nick manho

things they did way back when

it used to be the fashion in the old days for english comedians to name themselves after lancashire towns:


eric morecambe


jimmy clitheroe


bing crosby


bert weedon and max jaffa


george formby


mickie fleetwood



they don't do it anymore.

trish from brighton, the design consultant, was obviously excited about yesterday's "dog power" idea. she sent me this mail:

MANWHODOESDOGS ON WHEELS

IN THE ENGLISH SEASIDE CITY OF BRIGHTON WE HAVE TAKEN UP THE BOX CAR.

BECAUSE OF ALL THE 4X4 SHORT PEOPLE DRIVING BIG CARS THREATNING NORMAL
DRIVERS IN AVERAGE VECHILES ,WE THE DESIGNERS HAVE TAKEN REVENGE.

MY FRENCH OLD BANGER HAS HAD CARDBOARD BOXES ADDED TO THE FRONT TOP AND
SIDE.SOME ROPE TO KEEP IT ALL IN PLACE,SOME DESIGNER PRODUCT BOXES
WASHINGING POWDER BOXES HAVE GREAT STRENGH AND POWERFUL GRAPHICS AND I CAN
TAKE ON THE BUSY CITY TRAFFIC.YOU SHOULD SEE THE OTHER VECHILES HORRIFIED BY
MY ARIEL/DAZ BOX APPROACH.SOMETIMES I ADD THE EXTRA BOX ABOVE THE DRIVERS
SEAT ON THE ROOF WITH FACE WITH WIG AND MOUSTACHE,SALVIDOR DALI IS A WINNER
BIN LADEN A BIT TRICKY AT TIMES,BUT BOTH HELP YOU TO GET AROUND THE RESORT
QUCIKLY.

MY NEXT PROJECT IS STRAP ON DESIGNER CLASSICS.A PRE CUT CLASSIC CAR WHICH
YOU CAN ATTACH TO YOUR CAR,A SHELL FOR THE TOP PART WITH ALL THE DETAIL BUT
NONE OF THE WORRY.

A FROG EYE SPRITE IS GOING TO BE A BIT TRICKY,BUT THOSE 50'S CLASSICS WITH
THE FINS WILL LOOK GREAT.

SOON THE CUT OUT CLASSSIC WILL BE IN PRODUCTION 'ADD ON A CLASSIC'


i didn't understand all the technical "design" language trish used but the "box car" she describes sounds like something worth debating. i got out my Autodesk 3-D software program ($15,765) and bodged up this moving visual image of what i believe trish has in mind:




this idea is pungent of "city life". there could be big bucks in it for everybody.

alternative energy themes: #35

dog power

today, as i was walking home and trying to avoid the dogshit everywhere, i was pondering the end of oil and the search for new fuel alternatives, and then it hit me, "hey", i thought, "it's right in front of our noses and we don't see it: dog power." what with all these stray dogs on the street, shitting on the pavements, why bother with electric cars and hydrogen engines? use the dogs.

i got home and opened up Autodesk - the same professional computer design program used by architects and engineers - and i roughed out a sketch (it's 3-D, if your computer is state of the art) of how i see the car of the future:



it will look very similar to today's car but in place of the wheels there will be 4 dogs. petrol stations will convert to selling dogs and you'd stop for a re-fit when you get a burst dog or one just dies of exhaustion.

there would be a special box in the boot of the car and you'd stop and say, "fill 'er up" in the same way you do today. the guy would open the boot and put in a "bucket of dogs":



these would be for emergencies when you find yourself stranded far from a "dog station".

i have little doubt that this "scheme" will change the face of travelling for the next couple of hundred years.

great italian actors: #12

this is alvaro vitali:



one of the great italian actors of the 20th century, he worked with federico fellini in the clowns, roma, and amarcord. he worked with roman polanski in what?. he worked with mario monicelli in romanzo popolare. he worked with dino risi in the original (and superior) scent of a woman. let's just say he worked with the greats.



with his expressive latin style he's made the girls swoon for over 35 years (he still does some tv work). the phrase "latin lover" was coined for him. check him out next time you rent a dvd and phone for a pizza.

