Read Yourself RAW

I'm currently re-reading - for the umpteenth time, I might add - the great (and, sadly, late) Robert Anton Wilson's first Cosmic Trigger book. While the title might seem a tad hokey and dated (it was written in 1977), the book itself remains fiendishly clever, gleefully provocative and side-splittingly funny. Like most of RAWs oeuvre, it contains such a generous mindbending-idea-to-page ratio that he makes most other writers, philosophers and social commentators seem cognitively tight-fisted by comparison.

Anyway, a particular passage jumped out at me today. Let me share it with you:

Everybody nowadays thinks they must have an "opinion" on everything, whether they know anything about it or not. Unfortunately, few people know the difference between an opinion and a proof. Worse yet, most have no knowledge at all about the difference between a merely legal proof, a logical or verbal proof, a proof in the soft sciences like psychology, and a proof in the hard physical-mathematical sciences. They are full of opinions, but they have little ability to distinguish the relative degree of proof upholding all these various opinions.

We say "seeing is believing", but actually, as Santayana pointed out, we are all much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can't believe.

RAW was very good at codifying, clarifying and articulating the thoughts (and, sometimes, the intellectual prejudices) that many of us have from time to time. What he says here may seem fairly self-evident, at least conceptually.

He also, however, had a mischievous gift for planting in his readers' heads nasty little neuro-linguistic cluster bombs with time-delay fuses. In the example cited above, we all encounter people/groups/institutions who seemingly can't distinguish between an "opinion" and a "proof" (let alone make a distinction between the different types of proof...) every time we pick up a newspaper, listen to a politician or subject ourselves to the BBC News website's Have Your Say page. What's not so easy, of course, is detecting this sort of thing in your own group, tribe or self.

That includes myself, of course.

What the Nyuk?

From Variety:

MGM and the Farrelly brothers are closing in on their cast for "The Three Stooges."

Studio has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome "Curly" Howard.

The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe.

What? What? WHAT???

For some reason, the notion of the recently Oscar-enriched Penn playing Larry puts me in mind of a Woody Allen short story, where a serious-but-struggling writer is commissioned to write a novelisation of a Three Stooges flick:

Calmly and for no apparent reason, the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. 'We suffer,' the dark-haired man said. 'O woe to the random violence of human existence.'

Meanwhile Larry, the third man, had wandered into the house and had somehow managed to get his head caught inside an earthenware jar. Everything was suddenly terrifying and black as Larry groped blindly around the room.

He wondered if there was a god or any purpose at all to life or any design behind the universe when suddenly the dark-haired man entered and, finding a large polo mallet, began to break the jar off his companion's head. With pent-up fury that masked years of angst over the empty absurdity of man's fate, the one named Moe smashed the crockery.

That's it. I'm off to watch You Nazty Spy! before I go to bed...

My Movie Alphabet

Here's something fairly inconsequential for you.

This is a meme I saw on Rol's blog late last year. Rol heard about it here, but I believe it originated from here. In any case, the idea is to select a favourite film to represent each letter of the alphabet. As I have lots of favourite films and a fairly temperamental set of taste buds, I've included runners-up in my list. This was to overcome the judgement-call paralysis that hampered my previous attempt.

If I didn't do it this way I wouldn't have made it past the first consonant.


Annie Hall (Runners up: An American Werewolf in London, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension)

The Big Lebowski (Runners up: Batman Begins, Blazing Saddles and Brazil)

Citizen Kane (Runners up: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Chinatown and Casino)

Dirty Harry (Runners up: Dawn of the Dead, Duck Soup and Down by Law)

Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (Runners up: El Topo, Escape From New York and The Empire Strikes Back)

F For Fake (Runners up: Fight Club, Fitzcarraldo and Fistful of Dollars)

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (Runner up: Ghostbusters, Get Carter and The Great Dictator)

Holy Mountain (Runner up: High Fidelity)

It's a Wonderful Life

Jaws (Runner up: Jackie Brown)

Kiss Me Deadly (Runners up: King Kong [1933] and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang)

Love and Death (Runner up: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and L'Âge d'Or)

Manhattan (Runners up: Momento, The Magnificent Ambersons and Monty Python's Life of Brian)

North By North West (Runners up: Night of the Hunter and Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!)

The Outlaw Josey Wales (Runner up: Once Upon a Time in the West)

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Runners up: Point Blank, The Producers and Paris, Texas)

Quadrophenia (Runner up: Q - The Winged Serpent)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Runners up: Repoman, Rear Window and Reservoir Dogs)

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (Runners up: Spider-Man 2, Santa Sangre and The Searchers)

This is Spinal Tap (Runner up: Touch of Evil, The Thing and The Third Man)

The Usual Suspects (Runners up: Un Chien Andalou and Unforgiven)

Vertigo (Runner up: Videodrome)

Withnail & I (Runners up: W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism, When Harry Met Sally and Wings of Desire)

X-Men 2

Young Frankenstein

Zelig (Runners up: Zero Effect, Zoolander and Zodiac)

Today... is... International Talk Like William Shatner Day

So declareth Maurice LaMarche - the voice talent behind such animated greats as 'The Brain' from Pinky and the Brain and the self-proclaimed "third most prominent imitator of William Shatner" - and who are we to argue? The mighty Shat turns 78 today, and LaMarche urges us all to celebrate this great man's birthday by adopting some of his highly idiosyncratic verbal mannerisms.

