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The Telepathy of Louis Armstrong

June 10th 2009 05:44
: The Telepathy of Louis Armstrong
I've noticed a trend in America (it could be in other countries as well, but I've only noticed it happening in America) to say the word "redundant", when I think what they mean is "tautological". For instance: "So, on the news last night they were interviewing this corrupt politician... though I realise that's probably redundant!" (Truth be told, they likely said "realize" instead of "realise", but I couldn't bring myself to type it. Even though I just did. Hey, now I'm redundant!)

Sentences like that always require an extra moment or two to decipher. "Hang on, which bit is redundant? The interview was redundant? Why? Had someone else interviewed him earlier?" Then it becomes clear it was the word "corrupt" that was redundant, not the entire statement, and suddenly everything makes sense, even if you then missed the following sentence to figure it out.


I don't know why they do this. "Tautology" is brief and to-the-point. It highlights the fact that there is an adjective-noun combination (or, sometimes, an adjective-adjective combination) that you immediately know to hone in on. "Redundant" is too broad, too generic. You could be referring to anything with "redundant", including, pertinently, the fact that you said anything at all.

A bigger problem for me is that this imprecise language is used by people I admire -- really smart people, at that -- leaving me unable to engage in that terrifically fun exploit of insulting their overall intelligence based on a singular word. (Insulting the intelligence of such people is not something I'm proud of, but it is immensely satisfying, particularly if you already harbour a dislike of them.) When it's someone you like who does it, it immediately becomes nothing more than a perfectly-acceptable mistake, and even calling it a mistake is a bit on the harsh side. Keep in mind, I'm someone who used to say "for all intensive purposes", right up until the day I realised it didn't make sense, and that I should have been saying "for all intents and purposes". I'm man enough to admit that.


Another redundant tautology* is the phrase "I thought to myself". It's easy to see why people say it: it's lyrical, and so much more poetically satisfying than just saying "I thought". Again, I refrain from making fun at the expense of such people, because of the most popular iteration of that phrase. Think Louis Armstrong. Think songwriters Bob Thiele, George David Weiss, and George Douglas. Think one of the greatest songs of all time.

If you're going to tear the tautological "I think/thought to myself" asunder, you're going to have to dismiss "What a Wonderful World", the ballad that rendered nearly every subsequent ballad as being, well, redundant. The word "sentimental" is often used pejoratively, but this song is one of the few great defences that sentimentality has left. At less than three minutes long it doesn't overstay its welcome, and the incomparable Louis Armstrong elevates it stratospherically. "And I think to myself" is infinitely more beautiful a turn of phrase than "And I thiiiiiink". Even if the dragging out of "think" is done so with Armstrong's addictive vocals, I still prefer the "to myself", despite its position as the ultimate tautology.

Or, he asks enigmatically, is it?

Language changes over time. This is a fact of life. It evolves as society and humanity evolve, and even if this evolution is sometimes used a pathetic excuse by a minority of lazy educators to justify not teaching spelling and grammar, it's still fascinating to watch. The most alarmingly sudden evolution of language -- and I suspect that if it happens suddenly, it might no longer be called evolution -- has happened only recently, and I'm not sure anyone noticed.

I have only recently heard of Professor Kevin Warwick, so I won't presume to talk about his work with any authority. He is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, as well as, amongst many other things, one of the first proper cyborgs that humanity has produced. A chip he had implanted in his head allowed him to control a robotic arm that was hooked up to said chip via the internet. From New York's Columbia University, he was able to control the robot arm which was, at the time, at the University of Reading, all simply by thinking. The implications for this are astonishing and wide ranging, but I am, at the moment, primarily concerned with how it affects "What a Wonderful World".

You see, the next stage of Warwick's experiment was communication. An array was implanted in the brain of Warwick's wife -- who, in terms of spousal support, must surely win a prize of some kind -- and the two were able to communicate basic levels of empathic emotion from a remote distance. That, right there, is surely the future, and I suspect that Kevin Warwick may one day be a name that's casually rattled off with other scientists the general public may be aware of (Newton, Einstein, Hawkings, Feynman, etc).

