The disordered mad of a brain man

Looking through some reviews of past Edinburgh Fringe shows, I was sad to see that not being at it in 2012 meant I'd missed Re-Animator: The Musical. I can see that not everyone liked it but I doubt they were its target audience.

A few clicks later, I'm watching a clip of two of the film's leads talking at a convention in 2010, and Jeffrey Combs wonders how many 1985 films still have 'legs', i.e. are still being talked about and worth seeing.

Well, the 'Best Picture' Academy Award for that year's films went to Out of Africa, a two hour forty snoozefest that's one of only five films to have won and have a 'rotten' rating on Rotten Tomatoes (all but one of the others are from the 1930s). So that's out.

Looking at the WP list of 1985 films and excluding for a minute those that did win something in the Oscars, I will happily see again and talk about:

Brazil – looking more like a documentary every year, it missed winning 'best original screenplay' and 'best art direction'. Had it had a different ending, it would have made much more money but wouldn't have been as great

Crimewave – with a script co-written by the Coen brothers and director Sam Raimi, this is a violent and sick comedy: if that's your thing, this is fab

Day of the Dead – the final film in George Romero's first zombie trilogy, this isn't as good as Dawn.. but it's still better than almost everyone else's zombie films and, as ever with Romero, says more about humanity than Out of Africa et al ever did. Here, the central theme is that one of the zombies is more human than the soldiers who are supposed to be protecting those researching the zombies. Pity it doesn't all live up to the opening 'hello.. hello..' sequence

Jagged Edge – tense courtroom drama about a murder that Jeff Bridges may or may not have committed

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome – another third in a trilogy, this is the last Mel Gibson Mad Max film. Not as great as Fury Road, but better than the first and the best car stunt film for at least one decade if not two

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters – Paul Schrader's visually stunning biopic of Japanese author Yokio Mishima, helped by Philip Glass's superb soundtrack and an intelligent script. It's a disgrace that this hasn't had a UK DVD release

Mr. Vampire – Hong Kong supernatural comedy action at its finest

Pee-wee's Big Adventure – probably because star Paul Reubens was later discovered masturbating in a porn cinema, younger readers may never have heard of Pee-wee Herman. Nominally for kids, this is queerer than most 'gay' cinema

Police Story – Jackie Chan showing why he's the greatest action star ever, putting his life on the line to thrill his audience. The outtakes at the end show it wasn't easy

Re-Animator – fabulously over the top splatter comedy horror, it contains one of the best ever exchanges: 'I had to kill him!' 'What? He's dead?' 'nnn-Not any more..'

Seduction: The Cruel Woman – the second queerest film of the year, this was Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut's reaction to an earlier film about a brothel that had sex workers only as powerless victims. Here, a German dominatrix is neither, including topping the wonderful Udo Kier

Shoah – I've mentioned this before: a nine hour documentary on the Holocaust with no archive footage

Tampopo – Japanese sex and food comedy, with one of the most unforgettable – for a nice reason! – sex scenes ever

To Live and Die in L.A. – William Friedkin cop film that's overshadowed by his The French Connection, but is differently great

A Zed & Two Noughts – probably my favourite Peter Greenaway film, with one of Michael Nyman's best soundtracks, this is an art film about death and decay and obsession

.. and I'm probably missing at least one French film, but I don't recognise any of the names.

Looking at those that got one Academy award, both Prizzi's Honor (Anjelica Huston won best supporting actress) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (William Hurt won best actor) are miles better than the winner.

Ran would have walked 'best foreign film', but wasn't even nominated (apparently Akira Kurosawa didn't show up to his première and this annoyed the Japanese film industry too much!) It did win best art direction and best cinematography.

You might remember

• Back to the Future
• A Chorus Line
• Cocoon
• The Color Purple
• Mask
• Rambo: First Blood Part II
• Witness

.. all of which got at least a nomination and typically won, but I wouldn't want to see any of them again. Back to the Future opened the Edinburgh Film Festival I saw Mishima at, and there's simply no contest in terms of which one is the best.

One of the advantages of being my age is that I remember the UK TV première of Star Trek and the first R4 run of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Today's Today programme had something on being the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, but a) it'd had been broadcast on the 6th Sept 1966 in Canada* so they're two days late, and b) the UK première wasn't until the 12th July 1969, just over a month after the last original series episode was broadcast in the US.