By Glenn Cripes


When I was in grade school girls had cooties.

I first became aware of cooties around 3rd grade. Us boys played kickball on the playground, while the girls busied themselves with hopscotch and jumping rope, and we remained in separate camps. One time I wandered over to watch the girls play jump rope and listen to their jump rope rhymes. A bigger kid came up behind me and said 'Cripes, whatchoo doin? You gonna get cooties from them girls standing there like that.....what's wrong with you?'

Once the girls found out that they did indeed have cooties, they couldn't wait to give them to us. Cooties were transferred through a slap on the arm usually. If a girl tagged you, you had cooties, and they pretty much lasted the whole day. The only way to immunize one's self is to write CP (Cootie Protection) on your arm with a ball point pen. I actually did this up through 5th grade.

The fear of cooties disappeared with the onset of puberty of course. Raging hormones necessitated the commingling of the sexes. Boys and girls were forced to assimilate. Us guys did things unnatural to us like learn to dance, while the girls did their bit by pretending to laugh at our jokes and feigning a passing interest in things we liked.

Now that I'm older and married with grown children, I find that the males and females of my age group are once again free to revert to the natural order of things and hang out with our own kind. At our holiday get togethers the women huddle on their side of the room, free to discuss things that they care about (don't ask me what, I can't be bothered), while the fellows congregate elsewhere and do what we like to do (basically drinking). Once you get the sex thing out of the way, life reverts to the carefree ways of grade school. So we're back to hopscotch and kickball.

Which brings me to the Cripes Classic LP of the week, Blue by Joni Mitchell.

This record has cooties.

Blue is regarded as the flagship LP for the confessional singer-songwriter movement of the seventies. Thanks a lot Joni.

Joni takes us on a stream of consciousness holiday sleigh ride through her mind.....not a single thought goes unexpressed. Every parenthetical aside is chronicled in detail up and down the octaves. This stuff must have just flowed out of her. There are a few good lines to be found. I like the one about the frying pan seeming bigger when her guy is gone. This guy she goes on and on about...this 'old man', this 'mean old daddy'....I get the impression she's really hung up on this rascal. What do I learn from this? The way to a woman's heart is to treat her like crap. This guy she wants to 'drink a case of'....I just know that he's not the sensitive kind of guy who listens to Joni Mitchell records.

Joni Mitchell's music and lyrics wear a beret, carry a cigarette holder, and won't shut up or let you get a word in edgewise.

The last song on Blue, The Last Time I Saw Richard gives us a clue about this mean old singer in the park daddy--

Richard got married to a figure skater and her bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator, and now he drinks alone most nights with the TV on and all the house lights off, crying. "I'm gonna blow this damn candle out, I don't want nobody coming over to my table I got nothing to talk to anybody about" All good dreamers end this way, staring down bottles in dark cafes, dark cafes, only a phase before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away, only a phase, these dark cafe days.

Good for Richard. He no longer has to listen to Joni blathering on and on and on about herself.

Blue is Blood on the Tracks wearing a halter top sitting in a shallow reflecting pond.

got a couple of posts from fans yesterday. trish, from brighton wrote:

MANWHODYES AND WOMENALSO

THINK ABOUT IT THE BLOODY ELVIS BLACK HAIR,WHAT A PROBLEM AS YOU GET OLDER.

THIS ALL STARTS WITH NICK CAVES WIFE SUSIE REMINDING HIM TO 'DYE YOUR HAIR
NICK,YOU HAVE A LEONARD COHEN TRIBUTE CONCERT TOMORROW AND YOUR ABIT GREY
AROUND THE EDGE'

JULIE BURCHILL IN THE HAIR WHOLESALER TOPPING UP BOXES OF A JOB LOT OF BLACK
DYE,FANNY AND ARMPIT COVERAGE NEEDED FOR WOMEN.


THEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT BLACK HAIR,AND BEING FAMOUS POP STAR WITH JET BLACK
HAIR FOREVER TILL GREY DO US PART.

GARY GLITTER,WONDER WHAT THE FUCK THE PRISONS DYES LIKE 'HARMONY' special.
GARY NEWMAN,BET HIS EYEBROWS ARE A BIT DODGY
URI GELLER,VERY BLACK,WITH EXTRA ON EYEBROWS FOR EFFECT.
SEE IF YOUR BLOGGERS HAVE A FEW BLACKIES IN MIND DENNIS ROUSSOUS.I NEED THAT
BLACK HAIRDO LIST.

CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT THE QUEEN NOT FREEDIE MERCURY WOULD LOOK LIKE WITH
BLACK HAIR

THE CURE, SUSIE AND BANSHEES ,ADAM ANT,PLEASE ADD TO MY LIST
DON’T KNOW ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON?


turns out that trish is a fashion consultant (i hear you can't move in brighton for fashion consultants). i like her style. maybe i'll kick my legal team out of bed and see if we can get her signed up on a weekly basis. that would be cripes as music guru and trish from brighton as fashion consultant. wow! the blog is getting to look more like an ezine every week.

i also received this cryptic note from byshe in iowa (i guess based on yesterday's chill out feel to the blog):

you may want to check out the sand paintings Tibeten monks do

not a bad idea, byshe. i'll hit google later today.



tibetan sand thing update




i checked out the sand stuff. apparently tibetans get together and make pictures from different coloured grains of sand. it's a sort of himalayan jigsaw puzzle by the look of it. here's a site which explains it all. pretty cool, but if you lose a piece then forget it, you won't find it down the back of the sofa.


ok, that special moment has come around once again. time to leave the stage to "mister jizz", glenn "i threw it all away but somebody brought it back" cripes.

see you guys on saturday.

there's a short story by ray bradbury about a guy on holiday in the south of france who comes across picasso on the beach, late afternoon, alone, drawing in the sand with a stick. the guy goes crazy because he can't get cement or something organised quickly enough to save the drawings. the tide comes in and the designs are lost for ever.

you might laugh but picasso created many things which only lasted for the time it took him to draw them. check out this photo:




pablo did a similar trick with plates. he'd paint them and offer them to friends, but they had to promise to use them like normal plates and not hoard them for their artistic value. that's so cool. nobody is that cool anymore. that sort of cool has been dumbed down.


cool update

when you think about cool you think of bogart and george sanders and people like that, but they were actors, i never saw those guys being interviewed so i don't know how cool they were in real life. ok, people will tell you they were, but people are liars, right? you have to trust what you see with your own eyes.

i saw both these guys in long interviews and they are the two coolest guys i've ever seen:

if you think sculptors are bad you should check out war photographers. they are the worst. you always get that shot of the kid's shoes lying in the road, right? or the tearful woman in the foreground tastefully balancing some harrowing scene that you see all out of focus in the background. you've seen these shots so many times that they make no impression on you. if they put a digital camera on a soldier's helmet you'd get better photos.

the only good war photographer i ever saw was a guy called tim page. i looked for some of his stuff to post here but they don't have much at google. then i came across this site: get your tim page photos here.

you can read about tim page in michael herr's book, dispatches. one of the best books ever written about war.

the thing i like about page is that he makes his photos beautiful. however horrific the scene, the photo is still beautiful.

if you're making art you have to make it beautiful.

late night horse statue up-date

you'll probably think i had all this planned, but anyway... i've been wondering all day how to follow up the horse photo that i posted this morning. i guess you all realised it was from the parthenon (in athens, for any dorks who are browsing), and it represents the high point in western culture and everything, and that obviously it knocks all those modern things i posted yesterday into a cocked hat, and stuff.

