Point Of Sale + Lookalikes - my February Facebook noodlings

Jan 31: Guess who’s got himself a new hi tech point of sale unit then? Unveiled at the Illustrators Showcase in Islington, and now used at all comicons. I have two ipads . One lasts about four hours, the other about two.

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Feb 1: It says in this article that "blue ink allows people to transfer signatures easily to other items which is why they (celebrities) only sign with black ink"

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't that bollocks? As someone who scans artwork as part of his job, aren't blue and black ink equally easy to scan, copy and print?

I can see an argument for using silver pens, which are indeed harder to scan. But blue?

Explain and show evidence, or this is just nonsense.

And today I discover that Cristin Milioti (from The Penguin and Black Mirror) and Oona Chaplin (from Game Of Thrones and Black Mirror) are two different people.

Which actors have you thought were the same people for the last year or more?

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Feb 2: Try as I might I cannot get my head around how tariffs work. The explainers in the papers still don’t make it clear to my tiny mind.

So: Country 1 has a beef with Country 2, so it adds a tax that makes Country 2’s products more expensive. A tax that is paid by Country 1’s buyers.

How does that hurt Country 2?

Country 2 are still being paid the same for their products. And Country 1’s citizens have just had things from Country 2 made more expensive. The government of Country 1 gets a bit of money, but do the people of Country 1 suddenly stop importing the stuff they need?

In the case of the USA vs Canada and Mexico, the USA have just made things like essential car parts cost more. And they’re threatening to do the same to China’s computer chips. Doesn’t that just harm the US motor and computer industries.

And if the countries being tariffed respond by suspending supplies, surely only the country imposing the tariffs loses.

Can anyone explain why this is a supposedly strong thing to do? It seems literally self-harming.

Here’s a fun job I just did, cartoons of comedians for the poster for York Comedy Festival. And now I’m kicking myself that I didn’t push for a gig at the festival itself, but you can see from the line up that it’s more of an “Acts off the Telly” event than the Socks usually play.

Here, as a treat, is their finished poster and my original art, which had a very different shaped York Minster. I prefer theirs.

Watched a movie called Ad Vitam last night. Was surprised to find it was French. Why? Cos I thought the guy in the Netflix holding image was the guy out of Enchanted.

Uncle Kev and his ongoing inability to tell faces apart.

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Feb 3: Re Emilia Perez

Isn’t this weird? When I watched Emilia Perez I posted that I’d loved it and that it would win Oscars. Now everything I read about it is negative. Never mind the star and her career-cancelling tweets, the rest of it crumbles on examination.

A French film with apparently dodgy Mexican accents and a tone deaf representation of both Mexico and trans, with music people hate and which seems shoehorned in, a lead actor who’s suddenly not the lead by the end, and so many plot holes.

So why did I tip it, instantly, as an Oscar winner, and why does the Academy agree? I think there’s one big reason: pretentiousness.

You see I’m a pretentious wannabe film-maker who looks at a movie like this and says “I wish I’d done that.” And I think the Academy is made up of a lot of people like that. We see a bit of novelty, something superficial that shakes up the genre slightly and we think it’s great.

We see a movie all done in one take (Birdman) or all in black and white (The Artist, Schindlers List) or with a new take on the musical (La La Land) and we nominate it for an Oscar. We do the same with stunt casting (eg kids) and box ticking (eg that year after #OscarsSoWhite, or like Kate Winslet says in Extras “that’s how you get an Oscar, do a disability”)

So Emilia Perez shakes things up with its mock light opera and its fourth wall breaking, and its apparent diverse representation (though the poor of Mexico are apparently more realistically depicted in Encanto!) and it gets a raft of noms.

I mean I’ll tell you how pretentious I am. I was watching this movie thinking “yes, that’s what I was trying to do” in my graphic novel of Hamlet which I did as a musical set in London in 1977. I really do imagine my comic books as movies. How pathetic is that?

Anyhoo it won’t be winning all the Oscars, so panic over.

Every now and again I feel like I’m cheating when I pose for a photo to draw from for my comic strips, thinking that ‘real’ artists can do it out of their heads. Now I find Neal Adams took reference photos too and suddenly I’m validated.

Oh god, why has it taken me ten years of owning an iPhone and forty five years of owning cassette cases to realise you could do this?

I love this. A comedian (look close, you’ll recognise them) making a great but parochial joke about being someone from the small town suburbs pretending to be big and famous. At the time of this album they couldn’t realistically hope to be anything more than a big name in their home town, which is why the joke works.

