An Elephant of One's Own

When you get to my age, you tend to notice the bugs and glitches in your brain circuitry more than you used to. The factory-default smoothness and disciplined algorithms of the youthful mind are a wondrous thing. In my case they enabled me to sail through school and university, effortlessly passing exam after exam while devoting my main attentions entirely elsewhere. (Where? See last post, and stop asking daft questions.) Which in turn means that, on the rare occasions that one's neural circuitry misfires, the phenomenon tends to arouse an almost superstitious awe and concern. Take deja-vu for example. As a young man, it might have assailed me maybe once in three years. It was something a little weird and unsettling, and seemed to require an explanation, and metaphysics might have seemed, at times, as good a place to look for that as any. Well, I managed to experience mild deja-vu at least three times just yesterday, more or less at one sitting. See - that means I'...

One day I will have time to write a proper post, with a plan to it, and a point, and everything. Promise. OK, first off, if you haven't seen the original Matrix movie, trust me: you missed nothing. I managed to survive from 1999 up to about a week ago without seeing it, then the curiosity became too much and I downloaded it and watched it, only to wish immediately that I hadn't. Overrated is putting it mildly. The word "crap" comes to mind. I will allow that the special effects are, well, special, but then, that's what special effects are supposed to be. (Movie makers please note: if your effects are not, in fact, all that special, there's no shame in crediting them as "Not Particularly Special Effects". Plain language will get you far.) I will also allow that the movie loudly trumpets "an aesthetic", which was briefly fashionable in the early noughties if not before, consisting of everyone wearing long coats and dark glasses and looking ...