I have a love for coincidence. Seeing similarities in different parts of my life makes it seem like there is a plan to the universe. It allows my imagination to posit a (usually incredibly unlikely) future based on what I’m seeing. The universe cares about me and is sending me hints so that I can guess what happens next.
That makes this current case of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon somewhat disturbing.
Everywhere I look, I’m seeing Ragnarok. That can’t be a good thing.
It started when I began planning the second Thropes book. I’m planning the second book so that I can put the appropriate foreshadowing into the first book, so stop judging me for being a procrastinator. Lycanthropes came about as a result of a curse by a Greek goddess. So gods are real. And how would that change society? Having a pantheon of hands-on Greek gods would change a few things.
Not to mention that if the Greek gods are real, then wouldn’t that indicate that the others are as well?
So World War I is now a battle between the legions aligned with the Greek gods and those who worship the gods of Asgard. A couple of the days of the week have changed. As have a couple of months. I’ve ditched Roman gods altogether. And then left it as “time manages to push things back to what we know and love”.
But there’s Norse gods version one. And the wolves of Fenris.
And then I picked up Magnus Chase book one by Rick Riordan. He’s a very funny man and he really knows his mythologies. The writing isn’t phenomenal, but the stories have heart and the voice of Magnus is highly amusing. Oh, and he’s the son of a Norse god. Trying to stop Ragnarok.
Then my character in World of Warcraft levelled high enough to hit Northrend, and suddenly I have all of the Norse mythology I can handle, with Loken and Thorim and Jotunheim and Freya amongst other places and deities. They even have valkyr.
Following on from this, with the new WOW: Legion, they are opening up new Norse areas, including Helheim, as dungeons. It all looks very impressive.
Finally, I’m reading Morning Star by Pierce Brown. Third in the Red Rising series, it’s an engrossing work of war in space and the segregation of peoples based on colour rather than skill. Well worth a read.
The mighty Obsidian warriors live in the icy Antarctic wastes of Mars. They follow a Norse mythology and answer to Asgardian “gods” who keep them subjugated.
This is happening people. The time of the wolf is upon us! Sharpen your axes and drag out your horned helms. Let’s get the end of the world happening.
After my Bullying post, I received a Like from Christine Barba, who writes a blog called Project Light to Life. I checked out her page and, coincidentally, found the name of the coincidence thing I keep talking about on Finding Damo. It’s called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. So thank you to Christine. Go read her blog.
That means that I can now add BMP to all of the posts that have previously referred to ‘that coincidence thing’.
And speaking of which:
A couple of weeks ago I finished the third book in a most unusual trilogy.
Not that the books were written by the same author, had the same characters or were written in the same universe. None of the three writers wrote their novels as part of this trilogy. But they were a trilogy nonetheless.
Holding to my desire to write about things when they turn up more than three times in a row (BMP!) I wanted to chat briefly about this trilogy.
Chronologically, the first book in the series is a little known story entitled “The Body Snatchers” (later re-released as Invasion of the Body Snatchers). It’s popular enough for the term “pod people” to have entered into standard English speech, so I won’t worry too much about spoiling the story. It is set in a small town in the United States where a doctor starts noticing unusual behaviour from his friends and neighbours. After an encounter with the town’s resident author, the small band realise that they are being invaded by beings from space, who are rapidly replacing the locals with replicas grown from giant pea pods.
It is an easy read, but Finney manages to really hook you in with some incredible prose. There were moments where a chill thrilled through me at a passage in the story. This book is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. I’m pretty sure there is a dissociative disorder that manifests itself in removing the brain’s ability to connect to people, leading to a person thinking that their family have been replaced by exact duplicates.
Yes, here we go. Capgras Delusion. I typed “pod people delusion” into Google. Anyway, where was I? OK, yes. For anyone who has seen any of the numerous film adaptations, it is well worth taking the time to read this novel. You can knock it off in an afternoon, and Finney’s son, in an interview on the audio adaptation, states that his father was never really happy with the movie version, even though it is a cult classic.
The second book in the trilogy was written much later. It is an amusing, meta little story called Red Shirts, by John Scalzi. It has nothing to do with The Body Snatchers, but the third book I want to talk about links these two together so tightly that I just had to write about it.
