Is it wrong?

Is it wrong that I want to write a science fiction story featuring Laurel and Hardy’s screen personae? #comicstripideas

I’ve just finished a biography of Houdini and it’s another one of those things where I suddenly realise that people don’t live in vacuums.  (An earlier occasion of this was seeing Ernie Wise talking to the two Ronnies at some awards ceremony on the telly.  Ernie Wise and the two Ronnies knew each other?  That makes no sense.  It’s like Sean Connery playing golf with Jimmy Tarbuck.  Ernie could kick the comedy stuffing out of Corbett.)  Lives cross over.  Houdini (which I already knew) was, for a little while, friends with Conan Doyle.  But Doyle was, by this point a somewhat zealous spiritualist and ended up being part of a war against Houdini.

We expect people to be sensible, and rational, but they just aren’t, are they?  Now Houdini himself was a bit of a womaniser, a control freak and prone to fits of anger, but he at least didn’t believe that ghosts were going to save the world from calamity.  Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed this to be true.

And fake mediums (media?) then claimed that when Doyle died, he was writing Sherlock Holmes in Heaven in the other world.  I don’t have words.  And I’ve read a biography of the grade-A weirdo Aleister Crowley.

But then we all have our little madnesses, don’t we?  It’s what makes us interesting.  When I was a kid, I used to wear my madness on the outside.  Nowadays it only peeks out at inopportune moments.  Clowns always want to be taken seriously.

I would love to believe that the world wasn’t grey and small and banal, that there were things beyond mortal ken.  But I don’t.  I don’t particularly believe in extra-terrestrial life.

I wish I’d been born in New York, instead of Scarborough.  Imagine how much more like Bill Murray I would have been.  (Did you know he’s only 59?  He looks older, when you consider that Connery must have been sixty when he did Last Crusade.)  If I could be Bill Murray I’d be happy.  (Well, Murray wasn’t born in Noo Yawk, but anyway…)

This post was written to the tunes of Natalie Imbruglia, Kings of Convenience, Nelly Furtado, Diana Ross and the Supremes, The Righteous Brothers, The Dandy Warhols, Dawn of the Replicants, and The Marriage of Figaro.

Looking forward to The Waters of Mars, the Prisoner remake, House season five (I guess I’m gunner have to buy the DVD, eh?).