It's quiet out there (redeux)

It's quiet out there. No one has posted here except me for the last 24 hours or so. It could just be the Saturday doldrums. Stew's probably taking his 72 children to the movies or to "Chuck E. Cheese".

Could I just add here that while the arcade games are quite fun there, there is nothing quite so spectacluarly excruciating as the quiet hell of the characters' performances. When we visit the local C.E.C. with the littlest Fando, the lighting comes up, cheesier than the pizzas, and these low-budget anamatronic figures of mice and other animals being to play remakes and alternate versions of pop songs that, by comparison, give Madonna's insipid re-make of "American Pie" all the impact of "Der Ring der Nibelungen". The figures themselves are hardly animatronic. Let's just suggest that maybe an arm or two is barely animatronic (in that some movement, however spastic and unnatural, occurs), and occasionally they will blink, but with all the subtlety and realism of Crispin Glover in a production of "Singing in the Rain". It's far worse when the help, young and fresh with all the enthusiasm amphetamines can bring to a body, get in front of the figures and dance along. I keep praying for Simon Cowell to walk in by accident, take one look at the lot and tell them how bloody awful they are. One last word to the bloke in the mouse suit...drycleaning. Now. Nothing puts off a pizza dinner like the smell of giant, sweaty, teenage mice.

All right I'll try once more...