ok, well here's what i came up with, and i only thought of this a few minutes ago (the "random" process is long and painful):




a few years ago they decided to put this statue in one of the nicest piazzas in the city where i live. yeah, you saw right, it's a horse sort of sprawled out and showing off its wedding tackle. tasteful.

anyway, a guy who works for the local council got pissed off because the statue is in a street where some saint or other passes on her procession round the city every year, so he - without official authorisation - welded a sheet of metal over the offending equine regalia.

he got caught, and it got into the national papers. they took the sheet of metal away and you can still see the horse in all its glory today.

most people laughed at the guy: what a wanker, what a religious idiot, etc. i had a laugh at him myself to tell you the truth. but thinking about it, the guy was right. when you look at the statue from the parthenon and you look at the metal horse with its balls akimbo you realise just how low we've sunk over the intervening 2,500 years. we really have hit rock bottom.

what the guy should have done was to cut off the horse's balls, carry them round to the artist's house and throw them through his front window (maybe along with some real horseshit he'd picked up en route).

we have to teach these art guys. we want nice things, not horses' bollocks. get it?

for any australian visitors

this is what it would have looked like in wagga wagga:

i didn't write that poem yesterday, by the way. it was by somebody called william butler yeats. irish guy. i went to google for a photo and look what i found:



they made this statue for him in his home town of sligo. you have to laugh, right? ok, there's a small possibility that yeats had heron legs and a body like a hot-air balloon, but the truth is that sculptors don't know shit about art.

take that michelangelo guy. have you seen his famous statue of david? check this out:



look at that right hand. like, is that in proportion? michelangelo has to be one of the most overrated artists of all times. the guy couldn't draw. remember eve? she was pretty hot, right? a babe, if i remember correctly. take a look at how mikey depicts her:





that's a bag of potatoes with tits stuck on, right? and he was a big earner back in the middle ages. not that they're any better today. i googled "adam and eve statues" and look at this one by another irish guy called albert o'giacometti (have you heard of him?):



nothing like them. and there's worse to come. i came across this one of the beatles:



it's in matthew street, liverpool, and it's supposed to be some sort of homage. apparently when it was unveiled by paul's brother michael, he said, "which one's our kid?".

you nailed it mike, it's just four blobs of metal.

is there a good sculpture anywhere out there?

on the trail of the lonesome pine...



don't worry, it's not porn, it's legit stuff. art. it's by a guy called hendrick von balen (yeah, i'd never heard of him either). it's a picture of paris with his golden apple. he's giving it to athene. there's all kinds of symbolism in the thing and i can't be bothered explaining it all at the moment (get thee to a google). the point is that this apple thing is pretty old. it pre-dates adam and eve (so, logically, it pre-dates god, too). the truth seems to be that the bible copied the story. paris gives the apple to athene and all hell breaks loose. sound familiar? there's no mention either of the chick with the big tits and scaley duck feet (maybe the bible invented that too?).

so, we're half way to the truth. we know why john and paul chose the apple for the beatles:



and we know why steve jobs chose it for the mac: he copied it from the beatles. in fact paul is pissed off with apple at the moment because they've started selling music and when paul gave his permission for jobs to use the symbol he stipulated that there would be no music competition from the company. so jobs has betrayed paul just like eve betrayed adam (or adam betrayed eve if you go with the duck-footed woman theory).



clever idea to have the bite out of the symbol, right? one bite and you get to have sex with a girl with big tits, webbed duck feet and a lizard tail, seems to be the subliminal message. no wonder mac has cornered only 1% of the computer market.



atlas carrying his giant apple.

of course andy got there first as usual:



and you know when you see this where the beatles stole the idea for the apple, right. as i noted in an earlier post, why an apple? why not a banana?

who knows, maybe the guy who wrote the greek myths ripped off the stories from an ancient andy warhol type guy who had paris giving athene a banana? take a look at that athene, she's a babe, right? do you see paris giving her an apple or giving her a banana?

yeah, me too.


romantic apple poem

i will find out where she has gone,
and kiss her lips and take her hands.
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon,
the golden apples of the sun.

by Glenn Cripes


Every decade has a day that everyone remembers. The sixties had JFK in Dallas, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and the moon landing, the seventies had the resignation of President Nixon and The Village People on Merv Griffin, and the eighties had Live Aid.


