JULY 29

I'D LIKE to be able to report that I behaved bravely throughout this morning's earthquake - how I manfully grabbed the cats, my Mini collection, our priceless Wal-Mart novelty mugs, chucked them in the back of the Mini and drove to high ground (stopping only to rescue a bus full of 18-year-old girls as Ev may not have survived and I might have to repopulate Southern California) to wait out the inevitable world-shattering cataclysm Hollywood has taught me to expect.

But in reality I was lying in bed scratching my nuts and debating whether to get up when the cats legged it under the bed and the room started shaking. "Stone me," I thought, "this doesn't half feel like an earthquake. Either that or the fat lezzers upstairs are going at it again." The shocks only lasted about five seconds so I got up, made a cuppa and phoned Ev. She did survive and assured me that she was OK. I turned on the telly, watched the "news" to find out what happened, and now I have to get to work. See how exciting Southern California living really is?

JULY 26

I SPOTTED this beautiful chrome-laden, razor-finned monster when we were heading to lunch this afternoon. It's a Plymouth and at first I thought it was a 1958 Fury, the car that stars in Stephen King's Christine. But from what I can find on the Interwebs it's not a '58 - the fins on those were even bigger. If anyone does know what model year it is, please drop me a line. Ta. UPDATE: It's a 1959. Thanks Jon!

Ah, lunch. We went to La Creperie, a restaurant we discovered a couple of years ago. It's a place where you can eat authentic French crêpes prepared by authentic Mexican chefs. But the food is fantastic - I always get the curry crêpe as it's my personal favourite and tides me over between visits to the Indian place over the road.

We (there were four of us) placed our order with the waitress, who seemed pretty distracted. Our drinks turned up and we waited for our food. And waited. And waited. After 40 minutes our waitress comes over and informs us that she'd forgotten to put our order in. And I skipped beans on toast for this?

Finally the crêpes arrive and as usual they are excellent. The waitress brings us a free dessert to make up for the overdue food and when we get the bill we see she's knocked the drinks off. She's saved us about $16 so what do we do? We give twelve of it back as the tip.

One of the downsides to eating out in America is tipping. As far as I can tell, you can be as crap a waiter/waitress as you want and you'll still be tipped.

Now I don't mind tipping as a rule but I do have a couple of things against it. Firstly, I don't see why I should be required to subsidise the staff's crappy wages. Secondly, I certainly don't see why I should be expected to tip either the full amount (which is calculated by doubling the sales tax) or more. I have tipped more than necessary before in return for outstanding service, but as ninety percent of the time the service is perfectly adequate why can't I just chuck them a couple of dollars instead of the more usual five or six?

I think the problem is that tipping's changed from being a gesture of appreciation for good service and has become a reflex action when paying the bill. In other words, the wait staff don't have to do anything special to get some free money. Ev's given five or six dollar tips to people who've done the absolute minimum required of them when I would have left a dollar or two. On one occasion I took the tip back because I thought the service was bloody awful; on another I took it back because I was buggered if I was going to give someone free cash for pouring me a Coke that seemed to be 99% water and 1% syrup. We even have friends who were shouted at in the street after they refused to tip. Our experience at La Creperie was to me a classic example when we should have told the waitress not to worry, smiled politely, drunk our free drinks and eaten our free dessert and then left her a dollar. Not twelve.

JULY 25

SECOND-HAND bookshops are my favourite places on the planet. Well, any bookstore is but recently I've begun to go off places like Borders, Waterstones or Barnes and Noble. They're too brightly lit, the staff are too helpful and you can't move for displays advertising the latest self-help book or the spotty teenagers sitting in the aisles. The kids' sections are more like a Disney store than a bookshop. And worst of all they just don't smell right. Compared to them, second-hand stores are paradise.

