This is the fourth birthday I’ve celebrated in the post-stroke, apoplectic.me world. And it’s a significant one. Really, any birthday after the one you forget because you’ve had a massive haemorrhagic stroke two weeks later is significant.
But specifically, Mrs Stroke Bloke has taken to referring to me during the week of 15th September 2016 as “The Answer”.
Before being distracted by something shiny last week, I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with this Donald Trump thing. Why, over the past week, have presidential general election polls continued to see Trump bouncing along at 40%, when he’s indicated that a Trump presidency would look like this?
That’s an actual [inside] page from this The Globe back in April, described as the front page we hope we never have to print. The accompanying editorial called Trump’s White House run “flippant and reckless” and “profoundly un-American”. But while this would all seem obvious from within The Globe‘s newsroom, or my Twitter feed, Trump easily won the Massachusetts Republican primary, collecting 22 delegates and nearly 50% of the vote. Meanwhile, over 50% of the voters in the recent EU referendum in these islands voted for an Out campaign fronted by Trump-like trolls.
So rather than dismissing this tendency out of hand, I’ve been trying to think a little about how we came to this pass. Continue reading The Elephant’s Nelly – Pt 2
Tiny Letter readers will know that Mrs Stroke Bloke and I visited Cairnpapple Hill in central Scotland last weekend. It was an enlightening trip, in light of last week’s post on ’80s movies. Like Withnail and Marwood, we came across a bull in a field. And turning to an obvious omission pointed out by Atletico Marcelo in the comments, Cairnpapple was the site of a little henge.
Continue reading Cairnpapple Hill
Sometimes, it feels like the blog is being hounded by an abstract concept.
The land, maybe. Or mythical creatures. Or The Onion‘s conception of Joe Biden. Right now, though, it’s something else. Maybe you can guess what?
[Get more whimsy and free gin* at the Apoplexy Tiny Letter.]
Urgh. What a horrible week or so it’s been. I survived a massive haemorrhagic stroke for this?!
At around 2am on the morning of Sunday 12 June, a man walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. By the time two hours had passed, 49 people who had been in the club had been killed, and 43 injured. To highlight the disproportionate risk of violence people in the LGBT community face, it’s worth mentioning that Pulse is one of Orlando’s most popular gay clubs.
When even a Mail on Sunday commentator is saying this, it’s hard to imagine that America’s incredible rates of gun violence will ease any time soon:
In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015
Continue reading This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours
Last week’s post on the nature of memory ended with a scene from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – the (loose) inspiration for Blade Runner.
‘Does she know?’ Sometimes they didn’t; false memories had been tried various times, generally in the mistaken idea that through them reactions to testing would be altered.
Eldon Rosen said, ‘No. We programmed her completely. But I think towards the end she suspected.’
But that’s science fiction, of course.
I wonder what a Philip K. Dick deep in his shroom cups would make of the #Eurovision pixelgasms pic.twitter.com/GHTtHz3Gd0
— Pat Kane (@thoughtland) May 14, 2016
Continue reading My Name is Joe 2 – Partial Recall
Hi.
If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed that Mrs Stroke Bloke recently made me Mr Mrs Stroke Bloke. (You’ve made that “gag” before – Ed.)
Now we’ve been married for as long as the three-and-a-half weeks I was in Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital before my transfer to the Rusk Institute, I thought it might be time to scribble down some thoughts about what just happened – figure out what it was all about….
[Interact some more with Mr Mrs Stroke Bloke and read the Apoplexy Tiny Letter here.] Continue reading Something Changed
It’s the Early May Bank Holiday in Scotland today. Ian Wiki confirms that May Day is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival.
The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times, with the Floralia, festival of Flora.
In explaining the origins of May Day, Ian comes up with all sort of specifics, but kind of slides over the idea that – as Longsufferingreaderoftheblogpaul wrote in a comment to a particularly off-the-wall post – time is social. Harvests. Day and night. Diurnal clocks. Biorhythms and cycles. All that mushy wetware bio stuff I never learned but is real.
Cornwall in England definitely gets into that side of things:
[On May Day,] Padstow holds its annual Hobby Horse day of festivities, believed to be one of the oldest fertility rites in the UK.
Sutekh the Destroyer‘s been at it again this week. Victoria Wood died on April 20. And then of course, Prince died on April 21.
If you want to skip straight to the peaches and cream,
there’s a cover of Prince’s When Doves Cry
by early-nineties indie stumblebums Bird’s Fate
at the bottom of the page…. Continue reading Sign o’ the Times
Hello, and welcome to apoplectic.me’s occasional round-up of strokes in the news. It’s been quite a week….
I saw #TheRevenant. Leo drags a useless leg around for ages, while grunting incomprehensibly. Aah, memories. #stroke pic.twitter.com/VKK1qYNnWC
— Ricky Brown (@ricky_ballboy) February 15, 2016
[More stroke blog inanity and whimsy here.] Continue reading Digesta Plaga #8