Oh so many!

A bumper crop of sightings now. They've been collecting up as I no longer have the internet at home...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 76: "When I grow up" by Garbage, features the line "Floating out to Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 77: Paul Kaye's intro to Being John Malkovich on Film Four features him making the Alice influence on the film explicit. Saying that when you enter the office in the film you "enter Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 78: Another US episode of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" features a talk show skit based around Wonderland/Looking-glass. Including Ryan Stiles playing the part of the "man who sold her the mirror". He notes that he thought "it was just a mirror, otherwise I would have charged her more".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 79: In this weeks batch of PostSecrets, this card came up:

Also, today's XKCD is this:

Featuring the alternate text of "Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem."

My insights into daily life, let me show you them

You should know about this place already, I post enough images from it. If you don't, I don't think we can be friends any more...

Alice was a Bond girl

"HUMANS ARE SO INTERESTING THAT THEY HAVE EVEN INVENTED DULLNESS. QUITE ASTONISHING."
-Death, from Hogfather

I started thinking the other day about how awesome things are (and I'm using the original definition of awesome here). About how awesome simple day-to-day things are that we take no notice of, because, if we did, we wouldn't be able to stop. We'd wake up each morning and we'd spend an hour unable to move while we come to terms with our very existence. Even longer if we'd been dreaming.

It's our humanity that takes us to the top of Everest and makes us stand there and go "You know, I could murder a sandwich..."

As technology advances, we're being exposed to more and more awesome things and we're ignoring them more and more. Right now, I'm talking to a friend in Australia. I actually talk to him more than some of my friends who live in the same city as me. Let alone those in the same country. I take no notice of this and I'm more concerned with how my left speaker cuts out when I knock it because there's a wire loose somewhere.

I think we should all take any chance we can get to inject some more awe back into our lives. And who knows what awesome things the future might bring?

"Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.

Build an eye."
-Spider Jerusalem, from Transmetropolitan

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 21: I stumbled across this website earlier, which makes fun of various ridiculous situations in old comics. It features two issues that have Alice references. The first in a small reference to a back-up story about "The Girl From The Looking Glass!". The second is a full comic about Alice, with the cover featuring a picture of her being spanked by a rag doll.

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...