Wandering around a decent-size used-book store is like taking a walk through what I'd like to live in. Yards and yards of shelves are crammed to bursting with a jumbled mass of books. There are creased covers and broken spines (white strips showing where the pages were bent back too far, something I'm guilty of) as far as the eye can see. Some areas are almost colour-coded by the spines on the shelves; mostly black and red in the horror section, rows of Penguin classics in stripes of bright orange or faded yellow, the pinks of the romance section... at least someone told me they were pink. (Honest). And then there's the different editions of the same novels - first edition, movie tie-in, reissue, anniversary edition, each with its own style of cover art. And then there's the joy of looking for a particular author and cleaning up - like the time I found virtually all of Tom Sharpe's books for two quid each in Hay on Wye - which always makes for happy day. Or the flipside of failing to find anything at all and heading home in dismay.

The main advantage of buying second-hand is the price. Although the days of clearing out the local Oxfam of Jack Higgins or John Le Carré for 20p a book have long gone it's still a damn sight cheaper than buying new. Even Amazon has dropped off my radar after it standardized postage for books at $3.99 a shot. Three ninety-nine? I could get another book for that! Besides, the stock of a second-hand store changes more often than a high street shop. I can pretty much tell you the contents of all the shelves in our local Barnes and Noble which is why I stopped going there.

But there's more to second-hand books than just the covers and the cheap prices. Each one of the books sitting on the shelves was once new. Someone bought it, made time to read it, made space for it on their own bookshelf, then sold or donated it. Each has its own history and sometimes you're lucky enough to find a clue to its past; a train ticket stuck between pages, a name written on the inside of the cover or on a bookplate, notes in the margins, doodles on the end pages or half-filled subscription cards for Time or National Geographic.

And then there's the smell. Regular bookstores just don't smell right. There's no mustiness in the air, no scent of old bookbinding glue and cardboard. I don't want to smell Seattle's Best in Borders or Starbucks in Barnes and Noble. As far as I'm concerned nothing beats the mildewy smell of a well-used book. I'm currently reading a 26-year-old second-hand edition of The Thing and I'm regularly sticking my face in the pages and inhaling deeply. Some people like the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee or expensive cigars but give me a 1982 novelization of a John Carpenter horror movie and I'm snorting like a Hollywood executive with a big pile of cocaine.

JULY 17

ALTHOUGH I loathe Disney and everything they stand for there is one movie they made that I love. OK, two if you count The Rescuers. But the one I'm talking about is their 1979 entry into (and exit from) sci-fi: The Black Hole. I've wanted to see it again for a while and on the way home tonight I thought "bugger it" and picked up the DVD in Barnes & Noble for $15.

I can remember seeing The Black Hole in the cinema with my dad when I was seven. And when I was seven years old I had the critical faculties of, well, a seven-year-old. In other words, if it had lasers and robots and was set in space I'd love it. The Black Hole has all these so it shot straight to the top of my favourites list. But now I'm 36 would I still love it? Only one way to find out, and you lot are coming with me.

Here's the DVD menu. The special features include a making-of featurette and French subtitles. Making French subtitles one of the special features is another reason to hate Disney.

Before the credits start there's an overture. Apparently The Black Hole is the only Disney movie to do this. Personally I didn't mind as the music is one of the film's high points.

Norman Bates is in it? Better hide the kitchen knives!

"Mother?"

The crew of the Palomino come across a black hole with a derelict spaceship poised on the edge of it. Turns out the ship is the USS Cygnus, which went missing 20 years before. The Palomino is damaged by the black hole's gravitational pull and docks with the Cygnus to make repairs.

The crew board the Cygnus and discover Maximillian, the coolest robot ever to grace a movie. He has a single glowing red eye, is silent, hovers above the ground and for some reason his arms end in spinning blades. They just don't make 'em like that any more. When I was seven Maximillian was the best thing EVER. Forget Darth Vader, forget Stormtroopers, forget C3P0. One of the movie tie-ins in the UK was a powdered drink that had tokens on the packets which you could use to get toy figures. I swigged down Christ knows how many litres of this crap - a drink that had to be about 98% artificial ingredients and today probably couldn't even be sold in China - to get enough tokens to send off for a Maximillian figure. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally a letter arrived telling me the company that imported the figures had gone bust. Bastards! By the way the Dusty Bin lookalike to the left of the photo is VINCENT, the proverb-quoting robot that's part of the Palomino's crew. I had a toy one of him. They now go for about $100 on eBay. Needless to say, mine vanished years ago. Oh, and VINCENT has a "psychic link" to Kate, one of the Palomino's crewmembers.