Why it took so long to get to the UK, I don't know. Perhaps it got cheaper to buy after NBC made the decision to cancel it, or perhaps the imminent moon landings made a space programme more attractive to buy.

In a bit of programming that's either inspired or boringly predictable, it was placed in the Saturday teatime 'Dr Who slot'. I was the only member of the family to watch it – afterwards I remember being asked how much I understood** and saying all of it except the 'star dates'.

I would have missed the next episode – we went to Butlins that summer just before moving house and we were there when the Apollo 11 landing happened – which is slightly annoying, because the BBC had their own ordering of the programmes and, after the Kirk pilot, they put the best ones on first. So The City on the Edge of Forever was 3rd out of 24, rather than 28th out of 29,*** for example.

While I can listen to Hitchhikers (and complain that the mice don't sound right), I'm not tempted to watch all of the Star Treks again. Perhaps one or two…

* Thank you, WP!

** I was seven at the time.

*** The BBC didn't show some of the first season until 1992 because "they all dealt most unpleasantly with the already unpleasant subjects of madness, torture, sadism and disease".

Currently, the fourth most read story on the BBC news website is a story about Sainsbury's removing their 'taste the difference' sandwiches from their 'meal deal'. You don't get a fork with the pasta options either, which seems a bit silly unless they're going to be supplied separately, as in M&S.

This is beating stories about the Met Police starting to use 'spit hoods' over the heads of suspects in police stations – doubtless we'll see more ones like this, on police using one on a 12 year old disabled girl – and Keith Vaz resigning as the chair of Parliament's Home Affairs select committee.

There's a fascinating discussion on supermarket sandwiches on Reddit started by someone who claims to work for the company that Sainsbury's have stopped using.. and Boots have started. (Obs warning that people on Reddit may not be who they say they are.)

A local business – formerly Ciseco, now WirelessThings – is sadly closing down. They've got a 70% off sale for the next couple of days.

Quite a bit is out of stock, but I've got more LED boards for the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, plus their 'Arduino with built-in wireless' board.

(No clickable link, because it'll doubtless end up being squatted, but wirelessthings.net is where to look.)

For the past (cough) years, my basic breakfast has been yogurt, fruit and muesli. This means I've tried rather a lot of mueslis.

I've never liked the standard Alpen or its 'let's see how much loose sugar we can add' clones, and the Dorset Cereals range is way too expensive unless there's a serious discount on offer, so my current favourite is the Harvest Morn 'Luxury Fruit & Nut' which is an Aldi own brand product.

You would have thought that would make it simple to get, but one of the things Aldi do to make their stock control easier is bundle more than one product together in the same packaging and with the same barcode. In this case, the 'Fruit & Nut' (purple box) muesli is paired with the 'Fruit' (brown box) muesli. Which isn't as nice.

It's not just me who thinks so either. Typically, whenever I go into an Aldi, there are about four big boxes of the two. They started life equally split between the Fruit & Nut and the Fruit, but what's left on the shelf is almost always entirely Fruit, sometimes to the point that two boxes-worth of Fruit have been stuffed into one. If I'm lucky, the box underneath and behind the rest has a couple of Fruit & Nuts, so I buy them – you can never be sure when you'll find it again.

The downside of having the same barcode for both is that the Aldi stock control system never realises that there's a big disparity in demand. It was a similar situation with their 'not from concentrate' orange and apple juices, but they did move from 4:4 in a box to five orange and three apple, which seems to reflect real demand – there's never a huge preponderance of one or the other now. Here, it should be at least 6:2…

Two exciting* developments have happened recently. Firstly, the packet size has increased from 750g to 1kg. This means there are now fewer packets in each box, but they stand up better to being rummaged through to find the Fruit & Nut ones. They're so much better at this that I wonder if that was the reason for making the change (I should really have checked to see if the price per 100g changed, but..)

Secondly, the 'best before' dates have got more variation. Before, you could buy two packets many weeks apart and discover that both had the same 'BB' date. There were only about four of them in any year and it would jump from some date in April 2017 to 6th July 2017. Now, I have four packets in the cupboard* and they have four different BB dates, including two with 2nd Aug 2017 and one with 4th Aug 2017.

* Your level of excitement at these may vary, and almost certainly does!

** This translates to about three weeks supply. I have no idea who has a 30g portion – mine's nearer 200g.