I’m off to Google whether they ever ended up playing the ‘real’ Carnegie Hall.

PS I have since found out this album is from ten years later than I first thought (1972) so this act was already quite famous outside of their home country. I cannot find whether they ever played Carnegie Hall NY, but they did do a run at the Booth Theatre on Broadway.

In today’s instalment of Kev F Can’t Tell People Apart, I am reminded that Harriet Sansom Harris and Catherine O’Hara are different people.

That Hollywood just keeps getting bigger.

Look kids, How to Draw Elon Musk.

Also works for Kanye West.

Mentioned in the Rest Is Entertainment podcast just now, there’s a range of Neil Gaiman fragrances. Or rather there was.

The manufacturer, Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, has taken all the bottles of smellies down from their website, and is no doubt busy relabelling them (maybe they’re now Essence of Kanye, or Offence by Gino D’Accampo).

So sadly if you wanted to own the great smell of The Master (a mix of outdoor bathtub and non disclosure agreement, I imagine) you’re out of luck.

Uncle Kev Can’t Tell People Apart episode 312: Kev learns that actor Julia Stiles and pop singer Mandy Moore are not the same person.

It’s not just me, is it? Who can’t you tell apart?

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Feb 15: Anyone watching What If season 3? Having loved the first season, I’m finding its now really badly written.

The animation is great still, but it seems all the effort’s gone into that, with the scripts really feeling substandard. The Howard The Duck was the poorest, with the characters being all wrong and the dialogue worse than any comic I can remember. Am I being over critical?

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Feb 28: Anyone else having trouble getting paid by eBay? I sold three pieces of artwork ten days ago. Usually you’d be paid instantly. I am still waiting for this money despite the clients having paid ten days ago and all confirming they received the art over a week ago.

Just me?

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Feb 28: “I have in my hand a piece of paper”.

Is Keir Starmer a Neville Chamberlain tribute act?

Oh look. The home of "free speech" bans you if you use a certain word on Twitter. Can you guess what that word is?

NB: I've been off Twitter for a while now, but I tried this experiment cos someone said it was a thing. It is. Simply type the word cisgender and your post gets instantly banned.

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Feb 17: Janice Forsyth steps down from Radio Scotland because she has alzheimers.

Dreadful news about Janice Forsyth. An early fan of the Socks, she had us on her show a few times. Wishing her well.

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Feb 19: So my question is: how do Britain’s right wingers who’ve been putting up Ukrainian refugees feel about this?

When the war in Ukraine started there were a lot of yellow and blue flags flying alongside the George crosses and poppies of the Lest We Forget brigade. But a few people of that ilk are also big Trump lovers.

So how do Trump loving Ukraine supporters square this with Trump being a Russia-loving Ukraine-betrayer?

And when it comes to going to war (don’t worry kids, there’s not going to be a war) where Europe and Ukraine are on one side and the USA and Russia are on the other (relax children, this would never happen) which side will your European-hating Brexiteers actually want to fight on?

Maybe we’ll keep it simple and just have our own Brit-centric civil war and leave the rest of the world to fight itself. (Calm yourselves little ones, this sort of thing has never happened)

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Might place a second bet on when Ukrainian refugees get classified as illegal immigrants. Quick tip: if you've got one living with you, maybe start clearing the loft for them to hide in. Just a lesson from history.

Continuing Uncle Kev's "thinking people look vaguely like other people", we just started watching White Lotus season 1 and I thought Connie Britton was Sharon Horgan.

Naturally when I google them, no two photos make them look in the slightest bit similar. Still, there it is.

My Books And Where To Find Them...

Richard  The Third Paperback • signed	Findlay  Macbeth Paperback • signed	Prince of  Denmark Street Paperback • signed	Midsummer Night's  Dream Team Paperback • signed
Shakespeare Omnibus Paperback • signed	Comic Tales From The Bible Paperback • signed	Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories Paperback • signed	Space Elain Paperback • signed
Book Of Esther	Who Notes	Sweet Smell Of Sockcess	Attack Of The Sausages
My 1975 Diary Calendar	Colouring Books Paperback • signed	Scottish Falsetto Socks Annual	Tales Of Nambygate

Colouring Books: Doctors Who, Hollywood Legends, Punk, Cult TV, Eurovision Vol 1, Eurovision Vol 2, Eurovision Best Of British & Irish, 1960s Pop, 1970s Pop, 1980s Pop,  1990s Pop, 2020s Pop, Bowie, Scottish Pop, Royalty, Rom Coms