Giraffes don't* advertise

* To be completely fair, this giraffe does advertise.

Disaster Film Olympiad: Outbreak

If there's been an outbreak, it is probably monkeys. It usually is. They're dirty. They wee all over their hands and then touch all the bananas in the bowl, not just the ones they were going to eat, and then you've got AIDS and Ebola all in your mouth in one go.

Zaire, 1967: a devastating virus with Ebola-like symptoms called Motaba has ravaged the camp in the jungle where the US army - who were propping up the CIA-sponsored coup d'etat of General Mobutu - are based. It's bad stuff, this Motaba virus, one of those nearly always lethal viral haemmorhagic fever things that makes you unwelcome company at all but the most unruly church fetes. In fact, the mortality rate and its infectiousness are so high that the American government enact Operation Clean Sweep, which sees the afflicted area cleansed by the dropping of a massive incendiary device. Which is what happens when you don't have socialised healthcare.

In spite of the rigour and unimpeachable moral standards of their decision, by 1995 Motaba is rearing its ugly head again, making every fart a mortal risk. Unfortunately, greed and military cover-ups abound, resulting in a monkey who is a carrier of the virus being shipped to the United States for use in animal testing, which is wrong on any number of levels.

In fact, it turns out that karma is a stone cold bitch. The monkey busily infects everyone who crosses her path, probably via the old wee banana shim-sham. By the time she is smuggled out of the Biotech lab by Patrick Dempsey, to be sold as a pet on the black market in Cedar Creek, California, there's a whole world of hurt brewing across the continental United States. Not least for the kind of selfless, hazmat-suited, wrecklessly brave infectious disease specialists whose job it is to sort out this kind of mess. People like Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo, a recently divorced couple who until this point thought that their biggest problem was who got custody of their dogs. With the military high-ups planning a dastardly repeat of Operation Clean Sweep on home ground, our heroes (by this stage in various stages of infectiousness, naturally) face a race against time to identify, find and capture Patient Zero, get hold of their juices and fashion an antidote. Preferably one that can be administered with a hosepipe. Plot twist: Patient Zero is, as you may already know, a monkey. Who lives in a tree.

Outbreak is the kind of film that you can put together like a jigsaw. Everything you are expecting to happen happens and roughly in that order. There are moustache-twirlingly evil career military men who view humanity as nothing but a series of statistics and calculations of collateral damage. There are good hearted scientists doing battle with a lethal yet invisible foe. There's panic, there is death, pestilence and gruesome chapped lip make-up. Kevin Spacey - then at the height of the part of his movie career where he'd die in every film in which he appeared - also duly obliges, falling victim to the kind of torn hazmat suit japes in the laboratory which would probably have been reasonably funny had the stakes not been quite so high.

Oddly, it is no less of a film for it. The thrills and spills (mostly bodily fluids in the latter case) are ramped up at a pleasing pace, while the fundamental truth that the ins and outs of immunology is probably a little complicated and dry a subject for a Hollywood blockbuster are adroitly sidestepped with a neat blend of expositional graphics and SHOUTING. It's a familiar old warm jumper of a film, one which rewards repeat viewings.

All of this and the monkey survives. Kevin Spacey should perhaps have had a word with their agent. Outbreak gets an all-your-organs-are-liquifying-and-pouring-out-of-every-hole SEVEN out of 10 disaster points.

Pictures for sale

It's that time again, when Spring is starting to spring and I look around my cave of bewilderment and pencil shavings and see artistic output strewn everywhere. Maybe you or someone you know might be able to give any of these pictures a home?

ADELAIDE TERRACE, HOVE. 28 x 38cm, acrylic on 300gsm watercolour paper. WAS £120, now £80.

CHIN UP, LOVE - IT'S THE PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION. 9.5 x 28cm, acrylic on 300gsm watercolour paper.
WAS £50, now £30.

NIKI LAUDA. 21 x 27cm, acrylic on textured white card. WAS £70, now £40.

