Studies show that journalists are very poor at understanding science.

When they might just as easily be “default” male, or indeed being aliens (even on a kids’ show) have no gender at all, they are neither very patriarchical nor matriarchal, and don’t seem hung up on gender at all.

While Sim would probably dislike the comparison, considering Blake to be inspired by YooHWHoo, William Blake is undoubtedly the closest comparison to Sim, as an artist whose work can’t be separated from his illness.

I’ve argued before that Smile and Smiley Smile were both attempts by Wilson to create a version of a platonic ideal album in his head, the former aided by Van Dyke Parks and the latter by the Beach Boys

It is a truth universally acknowledged that women are terrible at maths, driving and map­reading.

Jennie Rigg’s other argument against the Wolf story, which I decided to save for later, was that ‘There is research shown that both men and women will play up to stereotype when under scrutiny’.

In short, whatever the paranoid fantasies, you can’t download communism, you can only create it – the idea’s a non­starter.

But Chesterton reveals much more by getting it wrong in his Napoleon, than he does by getting it right: as he imagines a London of the 1980s that still runs on hansom cabs and gaslight, all because (as he tells us) people seem to delight in exploding the earnest predictions of forward­looking authors and thinkers…much preferring to go their own free
way, impenetrably.

This is, however, not to reckon with the intense, almost psychopathic, self­-absorption and power­-worship of the average comic­book fan.

The Galileo Myth provides the easy conclusion that the “why” of it all was superstition, irrationality, sheer base dogmatic stubbornness…but do we really have any reason to believe this, except that it flatters our modern sensibilities?

Time to stop chasing the same old stories; time to write some new ones, without ignoring what’s come before.

Meanwhile, in Limbo, comedian Richard Herring is dreaming a familiar dream.

Sometimes it’s important to settle on the most obvious examples of exploitation in order to make the point, and with so few words to play with, it would seem unnecessarily obscure to not touch upon the fate of Brian Wilson.

In ’66. Dylan had his motorbike crash, no motorbike crash, and disappeared from view.

The Walrus, The God Of Hellfire, Louie The King, Papa With His Brand New Bag.

And it isn’t Dick’s Christian fugitives and freedom fighters that we see manifesting themselves before us when we focus on that great lost dream.

You might see a “living fossil”: the enigmatic Moby Grape

Eppur si muove: which in plain English means the damn thing’s either moving or it isn’t, no matter what anyone chooses to say about it.

Reassuring as it may be to read aloud to ourselves from A Child’s Garden Of Science about the Jacob’s Ladder of ever­increasing knowledge, Kuhn deserves better than this, and so do the thinkers in the human past we often treat roughly in order to glorify ourselves as the inheritors of “progress”.

Jack Kirby, the man who was to comics as Hitchcock was to film or Louis Armstrong to jazz, a man who was literally incapable of not creating, a man whose unused concepts are still being mined by comic companies nearly twenty years after his death, one of the twentieth century’s most important artists by any criteria that matter… this man whose every pencil line was unique and original and identifiable as his work,this man who remade an art form in his own image… he apparently was working under close instruction from a bunch of businessmen who wouldn’t know one end of a pencil from another.

You know I can stow that stuff in my jacket now, without even having to call it shoplifting.

(Try to picture Alan Moore resuming his desk at the Gas Board.)

Gender ideology is a lie that makes itself true.

(And yet I’m still friends with Andrew. Go figure)

I’m fighting my own little time war in my brain, trying to work out how much I can change the past without damaging narrative integrity, and I don’t think I’m the only one.