MUSIC FROM SPACE: "Coo Coo Daddy Long Legs" - The Cheats

Thursday, July 24, 2014


As the classic UK comedy series The Young Ones taught us, Buddy Holly did not actually die on the Day the Music Died, but instead parachuted to safety, somehow landed in Bristol and spent the next 23 years hanging upside down in a student flat and subsisting on insects. It was a lonely life, but Holly never let it get him down and even composed a butt-kicking song about the virtues of an all-bug diet, Coo Coo Daddy Long Legs. The clip above features a cover of Holly's song by the obscure punk band the Cheats. Kick back with a plate of crunchy crickets and beetles, and enjoy.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Monsters and Rockets... dot NET?!

After several long months offline, lost in Internet limbo, Monsters and Rockets is back! But we've lost our .com, so from now on you'll find us at Monstersandrockets.net.

Why the change? Blame our friends at Google.

See, this site is hosted by Blogger.com, AKA Blogspot, which was acquired a while back by Google, which also apparently has some controlling interest in both Youtube and Yahoo. (For the purposes of brevity, and because I hate them just that much, I shall henceforth refer to this monster of a mega-corp as Blurgspurt.) A few months ago I got an email from Blurgspurt saying that my URL was due for its yearly re-up. It should have been a simple matter, but I knew from bitter experience that things with Blurgspurt have a way of getting needlessly, exhaustingly complicated in a hurry so I immediately tried to pay Blurgspurt to let me keep my URL for another year.

Only problem: they wouldn't take my money. Every time I tried to log on to Blurgspurt to renew my domain, I kept getting redirected to a sign-in page. (This apparently happens a lot.) Weeks went by, and I couldn't sign in and pay my freakin' $10.

So, of course I contacted Blurgspurt and got the whole mess sorted out quick... or at least that's how it would have gone, if Blurgspurt offered any way to contact them at all. They really, really do not ever want to talk to their customers. They have no phone number for tech support, no email address, nothing. Calling the main number on their contact page just gets you a recording, always. They will not talk to you. Ever.

I spent months getting the runaround from Blurgspurt, with their various useless "help" pages directing me to their user forums. When I went to the forums, I found many other users with the exact same problem and no idea how to fix it. That was Blurgspurt's idea of tech support: go talk to our other clueless customers. That's some Beware of the Leopard-level B.S., right there.

So, the weeks flew by, my URL expired and that royally sucked, and then I got cancer and all of this stuff stopped mattering for a while. Eventually I got better, and when I got out of the hospital I found out some walking crap-sack had bought my .com out from under me. I was fully prepared to buy it back, but Google (I mean, Blurgspurt) made it so complicated to track down Mr. Crap-Sack that finally I just said screw it and switched to a dot-freaking-net.

This year I survived cancer and another epic Blurgspurt runaround. Cancer's worse than Blurgspurt... but you know, Blurgspurt's a surprisingly close second.

Anyway. I'm still alive, Monsters and Rockets is back... and Google can bite every single inch of me.

Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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Relative sizes of STAR TREK & STAR WARS spaceships!

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

That chart showing the relative sizes of various sci-fi spaceships has been online for years. (Fair warning: if you've never seen it before, after you click on that link you will spend the next 20 minutes or so scrolling around in a geek trance, completely oblivious to your surroundings.) But while the images below depict similar information, they have a very different feel, with three dimensional views of the ships from the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. Click the images to enlarge-ify.

It's interesting to see that a Next Generation-era Klingon Bird of Prey looks like it could probably take out an AT-AT with one shot, while the USS Defiant looks outmatched by the rebel ship from the opening scenes of the first Star Wars film.

The ships are unlabeled, but if you're hardcore geek you'll recognize most of them on sight. A few of them are just too small though, they're little gray dots. I'm not sure what the big doorknob-like ship is in the upper right of the top picture. I presume it's something from the Star Wars prequels; I've worked hard to repress most of my memories of those movies.











Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.

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About This Blog

"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden

Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?

Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.

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