Sunday 19 July 2015

Emma Kennedy

Once I was watching television. This was in the days before smartphones and box sets of whatever. There was a lot of channels on cable TV at thus time, but a lot of them were Russian news, pornography or promoting Christianity.

I chanced across a TV show about Germany of the 1930s. Nowadays there are practically 24 hour channels dedicated entirely to the salacious exposing of Nazi evils but not so much then.

Anyway, on this particular show they showed the communists marching singing a jolly song about the evils of capitalism or whatever and then showed the Nazis marching along singing a jolly song about the evils of Jews or whatever.

To my disgust, I found myself a few days later, humming the nazi tune whilst doing the washing up.

It was quite catchy, I recall, although I wouldn't be able to sing it for you right now.

I'm guessing there's probably some people who first got into fascism that way. 


Thursday 22 January 2015

Petroleum Will Prevail

People who talk at great length about their dreams are notoriusly boring, despite this I have always been jealous of them, as I very rarely recall my dreams. Sometimes I will wake up with a feeling, which I assume to be left over from the dream: anxiety, happiness, disgust or something similar. 

Articles about dream journals advise keeping a notebook by your bed so that you can write down your dreams upon waking when you hopefully will remember everything in great detail. Then you can review your dreams at a later date and look for patterns.

I'm not a person who takes great significance in dreams: they're most often just brain detritus in my opinion. Even detritus can be interesting and useful though, so it shouldn't be written off for that reason alone.

It's even easier these days with smartphones as you can tap the details of your dreams straight on and you don't even need to turn on the light.

Last night, I woke up having had a very strange dream. Surprised and delighted I remembered something I resolved to make a note on my phone to remind me in the morning.

In the morning I completely forgot about this whole episode until I looked at the phone notes & saw the following, created at 4.28am

Poke him in the whor bot

Of course I have no recollection of what that meant. I need to write fuller mores in the future. Oddly I do recall when writing it wanting to be very careful in spelling "whor bot". It was very important for reasons I have now forgotten, for it to be spelt like that.

The whole thing puts me in mind of this:

William James describea a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered he rushed to see what he had written. It was: 'the smell of petroleum prevails throughout.'

No laughing gas was involved and I can't smell petrol.

Saturday 17 January 2015

If Men Had Periods

As we all know, advertising aimed at men is amongst the funniest, especially if you are a man. You might wryly watch an advertisement on the television for something firmly aiming itself at men and smugly laugh to yourself: do they really think we are like this? Then you think: what if we really are like this? Then you think: well they can't be aiming this advert at me, I'm sure I'm not so, for want of a better word, basic. But maybe we are. Or more likely, this is easiest thing to assume. After all, like most things, you have assume the people in power, the people running things, are generally male.  Maybe we are all this basic, including me & I've just failed to notice this all of this time*

But of course of all kinds of advertising, the best is that aimed at men, advertising something that might be described as girly. Such over compensating!

Imagine if men got periods. Theyd definately give tampons some stupidly macho name and design.

* there are so many things I've somehow missed in all my years & am only just discovering. It's quite scary.