Nice film too, though it'd suit me better if the leading male wasn't the guy an Amazon UK critic calls the "Austrian Oak" ('Total Recall'). I'll watch a good movie with Arnie in it despite him, wishing they'd chosen someone a little less ... I dunno where to begin!
Seems they nearly did and that's by the by. Bill Wallo's shared his ideas about a heap of 'Mind Hacks' (Blogcritics), compiled by one Matt Webb:
"Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, or some scientist has proven that we only use about 10% of our brains. And if only we could learn to harness the remaining 90% of that untapped potential, there's no telling what we would be capable of doing. Right? Er, well, actually - no."
Thanks to the genius who's just sorted out my facial cavities, now I've had a couple of decent nights' sleep, with a promise of more to come, and find it nice occasionally to turn off that "untapped potential" Bill mentions.
Weird Stuff is going down in my life.
For starters, synchronicity has become so routine for weeks now it's become a game I play with one or two friends as to where it sprouts up next. Even better is the way my memory circuits have switched back on.
OK, It's scarcely "total recall", but more than enough to surprise family and good friends.
Never mind exactly how accurate these memories are.
Most people know, like the brighter cops who've taken a close interest in me for reasons legal matters prevent me from exploring, how unreliable memory can be. I especially enjoy ones about women and wild and wicked adventures shared with several of them since the 1960s and bet those recollections are pretty close to the mark!
Long before it's too late, I rejoined the ranks of the Quiet Revolutionaries (QRs), with every intention of Changing our Minds about the best and most entertaining sides of life.
 The LP (the 'Lotus Project' screenplay) is wrapped up for a while, now I've fully realised that the film's all about the Quiet Revolution.
The seeds planted, until spring I'll simply be keeping my eyes and ears wide open for QRs, since they're still there by the scores and often in unexpected places.
Rediscovering this and finding some of my friends and even the Kid are among them has been been part of what I regard as "extensive audience research" before I plug on with the LP any further.
However, one or two of my mates have been irritated by "nebulous" hints about the White Goddess (WG), whatever she is, who seems to have taken charge of my life and of the LP itself.
To end any confusion, I'd say chances are the woman's both a sub-atomic particle -- I kid you not -- and what a feller named John Elder calls, along with others, the "Great Mother".
He's scarely alone, people have rabbited on about her for ages. And ages...
"Magic is the art and science of changing consciousness at will," Elder suggests astride his intro to the lass, portrayed as one of our ancestors sculpted the 'Willendorf Venus' around 25,000 years ago. I'd go along with Elder more if I saw so little need to drag "magic" into it! Much groundwork for the LP has meant making the most of the strange and less bizarre science I've found stashed away in my head and like to keep up to date on.
Moreover, real "witchdoctors" I've had the luck to meet, among heaven knows how many charlatans, have been quite as down to earth as your average man and woman in the street. Often more so, since they've got less reason to run away from "reality".
They don't talk mumbo-jumbo, just get on with it! "Luck" did I say, and "chance"? I did, but don't mean it, because 'Probability Theory' is far more interesting. It's pure coincidence, doubtless, that the "layman's guide" I've just found you on that stuff also happens to be by a man called Webb, Peter this time.
There's no escaping the weave and warp of the web! No doubt I'm being as clear as mud about the WG, but that's how it'll stay for a good while except for a few since the LP is, after all, nothing if not a thriller.
As soon as I left it to germinate for a bit, Ana Gracey -- you could look this fine musician up in the search engine here if you fancy -- and a couple of others chanced to throw e-mails at me asking essentially, "Where the heck are you with it? We're still interested, you know."
That's great, because it's going to be a shared project.
When I can, I leap back and forth between the '60s I now vividly remember and around 2040, because the LP's also "sci-fi". I have rude words for people who tell me SF isn't real fiction, since this is such an absurd received idea and prejudice. When a decent SF writer tells a story about rounded and real-life people, where do you draw the line? For me, there isn't one. What's Orwell's '1984', for instance, if not an SF novel and one which happened to be alarmingly right about some of what we have to put up with today?
To list more titles from the "mainstream of classic writing" is a waste of time.
 Hence here's one of my least favourite pictures of me, hopefully improved. I went for what was meant to be a quick lunch at the Canteen today. It wasn't swift since the company was so good, including the occasionally mentioned Jacques the Ripper of Wrong-headed Ideas, who makes sure nobody sits in Nick's Seat until I manage to show up.
He accused me of having become "philosophical". This "annoys" me, it happens too often, and "cerebral" is worse!