His vast array of achievements, both in this field and similar fields, are deserving of acclaim, but they may cause a significant tangental achievement to be swept under the carpet: thanks to Warwick's work, the phrase "I think to myself" will, soon, no longer be a tautology. Once we gain the ability to think at another person, think at a wide range of people, and have them all think back at us, thinking to yourself will be an important distinction worth making. Suddenly, a classic song with an endearing and forgivable slip-up becomes a classic song with a poignant message pertaining to the modern human condition. All thanks to the extraordinary unpredictable relationship between scientific advancement and language.

What a wonderful world.



* In a fit of paradoxical irony, it should be noted that "redundant tautology" is, in fact, a redundant tautology.
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: Hillbilly Borg and the Creative Process
As a writer, I'm often asked the same question over and over again: "Would you please not touch me there?" Afterwards, when my busy hands are kept to themselves, I'm then asked another question: "Where do you get your ideas from?" This is a very difficult question for a writer to answer, largely because the idea was probably stolen from somebody else.

Coming up with the idea is not the difficult part. That part is usually a mathematical process, adding two incongruous elements together to create a "what if?" scenario. ie: What if a zombie became President? What if bar stools became super-intelligent? What if the world's tallest woman fell in love with electricity?

It's where you take the idea, how it develops, that's the hard part. Figuring out the structure, the story's progression, that's where the difficulty lies. The story needs to be structurally familiar to be satisfying, but new enough to be significant. Audiences need wowing.

To give you an example, we present here a valuable insight into the creative process. The following is a transcript of a discussion between myself and Melbourne writer Mia Timpano. We began with an irresistible concept: what if the Borg (from Star Trek: The Next Generation) became hillbillies? The concept was so strong, so powerful, that we had no choice to immediately begin work on it. This is what happened...

Lee: Let's co-author it. I'll start at the start. You start at the end, and we'll meet in the middle.

Mia: No, I'll start three quarters of the way through, and you start at the first intermission, then we'll meet in the credits.

Lee: Opening or closing? Or either?

Mia: So I actually go to the end and back to the start.

Lee: The middle credits, then.

Mia: Exactly.

Mia: Our credits are during the film.

Lee: Agreed.

Mia: But it starts in the past...

Mia: ..then fast forwards to the future, but from the point of view of the past.

Lee: Okay. But everything's in a parallel universe. And occasionally set in Mexico.

Mia: But it's THIS Mexico, from the future.

Lee: Okay, fair enough.

Mia: So the audience has a common frame of reference.

Mia: To TekWar.

Lee: Yep. And the audience has to be set in the past as well.

Mia: Actually, we should so a TekWar crossover, maybe just for like a few minutes of the film...

Mia: ...just as like an in-joke.

Lee: Yep. Everyone will love it.

Lee: Sorry, not everyone. I meant Shatner.

Mia: No, the audience has seen it, we flashback to it in the middle credits.

Mia: No, wait.

Mia: We have the bloopers during the middle credits.


Lee: Can we just have the audience on screen and the film in the actual theatre? That might make things easier. In Mexico.

Mia: It's just a Mexican release, there's no international release.

Lee: Agreed.

Mia: They wouldn't get it outside of that territory.

Lee: True. What language should it be in?

Mia: Good question.

Mia: I'm thinking either Latin, just as a nod to Passion of the Christ.


Lee: They are Latinos in Mexico, so they should understand it.

Mia: Totally, good point.

Lee: And I'd like the subtitles to be in menu Italian.

Mia: Menu Italian?

Lee: You know, people who can only speak Italian in so far as things they've seen on menus.

Mia: Nice. That feeds into marketing.

Mia: Everybody loves food, etc.

Mia: This movie is good enough to eat, etc.

Mia: That's a poster quote.


Lee: Nice. Although I wanted to use "Saving the world... and loving it!" from Get Smart.

Mia: That actually ties well into the Borg theme.

Lee: And the hillbilly theme.

Mia: Totally. Are we green lighting this now?

Mia: I don't see how we can't.


