Pratt Porch Project – Days 15, 16

Once again something unexpected came up. But this one wasn’t optional. A lot of dry rot was found under the deck. Fortunately, none of it had reached into the sill of the foundation. Another bad bit of work by whomever did the original construction — there was no flashing! So all of day 15 was spent repairing that and installing flashing. The end result is in the left picture. Day 16 was the completion of the blue board and installation of the outside door. The wall sleeve for the A/C was installed before the blue board went up, but I neglected to mention it.

Pratt Porch Project - Day 15Pratt Porch Project - Day 16Pratt Porch Project - Day 16

HELPed Back

The second Beatles movie, HELP!, first mentioned here nearly a year ago, is being re-re-released on DVD. The Beatles were terrorized by a fanatical eastern religion that was out for blood! I love this movie, it always makes me laugh, and I think it HELPed prime my generation for enjoying Monty Python.

John Lennon knocked HELP!, but it had much more influence on the 60’s as an era than A Hard Day’s Night. And, in fact, I think it had influence on the Beatles themselves, as seen in this video I spliced together.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/HELP.flv 400 300]

“I can say no more” has been a running joke between me and D. F. Rogers for decades. Did you notice three things seen for the first time that would be seen again later?

  1. John’s wire-rim glasses
  2. Indian instruments
  3. The boys in Sgt. Pepper-ish garb

George Martin is also not particularly fond of HELP! because he didn’t score the incidental music. This is what Martin had to say about it in his book, All You Need Is Ears:

On the Beatle front, the next film was Help!, and that was done without my help! I produced all the Beatles recordings for it, of course, and they certainly thought I was going to do the film music; but since the director was Dick Lester again, it was hardly surprising that, to quote Sam Goldwyn, I was included out. The music was done by Ken Thorne, a buddy of Lester’s.

Petula Clark: Driven By Emotion, Driven Off The Web

A regular comment writer on Petula Clark: Driven By Emotion was Davie, who has written to me with an explanation of the blog’s sudden disappearance.

The blogger was getting a lot of hate mail and abuse from some nutty people. However, the final straw came when a copy of the blog was put up with a slightly different title, and it contained an upload of Petula’s new album.

Making some obscure pieces of Pet’s enormous catalogue available was a fantastic service to her fans. The blogger would NEVER, however, have put out an entire album, and most definitely, not her latest one. That would be seen to interfere with Petula’s career.

Clearly the person with a grudge against this blog, albeit that he is a complete ass hole, can find his way round a computer.

Presumably our blogger was standing on someone’s toes, costing them money perhaps, and the saboteur, went to work to end it all.

The blogger knows who the culprit is.

It’s sad because we have lost a really good, interesting blog, created with love and attention to detail. I think all of us who enjoyed the blog would want to thank the blogger, for putting up with all the shit that they did… and hope that they will come back at some stage in the future.

Incidentally, this information was posted on the blog on Saturday. Then it closed down.

I’ve had the honour to meet Petula on quite a few occasions over the years. My impression of her is that she would HATE people who did this kind of thing.

But then, as the saboteur is almost certainly mentally deranged… why would he care about that?

Thanks very much for the information, Davie. I wish I hadn’t missed that last post on the blog. Yes, thanks go to the blogger and let’s hope for a return of the blog. I’ll carry on with my occasional Pet posts. By the way, Goodbye Mr. Chips with Pet is on Turner Classic Movies TODAY at 11 ET.