This ain't toy shopping, this is genocide!

[alexsarll]

I'd always assumed that jigsaws were the sort of thing which, should I have reason to purchase one, would be really easy to find. Surely museum and gallery shops have them, or those London souvenir shops? Well, no, apparently they don't. Even the specialist games shop was short on the required 500-piece variety. So I ended up in Hamleys.
Yes, Hamleys on December 21st.
Hence the title.

The Crimea aren't at all what I expected. Please don't get me wrong - they're very good. But I'd expected something darker, something closer to the various doomed should-have-beens we've loved over the years. Instead, they're incredibyl accessible, songs I could imagine played over the sports highlights, or sung by drunken huddles come closing time - and not in a bad way. I suspect they'd have made a great deal more sense the night before, in their Wembley support slot, than upstairs at the Enterprise; they sound like a band where even the intimate shows for the hardcore fans should be at the Forum.
edit:(Though it would definitely have helped if they hadn't covered Roxy Music's worst song, and been supported by a man who reminded me of Chris T-T were he drained of every last ounce of talent, and then had his most trite political songs fed through a xOne Billion Triteness Magnifier)

"Work experience 'boosts earnings'" - or, to rephrase, 'Employers tell survey that they rather like having unpaid skivvies'.

Do you have any idea how much I want this single?

Since when was Patrick Suskind's Perfume in any sense 'unfilmable'? Yes, it has in it passages of descriptive prose which cannot be rendered directly to the screen - but surely even Dan Brown has a couple of those? Indeed, Perfume pretty much *is* a film treatment - a single chapter of Huysmans' stunning Against Nature ripped off (the central metaphor of scent-as-jewel, which must be set with lesser scents/jewels, is repeated pretty much verbatim), simplified, then expanded to novel length by being strung around a fairly generic plot.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'd always assumed that jigsaws were the sort of thing which, should I have reason to purchase one, would be really easy to find.

Too late now to be of any use this year, but for future reference WHSmiths is usually reasonably good for jigsaws and games...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you; I should probably have thought of that. Though the nearest one of any size would have required me to at least briefly join Oxford Street, thereby losing any SAN savings derived from Hamleys avoidance.

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

That single sounds a must-hear. Whether it will be any good, I don't know, but you've got to hand it to them for the idea at least.

I presume they're now in hiding, of course.

Jigsaws? You want pound stores. Or M&S, of course.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Ah, but do you do 500-piece ones? That was the real sticking point in the places which had any.

I should really have asked for jigsaw advice on here beforehand - but like I say, I didn't expect it would be a problem!

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

There's a winter-themed 500 piece one and a 1000 piece on the M&S website, although it says the former is unavailable, whatever that means. Such is the internet.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Maybe there's been a sudden run on 500s. It would explain why the only ones left in the games shop were quite so thoroughly ugly.

[peacockpunk.livejournal.com]

I'm searching for it now on slsk, but no joy as yet. Yeah, man! Need it.

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

You can add it to your list of Barley-tastic singles of the year! ;)

[intermix.livejournal.com]

Do you know when Perfume is being released?

I'm excited, second Alany-woo film of the year.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yes, I imagined that might dispose you well towards it, regardless of any other merits or flaws it might possess. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I think - does the article not say?

[intermix.livejournal.com]

December 26th. Typical.

Ah well, maybe they'll be showing it on the aeroplane.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Boo!

[intermix.livejournal.com]

Or maybe they won't?

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Yay!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

You're off before my birthday, then? Sob!

[ksta.livejournal.com]

hmm, I wonder if the reviewer is the bloke of that name, with whom I work.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

One easy way to find out!

[alexdecampi.livejournal.com]

The Crimea were downright terrible when Kunta Kinte supported them at the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes - muddy, fumbly and utterly forgettable. (But then again, when your support band is basically Adam Ant-meets-The Clash, you are perhaps setting yourself a difficult task).

On jigsaw puzzles, from THE CINCINNATI KID:

SHOOTER (Karl Malden) (As Melba uses a nail file to re-shape a jigsaw puzzle piece): Look, you're just cheating yourself, don't you understand? You'll be the loser, no one else but yourself. You've ruined the puzzle now. That doesn't go in there.

MELBA (Anne Margaret) (Bangs her fist on the puzzle piece): It does now.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

beingjdc's table has for some time been the bearer of the outline of a jigsaw puzzle where the edges simply cannot ever connect. He has checked and re-checked that they are all in correctly, and they are; it's simply impossible to finish it using our geometry. There may be a metaphor in that, who can say?

Good to see you both last night, albeit very briefly, and congratulations again on those splendid masks.

[alexdecampi.livejournal.com]

"it's simply impossible to finish it using our geometry"

A non-Euclidean jigsaw? Well, I suppose it does get boring down there waiting for the End Times. Maybe even Cthulhu needs puzzles.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

One of these days I must try and get said jigsaw to witch-haunted Crouch End, and see if it works there.