Lee: Only if Andrew Dice Clay will play the lead.

Mia: Who?

Lee: Okay, Judi Dench

Mia: Just for the historical element?

Mia: I was going more in a Matthew Broderick direction with this.

Mia: Sort of as a nod to Ladyhawke.


Lee: Okay. But he has to be voiced by Clint Howard.

Mia: Oh my god, YES.

Lee: I'm worried that Ladyhawke fans would get confused otherwise.

Mia: They would, they would.

Mia: And he appears on screen in like a speech bubble whenever there's dialogue.


Lee: Speech bubble - YES.

Lee: Actually, Clint Howard is the only person allowed to watch the film. In Mexico.

Mia: i'm thinking we bring in Rutger Hauer just to round things out?

Lee: Yep, agreed on Rutger.

Mia: Rutger sort of needs this right now, no offence.

Lee: None taken.

Mia: So, I think he's a lock.

Lee: I can talk to his people. Who are, funnily enough, Clint Howard and Matthew Broderick.

Mia: Seriously? That's pretty ironic. Who are Max von Sydow's people? I'd like to talk cameos here.

Mia: Just to keep the purists happy.

Mia: The Bergman purists.


Lee: Naturally. We want to see a profit on this.

Lee: It's show-business, not show-show. Or business-business.

Mia: I hear that.

Mia: I'm thinking 1D.


Lee: Okay, but people have to bring their own glasses.

Lee: Or special 1D monocles.

Mia: Okay, so there's no perspective or focus in any shots...

Lee: No. Everything's just one compressed point of singularity.

Lee: I think I can get Roger Deakins to shoot this.

Lee: He'd have to film using a black hole, but he's flexible.

Mia: Hey, I'm thinking web-res quality as well. Just as a nod to the internet.

Lee: We can't lose that demographic. It'd be insane not to.

Mia: Yeah, we can't not, just given where the industry is going right now.

Lee: You have to stay ahead of the curve.

Mia: Okay, I'm also thinking when you play the film backwards there's reverse dialogue?

Lee: Naturally.

Lee: I just assumed.

Mia: Sorry, I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.

Mia: So, alternate endings... where are you with this?


Lee: I hear alternate openings are the way of the future.

Lee: Especially if we're reversing the film.

Mia: Which we are.

Lee: Deerga.

Mia: Nice!

Mia: Is it 1D in reverse though?


Lee: 1D is actually in up. So if we reversed it, it would go down.

Lee: Which might get saucy.

Mia: True

Mia: So... wait, we start in the past, so we end with the opening, which is at the start when the film is played in reverse, which it is intended to be?


Lee: Maybe it's always behind us.

Mia: So either way, we start with a flashback.

Lee: Okay. And project it onto the back wall of the theatre.

Lee: Everyone may have to sit backwards on their seats.

Mia: You don't think this is pushing too many boundaries?

Lee: I don't care. I just want an MTV Movie Award on my shelf.

Mia: Likewise.

Mia: Soundtrack, I'm thinking extreme rap.


Lee: I was thinking the opening bar of the Beverly Hillbillies theme played at full volume. But at minimum compression, so that one second would take up the whole CD.

Mia: I'd still like to see it rapped.

Lee: That's understandable. Can I get Judi Dench for that?

Mia: I'd like to see her versus someone.

Mia: Can we get dead people?


Lee: In Mexico, yes.

Mia: Nice. I'm going to say someone BC, just as a nod to Jesus.

Lee: Was Jesus born before he was born, though? He might not get it, otherwise.

Lee: Oh, wait, I've got it: Lot's wife.

Lee: Judi Dench vs Pillar of Salt.

Lee: That's a good rapper name.

Lee: Though it'd have to be PILLA OF SOLT.

Mia: SLT.

Lee: Sorry, I always spell solt wrong. SLT.

Mia: Vowels are nineties.

Mia: I'm thinking only Blu-Ray for this.


Lee: No, HD-DVD. I think we can get a good deal on it.

Lee: I'm thinking multi-platform: Betacam for the home video market, Laserdisc, and HD-DVD.