Still, "fuckinfilosofy", as the WG calls it, interests me no more now than politics, except for sexual ones, unless put to good use.
The LP's about Applied Science, among people, and I can scarcely wait for the War...
You might notice I've updated the reading list on this page (which is one of the extras which makes the log load a bit slowly sometimes, but if you're interested, please be patient about these other people's costly net servers and I'd rather keep those links). Blake, now in it, is very much a case of "forward to the past".
My first insights into the Revolution came when a bunch of we Brits took a fresh look at William Blake (an archive) once most of the Sixties had swung by and understood what the feller was saying. True, lots of us were keen on "fucking the rules", but that man and "his" woman -- not that he was silly enough to believe people belong to each other -- were far better at it than most and had a fine time doing the most frightful things not merely to the Establishment but everything else they could lay their hands on.
 Quite a legacy! Today, I'm a bit miffed to find that 'Children of Albion: Poetry of the "Underground" in Britain' has long been out of print when my own copy's been repaired so often.
How can a book like that be allowed to sink into oblivion when the shelves are so full of nonsense? But never mind. The potty poet and Blake fan who flung it together and let anarchy reign at some of the funniest reading evenings I ever enjoyed, Michael Horovitz, is still going strong, it seems.
The "Underground", as then it got called, is more out in the open in 2005. One of the best places to keep an eye on it is ... the underground. So many people have plugged a part of it into their heads and Apple's done its bit by helping fill the subways of many a city with them.
When I start chatting to a stranger in the Métro -- I frequently do -- some are appalled, of course. For them, the idea is to shut the world out, go away! But for others, "turning on and tuning in" simply means something a little different from the way a few of us remember it.
That War I mentioned?
Well, we'll have to see, but once some of the more powerful dinosaurs who reckon they're in charge of things now and want it to stay that way get worried about what's going on, the counter-revolution will be quite something.
One battleground where I reckon we'll see it happening and take sides is right here. On the web. It is already.
The first place I thought I might take a look in the blogroll today was chèz Pollard. Well, knock me over with a feather from the WG's cap. Dave's on about 'Universal Values, Relatively Speaking' (How to Save the World). Among thoughts he tosses into a salad, he serves up this:
"What is interesting about [a] 'if we're all the same we'll get along' rationale is that it is imperialistic and utterly ignorant of the anthropological reasons why such cultural heterogeneity arose in the first place. Indeed, most anthropologists argue that man is already astonishingly culturally homogeneous already, and that cultural imperialism and cultural homogeneity have grown in near-perfect lock-step with the scale of human violence and war.
"In hunter-gatherer cultures, both human and animal, there is little cultural homogeneity between communities, and inter-mixing between communities is rare. Anthropologists are astonished at how tribes living just a few miles apart had rituals, beliefs, religions and even diets that were completely alien to each other, almost unimaginably different. Our civilization culture's expansion, imperialism, and language impositions have compromised these differences enormously, but they are still somewhat observable. Even after several hundred years civilization culture is so utterly alien to North American First Nations people that they have proved almost impossible to integrate and assimilate."
Scarcely a closet QR, our Canadian friend? I wonder if he realises the not too terrible truth about anthropologists I've just remarked on to a friend (I think, but did I send that bit or not?); to wit, when I thought I'd be an ethnomusicologist, it wasn't simply because music is lifeblood to me like for many others.
The required study of anthropology hadn't got far before I realised any decent one is a raving sex maniac! There's nothing more instructive than the way other people do it. It can even ... change your mind. It's wonderful to get your head round the Big Bang and realise you never ever were any "better" than people who said it's all about sex in the end, since they're quite right.
As for the Squip, 'Wackiness' is 'Dusting My Brain' for her, and why not?
"You cut deals, you change minds, you make things happen. You would prefer to be liked than" ... but don't be lazy, check it out if you like Cindy as much as I do (my italics of course).
I'll ask her about LPs and QRs -- without mentioning that the film's bursting with sex and includes several great stories about how somebody was a wretched an idiot about it for far too long, because once that's over it's really funny (don't tell Ana either, she only lets it all hang out in her songs).
Sorry to be rude and even skip the wackiness test tonight, but if I were to pursue this further, the neighbour will be banging on the wall since I'm in a mood for a good movie ... without something plugged into my ears.
Finally, there's an addition to the blogroll. SF led me to Mervius's Fantastica Daily, which is a pretty good way of summing up life, but for this guy it's not just a blog, he's quite a site!
11:37:34 PM link 
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