Recently, I enjoyed a retro-watch of a 1981 bank robbery movie called THIEF.

THIEF is written, directed and produced by virtuoso film-maker Michael Mann and is the precursor to what many consider his master work, another bank robbery movie he made 14 years later, called HEAT.

I’ve always had a dedicated love of the 1995 film HEAT. Watching THIEF brought all those feelings to the surface. I just knew I had to do something about it.

The result is a not-too-serious mini suburban noir I’ve titled NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH… AND LISTEN!

Hope you enjoy it and remember, as Tom Sizemore’s character in the movie memorably says… the action IS the juice!

Fergus Argyle didn’t just love Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece HEAT – he lived it. He’d been known to wear charcoal suits, stare intensely at the ocean, and, most crucially, had installed a high-gain microphone in the drywall shared with his neighbor, Gary.

Gary, also a HEAT devotee, was a died-in-the-wool ‘Waingro apologist’, which Fergus found personally offensive. For three nights, Fergus sat in the dark, wearing heavy tactical headphones, waiting for the ‘score.’ He wasn’t looking for bank heist intel; he wanted to hear Gary’s leaked copy of the director’s recently-updated definitive commentary.

Suddenly, the signal hissed to life.

“The air’s raw tonight, Ralphie,” Gary’s voice crackled through the receiver. He was talking to his cavoodle. “Just like the lighting in the diner scene. Pure steel blue.”

Fergus leaned in, his heart hammering. In the movie, Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna listens to De Niro’s Neil McCauley drilling into a safe. Fergus adjusted his levels, feeling like a wild urban predator. He heard a metallic clink.

“He’s prepping the drill,” Fergus whispered, quoting the film. “Give me the room! Give me the room!”

Through the headphones, a low, rhythmic grinding started. Whirr. Scrape. Thud.

“Yes,” Fergus hissed. “The vault. The silicon carbide drill bit. It’s happening.”

Just then, the audio changed. It wasn’t the sound of a professional thief bypassing a security system. It was the sound of a man struggling with a cheap IKEA Allen key.

“This coffee table is a goddamn weak design, Ralphie!” Gary shouted. “The instructions are a lie! It looked so glamorous in the showroom, but now it’s just particle board and despair!”

Fergus frowned. This wasn’t the high-stakes surveillance he’d envisioned. He wanted the tension of the Far East National Bank job, not a middle-aged man wrestling with a side table.

Suddenly, a loud crack echoed through the wall.

“Slick!” Gary yelled, referencing the heist’s getaway driver. “I’ve snapped the mounting bracket! I’m down! I’m boxed in!”

Fergus couldn’t help himself. He grabbed his own microphone and keyed the frequency. “Son of a glitch! You’re acting like a cowboy, Gary! You want to be making moves on the street when you can’t even assemble a cheese ‘n crackers flat-pack?”

There was dead silence on the other end. Then, Gary’s voice came back, surprisingly friendly and, like his celluloid hero, unnervingly calm.

“Fergus? Is that you in the drywall? You’re doing the Hanna surveillance bit, aren’t you?”

“I… I have to leave in thirty seconds if I feel the heat around the corner,” Fergus stammered, committing to the bit.

“Ten degrees flat,” Gary replied, completing the quote. “Now come over here and help me lift this tabletop. It’s solid oak, and I think I may have pinned Ralphie.”

Fergus sighed, took off his headphones, and headed next door. His cover may have been blown, but the brotherhood of the cinephile remained.

This is an excerpt from one of HEAT‘s most well-known scenes, the restaurant meeting between Al Pacino’s character and Robert Deniro’s ‘Neil’ –

Now watch British actor Tom Hiddleston (‘Loki’ in Marvel’s THOR movies) do his absolute best impersonation of this scene…

This post has been brought to you by the new Harper Collins-published novel THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES.

