Simian Substitute Site for March 2011: Monkey Truck

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR FEBRUARY 2011

Internet: Watch Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time. It's good for you, like mayonnaise.

Music: Oi! Lou! If you haven't already bought it yet, then Zang Tuum Tumb - The Art Of The 12" is a CD with your name all over it. It's the latest in a series of releases from Salvo Records, collecting the works of iconic 80s label ZTT: this double album pulls together a couple of dozen of their greatest extended remixes. Hearing so many of them back to back, it's surprising to discover that Trevor Horn and co gradually turned the twelve inch mix into a structure as rigid as sonata form - the version of Frankie's Rage Hard included here documents the unwritten rules to amusing effect. The CD features a nice mixture of welcome old favourites, plus lovely new discoveries like Act's Snobbery And Decay and Instinct's Sleepwalking. However, what with this, the reissue of Propaganda's A Secret Wish and the Claudia Brucken compilation Combined, it looks like Salvo have sold me twelve separate versions of Duel over the last six months.

Telly: Sky+ boxes and their ilk (I've got an ilk) are all well and good, but it's all too easy for them to become less of a time-shifting apparatus and more of a long-term storage facility. Case in point: when season two of Nurse Jackie started on BBC2 the other week, I suddenly realised that the first season had been sitting unwatched on my V+ for over a year. So I've been catching up with it long after everyone else. It's a curious little thing: a blackly comic hospital drama structured in half-hour chunks like a sitcom, with Edie Falco at the centre of a collection of characters who are all unsympathetic to one degree or another. (A predominantly female cast, too, which makes a nice change.) I'm still trying to work out my reaction to it bit by bit. It was certainly interesting to discover how appalled I was by the prospect that one episode would focus on Jackie's family life and not go near the hospital at all, and how relieved I was when that turned out not to be the case. I'm enjoying it generally - more than The Belated Birthday Girl is, anyway - but we're both curious to find out how they can sustain Jackie's disintegration as far as a third season (which starts on Showtime in the US at the end of this month).

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site for March 2011 is Monkey Truck. It's possible that you may be a newcomer to this site, perhaps one of the nine hundred people who came here yesterday off the back of that Guardian article. In which case, you may not be aware that since July 1998, I've been highlighting one monkey-related website a month, and that initially my reason for doing that was to provide some family-friendly content for any kids that accidentally came across the site. As the site's evolved over the years, I've deviated from that rule now and again, but every so often it's nice to get back to the feature's roots and find something that's specifically aimed at children.

This is a bit freaky, though. Written and illustrated by Michael Slack, Monkey Truck is a kiddy picture book about a helpful little jungle creature: a monkey who's been fused with a truck at the genetic level like Brundlefly. Publishers Macmillan have set up a promotional microsite for the book, including a few sample pages and a video trailer. Maybe it's just one of those things pitched in that curious area where kids find it charming and adults think it's terrifying. I dunno.

I do know that we had more useful comments here last month than we did in the previous six put together. Would it be cheeky of me to ask you all to keep that up? Ta.

Comments

[refuse vehicle hire]

Spank the monkey is a sitcom about how hard driving a truck and how it has been. It is made for truck drivers that compromises their life. It gains a good comments and reactions because of beautiful story behind the sitcom.