From Amazon:
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on “Away Missions” alongside the starship’s famous senior officers.
Life couldn’t be better…until Andrew begins to realize that 1) every Away Mission involves a lethal confrontation with alien forces, 2) the ship’s senior officers always survive these confrontations, and 3) sadly, at least one low-ranking crew member is invariably killed. Unsurprisingly, the savvier crew members belowdecks avoid Away Missions at all costs.
Then Andrew stumbles on information that transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is…and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.
I listened to this one as a download from Audible. Wil Wheaton read it and between Shereen and I, we almost crashed the car at least twice from laughing so hard. The line between reality and fantasy is severely blurred in this novel. It is almost a drinking game turned into a novel. But Scalzi quickly takes us to a point where we really care about the characters, so much so that by the end of the third coda, I had tears in my eyes (again, making it hard to drive). And yes, the codas take a bit of staying power to get through, after the rapid pace of the rest of the story, but they are definitely worth it.
To explain why the third novel in the trilogy actually makes these three novels a trilogy I need to go spoiler-fest on it. I won’t spoil RedShirts, and I assume you already know enough about Body Snatchers that conversation on it isn’t a spoiler (and if not, you might not want to read further).
Knowing the storyline of the third book – Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall – isn’t going to affect your enjoyment of the story. The spoilers are on the covers (I really LOVE the German cover). Basically, Jim Pike is an ex-soldier, returned from fighting in the Middle East. He is settling into quiet obscurity as a security guard at a posh hotel in Dallas. On this particular weekend, there is a Star Trek convention. Also on this weekend, a number of staff are off sick, and others are in, but suffering from illness. There have been a number of unusual biting attacks, and the wounds just won’t stop bleeding…
Soon, the Trek convention is completely overrun with zombies. Not only that, but Jim’s sister is in town for the convention. Jim Pike (get it?) needs to save his sister and get over his fear of command before day break.
That’s the premise. Now for the spoilers.
Early in the novel, Jim notices that the zombies are manifesting an eye on various parts of their body. These eyes are a vulnerable spot. They appear after showing up as a bruised lump, finally splitting through the skin and taking over the host. Here’s the sequel to Body Snatchers: these eyes are an alien life form that drifted to earth as spores, traveling through space for aeons and then landing on earth. They take over the hosts and use them as spreading mechanisms (hence the zombies) but their more sneaky goal is an amalgamation with the Earthlings and eventual colonisation of the planet.
The link to RedShirts is more mundane. The novel is littered with references to Star Trek, and the rules of surviving a Trek episode (even one with zombies). The funniest moment in the novel was the discovery of the last surviving member of a pack of Red Shirts. None of the others had died from zombie attack and he didn’t even realise that the hotel had been infested.
Night of the Living Zombies is the love child of Body Snatchers and Red Shirts. It is a bastard child, not written as well, or with as much raw talent. Neither parent would be overly proud of their offspring. But they, like me, would love it anyway, for the simple joy of laughter and dead trekkies that it brings to the world.
This little titbit is another one of those “I keep hearing this in completely unrelated forums, so I feel like I should make mention of it” news items. In this case, it is the Loch Ness Monster. It started with Dave showing me photos from his trip to Scotland, and his trip to Loch Ness. Unfortunately, he didn’t get a shot of the famous Nessie, but it put the creature in my head. Then my step-daughter was telling me how the Loch Ness monster is actually a dinosaur. My gentle assertion that the correct phrasing was more along the lines of “could be a plesiosaur if it actually existed” were met with the scorn it deserved. Finally, from two different sources, the final being Kevin Smith’s Smodcast, I hear that in America, the education department is funding a text book for schools that states that the Loch Ness Monster is real, is probably a plesiosaur (dammit, foiled by a 7 year old again), and its existence proves that evolution is false.
Socrates would have a field day with the logic involved in that one!
From here, I have a real Sliding Doors blog moment. Or a Trousers of Time scenario. Or a Community dice roll.
Depending on where I go from here could mean the difference between being picked up by a major newspaper or wallowing forever in obscurity. Or ending up evil, or with only one arm. Here are the options:
Trouser leg one: from here, I go on to talk about education and the teacher stereotypes that are prevalent in the media, compared to those that are prevalent in my ten years of teaching.