What an event! The whole world was watching this wonderful outpouring of kindness. It was a day for getting together with good friends and feeling good about ourselves.

High hopes were the order of the day. Remembering how George Harrison saved Bangla Desh we huddled around the TV anticipating what had to be the show of a lifetime.

'Please give generously'

We quickly learned to roll with the punches as The Who's broadcast was scuppered due to a BBC blown fuse. No problem--we got to see The Hooters, an up and coming Philadelphia band with hooks to spare. Who can forget Avtograf, the Soviet Union's donation to the show?

It was a cavalcade of stars--The Style Council, Status Quo, Adam Ant, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Rick Springfield, Howard Jones, REO Speedwagon, Paul Young, The Simple
Minds...top shelf all the way. Between set patter by the MTV's finest VJs ensured that there was never a dull moment. Making a beer run was risky business--who knew what one would miss?

The Led Zeppelin reunion was highly anticipated. We sat in awe as we watched Jimmy Page transform into Jackie Gleason before our eyes. We looked forward to making fun of Crosby, Stills, and Nash but the sight of David Crosby propped up with liver spots the size of quarters littering his bloated face cooled our chuckle lust. Those Ethiopian kids looked like the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 next to Cros.

No review of Live Aid would be complete without a mention of the triumphant performances by U2 and Queen. I don't really like those guys, so I'm not going to write about them. Live Aid MVP Phil Collins also deserves credit for his selfless determination to make sure England and America were both equally impressed with his ability to ride the Concorde.

Paul McCartney capped the British Live Aid broadcast with a tossed off version of Let It Be with the microphone off. British technological knowhow once again at work.

It was up to Bob Dylan to inject a bit of common sense into the proceedings by suggesting that maybe the American farmer could use a little bit of help since that's where the food that's gonna be dropped on those starving twats by airplanes is coming from.

The finale, We Are the World (written by child molester Michael Jackson and wife beater Lionel Ritchie) summed things up nicely. 'The world' can be a very superficial place and the collective 'we' proved it in spades.

I have yet to hear any thank you's from any Ethiopians. Have they even bothered to try and enterain us?

Assholes.

the apple in the garden caper

i got to thinking after writing that adam and eve thing, why an apple? why was it an apple eve gave to adam in all the books? why not a banana, or a kiwi?




i'm going out on the street again today and i'm not coming back till i have the answer.


sgt toysday checkin' inta da precinct

i'm back. i asked a lot of questions out there on the street to a lot of guys who just didn't want to talk. call it "omerta", call it "airhead reality", call it what you will, there's a lot of guys out there who wouldn't answer a question in exchange for a nude weekend with kate bush.

i've been trying to get to the bottom of this adam and the apple mystery and the only stuff i came up with today was metaphorical. one thing: don't ask chinese beggars about the bible, they'd rather spit in your face than answer. who knows, maybe "why was it an apple that god made eve give to adam?" means something different in their native tongue. anyway, give them a miss, that's my advice. you get more information from a dead cat.

i did get a couple of leads: the william tell thing, for example. they say he was on a paedophile rap, the kid was tied up alright, but there was no apple, the apple was just a metaphor.



and the devil is invoved just like in the pocklington scam. there's this place down in new zealand called "the devil's marbles" where you can see a split open apple as big as a bus. it's erotic, they reckon.





i'm getting there. this apple thing isn't going to beat me. oh, and by the way, when you're out on the street take some rubber boots with you. you can clean the dogshit off easier.



late night apple update

remember, it's the viscount of vavoom tomorrow, the king of the frisco jive-talk, glenn "who, me?" cripes.

i'll be back on saturday.

the curious tale of the diving dogs

there's an interesting story in today's manchester guardian:

Dogs defy Beachy Head fall

Press Association
Wednesday November 17, 2004
The Guardian

Two dogs survived an apparent 500ft (150 metre) fall over the edge of a cliff, coastguards said yesterday.

