Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind #8

A Very Naughty Puppy. A Heart-Warming Film. A Great Aussie Sitcom. Sci-fi. Noise.

Mar 20, 2025

Welcome to this week’s Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind from an unnamed puppy from an old cartoon in the New Yorker magazine, a publication legendary for its wistful, knowing and occasionally (as above) downright disturbing humour, usually dog-related.

I think about this cartoon a lot.

What on earth did he do to justify starvation as a punishment? Must have been pretty bad. I’m hoping that ten seconds after this scene his Mummy relents and feeds him steak or, I dunno, biscuits, whatever you give dogs, I don’t own one.

It isn’t chocolate, I know that. The poor things can’t eat chocolate or they will die, as is my understanding. Or is that cats?1

Some folks say dogs are more intelligent than cats, because you can’t train a cat.

I say cats are more intelligent than dogs, for precisely the same reason. You wouldn’t get a cat wasting its time learning tricks to please a human. We exist to serve them, whereas it’s the other way round with dogs.

So, this week’s newsletter includes a noisy record from the noughties, a superb Aussie sitcom, a heartwarming film by a Farrelly brother and a book by a great SF author who should be a lot better-known than he is.

This week I have been mostly…

Watching…

Upper Middle Bogan (2013 - 2016)

Posh to the left of me, bogans to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with booze.

After watching the excellent Australian sit-rom-com Colin From Accounts on the BBC, it was a joy to discover this on Netflix (it’s also on ITVX.com for free btw)

If you’re not aware of this, neither were me and the missus a month ago, but this has become our go-to comedy watch, temporarily replacing Brooklyn Nine-Nine in our affections.

Captain Holt was both mad AND disappointed.

“I am both mad AND disappointed.”

Sorry, sir. But this show is so good…

Middle-class doctor Bess (Annie Maynard, who played the vet in Colin From Accounts) finds out she is adopted after her mum (superbly played by stage actor Robyn Nevin) is admitted to the hospital where she works and her blood tests indicate they are not related.

It turns out that Bess was given up for adoption by a working-class couple, and that she also has two sisters, a brother and a nephew.

The show follows Bess as she meets her blood family, who run a drag racing team in the outer suburbs.

The laughs - and there are plenty - come from the personalities of the characters rather than going for the obvious class gags all the time although clearly there are exceptions.

Watch the preview that comes up when you select the show on Netflix and I promise you’ll be hooked.

Champions (2023) - Dir. Bobby Farrelly

Coach Marcus with half the team.

A modern-day sports underdog story. Bobby Farrelly (Dumb And Dumber) directs Woody Harrelson, who plays washed-up basketball coach Marcus Marakovich who rear-ends a cop car and is sentenced to community service coaching a team with learning disabilities.

Just as Nick Love’s Marching Powder (link) is a more mature film than that director’s The Football Factory, Bobby Farrelly’s Champions shows similarities with but also developments from the earlier film he made with his brother Peter There’s Something About Mary.

Caitlyn Olson plays the “Mary” role as team member Johnny’s sister and Marcus’s love interest Alex, and she’s a revelation, a million miles away from the level of non-acting required of her “Sweet Dee” character on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

This is a film with a big heart. It manages to be sensitive without being sentimental and screamingly funny without even once punching down. It’s the abled characters, and by implication, we the audience, who are the butt here.

Judge - I Will offer you 90 days’ community service, coaching adults with intellectual disabilities at The Friends Association in Capitol East.
Marcus - Your Honour, when you say “intellectual disabilities”, what are we talking about here? Are we talking retar…
Attorney McGurk - Oh…
Marcus (reading the room) - ded Americans? Because, you know, it seems kind of redundant that, you know, in a sense, Americans, we ARE re…
…
Marcus - If I can’t say the ‘R’ word, what do I call them?
Judge - May I suggest you call them by their names?
Marcus - That’s very astute, Your Honour.

The characters of the team members are all drawn properly and non-stereotypically, without exception. A few even have proper asshole tendencies.

Put in some gags among the team that demonstrate they are portrayed as real people

Reading…

Planesrunner - Ian Macdonald (2011-2013)

There is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one of billions of parallel earths.

Since I first read his magnificent and original Mars-set debut Desolation Road, Ian Mcdonald has been one of my favourite sci-fi writers.

He grew up in Northern Ireland in a house built in the garden of what used to be C.S. Lewis’s childhood home.

Possibly partially built from the wood of one of the original building’s wardrobes, who can say?

He has a refreshing aversion towards the many fictional sci-fi futures depicting “the future as the white man’s world writ large among the stars” and his work covers a wide variety of cultures - Indian, Brazilian, South African - and in the case of the Planesrunner books, the multicultural Britain of the 00s and its equivalents on a number of parallel worlds. This allows room to add steampunk and pirates to the basic sci-fi palette.

Our hero, Everett Singh, is walking with his Dad down a central London street with a black car pulls up and his father is kidnapped. Everett is later sent a mysterious email which draws him into worlds of intrigue which he then has to navigate to find his Dad - but of course it isn’t as simple as that because Everett has been targetted for a reason.

The parallel-words trope, often either under-used to make a couple of points (Robert Heinlein’s The Number Of The Beast) or over-used, creating a universe so complicated you need to take notes, has seldom been explored better in my experience.

The author’s attention to detail and command of prose make all his books special, and his YA mode is no exception.

Really enjoying it so far but if you want an intro to what the man’s about, the aforementioned Desolation Road is indubitably the place to start.

Combining hard sci-fi with magic realism, it tells the tale of the birth and development of a frontier town in the Martian desert some time in the future.

It has been described as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but on Mars, which I think suits it nicely. I need to read it again soon.

Listening To…

Travels With Myself And Another - Future Of The Left (2009)

Been a fan of the violently noisy Future Of The Left since the late 00s. This was the album of theirs that first blew my socks off and continues to do so to this day.

I hadn’t played it for a while and I was intrigued to know if it still packed the same punch. After all, noisy music doesn’t always date well.

How wrong can you be? This is still mind-blowing. And the lyrics hit as hard as the seemingly unstoppably chaotic but actually incredibly well-drilled racket that the three of ‘em make. And the lyrics are way funnier than I remember.

There’s almost a Half Man Half Biscuit feel to songs like You Need Satan More Than He Needs You, which seems to be about reluctant middle-class devil-worshippers perhaps regretting their minimalist sartorial choices owing to the British climate:

Goddamn its gonna rain
I only brought my socks
The night may hide my shame
But shame won’t dry my balls

Or try Stand By Your Manatee:

This one time I was running through the fields
When I came across a dead guy with a letter in his hand
So I scanned it and though the grammar was OK
There was such a lack of purpose that it was difficult to care
But anyway, hidden in the mess of letters lies the awful truth
Yeah, that Emma’s Mum and Dad use plastic forks

Have a listen on Spotify:

Travels With Myself And Another - Future Of The Left

Six Degrees News

Also, as of this week I’m giving Six Degrees To Kevin a bit of a break, mainly because I am starting to run out of Kevins. May bring it back on a monthly basis, we’ll see how it goes.

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