Mia: Can we do it on vinyl?

Lee: Okay, but only the silent movie version.

Mia: Just so I know we're on the same page, the parallel universe is really this universe, but we call it a parallel universe so we can deal with current political tensions on screen without retribution?

Lee: I think it would be inappropriate to do it otherwise.

Lee: I also think it will be revolutionary to have a multi-layered story in a 1D medium that can't even support one standard layer.

Mia: It is, and funny, since this is going to be basically a re-telling of the Gulf War in terms of plot.

Mia: So there's, like, several ironies.


Lee: I'd actually prefer it if it was just pure irony with no real message underneath.

Mia: Max will like that.

Lee: I'm not sure who I want to distribute it yet. No motion picture company, it's too extreme for them. How about a cereal company?

Mia: How about that salad dressing company that works with Paul Newman's supermarket products?

Lee: Okay. But we have to get free salad dressing for the premiere.

Mia: Granted. I'd also like to see this packaged with food, with the HD-DVD.

Mia: Just so we appeal to kids across the board.


Lee: But it's hidden IN the food, so you have to eat through it to find the movie.

Mia: Good thought, more interactive.

Lee: Actually, given the "reverse" nature of the film, you should only find the movie once you throw up the meal.

Mia: The film is basically an easter egg?

Lee: Essentially.

Mia: I like it. Will it make people think too much though? People don't like thinking.

Lee: Maybe we should supply ear muffs and blindfolds so they can sleep through it.

Mia: Maybe we should destroy all copies of the film en masse as a demonstration to the public.

Lee: That would also protect us as per Mexican copyright law.

Lee: Although we'll probably still see bootleg bonfires in China, but that's unavoidable.

Mia: Well, it's already in web-res quality, so that's covered.

Lee: Good point. I should re-read my contract.

Mia: I think it's great. I'm almost embarrassed for other filmmakers, though...

Lee: I think they should all retire out of respect. It would be an insult to audiences for them to continue making movies.

Mia: Yeah, it would be so tacky otherwise.

Mia: Still, we should be proud.


Lee: I think it's a masterpiece.

Lee: Where do we go from here? I think to protect our legacy, some sort of suicide pact is in order.

Mia: You know, I don't often use the word "gods" to describe you and I, but I'm going to put it out there.

Lee: I often use it to describe us, but now I'm going to use capitals. And, where appropriate, Comic Sans.

Mia: We need to appear to die, then re-emerge in Mexico. They'll want us there.

Lee: And that will tie in with the whole Jesus theme we'll be forcing into the Director's Cut. Brilliant.

Mia: The directors cut, one word: holograms.

Lee: That works really well. Particularly if we want to jump from the 1st Dimension to the 3rd without having a single copy in 2D.

Mia: But isn't this 4d now? These would be real holograms...

Lee: Depends how big the budget is.

Lee: We may have to do away with Time altogether, and just have the film exist at a fixed instant.

Mia: Okay, can we kill real people and turn them into holograms?

Lee: I don't think there's any specific law against it.

Mia: That's what I'm thinking...

Mia: I'm just thinking convenience. I don't know, maybe we need to change gears on this one though, we already used dead people in the original...

Mia: So do we look into the unborn?


Lee: It might be easier to just shoe-horn Hayden Christiansen into it. I'm sure the fans will love it.

Mia: But still voiced by Clint Howard, yeah?

Lee: In my mind, everyone is voiced by Clint Howard.

Mia: With the speech bubble?

Lee: Actually, for the special edition, Clint should be outside the speech bubble, and everything else should be inside it. Including the audience.

Mia: And subtitles are on another disc for another platform that hasn't been invented.

Lee: That will increase sales, yes.

Mia: Double them, effectively

Lee: Triple, if we charge twice as much for them.

Mia: What's our profit margin on this? I'm thinking clint needs this gig pretty bad, so he's negligible...

Lee: I'd like to break even on it. It will take a lot of tricky numbers juggling, but I think it can be done.

Mia: I guess it's our baby, so we don't need to see profit, just so long as people GET it.

