Geek salad hop frog

It's that time of the week again where time sort of slows down. Saturday morning lies between the working week and the weekend's errands and chores. A sort of blank space where I can gather my thoughts. All I need to go with it is coffee.

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I have just read a short story by John Carpenter no less. It's called Harlequin and concerns a man staring out to sea. I don't want to spoil it for you in case you read it. Suffice to say it appealed to me and the title helped too. I love Harlequins, pierrots and minstrels, but particularly the chevroned Harlequin.

It reminds me of a beautiful track by one of my favourite Seventies bands, PFM, called Harlequins. It has the opening line " Harlequin came at night, bowing to ghosts of freedom square". The song builds to a crescendo of sound in which a million harlequins fill the square. A gorgeous medieval image, which has stayed with me. Listen to the track if you can on You Tube.

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Hop Frog is another character I really like. It was created by Edgar Allen Poe. Hop's finest hour was in the Roger Cormen masterpiece, Masque of the Red Death, in which the diminutive jester Hop Toad is superbly played by Skip Martin. Not for the faint hearted, it is a tale of love, wrath and grisly revenge in the court of the King or in the case of the film, Prince Prospero.

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Another powerful but rather small hero of mine is the microscopic Tardigrade. Also known as the moss piglet, this creature is so special it can withstand freezing in space. Capable of not eating for thirty years, they can dry out and reform years later. I imagine them surviving a nuclear winter and beginning a post-apocalyptic resurgence. The name Tardigrade means slow stepper, a state from which we could all learn something perhaps.

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Horns was on TV the other night. I bought the book as a gift for my brother a few years back without reading it myself, a risky strategy for gift giving. However I thought I'd watch the movie and I was not displeased. Daniel Radcliffe nee Potter gives probably my favourite of his performances as a tormented young man who develops horns on his head giving him an unusual satanic appearance.

It is his power, however, that drives the film, the power to make people say and do what they really want to, in many cases dark deeds and fell thoughts. The town in which they live is riven with secrets and lies and the horned man roots them all out. It reminded me of Donnie Darko for some reason, a lonely youth battling a hostile adult world where darkness and deception lie just below the thin crust of family life.

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Well, that's probably enough geek salad this morning. My coffee's run out too so till next Saturday morning.....