They were found virtually uninjured, swimming at the bottom of the notorious suicide point at Beachy Head, in Eastbourne, East Sussex, according to a Dover Coastguard spokesman.

Mossi, a five-year-old black labrador, and Jack, a two-year-old Lakeland terrier, disappeared from their home in the town the previous day.

A coastguard team climbed down the cliff at Cow Gap and rescued the animals.

Barry Woodward, of Dover Coastguard, said: "Someone phoned in to say a dog had gone over the cliff and could we help. We said if it's gone over the cliff it's dead.

"Then we got another call from someone who said he could see a dog swimming off Beachy Head and he looked very tired.



something fishy there, right? like, two dogs fall from beachy head and both of them survive? have you ever seen beachy head? take a look:








hard to believe, right? why weren't they dashed to death on the stones that lie under the cliff? or torn assunder by the raging waves? or blinded by the dazzling glare of the lighthouse? this story needs to be investigated further. my journalistic instincts tell me that this is some complex fraud to obtain money from the european community sea-fishing fund.




photograph of a dog

you can find some great stuff if all you have to do with your life is check out the internet. people are always telling me, "get a life, man", but what i'd like to know is what kind of life do most people have out on the street with all those dead cats and chinese beggars? give me the net anytime.

here's something i found recently which should interest the more intellectual reader (trish of brighton, to name but one). it's a site about the american civil war. doesn't sound like much, right? but it's full of the most amazing photos you could imagine. i've scaled these down for the blog but at the site they're very large and the definition is impressive.

it's like that sensurround thing they did in the 70s. you feel like you're actually there at bull run, or whatever.


in the first photo you can see how technological war always is. this is a general checking out the battle from a hot-air balloon:



here's a bunch of officers chillin' out between battles:



and here's general pinkerton, later to become famous
as a theatrical producer on broadway:



here's pinkerton again posing with some dork in a
stovepipe hat (there's always one, right?):



and finally, a nice photo of some guys sitting round a
table and whistling dixie. could be your grandpop, right?

feedback from readers

apart from the comments you can read on the blog, i've been getting emails which make some quite astute comments...

from nadia, 15, liverpool:

I've been reading your blog. Its quite funny. I'm not to sure about the reference to me tho. Nice pics though. Except the one of the train tradegdy. Did you get them off google. Oh post some pictures of luisgarcia on your blog coz hes gorgeous. But DON'T MENTION MY NAME.

Love Nad
XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx
ps I'm 15


and this one from maria concetta, sicily:

my mum is depressed. get her to write in your blog under a pseudonym


and above all, this one from trisha, brighton, england:

DEAR CHAIRMAN MANO

BLODDY BLOGGER BUGGER

SERIOUS SOLICITER SHERLOCK SLOTH SLUTH SLUT


GREAT BLOGGS NEED A JOB MATE?WILL HAVE TO EMAIL TO LOTS OF PEOPLE,AND YOU
CAN BECOME FAMOUS FOR BEING AN HONEST BLOGGER AS OPPPOSED TO ONE WHO IS
IMPRISONED IN USA{GUARDIAN G2 STOCKBROKER WITH COCKROACHS BOG BLOG,THEY
WERE FOUL.


HAVE DECIDED TO BECOME A PARROT[tarot] READING CLOWN.
HAVE DONE A COUPLE OF DRUGGY IRISH FIDDLE POET PARTIES AND ALLL WENT WELL.

WILL DO YOU A INTERNET PARROT READING NOW.



i guess in the blogging game you get the readers you deserve.



photo update

those readers didn't send me photos so i googled them and here they are:



nadia, liverpool



trish, brighton



concetta, sicily

if you don't believe me, googe image them yourself.