'...and featuring Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln, it's Rob's Random 5!'

Paper weapons of Mass Destruction, where I got my moral compass, and as ever, there's 100 points and much respect if you know which TV show has been quoted in the blog title (big clue: it spawned 33 and 1/3 films)


1. Fat Daddy: Last week I learned how to make origami water bombs. Cue much wet fun. But as ever, I soon got bored and decided to test the boundaries of paper construction by building incresingly bigger ones, resulting first in the 'Harlequin' (named after its jaunty colour scheme), and then in the Oppenheimer of origami water bombs. I present to you: 'Fat Daddy'...

Magnificent, isn't he?

Actually, this is 'Fat Daddy Mk II'. The first 'Fat Daddy' broke apart in my hands as I was transporting it to the test ground, releasing 2 pints of water onto the hallway carpet. Ooops! Still, 'Fat Daddy Mk II' has been reinforced with sturdier paper to prevent such a mishap occuring. Oh, and you heard right - this bad boy holds 2 whole English pints in his mighty belly. Testing occurred successfully today, and the whole of my village was washed away as a result. Good work, Fat Daddy! (salutes). I'd make an even bigger one, but I think I'd be straying into 'Paper Lantern' territory...

2. The Moral of the Story: Did anyone else who grew up in the UK ever watch/see Tales of Aesop? This was my favourite show when I was just a gurgling little infant. It's just a shame they only made 13 episodes of it. Tales of Aesop was narrated and voiced entirely by the legend that is Tom 'The Doctor' Baker, which makes this all the better. It had characters with great names like Mrs. Bite the wolf, Geraldine Donkey, and Boris the Lion, and there's something so home-spun and hand-crafted about it all that you'd have to have a heart of stone not to love it. Honestly, this is classic TV. I'm going to make my kids watch this. How else will they learn what's right and wrong in this world unless a talking lion helps tell them? My entire moral compass was gained from watching this show... plus, it's hilarious to hear Tom Baker voicing a cockney lady wolf.

So I hope you all know what to do the next time you're involved in a dispute over sausages or any other item of charcuterie.

3. Parker: Normally graphic novel adaptations of books are terrible, but I've been reading an adaptation of Richard Stark's gritty crime novel 'Parker: The Hunter', drawn by my favourite comic book artist/author Darwyn Cooke. It's a fantastic piece of work that combines a cool 60s 'Mad Men' look with a grim noir storyline and some shockingly brutal (but not gratuitous) violence. Even though it's done in just pen and blue ink it looks fantastic, which pages I would happily put in a frame and hang on my wall. The novel has been translated really well to a visial form in both action and story. Parker is a really great anti-hero and while you never really like him, you definitely find yourself rooting for him as he hits New York looking for revenge. The publishers IDW have a great 20-something page preview which is worth looking at just for the first page and its first line. Take a look HERE

4. Twitter: Apparently Twitter went down for a few hours today (Facebook did too. Grrr!) due to some kind of cyber-attack. I just loved the irony of thousands of really ardent hard-core Twitterers wanting to tell each other and complain to each other that Twitter wasn't working, only for them to have no Twitter platform to be able to do it on. D'oh!

5. Paper Titanic: I just learned how to make an origami sampan (a flat bottomed boat). Will this lead to me making a paper sampan large enough for me to sit in? A Fat Boaty, perhaps? Almost certainly. I'll keep you updated on how it goes. Invites to the ship's christening for its maiden voyage will be in the post.