Written by Canadian author Glenn Dixon and set in the near future, it tells the story of a sentient Roomba vacuum cleaning robot who sets out to save the humans in her house from a rising, evil technological power. Original, huh?

Inside a Korean restaurant in busy downtown Seoul, I spied what looked like a bowl of freshly prepared guacamole.

A few seconds later and I’d heaped a generous sized dollop of the green stuff onto my rice bowl, decorated with BBQed beef pieces, and … down the hatch!

The ‘guacamole’ that instantly set my mouth ablaze with the power of a thousand suns turned out to be none other than the cleverly disguised undercover agent that is… wasabi.

For those who’ve never experienced a wasabi ‘wake-up call’ before, allow me to say – if chili peppers are a slow-building campfire, then wasabi is nothing short of a precision-guided thermal missile aimed directly at your entire central nervous system.

A few days later when my wife remarked about the ‘avocado’ fighting back and how I’d wanted more greens in my diet, I’d finally ‘cooled down’ enough to enjoy the joke.

This post was composed for a weekly travel writing competition that asks readers to share a travel experience in 150 words or less (with or without photos).

The comp runs in a travel magazine called ESCAPE, found inside the Brisbane (Australia) newspaper, THE SUNDAY MAIL. There’s a monthly prize (something usually to the value of around $500) for the best story published. The address to send entries to is escape@news.com.au if you’d like to have a go. Click HERE to find out more details.

That picture of ‘me’ on fire and fleeing the restaurant was, very obviously, courtesy of our silicon friends at Skynet, or as most folk refer to it …A.I.

Wanna see some images from the reject pile? The instruction to A.I (Nano Banana) was “Create a cartoon image of an Aussie guy in his 50’s running out of a Korean restaurant with his mouth on fire.” And this is what I got –

I’m Aussie for sure, but not THAT Aussie, so I changed it to ‘guy in his 50’s’ and got this –

This was still a little too grandpa vibe for my liking, so I then opted for ‘guy in his 40’s’ –

I may not want to admit it, but these days I’m probably closer to the 50’s look than the 40’s one, however I’m clean shaven, so the ‘Jim Carrey’ version of ‘me’ was the one that got the nod.

How’s this for a literary flavored story plot – six struggling authors find themselves on a remote island where they race to complete the final chapter of a famous, recently-deceased author’s unfinished novel. The competition turns deadly over a tense 72-hour period in what critics have called a “clever locked-room thriller which is also a biting satire of the publishing world.”

Released last week, THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF is written by ‘Evelyn Clarke’, which is the pen name of co-authors Victoria Schwab (American, aged 39) and Cat Clarke (English, aged 47).

There we were sitting on a bench at busy Seoul train station in South Korea when my wife spied a silver 100-won (10 cents in Aussie currency) coin resting unnoticed under a nearby seat.

I was about to comment how it wasn’t even worth picking up when, at that precise moment, a homeless man carrying a small plastic ‘donation’ box came shuffling past. 

With not a word of delay, our fifteen-year-old daughter sprang into action, bending down to scoop up the wayward coin and calmly depositing it in the man’s box. 

Impressed with this sweet (and swift!) show of character, not to mention uncharacteristic teenage situational awareness, we dubbed her the ‘Won Hit Wonder’ – a title she enjoyed for the rest of our 10-day trip.

This post was composed for a weekly travel writing competition that asks readers to share a travel experience in 150 words or less (with or without photos). The comp runs in a travel magazine called ESCAPE, found inside the Brisbane (Australia) newspaper, THE SUNDAY MAIL. There’s a monthly prize (something usually to the value of around $500) for the best story published. The address to send entries to is escape@news.com.au if you’d like to have a go. Click HERE to find out more details.

While in Korea (arriving back in Brisbane this morning) I spied this book in one of Seoul’s titanic-sized book shops (yes, such a thing, on such a scale, still exists) –

Check out this for a plot – 10 people find themselves locked in a bank during a holdup. Then a murder happens. Everyone is a suspect but who exactly is the murderer?