STREET FIGHTER 2: REUNION EDITION. 38 x 28cm; pen, ink and watercolour on 300gsm watercolour paper.
WAS £120, now £80.

SWAN RUGBY. 10 x 15cm; pen, ink and marker on 220gsm cartridge paper. WAS £25, now £10.

WESTERN. 21 x 30cm; pen, ink, watercolour and pencil on white card. WAS £35, now £20.

ZINEDINE ZIDANE. 21 x 29cm; acrylic on reclaimed book page. WAS £70, now £40.

If any of the above have caught your attention, you can email me or contact me via Twitter or Facebook. Alternatively, you can do the whole thing via Paypal, although do remember to leave a note stating which picture or pictures you would like.

Twenty five dogs

My history of doing prints has been a slew of disappointment and frustration, I'll be honest with you. There is little more dispiriting than watching a pile of identical artworks gathering dust sadly in the corner of your room.

So I have come up with a brilliant solution. What if everybody who wanted to buy a print told me ahead of time, so that I know how many to get? I know. Pretty smart. I suppose if I was really on top of things, I'd start getting deposits in as well. But if there is one thing about me, it is that I am a hugely credulous optimist at heart, so hopefully (hopefully) I won't have to do this.

I understand that this is perhaps not the kind of positivity and salesmanship that one would normally associate with this kind of pitch. However, as well as being a hugely credulous optimist, I am also a honest to the point of harmfulness. I anticipate that I will soon win numerous awards for my business acumen.

Click here for bigger

But anyway, yes... I've made a print! Twenty five dog breeds! How about that? It will be A3 size (29.7 x 42cm) and printed on 170gsm paper.  The price is £20, plus £5 for postage and packing (or £10 for postage and packing if you are outside of the UK). If you would like to pre-order one, you can either email me or contact me via Facebook. I can't absolutely guarantee that they will be ready in time for Christmas, but if you particularly want it for then do let me know and I will try and accommodate.

PLUS! A bonus for all my long-suffering fans: I have made all the line art (plus some extra stuff that didn't make the cut) available as six A4-sized pages that you can download, print out and colour in yourself. They are available HERE. For free! FREE!

Elephants and testicles

I think that it is now universally accepted that cancer can do one, so it's always good to see anyone stepping up to facilitate this process. The doing of one. CheckOneTwo are raising awareness of a cancer which predominantly strikes men. Women may well also be affected by testicular cancer but largely their own testicles remain unfettered.

Testicular cancer is the most likely cancer to afflict young adult men but it is also one of the most curable and survivable. The five year survival rate of sufferers in the UK is over 97%. As with all cancers, to give yourself the best chance it is best to catch it early. That's where CheckOneTwo's #FEELINGNUTS campaign comes in.

So, the next time your partner, spouse or mother tell you to stop playing with your goolies "because we're in the Harvester", stand up and be proud. For you are taking care of business and responsibility for your own health. For once, wrangling your knackers is the sensible, grown-up thing to do. As it ever was.

For more information on CheckOneTwo's #FEELINGNUTS campaign, you can visit their website, follow them on Twitter or Facebook, or watch their YouTube channel.

Blue-arsed monkey

Hello. Updates have been sporadic of frequency and patchy of quality of late, which is largely because I have been visited by a particularly vicious black dog. I know, boo-fucking-hoo. Anyway, here's something to just keep this place ticking over. It's the only thing I drew yesterday afternoon that didn't end up in the bin, and so comes with that guarantee of satisfaction at least.

An elephant eating a bun

Dog problems

I've become a dog owner by mistake. I'm looking after my girlfriend's dog for two-and-a-half weeks. He is a very nice dog and very well behaved. Naturally, then, he's driving me nuts. I've never had a pet dog before, so all of this is something of a voyage of discovery for me, although I was already aware of the fact that I was nuts.

