A lot of 1940s and 1950s Eastmancolor or Cinecolor cartoons have a disturbing edge to them on many levels. If you've ever seen the actual US "Let's all go to the lob-by/and buy ourselves some snacks!" pre-movie cartoons and imagery, you'll know that there's a degree of creepiness present in the naked capitalism if not the animation itself. Although the animation itself is creepy too, not helped by the fading and scratching on most remaining copies.
Someone has taken this a step further. Here's that animation but, as time passes, it gets more and more... wrong. Disturbingly wrong.
You may already I know about my love affair with Belgium. It's a great little country, industrious but quiet, progressive but traditional, exciting but dull. It's everything I need in a holiday destination. So saying that, we're going to Italy by train in September and missing out on Belgium entirely. Ah well.
Belgium loves trains. The federal and local governments have clearly lavished money on their system. It's almost entirely electrified and there's a lot of it - you're never more than 2km from a railway line. It's cheap, the trains are clean and huge and usually quite new (there's a few 1960s shockers on the more out-of-the-way stopping commuter services, but even these are fun. My friend Paul dubbed them "ratboxes" mind, when he lived there).
What people don't tend to know is that once the centrally-planned railway network in Belgium was complete, the plucky little Belgians decided to fill the rest of the limited space with trams. Not just local, city-wide trams like they have in Brussels and Manchester, oh no. They went the whole hog, building tram lines that ran from the railways stations to the tiny villages. Steam trams. Trams that took goods from Nowheresville to be sold in the metropolii. At its peak, and I'm now making this statistic up, you were never more than a metre from a tram track and frequently actually stood on one about to be senselessly mown down.
They're nearly all gone now. The system was effectively destroyed twice by German holidaymakers (Belgium: voted most popular holiday destination in Germany 1914-1918, 1940-1944) and the second go was fatal. Over the course of the next few decades, the tram lines were taken up, leaving wide cycle lanes at the side of even the most backy of backroads and surprisingly frequent bus services to tiny hamlets.
The remains of the nationwide system (the Vicinal or Buurtspoorwegen) are to be found in the cities - Brussels with STIB/MIVB's tram, Metro and pre-Metro services (don't ask); TEC's Charleroi pre-Metro and Han-sur-Lesse caves services; and De Lijn with trams in Ghent, Antwerp and all along the Belgian coast. That's the video above: the Kusttram, which runs along 68 bumpy kilometres from Adinkerke at the French border to the wonderfully named Knokke (pronounced 'knocker') near the Dutch border. Almost the entire journey is along the seafront, except for detours through the middle of any nearby towns.
I'm sure the ball and chain will correct me if I'm wrong, but in 3 or 4 trips I think we've now covered the entire route. It's a pretty route with an oddly mixed clientele of tourists doing the tram route as part of their itinerary and locals popping to the shops. And for €5 per person you can ride up and down it all day. Who could ask for anything more?
It's a weird do, having a faulty thyroid. I'm on 100mg of thyroxine a day, which keeps me going (without thyroxine, you slow to a stupid stop mentally, your eyebrows and random patches of hair fall out and you balloon in weight no matter what you do or don't eat) but artificial, fixed supplies of something my body should be naturally producing the odd squirt of now and again is clearly a poor compromise.
This means I have thyroid "highs" and thyroid "lows" - days or weeks when I have no energy and just want to sleep 24/7, unable to think in complete sentences and days or weeks when I'm on FIRE with energy and my brain is sparking like a Van der Graaff generator. Most of the time, it's in between - you know, normal and that.
What you don't get is any clue that you're about to become inert nor that you have a surfeit of ert around the corner. I go to bed 'normal' on night and wake up on fire in the morning. Or barely manage to wake up at all. And you don't know that you're not at 'normal' levels of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone because you're either suddenly to tired and thick to notice or you've got far too much to do to think about such things and you must get on and ooh look a butterfly I think I'll run after it.
I've been "normal" of late. Then, last night in bed, my brain resolutely refused to switch off. Oh, I slept, but I slept with a series of manically busy dreams, all of them detailed and important-feeling. Welcome to a couple of days of thyroid "high"! Yay! I'm going to lose weight no matter what I eat and irritate the ball and chain by being chirpy at odd hours and not shutting the fuck up and such. As a side benefit, I really, really get things done, especially things that interest my brain. The brain in question took time out of the busy night's dreaming last night to come up with this design. Isn't it a hoot? And I actually dreamed the bugger! I'm still a talentless freak when it comes to coding HTML and CSS (as Bods will wearily agree, although he'll benefit as I should finally be able to get off my arse and do some Transdiffusion work) but when my brain is on fire in this way, I'm a miracle of dexterity at The Gimp.
What exactly a 1940s-ish design has to do with a blog that consists of YouTube videos of trains, political rants and lots of unnecessary swearing isn't clear, but I'm not going to let that bother me and neither should you. Welcome to my new-look blog. I'm now going to eat a pizza the size of a manhole cover and yet lose half a stone. I wonder if your evening will be similar?