Eating only apples

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 93: The summary for a recent Slashdot story about the Apple/Psystar conflict finished with "As Alice in Wonderland might put it, "It gets interestinger and interestinger."" (taken from the article itself).

The Scottish connection

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 90: I'm currently following Stephen Fry on Twitter. One of his recent tweets made great use of the word "frabjous".

Also, it seems I'm now influencing other people into finding these sightings for me. Both of these were sent to me by my friend Rachel:

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 91: She first sent me a link to a pair of boots, among other links to various pairs she was lusting after.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 92: Then, the other day, she sent me a text containing this picture. I asked her where it was taken and she replied with "on the underpass at Potterrow Port, near Edinburgh uni".

Oh how time has passed...

So, I've been away for a fair while and I've amassed a small collection of sightings. I've found myself actually getting annoyed with them now...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 80: A while back I stumbled upon the "U.S National Debt Clock", which happens to be hosted on brillig.com (the homepage of some guy called Ed Hall).

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 81: A recent mass Turing test featured a bot named Jabberwacky (which I actually encountered back before my Alice obsession).

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 82: Due to my lack of internet, I hadn't been on DeviantArt in a fair while. I'd amassed a fair few deviations on my watch list. The first of which was the lovely FetishFreak dressed in an Alice costume.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 83: An advert that pops up a lot in my feed for icanhascheezburger.com is for some game named Wonderland. I'm starting to ignore the use of the word "wonderland" as it's too prevalent. This is probably how William Gibson feels when he hears the word "cyberspace".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 84: So, you all know how much I love Violet Blue. A recent post (NSFW material within) of hers features the line "This *somehow* came from an internet rabbit hole I went down when".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 85: Dene who I work with showed me this site which contains this video,"Quick and fun experiment done with Processing: the first 3,000 characters of "Alice in Wonderland", mapped to a cylindrical surface and rendered with varying radius and rotation properties."


Alice in Wonderland with Processing from zeh fernando on Vimeo.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 86: An advert for a new BBC programme on children's illustrations began with a quick shot of one of Tenniel's Alice illustrations.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 87: Volume 8 of Y: The Last Man features a piece of dialogue where Toyota refers to Dr. Allison Mann as "Allison Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 88: Another DeviantArt one. I happened to find myself on the homepage and one of the recent deviations was an Alice picture.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 89: My band are playing a gig at the Shed on the 24th of this month. We're apparently supporting a band called The Junipers. They've apparently released a single called "Callooh Callay!".

Alices old and new

So, my lovely friend Emma surprised me at work the other day with a random present. It was an old edition of Alice in Wonderland from 1943 (I think). The illustrations are by Rene Cloke, who is apparently quite collectible and most famous for illustrating some Enid Blyton books.






Alice in popular culture sighting no. 79: Another one I forgot is that I was looking at music magazines in WHSmith a while ago and turned around to be faced with a new magazine named Wonderland.

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."

One is far superior to the other

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 74: Thanks to someone's msn name, I discovered that the McFly song, "Lies", contains the lyrics "And I'm just one drink away/And I'm back in Wonderland like it was yesterday". However, it doesn't feature on their second album, "Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 75: Finding all that out jogged my memory that The Wildhearts have a song called "Geordie in Wonderland". They've also done a live album of the same name.

How about mint?

I started wondering earlier, do we actually know what butter tastes like? It seems most of what we use is actually margarine (stuff like Flora being made of sunflower oil, or Bertolli being made of olive oil) simply masquerading as butter. So I started to wonder, after years of having butter decried as unhealthy and instead being offered "butter substitutes" that are apparently just as good, do we know the difference? If someone actually gave us some real butter, made from real milk, would we like it? Would we complain that it doesn't taste just like Flora (or any of its variants that do many different things to your body)?

I wonder if there are any other products like this that we might have lost the taste for.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 72: It seems I found this one a while ago and forgot about it. I discovered a link to this page in my bookmarks on a site called "Blabberwocky".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 73: Bash.org has been down for a while, so I've turned to qdb.us for my amusing IRC quote needs. The other day I discovered this little snippet.