This is Dr Hans "I am not completely insane, honest" Reinhardt. He's completely insane. He tells the Palomino crew that he's developed a new form of energy that allows the Cygnus to hover on the edge of the black hole. Later he lets on that he intends to fly into the black hole to see what's on the other side.

By now we're about 53 minutes in and apart from Maximillian nothing has really happened. By the same point in Star Wars there'd been three shootouts, two space battles and a lightsabre fight. But this is Disney, so for the adults in the audience there's a dinner scene where Reinhardt explains his plans...

...and for the kids there's a fairly crappy (even by 1979 Disney standards) laser game battle between VINCENT and STAR, the captain of Reinhardt's robot sentries. Who, by the way, appear to be wearing ill-fitting leather gloves and who move like their legs have been broken and then put in plaster.

One of these is Ernest Borgnine, the other is a robot called BOB. I can't quite tell the difference. Anyway, BOB tells our heroes that Reinhardt is completely insane (told you!) and that the cloak-wearing robot crew are actually the human crew whom Reinhardt lobotomised and turned into drones 20 years ago. But sod that for the time being - the one part of the film that made a massive impact on me in 1979 is about to take place.

So VINCENT uses his psychic link to Kate to tell her about the crew. She tells Norman Bates and he investigates further and discovers it's true.

This scene scared the crap out of me at the cinema. Not quite what you'd expect from a Disney movie, is it?

Maximillian notices what's happening, moseys on over...

...AND USES HIS SPINNING BLADES TO EVISCERATE NORMAN!!

WHO THEN CRASHES INTO THE GROUND AND IS ELECTROCUTED! Nowadays this movie would result in wall-to-wall lawsuits for the mental scarring it would inflict on kids.

As she witnessed Norman's (unbelievably violent considering this is a kids' film) death Kate is sent to the "hospital" to be lobotomised.

She's rescued by the Palomino's captain, played by Robert Forster, and the two irritating non-Maximillian robots.

Holy shit I forgot about the meteor storm!

In another classic moment a meteor crashes through the hull of the Cygnus and rolls down the length of the ship! Did anyone involved at any stage of making this film know anything about physics?

"Did I leave the gas on?"

SHE CANNAE TAKE NO MORE, CAP'N! The meteors bugger up the Cygnus just as Reinhardt's piloting it into the black hole. The ship's anti-gravity doodah blows up and it's left at the mercy of the gravitational pull.

Maximillian is flung out into space after losing a battle with VINCENT. Yeah, like that would happen in real life. And I forgot the bit earlier where Ernest Borgnine tried to nick the Palomino but ended up crashing it into the Cygnus. What else would you expect from someone who starred in so many disaster movies? This means the surviving crew must use Reinhardt's probe (ooer!) to escape.

Unfortunately the probe has been programmed to fly into the black hole. Guess they shouldn't have flown economy after all.

Now things get weird. For we see Reinhardt floating in space with his hair moving in the wind!! Then he bumps into Maximillian...

..and ends up inside Max's casing...

...and he's presiding over Hell! HELL, I tells ya!

And then, just when you thought the drugs the filmmakers were taking had peaked, a tunnel of light appears:

AND SO DOES AN ANGEL!!

The probe flies out of the tunnel...

...and the credits roll.

So given my seven-year-old self was blown away by this movie, how did my 36-year-old self feel about it? To be honest it's pretty dull for the first hour or so. Until Maximillian uses his portable carving set to take out Norman Bates nothing really happens. There's a lot of talking about black holes and philosophising about what could be on the other side but that hardly makes for enthralling viewing. On the upside the set design is great, Maximillian is one of the most memorable movie monsters created and the musical score is superb. Will I watch it again? Oh yes.

JULY 13

THE Porsche Cayenne. For when you absolutely, positively have to tell the rest of the world that you have far more money than sense.