That’s pretty much the modus operandi around here – bitter cynicism leavened with fun. Skip down to the bottom of this post if you just want to hear some of the best Scottish pop ever.
But it turns out that this time, I wasn’t alone in my cynicism.
For a couple of weeks now, after considering why people are working longer and later hours notwithstanding the deleterious effect on their health, I’ve been wanting to consider the wider question of Why do companies do bad things?
“Relax kids, it’s all cool. Here, have one of these.”
Death Mettle. That’s some Punderdome 3000 level shit right there! Amirite?!
“Stop it. You’re killing us.” – Carcass
What I’m saying is, gird your loins, y’all.
Y’see, in the aftermath of last week’s laughfest about the movie Ghost and the experience of death, Paul pointed out that there’s a deep vein of pop culture death to be mined when it comes to the subject of death…
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.’
A search of apoplectic.me for the word “memory” comes up with 50 hits – almost a quarter of the posts on the blog. Hardly surprising, when one thinks that in the weeks following The Event, I couldn’t remember my age, where I was, who the person in the chair next to my hospital bed was, or whether or not I was the Vice President of the United States.
“I’m in Mexico, and if anyone asks, my name is Ricky Monahan Brown. If you catch my drift.”
Eventually, memories come back. Even now, Beth notices that my memories of thirty or more years ago seem to be more readily accessible than those from this week. Maybe you find the same thing. Continue reading My Name is Joe – Pt. 1→
Interested in Nerd Bait? Before digging into this week’s post, find out how The Wee Mermannie got the girl – deleted scenes from our Book Festival Gig are part of the bonus materials included in the first issue of the fabulous FREAK Circus!
The beautiful paperback artefact is here. The electronic version that includes the unexpurgated prose version of The Tail of The Wee Mermannie is here.
Right. Now. Back to the blog.
Last Monday, I noted neuroscientist David Eagleman’s remark that the idea that we are unitary people over time is merely an illusion of continuity.
The people each of us individually are at 10, 30, 40, “share the same name and some of the same memories, but we are quite different as a person.”
During the intervening week, I wrote a short story about a man who may – or may not – have lived a succession of quite different lives. Yet there are common themes in those lives. For example, in each case, the character’s father disappears from the scene in his early years.
Really? My dad died when I was 11! And mine! And mine! And mine! And mine! And mine!
It wasn’t until I was reading a passage in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel All the King’s Men last night that I realised that my fiction had been taking a sideways look at Eagleman’s theme…. Continue reading To a Tee→
Last week’s post, The Man Don’t Give a ****, kicked off with a visit to the new James Bond movie, SPECTRE, before running off on a Brosnan-in-a-tank rampage through British foreign policy. But really, what I wanted to post was more in the vein of a classic, Moore-era romp.
I got yer metaphor for British foreign policy right here.
Beth and I went to see the new James Bond movie, SPECTRE, last night. Long-suffering readers may recall that Bond has a cameo roll to play in the story of my massive haemorrhagic stroke. More about that in Being a Man Again: Strokes, Power Tools and James Bond.
“So, Doctor, do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to divert resources from combating shadowy Eastern Europeans to fighting Daleks.”
It feels like seeing the stark, terrible beauty of Glencoe in Skyfall serves as easy reference for all of the parts of my life that were coming together to direct me back to Scotland. The Glen eventually served as a major character in a short story I wrote for the first issue of Brain of Forgetting.
Saw #SPECTRE tonight. Here’s the review. (Spoiler alert!) A lot of things happened. In no particular order. It was pretty. 2 stars.
