Friday, 18 June 2010

DOES PINO DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

I don't know what Wayne Rooney said at the end of the England Algeria debacle but I'm as dejected as my Pino all alone in the attic. I spent a while with Pino a couple of years ago but he mostly cried and made me feel guilty. So the batteries came out and he went in his box. I often wondered what fifty Pino's would do in one room [witty suggestions welcomed!]. One things for sure, they couldn't do any worse than England in the World Cup!
And what do you get when you merge a Hoover with ALIEN?
LittleDog!
Yikes! Creepy!

5 comments:

  1. Yikes, that Hoover/Alien cross is the thing of nightmares! Something very disturbing about the way it moves and I don't like those two stingers/spinneret looking things at the back either!

    Toad is just gonna love this one hehe!

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  2. I totally agree, eviled! I don't know quite what it is, but there is something utterly flesh-creeping about the way it walks (or perhaps a Shakespearian "halts" might be more apt).

    Maybe it's the way one pair of legs bends the "wrong" way? *shrugs* I don't know. But this is a good example of something I believe to be true, but which rarely crops up in Science Fiction. I think that if ever humans did encounter alien life-forms, they would likely experience a similar feeling of unease, simply because movements, smells, etc., would feel "wrong". This is going to sound absolutely silly - but then we already know how silly Toad is (even Mitzi agrees) - the fist time I saw Michael Jackson "Moonwalking" (just glancing up at the TV and not realising what I was seeing), I felt extreme fear unlike any I had felt before. My brain screamed, "humans don't move that way", and it creeped me out for hours afterwards just playing it over in my mind. Seems daft now, but I am convinced that is how we would react to aliens - certainly until we got used to them.

    What do others think? Or is Toad simply crazier than a really crazy frog?

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  3. I think you have something there Toad about the way the legs move, it's not "right" is it?

    Your points about meeting aliens and being freaked out due to the, well, "alienish" nature of the experience are well taken.

    I think I recall Bertrand Russell making a similar point about people's unnerving reactions to so called "ghosts" i.e. it wasn't so much the fear that a "ghost" could harm them that caused so much terror, but just the total collision of one's world view coming up against a totally new version of "reality" that was so out of kilter with one's normal experiences of the world.

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  4. Can you recall the source of that Bertrand Russell observation, eviled?

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  5. Hmmm, you have me there a bit Toad, but I think the reference I mention comes in his little book "The Problems of Philosophy".

    It has been many years since I read his remarks about ghosts but they always stayed with me.
    Of course, there was a bit more to it too (not sure but he might have been discussing induction at the time, and how we expect things to always be the same because of our oft repeated experiences of the world gives the impression of order etc) and he put it a lot better than I did.

    I was always a bit of a Russell fan, what about you?

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