This page was sort of prompted by my meeting an old schoolfriend while out shopping and thinking "I thought I knew all of Lisa's sisters, which one is that with h-- oh NOOOO" as she was shopping with her daughter, who was now something like thirty five - okay, more like 12 or something, but tall (1), and not 'child like' and I thought less along the lines of "haha it's because I haven't seen either of them in a while" and more along the lines of "I will be dead soon."
But in fairness, she did have her first child while she was still in school - actually that is technically incorrect as she had her child after she was in school as she got kicked out of school for being pregnant - but she doesn't look old enough to be a mum is what I'm saying, and a recurring trope in my writing - in Frank especially - seems to be teenage mums. I'm pretty sure it's probably healthier to have recurring tropes like 'lesbians' and 'machine guns' when you're a bloke, but here we are.
A thing to take away from this page is not that I am suggesting only boffins and the moral elite read the Guardian and/or watch Star Trek, but rather that those who do tend towards a self-awareness that leads to depression, or at the very least an awareness of how little they can influence the world around them and this in turn leads to depression sooner or later. To me this is not actually a good thing. I have a mate - a Trek fan equal to myself, if not even more enthusiastic - who's a teacher in that there London and it takes huge toll on him because he's a bit of a thinker, and thinking don't lead to nothing good. It's unhealthy.
Back with the comics commentary, the Irish accent is laughably thick here, but still restrained compared to the real thing. "The one with Kirk fightin' the big lizard" is of course the original Star Trek - specifically the episode Arena, which I consider one of the finest hours of television ever made and will knife-fight in a pit of tigers with any man, woman or beast that tries to suggest otherwise. "The one with the black fella and Mr Wolf" is of course the magnificently flawed DS9, which took 1990s Trek's disturbing trend of regression and made it a virtue because it was portrayed as something inherently wrong rather than something admirable, a lesson which sadly didn't last into Star Trek: Voyager or Enterprise as those shows went back to fetishising women and pre-racial 1950s American values and societal structures as the default state of intelligent beings the universe over, while DS9 went the route of fetishising an Eastern Europe of civil wars, death camps and racial tensions and gave us a Mr Worf as less the one-note joke he was in Next Generation and instead an entertainingly sexist homiocidal xenophobe who was a pleasure to watch even when he's on trial for the mass murder of civilians. It also turned the one-off TNG aliens-of-the-week Cardassians from a footnote into the definitive bastards of the Trek universe, so evil that in the final episode when the shape-shifting Founders ordered the genocide of the Cardassian population I not only laughed, I thought they had it coming. DS9 was a flawed, stagey period piece, but it's easily as good as Trek got after the original series.
The Irish Times, for those not in the know, is pretty much the Irish version of the Guardian, by which I mean it is a paper created by overeducated liberals for the express purpose of annoying people who watch Top Gear. I also feel I am not harsh enough in my opinion of Hollyoaks on this page, so to be clear: I hate it beyond reason.
Toodles for the moment. Hopefully I'll be back at the blogging soon.
(1) 'tall' in this context meaning taller than me, which means pretty much everyone except Tom Cruise.
No comments:
Post a Comment