Lee: That's what's important. Making it accessible.
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: I Start Off Talking About a Department Store And End With Shakespearean Salad Dressing Or Something
It's been a while since I've thanked a major chain of department stores for anything, so I'd like to take this opportunity now to say a big THANK YOU. I won't say which store I'm thanking, as I don't want to embarrass them, but they know who they are.

I want to thank them because of the freedom they've given me. In the past, other department stores have curbed my freedom, telling me which products I can and can't buy, and it's been horrible. In fact, it was so horrible, I didn't even realise there was something better on the horizon until I walked into Better Department Store and saw a sign proclaiming their latest slogan:

"It's my choice!"

After I saw this slogan, I was reminded of the days when it wasn't my choice, when dictatorial stores imposed their iron-fisted will on me. But no more. Ever since chancing upon this brave new corporate selling phrase, I feel... saved.

Some people might think this slogan is a bit redundant, or even patronising, but not me. I may not be very smart, but I feel really empowered when I see that slogan, and it makes me want to spend an awful lot of money before I exit. I especially like how the word "choice" is written in a different, more fun font, so I'm even more excited by it. If this were mere marketing, I would praise it as shrewd and clever, but it's more than that: it's a declaration of freedom.

Before the facetiousness chip on my computer explodes, I should probably admit to the overload I myself experienced when I saw that phrase adorning a placard above some really ordinary-looking tea cups. Who is this aimed at? Who do they think will look at the words "It's my choice!" and think, oh yes, it really is my choice, I wonder how quickly I can get down to the store to exercise this choice I've suddenly been granted. Given this department store likes to use apparently-classy models to show how sophisticated their brand is, surely they don't want the Stupid Classes coming in to mess up their image, do they? Or is anybody's money good enough? So long as they maintain an impressive profit margin, it hardly matters that they're appealing to clientele who believe that when Norma McCorvey argued for a woman's right to choose, she was referring to brands of cutlery.

It is, of course, far more likely that the phrase was one that was created By Committee. Committees, as you know, as not just fun to spell; they're eponymous bodies that sucks the creativity and life out of everything. Committees usually arrive at decisions once they establish what everyone wants. ie: "Our new Public Conversation Statement must be three words or less, make the buyer feel included in an apparently deeply personal manner, give them about 14% freedom and empowerment that they don't get with our competitors, and also have a sense of fun!" That's usually how brain-numbingly awful phrases like "It's my choice!" get approved; they're so utterly inoffensive, they get the tick of approval from everybody.

Not all advertising catchphrases are like that, though. Some exist at the complete opposite end of the scale. Like the almost-certainly apocryphal story about a camping supplies outlet that wanted to boost sales over the winter period. Their tagline? "Now is the winter of our discount tents."

Possibly the greatest advertising phrase in history, not just because it's literary, but because it's clever. It says what it needs to, and doesn't have to alter any important or accurate information about its product or sale in order to fit the cleverness of the reference.

I didn't buy any camping supplies, but I did start wanting more Shakespearean phrases in advertising. So often, I look with disappointment at the products in the aisles of my supermarket, not just because there's nothing there to tell me how empowered I should feel about being there, but because so few of them reference the classics.

The company Praise puts out a Caesar salad dressing. Surely they could do something like "I come for Praise Caesar, not for..." Hm. I don't know what comes after that. If only they had a competitor named "Berryhim". Maybe I should start up a company so they can do just that. Maybe Berryhim could have a flagship dressing called Salad Days, a phrase Shakespeare himself coined in Antony and Cleopatra. How about a vinegar called "In a Pickle", a phrase he coined in The Tempest? We want kids to learn the classics, and all they seem to know is advertising slogans, so why not give them a complete rundown on the works of the Bard when they think they're just buying something to go on their burger?

I can't remember what my original point was, but I really feel like some salad dressing. And a tent.

