Warming Up

I saw someone on Mastodon (yeah that's right, grandad. Are you still on Twitter) - in fact I think it was Joz Norris or at least someone who was jozzing - say they had clear childhood memories of being able to shoot lightning from their fingers. That probably didn't happen, but human memory is a strange thing. I have memories from childhood that seem crystal clear (as much as my brain is capable of imagining anything), but that can't be true. One is of walking alone into my back garden in Cheddar at night and seeing a huge ringed planet, the size of the moon, in the night sky. The walking alone in the garden at night is enough to make it a hugely unlikely memory, but I am pretty sure Saturn has never come that close to the planet Earth to be visible (at that size at least) to the naked eye. But it was a different time in the 70s and the Heavens shift over the years, so who knows.

My other one is of my sister, on a couple of occasions at least, telling me on car journeys that she had blue blood and the pricking her leg and squeezing the injury and blue blood emerging from her veins. I think that latter one might have been her tricking her gullible little brother (I was 28 years old at the time) but even as an adult, I still don't quite see how she did it. What did she have that was blue and how did she make the blue blood appear to come from her body? Maybe my sister is an alien. Or maybe I dreamed the whole thing. 

Maybe I should ask her. But what if she is an alien? If you know how she did this, please tell me, so I can emotionally scar my own kids too.

Is it possible my sister had some blue blood? She's still tricking me 50 years on….. I mean 27 years on.

My interest once again piqued by Chaplin and Hitler and the possibility of them meeting, I watched the recent Chaplin documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin today. Spencer said his family had been slightly tricked into getting involved with this and that it twisted the truth, but it wasn't as much of an expose of his (admittedly somewhat dubious) personal life. As with many great comedians there seems to be confusion of who the real Charlie Chaplin actually was. It's like once you burrow down through the characters you find almost a personality void at the centre. Comedy can be a shield and sometimes it's so effective that there's nothing left to shield when the layers are peeled away. Or maybe that's the way things start. There are comedians I know very well who I don't really know in any real sense. And Chaplin had such dark and impoverished beginnings that it might not be a surprise that all the things he appeared to be were just illusions. Maybe Hitler too. 

Maybe anyone with that moustache was using it to hide behind.

It was nice to feel the little tug of a creative idea reaching out to grab me. This is an idea I've thought about before and it involves trying to get a read on Hitler as well as Chaplin as well as the problem of trying to represent him dramatically and to work out what is beneath the facade. There's nothing to be gained by making him a pure evil stereotype, but any attempt to humanise him is dangerous too. To be fair, Chaplin gave it a go and there's probably some way to play around with this idea in a cartoonish way that also does not shy away from the viciousness beneath.

When Chaplin sighted America for the first time he shouted out that he was coming to conquer it. Which is an interesting choice of words. And doubtless Hitler felt the same. But why conquer with hatred and violence when you can conquer with laughter? I guess when no one thinks you're funny (Donald).

The quote that would make the Fringe programme if this project ever gets off the ground is “Just think - He's the madman, I'm the comic. But it could have been the other way around.”

I was going to do Twitch of Fun tonight, but I was so heavy with tiredness that I decided to give myself a break. The stuff that had most interested me in the news was about the stupid childish nickname calling that politics seems to have descended into. From Remoaners and Leaveophiles (that one was mine, but I came up with it too late to affect the vote) to Ron DeSanctimonous (fucking shit) and Sleepy Joe. Is this really the level we're at? That's enough? It's amazing no one has managed to do it back to Trump til now, as his name is full of possibilities and rhymes (though sadly I don't think trump means in the US what it means here), though the right wing papers are now giving it a go with Trumpty Dumpty. Absolutely fucking pathetic that adults should be doing this and that it clearly serves as a political argument. We don't deserve this planet. We won't have it for too much longer.