I couldn't be bothered at first

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 71: So, two recent episodes of the US version of "Whose line is it anyway?" have featured Alice references in the "props" round. The first was Colin turning his props into a large smile and Wayne calling for "Cheshire cat, party of two". Then today there was Wayne making his prop into a hookah and saying "Welcome, Alice, welcome". Way too much Alice in that show...

Attack of the Alice

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 67: In a recent edition of Attack Of The Show's "The Loop" segment, Matt Schwartz describes part of his experience of researching into "trolling" as having "[fallen] down the rabbit hole of Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 68: Another AOTS segment, The Feed, recently reported on Tim Burton's work on an adaptation of the Wonderland story, with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 69: The last in a trio of references from Podcasts, a recent edition of Diggnation had Alex using the word "jibberwocky" as an example of a gibberish word.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 70: So this is a pretty exciting one for me. I've mentioned Rockabaret a couple of times before. This time, the entire night is going to be Alice themed! Their next night is on the 20th of September and is entitled "Rockabaret in Wonderland". I shall endeavour to go and take copius amounts of pictures, which I will of course post here.

Seriously, could someone make me one?

So, here's Violet's video response to the Boing Boing debacle. It doesn't give much new information, but it serves as a nice overview of what's been going on and it amused me.

In other news, there's now an Open Words forum up and running. For more info about what's going on, you can check out the development blog. Feel free to join it and start posting whatever you like (within reason, obviously). I'm hoping to get a fair amount of activity on there, so feel free to invite friends or whatever!

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 65: Something Awful's most recent Comedy Goldmine article features sock monsters made by some of the forum members. One of them is a rather awesome Jabberwocky. I want one!

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 66: I picked up the deluxe edition of City of Heroes the other day. It came with various additions, including the first three expansions for the game. The first of these is entitled "Through the Looking Glass"

A little update. Still confused.

So, yesterday I posted various bits, including stuff about the Violet Blue/Boing Boing situation. This morning I awoke to my RSS reader telling me that Violet had posted a couple of new things on her blog (which I only got around to adding to my subscriptions after posting about it on here). One of these is an update on the Boing Boing situation. There still doesn't seem to be any explanation of the goings on forthcoming (other than it could be something to do with Violet's relationship with Xeni Jardin). More interesting is the fact that more posts have been deleted, this time just being anything that has even mentioned Violet, some of them being quite important. Also, Boing Boing is apparently being very restrictive of the discussion of this issue, apparently deleting comments/questions from anyone who's (at least seemingly) pro-Violet.

Really, this issue isn't just about Violet and Boing Boing, it's about the ideas of freedom and transparency on the internet. It brings to light some important issues, such as that of who really controls/owns content on the web. It also shows how things can't be done "quietly", as there's eyes on everything online. Also, thanks to things like the wayback machine, deletion isn't the end. Even if you have no interest in what Violet or Boing Boing do, it's something to look into.

I've never been a reader of Boing Boing and I don't think I'm about to start.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 64: I just looked up the Siouxsie and the Banshees album, "Superstition", on Wikipedia and stumbled upon the fact that they also released a covers album entitled "Through the looking glass". I should've noticed this before, as I actually have their version of "The Passenger" that features on it.

Collaboration and erasure

So, a few little things I fancied commenting on today.

First is the strange case of Boing Boing and Violet Blue (be warned, some stuff on Violet's blog is NSFW). To sum stuff up, Violet recently found out that Boing Boing deleted some posts she had made there. They don't seem to wish to tell her or anyone why exactly they've done this (which apparently happened a year ago). All they've said is that "Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her." and that they "were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved." Violet seems to be as in the dark about this as everyone else, stating that "I still have no idea what they’re talking about — except that it seems to be personal? — and really don’t understand why I’m being attacked, nor why they’re stating they kept it a secret (and are behaving this way) out of “kindness” toward me." There's lots to read about this and even I still haven't made my way through all of it. I'm a fan of Violet's work, so I'm on her side. I'll be interested to see if this ever gets solved.

Using Violet as a link, I'm jumping to NxE's Fifty Most Influential 'Female' Bloggers, where she appears as number 28. Also on the list (at number 41) is Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.tv, one of my favourite video podcasts. Looking through the list, I don't recognise many of the names, making me feel a tad "out of the loop". So, if anyone wants to point me to any good web stuff, whether it be blogs, podcasts or just anything along those lines, then feel free. I don't need any funny picture sites though, thanks.