Almost as interesting as my two all-time favorite bank robbery movies –

And speaking of Val Kilmer (well, we were talking about HEAT, right?) the trailer for his ‘new’ (Kilmer passed away this time last year) movie AS DEEP AS THE GRAVE has just been released.

The film is based on the true story of North America’s first female archaeologist Ann Morris (1900 -1945) who worked with the Navajo in the 1920s in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona to uncover North America’s first civilization – the Anasazi.

Val Kilmer can be seen on screen for 77 minutes of the films 111-minute running time.

How is this possible? Two amazing, future-shaping words – Artificial Intelligence.

Six months ago I had a knee operation.

The procedure was to repair something called a ‘meniscus tear’. And if you say it right, that sentence kind-of rhymes. Kind of. ‘Cause that’s tear as in rhymes with ‘bear’ and bloody well hurts; not tear as in saline liquid from an eye.

Recovery was gradual and for the first four months post-op I walked with a noticeable limp. In an effort to keep my spirits up, I imagined myself as one of my favorite movie characters, Snake Pliskin (Kurt Russell) from the movie ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

There’s a scene in that movie where our hero Snake gets shot in the leg with a crossbow arrow. For the rest of the movie, he gets around with a limp. A genuine, A-grade, blue-ribbon ‘nothing’s going to stop me’ – mind over matter – hero’s limp.

Here’s a taste of that classical hero’s’ limp...

It got me thinking, what other memorable movie characters have walked with an ‘injured gait’.

Jack Nicholson’s unhinged (mild understatement there) Jack Torrence character in THE SHINING developed his limp after tumbling down a flight of stairs after taking a whack from his baseball bat-wielding (defending) wife Wendy.

Then we had the endo-skeleton version of THE TERMINATOR (1984) who endured quite a bit of punishment to earn his mechanical limp…

They’re my top three.

An honorable mention should also go to Mel Gibson’s limp in MAD MAX 2.

He gets beaten pretty badly at a certain point in the film and the limp is probably the least of his hurts. But it is undeniably another classic hero’s rendition of the stylized injured walk in all it’s never-say-die glory.

Don’t have a clip for this one, so the next best thing is this scene, which ironically features another character (played by great Australian actor Mike Preston) who walks towards Max with, you guessed it, his very own… limp!

And before we limp away from this subject altogether, a final nod to a supporting character from the BLADE vampire trilogy that starred Wesley Snipes in the late 90’s/early noughties.

Whistler (coolly played by Kris Kristofferson) was Blade’s ageing mentor and ally in battle. This character walked with a limp, which in no way hindered his ability to machine-gun and shotgun away to his heart’s content blood sucking hipster vampires.

It’s brief but by God it’s there. The Whistler limp..

What’s that? You want a bonus limp? Ok, if you insist. This one’s from the ending to Clint Eastwood’s 1977 movie THE GAUNTLET. The blood on our hero’s leg when he steps off the bus looks more like he just lost a fight with a bottle of Heinz ketchup, but the limp? It’s top-tier, inspired and genuinely Oscar worthy. See for yourself…

The certified knee-slapper reproduced below was penned by humorist Greg Nix and appeared in the March 2nd edition of his highly entertaining newsletter CHORTLE.

This week, the Hatchette Book Group (one of the ‘big five’ global publishing companies) announced it had cancelled the U.S release of a horror novel titled SHY GIRL – originally self-published by Californian author Mia Ballard in February 2025 – as well as withdrawing the book from sale in the UK (effectively ‘limping away’ ) because of suspected use of A.I generated content.

You can read about the controversy HERE.

Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale—a tale of a fateful blog that started from this tropical port (my living room) aboard this tiny site.

If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a radio made out of two coconuts and a piece of wire and thinking, “Yeah, that seems scientifically sound,” then it’s entirely likely you have finally found your people, people!