I always thought that the whole concept of there being dog people and cat people was probably an over-simplification. But actually, it isn't. The demands of a pet dog and a pet cat are such polar opposites that it's surprising that there are any similarities at all. There are, of course. Both dogs and cats are cute and loveable and like a fuss and a play. Both dogs and cats eat food that stinks out of tin cans. And both of them watch you eat your food with an intensity that makes it clear that they kind of wish they didn't. However, after a week of looking after a mutt I now believe that people who prefer dogs to cats must have a chromosome missing.

A dog, yesterday

It is a truism emblazoned on a million bumper stickers that a dog has a master while a cat has a servant, and I think this is the root cause of the difficulties that I'm experiencing. I'm tending to deal with this canine interloper as if it is some kind of firefighting operation. My key concerns are to make sure he gets out to do his excretions and therefore doesn't park anything in the house, and that he doesn't bark because people as highly-strung as I am don't take very kindly to such malarky. It's fairly easy to see why I don't feel that I'm getting very much out of this experience other than a headache. Instead of enjoying it I am largely treating him as if scientists had finally managed to graft working legs onto a piping bag filled with turds.

Although prepared for a few dog things, I'd not factored in quite how much talking in the street dog ownership entails. I spend half of the day in a dialogue with this dog, for at least an hour of which I am in public. They like it, need it and want it. I speak to cats, too, but I've never found it met with anything other than thinly-veiled contempt. I kind of miss that.

And there's the rub: ultimately, cats hate you. They want you to feed them and then leave them be, which is a mission statement not dissimilar to my own. Dogs love you unconditionally all day long, and that freaks me out. But though I am a grouchy bastard with a heart of stone, I am also a creature of logic and reason and logic and reason tell me that this unconditional love means that the dog has no intention of ruining my day. He'd not even have dreamt of it, nor could he even conceive of a way he might go about doing so (dogs are thick). Therefore, if he has ruined my day it can only because I have allowed him to. So the onus is on him to adapt to a new pace of day-to-day life, and on me to be less of a fanny.

There is no prize for guessing which of these is likely to happen first, by the way. Shut up.

Watching horror with a dog

This week I have begun a two-and-a-half week stint looking after my girlfriend's dog. This dog is a dog and therefore he is quite difficult to explain things to, or to reason with. As a result, he has been somewhat clingy. He is currently sitting on my leg. When he isn't he dogs my footsteps. Probably because, as I have mentioned previously, he is a dog.

The problem is, it's making my life rather difficult as a number of my best laid plans have had to be abandoned. All I have to show for the last two days is a blog post about Jack the Ripper films which only 42 people have so far read and a cold. Also, my leg smells a bit like dog. Today, then, I thought I'd make a virtue of this situation and at least get another post out of it. This will represent a 200% increase in my productivity since Wednesday and is a step in the right direction. A dog.

My plan is, I'm going to watch three British horror films from the 1960s and 1970s, which I have never seen before, with the dog and see what happens. I am very aware that it is this kind of hard-hitting journalism that keeps you all coming back.

LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF (1975)

Much like this dog, this film has a good pedigree: directed by Freddie Francis, starring Peter Cushing and written by Anthony Hinds, it's a Hammer Horror Holy Trinity. The plot summary on Wikipedia, too, is irresistible:

"A boy that has been raised by wolves is displayed as a circus freak. Then he grows up, becomes a zookeeper and falls in love with a prostitute. His jealousy brings out his wolf side, changing him into a werewolf so that he can kill her clients."

But this film is a risk. This dog does not take kindly to other furry things. On Wednesday night he spacked out at the sight of a camel on QI. And that was a camel. It is very possibly a portent of worse things to come, much like letting a man raised by wolves be the keeper at your zoo.