Trouser leg two: from here, I go on to talk about all of the weird and wonderful things in this world, which ones I believe in and which ones are absolute rubbish.
Trouser leg three (I’m Jake the Peg, diddle-iddle-iddle um) – there is NO leg three. Although I’m going to do a blog soon on being a sudden parent, in order to stay within the realms of the Finding Damo universe.
Shooting myself in the foot – career-wise – I’m going to go with spooks and the unexplained.
Girls With Slingshots – another great web comic
The other night, I had a dream that my brother was only a child – say about ten years old. He had a red parka on with the hood up and I couldn’t see his face. He was autistic. He was playing in the playground and fell over. I ran over to help him up and to hug him better and he pushed me away because he didn’t like being touched. It broke my heart. I woke up sobbing and it took me a good five minutes before I could wake up enough to realise it was just a dream, calm down and go back to sleep. I’m not sure what Shereen thought. She was very sympathetic. When we were talking about it the next morning, I said that if we found out she was pregnant any time soon I’d be highly nervous following that dream.
We are still largely ignorant of the universe we live in. There are thousands of strange and unsettling occurrences that – well, that occur – every day. Some people say that they can explain it, WITH SCIENCE! but they often just ignore the element that isn’t explained.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if Shereen had been pregnant and a doctor had told me that the baby would be born autistic. Because I’d dreamt it. I might have been surprised if they doctor had told me that the baby was made out of strawberry icecream, and I’ve dreamt that as well. But I’m quite happy to believe that I had a prescient dream.
I mean seriously, who wouldn’t be? It means that I’m a super hero! I can see the future! The day that I stop dreaming is the day I can tell the Prime Minister that the world is about to end! If I ever dreamed of tattslotto numbers I’d be set for life!
Of course, that’s rubbish. I seem to get déjà vu more than the average person. I remember dreaming it and then it comes true. Or I just live an incredibly boring life where I do the same thing over and over again, and have shocking short term memory. But I’m not dreaming true dreams, and don’t place a lot of credence in the words of other people who say that they do.
But I believe it’s possible. I just haven’t done it yet.
True dreaming. Out of body experiences. Aliens, ghosts and poltergeists, clairvoyants, past lives, the yeti and the panther living in the Rushworth forest. I’m quite happy to believe in all of these things. They aren’t outside the realm of possibility. They’re as plausible as God, heaven, guardian angels and the like, and some people get quite upset when you laugh at those beliefs.
OK, ghosts. That I can give a little more personal experience about. I have two personal ghost stories and one that I’m going to butcher because I can’t remember it properly. I think it comes from one of Shay’s friends, so Shay, if you remember the conversation, feel free to weigh in via the comments.
Ghost story no. 1:
I was living at the Terraces in Bendigo. Every Tuesday, I’d walk over the hill in the dark to where Mark lived to watch Star Trek: TNG. And then I’d walk back much later at night over the same hill. At the top of the hill one night I noticed a pure white cat sitting in front of a car wheel. As Death says: CATS. I LIKE CATS. So I watched it. It watched me. As I walked past the car, it should have passed beyond my line of sight behind the wheel – it was just sitting there looking at me. To my shock, I realised that I could still see the cat, through the wheel of the car. Now it was slightly transparent, but it was still there.
I kept walking. I never saw it again. It could have been a trick of the eyes, but that’s my story.
Ghost story no. 2:
I’d just broken up with Cath, back when she was still Cath. We were civil, outwardly friendly, but there was still a bit of stress there in the relationship. She was flatting with Dave in Middleborough Road, a brilliant house that we almost destroyed in the time we lived there. Those two stayed in the same place for another… year? after I left. I was back for a visit and stayed out in the lounge. During the night I woke up and stared into the face and torso of an old man staring back at me out of the roof. I felt the thrill of fear but he wasn’t threatening. He seemed more evaluative. He was trying to get a measure of me. When I sat up, he faded.