Welcome to the official launch of GILLIGAN’S ISLAND: THE COLOUR YEARS – a place on the internet dedicated entirely to the seven most stranded people in television history.

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND ran for three seasons back in the mid 1960’s. Two of those seasons – spanning 62 episodes in total -were filmed in color. They’re the knee-slappers this blog will focus on, week by week.

Episode by episode, we will answer some of the big GILLIGAN’S ISLAND questions –

So, grab your favorite Hawaiian shirt, keep an eye out for headhunters, and get ready for coconut cream pie! But whatever you do—don’t let Gilligan touch the signal fire!

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND: THE COLOUR YEARS is ready to welcome you home and welcome you aboard.

Wanna jump on board the tour bus?

Click HERE to subscribe and begin your castaway adventure.

The views at Scenic Writer’s Shack are so often nothing short of travel magazine-worthy, but today the view from the 3rd place podium is even better.

Komiko Noir’s story ‘THE GRAND SLAM GHOST’ haunted its way into 3rd Place in the Scenic Writer’s Shack 2026 Humorous Short Story Contest! 🥉

Its style of paranormal activity was way more ‘‘haha’‘ than ‘aaaaah,’ and you’ve likely never seen a ghost with such a killer overhead smash.

While most ghosts merely rattle chains, this one really knew how to raise a racket, while putting it’s own unique spin on the genre.

Before any more unfortunate tennis puns get served up, its time now to read on and enjoy author Komiko Noir‘s –

It was a moonless night when Finn, an aspiring paranormal vlogger, decided to spend a few hours in the notoriously eerie Blackwood Cemetery. His mission: capture definitive proof of the spectral presence rumored to haunt the oldest section. Equipped with a night-vision camera and an over-reliance on caffeine, Finn was ready.

As he crept past crumbling gravestones, a faint, rhythmic thwack–thwack echoed through the misty air. His heart pounded. This wasn’t the usual creak of branches or hoot of an owl. This sounded… deliberate. He slowly turned his camera towards the sound, creeping closer to a particularly weathered mausoleum.

There, in the faint glow of his camera’s IR light, stood a translucent figure. It was wearing what looked like vintage tennis whites, complete with a sweatband, and was vigorously swinging an antique wooden tennis racquet at an invisible ball. The ghost was panting, muttering to itself.

“Forehand… too weak!” it groaned, a wispy sigh escaping its ethereal form. “Net fault again! Oh, Harold, you’re losing your touch even in the afterlife!“

Finn nearly dropped his camera. It was a wrong end of the telescope moment, he realized, shaking his head. This wasn’t a menacing spirit, but a spectral athlete obsessed with perfecting his serve, even centuries after his last match.

Suddenly, the ghost spotted Finn. Its translucent eyes widened. “Oh, finally! A living soul! Care for a quick set? My partner, Reginald, quit after I double-faulted at match point back in 1892. Been looking for a decent opponent ever since!”

Finn, a recreational player at best, gulped. Being challenged to a tennis match by a Victorian ghost in the middle of a graveyard was not in his vlogging script. He politely declined, citing an urgent ‘appointment with a very living alarm clock.‘ As he scurried away, he could still hear the ghost’s disappointed thwack-thwack, forever doomed to serve aces to an empty court.

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK is this week bittersweet proud to present our 2nd place winner’s story from our 2026 HUMOROUS SHORT STORY COMPETITION.

To our esteemed silver medalist, UK based Yvonne Lang, we say – you were this close to the top prize. But look on the bright side—you now get to spend the next week or so nursing a healthy, productive grudge that may very possibly fuel your next best-seller.

Coming in at a very prestigious, very impressive second place…

“So, let me get this straight – I told you to take care of the vampires, and you left toothbrushes and toothpaste in their garden?”

“Yes,” Esther answered, her bright earrings jangling as she nodded.
“So you didn’t kill them?” Derek checked. Esther’s eyes widened behind her purple rimmed glasses.