He even offers some handy tips on how to do it right:



You'll never say the word 'sabotage' in the same way again.

Happy birthday, Mr Shatner.

Oxford, Cambridge and Hull

We arrived back home from Hull the other week safe and sound and ever-so-slightly knackered. Or at least I was. Knackered, that is. Clare, Lily and Optimus were just safe and sound. As I mentioned previously, we went to Hull to collect a pram that can change into a pushchair and that's why we call it Optimus Pram. Or, at least, that's why I do.

I was a student at Hull University between 1990-1993, so returning to my old stomping ground for the first time in a long time was always going to be weird. Over the years I've carefully maintained a massive stockpile of rose-tinted recollections associated with the place. I suppose that's something that most people who went to college do, with the possible exception of graduates from Sarajevo Poly.

Still, Hull was where I met some of my closest and most trusted friends. In that respect I'll always have a lot to thank it for. During those three years there were good times, bad times and some extremely batshit crazy times. This was, after all, the place where I was interviewed on a local radio news programme after fleeing for my life from an exploding aerosol factory. It was where I spent every Sunday afternoon at a workingman's club that offered a regular line-up of bingo, live yodelling and striptease. It was where I shared a house with three friends and a 6-foot tall mechanical bear. It's a place that's hard-wired into my history and has helped make me the person I am today. In that respect, then, it probably has a lot to answer for.

As Clare, Lily and I approached Hull the other week and I caught my first, still-breathtaking glimpse of that ridiculously long suspension bridge spanning the Humber Estuary, I found myself thinking of all those other times I did this journey, back when my Dad did the driving and I just struggled with directions. My dad passed away in 1995, and now - years later - it was my turn to be the responsible adult sitting behind the wheel. I mused on the way that life has a funny way of throwing up such ironies, until I remembered that I still struggle with directions.

After picking up the pram from Hessle, we made our way towards the city centre. As I'd expected, things had changed in the way that things invariably do. Having lived in Birmingham for most of my life I know that modern British city centres are more than a wee bit partial to extensive plaster surgery. Hull, it seems, was no exception. The change in the retail landscape was the first thing I noticed: the Jacksons chain of regional supermarkets had all turned into Sainsbury's Locals, the Armadillo comic shop was now a coffee shop and the sight of the massive new St Stephen's Shopping Centre (next to the revamped Paragon railway station) caused my eyes to do a reasonable impersonation of Marty Feldman's. Hull's been hit hard by High Street homogenisation, I alliterated wistfully to myself.

This feeling swiftly passed as we swiftly passed the neighbouring LA's nightclub. From the outside, at least, it looked exactly the same as I remembered it from 18 years' ago. This was quite an achievement, as back then it looked rather dated.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as they say in South Yorkshire.

The Destroyers

As yesterday was St Pat's day I spent the evening visiting my Mum. While I was there I caught up with my brother, Rob, who asked me about the fabulously riotous Brum-based band The Destroyers. For Rob's benefit - and anyone else who might be interested - here's their video for Out of Babel:



The Destroyers are a genre-breaking 15 piece group who describe their sound as "Eastern European folk music with a gothic turbo charge." They're a phenomenal live act who seamlessly combine the spirit of The Pogues, a Black Rider-era Tom Waits and The Wedding Present's Ukranian John Peel Sessions to powerful effect.

They are, to use the common parlance, good shit.

Japanese Spider-Man

It's Spider-Man, it's Japanese and it's crazy as a shark's knee:




Thanks to Phil for pointing this madness out to me.

Watchmen: Bigger, Louder and Uncut

I went to see Watchmen last night.

As a somewhat obsessive fan of the original comic book (alright then, graphic novel), I expected this to be something of a Manichean moviegoing experience. I'd leave the theatre either loving or hating the film, hailing Zack Snyder as a cinematic genius or denouncing him as the New Schumacher. Like the moral standpoint of Rorschach, one of the anti-heroes from the film (alright then, motion picture), there would be no middle ground, no compromise.

That was yesterday. Now, I'm not too sure.

My good friend Phil likened the film to the Ludovico technique, that fictitious aversion therapy from Clockwork Orange in which Malcolm McDowell's Alex was forced to watch a barrage of lurid, violent images with his eyes prised open. Watchmen was two hours and forty minutes of relentless sensory overload which made me feel happy, annoyed, ecstatic, angry, gleeful and perplexed and often all at the same time. It's also left me feeling a bit like Malcolm McDowell.

I'm still trying to process it now. Like Schrödinger's Cat - which is both alive and dead at the same time - I find myself simultaneously loving and hating Zack Snyder's Watchmen. I'll try to write something more coherent once my neurology settles down.

Or I might just go to see it again.

Nite Owl and his Amazing Friends

Re-reading the Watchmen

As you might have already noticed, the Watchmen movie comes out this week. Unlike most online commentators with geekazoid tendancies, I'll try my best to reserve judgement on the film until I've actually seen the damn thing. Whether I end up loving it film or loathing it, at least it's given me an excuse to re-read Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' original comic series for the umpteenth time:

"Moe Vernon was a man around fifty-five or so, and he had one of those old New York faces that you don't see anymore. It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."

I first read Watchmen when it was released as a 12 issue series between 1986-7. A lot of things have changed since then, but it's still my favourite comic.