I needn't have worried, though. The dog had no interest in this film whatsoever. He was more taken by the soluble paracetamol that I was taking for a sinus headache, which some genius had made aniseed flavour in order to send dogs wild with jealous yearning. But I quite liked the film. I liked the magnificently smarmy filthy old head zookeeper (played by Ron Moody) and I particularly enjoyed the innovative WEREWOLF VISION. Otherwise known as sticking a red filter over the camera. I enjoyed, too, Peter Cushing's role as the forensic pathologist. In his determination to look past the easy solutions in order to find the truth, his character put me in mind of my beloved Quincy - if you can imagine that instead of fucking a string of airline stewardesses on a boat in Los Angeles, Quincy hung around 19th Century Parisian knocking shops looking for werewolves.

The werewolf: responsible for more Paris deaths than emphysema and syphilis combined

Where it perhaps fell down is that I suspect it aims at making a commentary on the destructiveness of male sexual jealousy. But it's hard to take things much past face value, having already suspended enough disbelief to buy into the main protagonist being a wolf boy found and displayed by circus Gypsies, eventually becoming urbane and socialised enough to get a job at a Paris zoo, albeit Paris' mankiest, most sordid, Albert Steptoe zoo ever. The overall effect, then, is merely a tale of the damaging effect of lycanthropy on the rumpy-pumpy sector of the free market economy, normally an area of sustained growth.

The dog, meanwhile, just wanted to play with his ball. It was a handy reminder to carry a rubber ball with you at all time, with one eye to being able to fend off any werewolf attacks as and when they occur.

FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1972)

At this stage I took the dog for a walk but, not finding any werewolves, it was time for another film. This time, Judy Gleeson plays a woman who gets a job working at a boarding school, only to start to be terrorised by a one-armed man. This film was immediately more up the dog's street and he happily barked along with the opening title sequence, which featured a schoolboy choir singing.

The dog was not particularly interested in this perilous scenario, however. He went to sleep once and then barked at a carpet van.  Maybe it was the effect of the walk. I suggest it's more likely to be the effect of the film, which drags on a bit. When there's a one-armed maniac on the loose, the simple fact of the matter is I want him to be more prevalent in the overall narrative of the film.

Peter Cushing in Fear in the Night: having a variety of problems

Nevertheless, it did have Peter Cushing in it, who couldn't have been unwatchable if he tried. If there were only one reason why I find British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s so compelling (there isn't), it would be because the likelihood of an appearance by Peter Cushing is very high. The dog, seemingly, is less impressed by such things and went off into the kitchen to find something to sniff.

THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR (1968)

Handsome young men everywhere are being sucked dry of their juices by a cryptozoological demon which has overtones of case of The Owlman of Mawnan, only less shit. Peter Cushing is again in attendance, making everyone wonder if perhaps it's more than a coincidence that all this death, terror and mutilation should follow him about. And whilst it may not have captured the imagination of the dog, any film whose opening titles read "Guest star: Roy Hudd" is a force to be reckoned with.

The Blood Beast Terror, hushed up by the mainstream press

The actual explanation for all of these goings on is more straightforward. Etymologist Dr. Mallinger's daughter Claire turns into a blood-sucking weremoth during a full moon and preys on the village males, whilst her father tries to genetically engineer her a mate. As any father would, and does. It's something of a far-fetched premise and I suspect a lot of it was designed merely with one eye on creating set pieces filled with gore and monsters. Although this may be a cynical view. This film could have more to say than The Battleship Potemkin. Which would make this film better than The Battleship Potemkin because The Battleship Potemkin has ZERO weremoths. Most things do. Weremoths don't actually exist. If they did, lightbulb sales would plummet as fast as blackout curtain sales would soar. Weremoths. Ultimately, this film isn't better than The Battleship Potemkin, which I think says it all. The dog didn't like it much, either.

So, as with yesterday, what have we learned? Nothing. Except that werewolves are better than weremoths and Joan Collins is a cow.

Animal mathematics

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Goose news

Horrific as this may seem, it's Christmas Day in two months. This is likely to be causing you all profound grief especially if you, like me, hate the world and want it to suffer.

