Guitar Hero

Y'all with the coloured buttons and "Star Power" ain't no Gee-tar heroes, this guy is. He even got a hero beard.

Memory Etearnal

Computers forget less than elephants do. Which is good, because remembering stuff is one of the main things we use them for. Having an archive of your entire life sitting under your desk is a little spooky sometimes too. Some things you'd rather were not remembered.

While looking for something else buried deep in the archives of my "My Documents" folder today, I came across an old text file. "Poetry to steal your smile.txt". Poetry is a very generous description of the contents, but it possibly passes as evidence that I invented "emo" several years before anyone else. It's got some good lines (if cheesy super-angst), but I apparently lack the creative flair to turn one good line into anything resembling a good peom.

I quite like the "glass eyes and porcelain smiles" description of commuters on a train, and I'd be very suprised if the line "you're all my dreams come true, and all my nightmares too" isn't in several other more professional works. The concept of the inhabitants of a city being faceless, silent drones while the city itself is loud, angry and lustful is a good one too, I just did a fairly poor job of expressing it.

I was an angsty pathetic whinger even before I got a blog! Anyone know a good psychiatrist? I have ... uh... a friend... who possibly needs one.

Face Off

Of the many random thoughts that have drifted through my mind recently, one was "I wonder what it's like to wake up with someone else's face?" It's a common plot device, various movies and books have been based on the concept of living someone else's life for a bit. Tom Hanks in "Big" springs to mind first, but there's been a whole raft of them. I think there was a mother/daughter body-swap thing fairly recently (a year ago or something no doubt, I'm not so current-affairs in the media arena).

There are people who live this surreal moment daily - face recognition is a brain function and thus can malfunction or be damaged. It must be very odd to not recognise your own face in the mirror. It must always feel a little like there's a mime the other side of a window copying your actions. You know (because the same strange thing happened yesterday, and the day before that) that it's just because your brain is a little out of whack, but you'll never quite shake the feeling something is a little off with the guy staring back at you out of the bathroom wall.

In the movies of course, while our hero/heroine is wearing someone else's body, they're still "themselves" and pretty certain they know who that is (they generally even learn something about themselves in the process of course, usually that was the universe's intention in orchestrating the body swap in the first place). So the thought that quickly followed on from the first was: "What about the inverse of that - what does it mean to wake up one morning and realise you're not the person you thought you were?" I suppose in a way, we all fall short of the person we imagine ourselves to be, or the person we think we ought to be, fairly often. For me, I set myself impossibly high standards in everything I do, so failing to be the person I think I should be is a very regular occurrence.

Life has a way of chewing up your best laid plans, your dreams and ideals, and spitting them back at you as twisted shadows of themselves. I think what really defines "who you are" is how you deal with that situation, not the plans themselves or their eventual failure.

I think when I started this post, I had a point. But now I can't think of it. Chalk up another failure.

Al Gore: Climate Change

Look! Evidence some Americans worry about stuff other than the fact Barak Obama can't bowl straight!

Al Gore is probably the highest profile adovate of Climate Change action, so his newest presentation on the matter is well worth a look. I'm not sure many people here in Europe still need convincing that climate change is a human-induced problem, but plenty still need convincing that it's something we need to do something about in a hurry, and that it's something they personally need to do something about. It's something we must all take individual responsability for. Not just with the lightbulbs and the walking rather than driving stuff, although we do need to do that, we also need change the perception of politicians. The sort of policies that are required at a national and global level are largely seen as unpopular, or at the very least not "vote winners". We, as a society, need to make the environment and thus the future survival of our planet and race, an issue politicians can "run on".