It's my choice.
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Stooge Hate-Olics Anonymous

April 8th 2009 01:35
: Stooge Hate-Olics Anonymous
There should be Alcoholics Anonymous-style meetings for people with socially-alienating traits that might exclude them from the specific social circles they live in. Like, rock aficionados who are afraid to admit that they don't like the Stones, or fantasy novel enthusiasts who don't "get" Tolkein, or comedy fans who watch Family Guy. Really embarrassing stuff like that.

My name is Lee, and I don't get the Three Stooges


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: What Star Trek Teaches Us About American Politics
I don't want to alarm anyone, but I think I know who the next US President will be.

The debate regarding whether Star Trek has any sort of accuracy in predicting the future has been hotly contested. Well, warmly contested, anyway. On one side of the fence, you have people who argue that the medical recorder McCoy used in the original series managed to predict, by many decades, medical devices that are only now being developed. On the other side, Trek also claimed that the 1990s would see a global Eugenics War, and, based on my perusing of the internet, I can see that didn't happen. (I did, however, develop a huge amount of respect for latter day 1990s Trek for maintaining continuity in its acknowledgement of the wars, instead of shying away from a clearly-inaccurate claim by its 1960s predecessor.) Star Trek is about as popular as filmed US science fiction has ever been. Even Star Wars, which is not actually science fiction, doesn't get this sort of debate about future predictions, largely because it's set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away", meaning that it is, at best, historically inaccurate


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The Oppostles

March 3rd 2009 02:26
The English language is not an easy thing to follow. It has many unimpeachable rules that are frequently impeached and then peached. Take, for instance, the famous mnemonic "I before E except after C". Even the rule itself has its exception built into it, like someone proclaimed "I before E" and then found out that the rule was only correct 50% of the time, thus rendering it completely useless. Putting in the "except after C" bit only served to make life more complicated when people tried to write "speceis", "fanceis" and the doubly-confusing "deficeinceis".

To make life easier on everybody -- and hopefully make money by featuring as a chapter in a primary school text book -- I'm going to try to explain various elements of English that may cause confusion, beginning with opposites


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I'm With The Banned

February 18th 2009 03:23
Living in the Age of Self-Realisation as we do (actually, I just think we live in an age of self-realisation, but I decided to add capitals to give it some Faux Importance), there are a lot of largely-depressing facts that you become aware of as time passes. Only recently have I come to terms with the fact that I may never play professional soccer, that it's possible I won't become a world-class musician, and that, given my advancing age, I'm unlikely to be a child prodigy. At anything.

One other recent realisation is that live music and me don't mix


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I'll Think of a Title Later

February 3rd 2009 03:57
There are only a few subjects that cannot be written whilst they are taking place. Death is probably the most obvious one. You can talk about the lead-up to death, and, for those who have been brought back from the brink by a clever doctor or a fortuitously-placed car battery, you can talk about it after the fact, but you can't really talk about it right at the moment it's taking place.

The bigger one -- perhaps even more horrible than death itself -- is writer's block. Surely the very act of writing about writer's block means it's no longer an affliction, yes


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44

January 20th 2009 03:23
Having just begun to immerse myself in international politics from my computer desk in the outskirts of Melbourne, I watched the 2004 Democratic National Convention with a lot of interest. Since I'd started watching the midnight showings of Parliament Question Time on the ABC, I'd become deeply interested in the differences between politics and theatre. Or was it that politics was theatre, and I was trying to determine the difference between policy (or governance), and theatre? Parliament Question Time had given me an immediate dislike of the Westminster system. I'd watch my elected officials spend hours arguing and Dorothy Dixing and behaving like naughty school children, and I'd yell at the screen, "Fucking do something! Go fix the roads or something! Jesus..."

My attitude towards it would eventually change -- though I still dislike the way it's conducted, I do like that a degree of mandatory and public accountability is built into our government system -- but was wondering if there was any substance to politics, or whether it was all just performance


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Us... Anthem

January 6th 2009 22:29
(the title only works if you have "Us and Them" from Dark Side of the Moon stuck in your head, and even then not really)

Let's be completely honest here, and I mean total, complete, unfettered, unabashed honesty. I don't want haughty, showy, faux patriotism to get in the way of something we all know not-so-deep down: the Australian national anthem sucks


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