However! This year I've decided to stop being a part of the problem and instead become part of the solution. I am doing this via the means of my very special and uniquely offensive Christmas card range, now available on my Etsy store.

I am mindful of the fact that some of you may not want to go via Etsy to acquire these precious, precious things, though. For one thing, you have to create an account to buy shit, which would certainly put ME off. Although, of course, I do already have an Etsy account, so it isn't a problem.

Long story short, if you would like to buy any cards but would prefer to do so more directly by (almost) speaking to an (almost) real person, you can email me instead. This goes for all the offers you see on the Etsy store now or in the future. There are currently 68 cards left available from this particular print run: should these sell out I will be ordering more, including two designs not currently available. Specifically, these two here:

Turkey

Wink wonk

If you would like to have cards of this design, I'm afraid you will first have to put your hand in your pocket - or spread the word to friends, relatives, co-workers and enemies - to start to make a big enough dent in the stockpile to get my slothful, lackadaisical arse back off down The Print Wagon.

Also available from today, exclusive to the blog - this bona fide piece of genuine zoological art, depicting a rhinole.

It is A6 postcard size (175mm x 125mm), acrylic on card-mounted canvas, all for the low low price of £40 (inclusive of postage and packing within the UK). Email me at the same address if you are interested or just wish more animals had holes in.

Sad Clown Etsy Store | Sad Clown Facebook Page | Sad Clown Email

Bayeuxsaurus

Christmas cards now available from THIS location: http://www.etsy.com/shop/SadClownIllustration

It's a rhinole

If you'd like to ruin someone's Christmas, how about finding something to send them from my Etsy store? http://www.etsy.com/shop/SadClownIllustration

Home decor for beginners

Osaurus

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You can order my Christmas cards here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/SadClownIllustration

Animal alphabet: the conclusionz

I have now finished the animal alphabet, the pioneering (it wasn't) PRINT THEM OUT AND COLOUR THEM IN IF YOU LIKE online repository of A-Z animal pictures. The sound you can hear is the people who live next door whooping.

Anyway, the final letter in any (proper) alphabet is Z and this presents something of a difficulty. As we all know, there is only one animal that begins with the letter Z and this animal is resolutely black and white, a problem in a colouring-in project.

However, the keen-eyed among you will notice that I reached a solution of some considerable cunning and elegance, proving once and for all that I am cleverer than you are.

If you'd like to download and print out an A4-sized version of this picture, even just for the sake of completism, you can do so by clicking HERE. To see the whole lot and use it to spell out rude words, click HERE.

I don't know what I am going to do with the animal alphabet next. Needless to say these pages will keep you updated as to my inevitable, doomed, attempt to make some money out of it. This will be as exciting for you as it will be financially ruinous for me, so it's something to look forward to.

Y is the question

Today's penultimate animal in the animal alphabet begins, surprising though this may seem, with the letter Y.

If you would like to download an A4-sized version to print out and make a paper aeroplane from, you can do so HERE.

Meanwhile on the ostrich farm

X is for African ground squirrel

The letter X presents something of a problem for any animal alphabetiser and it has been tackled in several different ways. Two snakes crossed over. An Ibex or some other animal with the letter X in its name flamboyantly stretched to purpose. The list goes on.

I was somewhat handicapped in this by the fact that I am a colossal pedant, so deeply autistic and damaged that I was determined to find an animal that begins with the letter X, no matter how arcane or stupid it may be. And I found one, thanks to genotypes and Latin, which is a great language let's face it. And Xerus is also the name of a spaceship. So space squirrels ahoy, get your crayons out.

To download an A4-sized printable version to take a shit on, you can click HERE.

W for

It must come as a great relief to you all that the Animal Alphabet is nearly at its end. Today is the letter W and one of my favourite animals of all.

If you would like an A4-size version of this to print out, colour in and burn, you can find one HERE. And I've even now spelt it all correctly, too.