Simian Substitute Site for May 2009: ...Monkey Fighting Snakes...

I know, I know: after all the ballyhoo about getting the Prague Christmas writeup on the site in time for Easter Sunday, things went a little quiet around here. Blame it on a combination of a busy period at work, plus most of the computers in my house deciding to go wrong in different ways at the same time. That's why you got all of Spank Gold '92 in a big pileup over the last two days of April.

Hopefully, things should be slightly better organised for May. Spank Gold hits 1993, a year when I didn't go to Edinburgh. What I did instead should start giving you some clues about plans for later this year. You should also get a movie review, and hopefully one or two other bits and pieces. And I'll try to space them a little more evenly throughout the month, if I can.

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site for May 2009 requires a bit of setting up, so bear with me. Remember a movie from about three years ago called Snakes On A Plane? Everyone was talking about it for ages, and then when it came out everyone stopped talking about it pretty quickly, because it was rubbish. The warning signs were there all along: the film's publicity department couldn't be bothered putting together a decent trailer or maintaining a functional website, because they were expecting internet geeks to do all their work for them.

In the most notorious example of this, at one point in the movie Samuel L. Jackson says a very rude thing just because the internet geeks asked him to. Here's a clip of the very rude thing: it contains strong language from the outset.

Cut to April 2009, when Snakes On A Plane gets a television screening on FX. That's FX in the US, not in the UK: there's an important difference. FX UK gets to show cool stuff like The Wire and Dexter, because over here we don't really give a flip about swearing on TV. American FX, though, is basic cable, and as such is much more restricted in what they can broadcast. So when Snakes On A Plane aired on that channel, they had to use the edited TV version. Let's have a look at a clip from it.

Samuel L. Jackson really just said that. Rewatch it a couple of times to make sure if you like. And that's why the Simian Substitute Site for May 2009 comes via zazzle.com, where someone has knocked up a splendid t-shirt featuring the line in question. Obviously, this means that the shelf life of Snakes On A Plane has been unnecessarily extended by a few more weeks thanks to yet another tiresome internet meme: and my mentioning it here just contributes to the problem. But I'm too busy to pick anything else right now, so tough titties.

Everybody strap in: we're about to open some freakin' comments!