I told Cath about him the next day and she said “Mmm. I know him. He looks after me at night. He’s very protective.” To top that off, I emailed a clairvoyant who dealt with ghosts and spirits. She emailed back saying “Oh yes, that’s the man who used to own the place. He’s looking after Cath and he has always been a little bit curious about you. He never quite trusted you in your relationship with her. He isn’t threatening, just curious. He watches you on the loo, cos he liked to read there too.”
Quite apart from being freaked out by the fact that a ghost is watching me on the loo, I hadn’t told her most of that information, so it was an impressive feat of either ghost whispering or making stuff up.
Ghost story no. 3:
This one is absolutely freaky. But it was ages ago, and I’m not sure if I can tell it properly. It happened to a friend of a friend of mine… But the friend experienced a number of the ghostly symptoms, so I give it a lot more credence. OK, let’s see what I can get out.
This girl’s boyfriend lived in a flat. He experienced a number of elements of a haunting – The lights would turn on and off by themselves. The taps would turn on when he left the room. There was a cold patch in the lounge, directly under the fan. He loved it. A haunted flat. And then, somehow, he found out what had happened. The guy who’d been there beforehand had committed suicide after his girlfriend had died (I’m making up the reason, but he committed suicide). After he found out, the spirit started to get angry. Objects would move around the room. My friend’s friend (the girlfriend) was hit with a glass one day when she visited. And then the guy had a dream where he died, hanging from the fan like the man who’d died in the flat. It wasn’t fun any more.
He started to look for a new place. He started to get angry very quickly. He withdrew, argued with his girlfriend. One morning, his girlfriend came over and he didn’t answer the door or his phone. You know where this is going. He was hanging from the fan, attached by his belt around his neck.
I can’t explain that one. I have another friend whose ghostly companion follows her from house to house. There are hundreds of stories out there. You can’t explain them all. Oh, you could say they’re lying, deluded, psychotic or mad. There are atmospheric anomalies and magnetic disturbances and the like.
But for now, I’ll keep an open mind.
Remember Alfie Dog and my stories. Apparently they’re selling well. Thank you to everybody who as supported me.
From a conspiracy theorists point of view, the past couple of weeks have been phenomenal.
Do you ever get the idea that the world is trying to tell you something? No, really, this fits with my opening statement. Let’s see. I need some concrete examples. Ummm.
Right. TED talks. I listen to them in the car on the way to and from work – when my Audible credits have run out. There are some amazing speeches on this site and I’ve gotten a lot out of them. I also listen to the Smodcast with Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier. I’ve been playing them out of order, and sometimes they’ll be years old. But on one drive into work, I had a TED talk about pacifying crowds using heat rays, and then Kevin Smith talked about the same thing on his podcast, and then Dr. Karl mentioned it on HIS podcast, then I saw it on TV on a completely random bit of news footage, and finally, I read it in the book I was reading at the time.
All of these were disassociated from each other. None of them, bar the news footage, was current. I just happened to come across them all in a single 24-hour period. And this happens to me on a regular basis. Really, conspiracy theories are a doddle compared to some of the things I have to deal with in my head.
Is this a Final Destination type event? Should I be watching out for stray death rays? And Rocky Mountain High, by John Denver?
Which leads me to zombies. No, seriously. I read in the news about a naked guy who was shot multiple times to stop him from eating a guy’s face. Kevin Smith was talking about it as well . That’s not freaky at all. It was all over the Twitter-sphere. What is freaky is that THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US!! It was the go-to position of every conspiracy nut on the planet. Finally, the superbug has gotten loose and Florida is ground zero. All of the movies we’ve watched and The Walking Dead tv show have given us some good grounding for how to survive the coming onslaught.
First up: don’t live in America.
Check. I have a feeling getting zombies through airport security could be a bit tough.
“Anything to declare?”
“Braaaaaaains….”
“Sorry sir, but you can’t bring foodstuffs into the country, so could I ask you to ARGH! STOP IT! Nooooo….”
To add fuel to the fire, the Centre for Disease Control has come out with an official statement denying that there is a zombie outbreak. What more do we need??? And then a fascinating biologist – Nathan Wolfe on TED tells me that when they do swaps of the inside of the noses of volunteers, they find that 30% of the material they collect is unclassifiable. Viruses and bacteria that they cannot identify. And even in the blood, something like 1% of what is running through our bloodstream is unidentifiable. He was making the point that there are still undiscovered territories for our young people to explore when they leave school.