Changing direction completely now, you might have seen the new Orange adverts. Their new slogan of "I am who I am because of everyone" is pretty much a translation of what Ubuntu means. I'm guessing it's meant to encourage people (at least in some abstract way) to communicate, rather than to collaborate and work together, the way Ubuntu does. I'm thinking it could be a bit too hopeful of me to start wondering if Orange might start producing phones running Ubuntu MID.

Sticking with ideas of collaboration, one of the newest TED talks is by Clay Shirky. In it he talks about institutions vs. collaboration and gives a great explanation of why stuff like open source software works and how he sees this as the future of technology.

Alice Pacino

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 63: There's an advert on Dave currently for a film called "The Recruit" (as it's playing on one of the other UKTV channels soon). In it, they show a clip of Al Pacino talking to a group of (I'm guessing) recruits and telling them that they've "stepped through the looking-glass".

Going halfsies once more

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 61: Another one found through Stumbleupon. Contrariwise is a site that showcases people's tattoos that feature quotes from "books, poetry, music, and other sources". Of course, one of the tattoos featured is the line that gave the site its name, "“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 62: This one was another random encounter, but not using Stumble this time. Instead a Google search led me to the Cheshire Cat car club a "Radio Control Car Racing in Congleton, Cheshire".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 62 ½: This one's not quite a sighting, but instead an acknowledgement of an influence. I recently got a chance to play Super Mario Galaxy. In a game set in an alternate reality, near the beginning of the game you find yourself waking up and having to chase white rabbits.

We're going even further out

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 59: "Not always right" is a site where people post humorous stories about customer service. Once such story about strange requests for prizes is entitled "Tweedledee and Tweedledum".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 60:I've been following the Phoenix Mars lander on Twitter and it just posted this message: "Will continue to monitor the first dig site (AKA Dodo-Goldilocks) while I start a new test dig in "Wonderland." Still baking samples, too." Apparently, Wonderland is "part of the larger 'national park' area named 'Cheshire Cat'" Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything about why these places have been named as such.

And once again we pass the mark

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 58: In the Kevin Smith film, Dogma, when we first meet the character of Loki, he is talking to a nun about his interpretation of the Walrus and the Carpenter as an indictment of organised religion.

In other Alice-related news, my friend Jess linked me to this video of a remix of music from the Disney version of Alice.

Please please please

So, considering this is a blog about culture and how I often focus on the connections and references inherent in culture, a TED talk on memetics is something I just couldn't pass up. Susan Blackmore's talk is stunning and it will really make you think about culture and why exactly certain things have come about. When I think of a meme, I think about things that propagate the internet. I think of images and inside jokes and references that only a select few understand. But really, memes are all around us. Every culture is built on mimicry. No wonder I've managed to be so prolific at simply spotting these imitations!



Alice in popular culture sighting no. 57: In a scene in This is England where the gang take a football from some Asian kids, Combo refers to two of them as "Tweedledum and Tweedledee".

No rest for the obsessed

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 56: At Rockabaret last night, they were showing various cartoons on a screen over the stage. Some were old cartoons, such as Felix the cat and a Betty Boop cartoon entitled "Betty in Blunderland".

LikeTelevision Embed Movies and TV Shows

I knew it the moment I picked it up

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 53: Page 196 of "The Portable Door" by Tom Holt features the lines "Sophie raised her head and stared at him. She still looked as though she'd followed a large white rabbit with a pocket watch down a hole in the ground, but some colour was starting to return to her cheeks."

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 54: Danielle Horvat (the actress who plays Taylah Jordan in Neighbours) has a picture on her MySpace of her in an Alice costume. It appears to be the same costume as worn by Pyretta Blaze.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 55: The Screaming Trees album, "Buzz Factory", contains a song entitled "The looking glass cracked". While the lyrics don't refer to Alice specifically, they revolve around themes of altered reality and "going beyond". In looking them up, I also found that there's a Babyshambles song called "Through the looking glass". No doubt it's horrible.

Here's a causal link for you

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 52: In episode 12 of the first series of The Big Bang Theory, after Raj, the third person he's tried to help with their research, tells him to go away, Sheldon mutters "curiouser and curiouser" as he's walking away from Raj's office.