They're coming thick and fast now

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 20: In Freaky Friday, Tess Coleman's book is called "Through The Looking Glass: Senescence In Retrograde".

Interestingly, putting "Tess Coleman" into Wikipedia gives you this episode of Private Practice as the third result.

I am the girl Anachronism

Kate and Leopold was on television last night. I caught a bit of the beginning, but it wasn't the film that grabbed me. What grabbed me was the main Character: Leopold, Duke of Albany. Having just read Alice in Sunderland, I realised that this was the same Leopold who is rumoured to have once courted Alice Lidell and who one of her sons was named after.

The film isn't exactly very faithful to ridiculous things such as "facts" when it comes to the character of Leopold. Just looking at Wikipedia will tell you this. Interestingly enough, in checking all this out, I found a mistake in Alice in Sunderland. Bryan Talbot says Leopolod died at the age of 28, whereas he was actually 30. It's not even a case of bad wording or him mixing people up, as Alice was a year older than Leopold.

Reading Alice in Sunderland, you begin to realise how much things can be connected in such little ways. I keep listing instances where the Alice books are referenced in popular culture, but I could go crazy and connect everything in popular culture straight back to Alice. As Bryan says near the beginning of AiS: "Alice lives in our collective imagination." You don't wanna know how many connections I could make to that phrase. I'll pick the first one that pops into my head: Jenny Quantum, a member of The Authority. She's the spirit of the 21st century. From here I can go any number of places. To comics again with something I just read in issue 3 of Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis (original writer of The Authority) about how there hasn't yet been a big cultural movement in the 21st century. Or I could go to one of my old A-level German textbooks that was called "Zeitgeist" (literally "time spirit").

And suddenly we're in a Rhizome. Everything's branching off and ultimately going nowhere. And now I've gone from part of a film I saw last night, to my Digital Cultures lectures without even trying. I didn't even get here by going straight down the Alice route! I always try to riddle this blog with links. Follow them. Then follow the links those pages give you. Then again. Then realise you've been sat there for five hours reading about Belgian shoes. And now I've just connected us to an xkcd comic.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 19: A Suicide Girl named Quinne has done a photoshoot with herself dressed as Alice. Suddenly I'm wondering if this is high or low art? It's a pornstar (maybe, some people are iffy about the "porn" status of SG) dressed as a character from a piece of nonsense literature. And suddenly I'm thinking of how there's history here, with photos of Alice and of young girls and of the question of what is pornography?

I've got the full set if you want it, by the way...

First post!

I had a dream last night. I won't go into the specifics of the dream as that's for somewhere that isn't here. The important part is that I woke up while my brain was in mid-tirade about bits in bread. You know the stuff I'm talking about, like Mighty White (which, according to Yahoo answers, does still exist). It was a tirade on how it's an affront to all the effort that has been put into the development of the milling process that produces fine flour without leftover husks and other assorted bits of crap that would otherwise make the bread unpalatable. Who the hell was having a slice of bread and thought to themselves "This would be so much better if it was full of hamster food that could get stuck in my teeth"?

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 1: In the episode of the Simpsons that was aired on Channel 4 last night (A hunka hunka Burns in love), Mr Burns uses words from the poem "Jabberwocky" twice. Check the Wikipedia link for more details.

-Alice