Thursday 30 October 2008

Headline of the day

Rogue wallabies terrorise aged home residents in Townsville

Do vehicles have souls?

If you take "soul" to be a psycho-linguistic, socially developed concept which operationalises and explains our experiences of consciousness, emotional experience and endurance of memory, and;

If you accept that consciousness, emotional experience and all other psychological processes are the result of extraordinarily complicated and rapid neural processes which may in fact even include the effects of quantum uncertainty and even superposition, then;

You can posit that vehicles, as machines which rely for their operation upon the complicated and carefully coordinated and tuned interaction of multiple disparate and finely engineered parts, do have a form of crude soul.

Monday 27 October 2008

Note to budding superheros: Lycra melts and offers no protection. Wear bike leathers.

I have an idea for a vigilante-style superhero comic.

It's called "Driver Education Rider and his side-kick, Orbiting Hyper Death Space Ray".

It works something like this:


  • Driver Education Rider is riding through traffic, minding his own business, when a large 4WD forces him to take evasive action by merging into him.
  • DER pulls up next to the 4WD at the lights.
  • DER: "Excuse me sir, but did you see me when you changed lanes back there?"
  • Driver: "Huh?"
  • DER: *PUNCH*
His sidekick, Orbiting Hyper-Death Space Ray, is in constant radio contact.


  • DER: "DER to Orbiting Hyper-Death Space Ray. Did you see that blue vehicle pull out of that side-street?"
  • OHDSR: "Sure did, skipper!"
  • OHDSR: *VAPORISE*
  • DER: "Good work, boy!"
  • OHDSR: "Arf! Arf!"
Or, maybe not.

If I had any drawing talent at all I'd do a couple of episodes, for the hell of it.


P.S.: I toyed with the question of whether he should be "Driver Education Rider" or "Driver Re-Education Rider", but since most drivers in need of re-education don't appear to have been educated in the first place, I settled on DER.

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