“Of course not. You asked me to take care of them!”
“Esther, I feel your staggering confusion about sayings has let us down again.”

Esther’s smile faltered.
“Oh no. Is this another one of those wrong-end-of-the-telescope moments?”
Derek massaged his temples.
“The phrase is the wrong end of the stick.”

Esther looked like a deer in headlights; a deer that had been dressed in a jumble sale by a blind woman. Derek had no idea if it she was on another one of her wacky home remedies again but she smelt like a takeaway.

“So you didn’t want me to take care of them?” Esther asked.
“Not literally no.”
“So I was meant to…”
“Kill them.”
“But that’s the opposite of taking care of them! I’m only a junior. You said I wasn’t up to being in charge of the swimming pool’s new car park. Why would you ask me to kill the undead? Actually – if they’re already dead does that mean I succeeded? An unintended concubine?”

“Consequence, not concubine. Are the vampires more dead than when you arrived?”
“No, they seemed quite chippy.”
“Why did you leave a dentists’ starter kit in the garden of vampires we are trying to evict?” A vein in Dereks forehead was pulsating.
“You told me to take care of them. They use their teeth a lot and oral health is important – often overlooked.”

An earlier comment of Esther’s suddenly resonated.
“Wait, they seemed chippy? How could you tell their mood?”
“I spoke to them.”
Derek was beginning to wonder if he was unknowingly suffering carbon monoxide poisoning delusions.

“You spoke to them?”
“They came out to see what I was doing. They were quite confused until I told them that you said if I took care of them that I could finally have a promotion. Which was great as in my last appraisal you said I could easily be replaced by a pigeon. Anyway, they offered me a better job themselves!”
“A job doing what?” Derek asked incredulously. Maybe being her employer would be what proved an end to their immortality.

“Bits and bobs. I’ve already done my first task for them.”
“Well I hope you are bloody more efficient for them than me. Did you understand their instructions?”
Esther nodded,
“Simple enough – remove the crosses and garlic from around your office.”
That focused Derek’s attention.

“Did it ever occur to you to ask why?”
Esther shook her head, earrings swinging,
“You don’t look a gift donkey in the mouth when the pension is that good.”
That butchered saying was the last thing Derek heard before Esther’s new employer flew in to take care of him.

Next week, the ghostly groans, giggles and guffaws continue with third place getter Komiko Noir‘s fun tale of overhead smashes and underworld specters –

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK has previously explored the subject of women’s participation in the game of chess HERE and HERE.

Now comes a new NETFLIX documentary that examines the life of the greatest female chess champion in history, Hungarian-born Judit Polgar (now aged 50).

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK boldly declares this 90-minute doco to be a five-star grand-master. It checks all the boxes for compelling, ‘brainy’ viewing.

Ladies and gentlemen, caffeine addicts, and people who spent three weeks staring at a blinking cursor only to write “The end” and call it a day—welcome!

THE SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK 2026 Humorous Short Story Competition asked you for comedy, and boy… did you guys deliver!

Received were stories that ranged on the laugh-o-meter from sympathy sniggers and gentle chuckles all the way up to – ‘I’m no longer reading this – I’m vibrating. With laughter‘.

But there can only be one winner. Well, three winners, actually. And here they are –

Were SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK a peacock, it would this moment be in full plumage.

We are tickled pink – actually, let’s make that a full-on shade of neon fuchsia – to present Samanatha’s winning story –

The day 56-year-old Manhattan dentist Phillip Yankum inherited run-down Blackwood Manor—a Victorian-era style house complete with suspicious turrets and windows covered in ‘ghost smudges’ – he arrived armed with nothing but an old bag of cleaning rags. In his back pocket however, he carried a state-of-the-art, Bluetooth-enabled Oral-B Pulsar 9000. You never knew when one of those might come in handy.

Working his way through the dust covered interior with its heavy-on-the-unsettling-oil-paintings aesthetic, Phil ascended the rickety staircase, trying not to breath in the damp air that smelled of wet cardboard and the lingering scent of a cabbage soup made in 1924.