I took it to mean that it is totally conceivable that there is a zombie virus out there that has already infected most of the population and is only awaiting the anomalous solar flare to reach us from the sun. Maybe we’re both right. Zombies are a bit passé. They’ve been done to death. Ha ha. I like zombie movies. They’re fatalism at a grass-roots level. The world is stuffed. Let’s eat some brains. They feed on our fears of the coming environmental apocalypse and the knowledge that our governments are so stupid that it is totally conceivable that someone has requisitioned a killer virus and all we can do is wait for the “oops!”
This zombie has no hope.
And it’s good to see a genre so friendly to kids. My step-daughter loves zombies. Many’s the morning I wake up with a small child chewing on my head. No, actually I mean, when I first met her mother, I was right into Plants V. Zombies. That meant that within a few weeks, young miss O was into it as well. She has written a song about the sunflowers and their quest to save us from the zombies. She drew a picture for school showing a very good defensive layout for an early level of the game. And still there’s been no call from Child Services.
I like zombie movies, but there’s not a lot of romance in a zombie. There are very few “I love you, and can’t live without you, so eat my brains and we’ll be undead ever after” moments in zombie movies. Romance is the domain of the vampire.
Man with perfect skin, loves the nightlife, seeks vulnerable beauty for passionate necking. Must love bats.
I’m a bit over vampires. I used to devour anything involving sharp pointy teeth, from Anne Rice to Count Duckula. I read the Twilight series, to my ever lasting shame. I enjoyed it, which I truly believe makes me a bad person beyond redemption. But I can’t fathom a race of shiny almost invincible people who don’t say: “You know what, these squishy humans can’t do anything to stop us. They can’t stake us. The sun doesn’t hurt us, we can throw century-long disco beach parties. Let’s take over the world!”
What I am enjoying is Kim Newman’s Bloody Red Baron. The first novel, Anno Dracula, was an incredible read. The sequel just goes from strength to strength. Famous characters from history and popular fiction dive in and out of the novels, set in a world where Dracula was not beaten by Van Helsing and his band, and instead marries the Queen of England and ushers in a Vampire England. Alternate Reality novels always fascinate me. A novel where Jack the Ripper hunts vampire prostitutes through the streets of Victorian London was always going to get me in. But still, the graphic descriptions of feeding – sweet coppery blood trickling over the tongue and down her parched throat – no longer have the same appeal that they did when I was wearing black and dangly ankh earrings.
Werewolves on the other hand. . . Like Jekyll and Hyde, the werewolf is the freedom to let your inner beast free, to act without worrying about the consequences. And they’re alive. Hyper-alive. Depending on the mythos, they’re untethered from their human shells once a month at the full moon to frolic in amongst all the lovely food.
I need help.
I’ll finish with some recommendations. They might not fit anybody else, but, I love:
Zombies:
Shaun of the Dead
28 Days Later/weeks later
The Walking Dead
Plants v. Zombies
Vampires
Anno Dracula
Anne Rice – the early years
Being Human (and -gasp- Being Human US)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Fray (comic)
Werewolves
The Twilight Series (Team Jacob)
The Wolf’s Hour – Robert R. McCammon
Being Human (this one, more the UK than the US version)
I have a love for coincidence. Seeing similarities in different parts of my life makes it seem like there is a plan to the universe. It allows my imagination to posit a (usually incredibly unlikely) future based on what I’m seeing. The universe cares about me and is sending me hints so that I can guess what happens next.
It started when I began planning the second Thropes book. I’m planning the second book so that I can put the appropriate foreshadowing into the first book, so stop judging me for being a procrastinator. Lycanthropes came about as a result of a curse by a Greek goddess. So gods are real. And how would that change society? Having a pantheon of hands-on Greek gods would change a few things.
And then I picked up Magnus Chase book one by Rick Riordan. He’s a very funny man and he really knows his mythologies. The writing isn’t phenomenal, but the stories have heart and the voice of Magnus is highly amusing. Oh, and he’s the son of a Norse god. Trying to stop Ragnarok.
Finding Damo 