finale cobbled together from what Shatner could afford to shoot from his own pocket after the studio pulled the plug on the original ending, the script keeps things light, Kirk makes dark allusions about knowing he'll die alone that sound ominous but it's basically him saying as long as his bros have his back he knows he's invincible, and there's a pleasant subtext about the nature of faith in a secular society as an article of singular and internal council rather than something maintained via committee.  I mention all this to assure you that I am thus very serious when I say it is a better film than the JJ Abrams reboot, which I have watched and enjoyed several times since it came out but can say with absolute certainty that for me it is so dumb it is actually bad for you.  Nero wants revenge for his dead wife, Kirk wants revenge for his dead dad, Spock wants revenge for his dead mum, Captain Archer from Enterprise wants revenge for his dead dog, some security dumbass wants revenge for Kirk grabbing Uhura's boobies during a barfight, Scotty takes a ride in a waterslide, no-one mentions that the Enterprise has concrete floors and is clearly a sewage plant, etc...  No aspirations in the story, no allegory, no lofty ambitions or even basic compassion, just some thugs bro-fisting as they blow stuff up and fix everything with the power of coincidence.  Next to that, Kirk having another fistfight with another God after the Enterprise is taken over again is small beer.

Either he's the Lord Of Winterfell or he's working with a real piece of pipe

I had a dry St Pat's, thangew very much, which took some especial doing seeing as it coincided with the christening of one of my ever-growing army of nieces, but I managed to keep sober and limited myself to a few ginger ales like a gay fellow might enjoy of a warm summer evening.
Hopefully back to some semblance of a work schedule in the next few days, in the meantime, have some vintage Sabbath, you deserve it:

I like to hang out with dudes - they say what they mean, they like to have fun, and in a pinch they have a penis

Been watching: Walt Disney's Marvel's Joss Whedon's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Avengers Assemble for the first time since the 3d outing in the cinema, and while some of the 3d stuff now comes across as superfluous - though still visually impressive - like the Black Widow/Hulk running into the screen, arrow POVs or tracking shots of NYC in the finale, it's interesting to note the change in the traditional Hollywood action movie narrative by shifting the usual slow middle hour of the film to the front to BOLLOCKS I AM ONLY NOW GETTING THAT MARK RUFFALO LOOKS LIKE BILL BIXBY IN INCREDIBLE HULK escalate from sci-fi-tinged espionage in the Nick Fury scenes to the more outre superheroic visuals as each character is (re)introduced old-school Marvel style before the big fights kick in.
The NYC invasion obviously dominates the film more than the easy-money throwdowns like Thor/Iron Man, Thor/Hulk or Arrow Man/Token Woman, but for some reason the stupid stuff everyone else was complaining about at the time only struck me during this rewatch, like the film really trying far too hard to make Arrow Man seem as interesting as the others (although fair play I think this was a problem first time around for me, too, exacerbated by his thin character and unconvincing face turn at the end of the second act) by giving him context-specific arrows that do literally anything te scene requires, or that the alien army's plan of invasion isn't to establish a beach-head but to run at everything in multiple directions shooting and screaming and all doing their own thing while their enemies do the sensible stuff like team up and establish a perimeter to create a bottleneck/killzone at the single extremely narrow and vulnerable point of entry to US airspace, or that the nuke for some reason waits until it hits something before detonating like it was a rocket rather than a nuclear weapon, and the aliens deus ex off-switch was old hat in 90s cartoons but I suppose it puts a definite endpoint on the invasion if they all drop dead rather than have to be mopped up by the national guard for weeks afterwards in various hidey-holes.  Well, I enjoyed or didn't notice all that stupidity first time around, anyway, so my takeaway here is that I need to buy a 3d tv as clearly 3d stops me noticing/caring about these things.
"The Avengers are dangerous!" epilogues were admittedly a bit self-parodic, but it was nice to see the post-credits stuff finally, and my biggest gripe is really that the film doesn't have much of a definitive soundtrack theme for the team.  Not essential, but would've been nice if they went to the trouble of a bit of aural branding.