Pushing open massive oak doors, Phillip crept into the master bedroom. In the corner, magically hovering above a stained marble sink, was a floating toothbrush. Phillip was temporarily frozen to the spot in amazement. He’d seen plenty of horror stories inside people’s mouths, but this was somehow more jaw-dropping.

The toothbrush wasn’t merely floating; on closer inspection Phillip could see it was performing a vigorous, mid-air cleaning of an invisible set of teeth. The brush scrubbed with a frantic, aggressive energy, its “sensitive gums” light flashing a panicked red.

“Um,” Phillip whispered. “That’s my plaque-control head.”

The toothbrush froze. Then, with a violent whir, it dived at him. Phillip shrieked, a sound usually reserved for Victorian orphans, and sprinted down the hallway. The ghost of Blackwood Manor, it turned out, was Sir Alistair Blackwood, a 17th-century aristocrat who had died of a catastrophic tooth abscess and was now obsessed with modern dental hygiene. He didn’t want the dentist’s soul; he wanted his bristles.

Phillip dove behind a crumbling velvet settee as the brush buzzed overhead. It was most definitely a wrong-end-of-the-telescope moment. In the grand scheme of the universe, he was being super-aggressively peer-reviewed by a spirit with a piece of molded resin and a two-minute timer.

“Enough!” Phillip yelled, finally mustering some of his Manhattan ‘Do you know who I am?’ confidence. “Sir Alistair, I presume? You’re using the wrong setting! That’s the ‘Deep Clean’ mode. It’ll ruin your ghostly enamel!”

The toothbrush paused, hovering mid-air with a curious tilt.

“You need the ‘Whitening’ pulse,” Phillip advised, slowly approaching. “And for heaven’s sake, you’re not even using paste. Do you want the phantom gingivitis?“

Amidst the cold air, he reached out and took the vibrating brush. Carefully, Manhattan Phil applied a pea-sized amount of “Cool Mint” gel. He clicked the button twice to the “Gentle Massage” setting and handed it back to the void. The brush began to move again, but this time with a rhythmic, satisfied hum. A faint, translucent sigh echoed through the bathroom.

For the rest of the night, intrepid cavity crusader Phillip Yankum sat on the edge of the tub, reading a magazine he’d retrieved from his car, while a dead nobleman polished his non-existent molars. Phillip thought about leaving a bill but realized that would be so transparently absurd.

Tune in next week when we are treated to 2nd place getter Yvonne Lang‘s garlic-mouthwash-flavored giggler –

While you’re here…check out this new 2026 read from the South Korean author who penned the bestselling “Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop’.

A special announcement for all word-wonks and aspiring class clowns: we have now reached the ‘frantic typing while dressed in your bathrobe’ stage of the 2026 SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK HUMOROUS SHORT STORY COMPETITION.

If you’ve been sitting on a comedic masterpiece—or even just a moderately amusing anecdote about a goat—the window of opportunity is closing faster than a laptop lid when a boss walks by.

Comedy is tragedy plus time, but if you run out of time, it’s just a tragedy. Don’t let your literary genius die in your “Drafts” folder alongside that half-finished screenplay about a detective who is also a dog.

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All details about the competition – including where to send entries – can be found HERE.

So before SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK closes its double-glazed decorative glass submission doors for another year and leaves you alone with your puns, send your funny, honey!

Eternal glory and a boost to your ego, not to mention hard cold cash and the chance to perform the SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK winner’s dance are yours for the taking.

SWS Victory Dance (Click HERE)

You don’t have to be screwball mad – like our avocado-colored pond friend above – to enter the SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK 2026 writing contest… but it probably wouldn’t hurt either.

What you do have to be is funny. Or at least mildly amusing. Because it is a HUMOROUS short story competition.

You can get all the knee-slapping, side-splitting details right HERE.