Madness!

We've been working hard at the LLC, but it's been dull work like printing leaflets, updating websites and replying to e-mails, and we haven't had much time to think up funny stuff. So we agreed to pick one date when me, Cal and Al would do the whole middle section and the topic happens to be madness.

So today's blog is a random trawl through the mad, which will hopefully be the first stage in writng 20 minutes of material.

The picture is (I think) Mark Twain, who said...

"...in one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money...Love is a madness...it can grow to a frenzy of despair ... All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions, passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipience madness, and ready to grow, spread and consume, when the occasion comes. There are no healthy minds, and nothing saves any man but accident--the accident of not having his malady put to the supreme test.
One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is not merely common, but universal."

And he looks a bit nuts himself doesn't he. He has that Einstein haircut. Einstein, also a bit doolally, he had identical clothes so he wasn't distracted from important things by choosing what to ware. An example of how madness is close to genius, although in reality the examples where madness is closer to idiocy seem more common.


Some people call Salvador Dali mad but you can't really be mad and still paint that well. I went to his home / museum. It may be a bit mad to want a gold plated orang-utan skeleton in your bedroom, but to actually be able to afford it you must basically have your head screwed on the right way.

Another mad is the 'Zany' which we avoid at all costs. It's a fine line. Monty Python is great. People who go to Monty Python conventions are 'Zany'. We're pretty open to weird stuff at the LLC, but if people ever come up after a show and say 'You guys are just crazy! Seriously, that was great but you guys are just too much!' then we know we've gone too far. 'Zany' people are about as far from real rebellion, danger or madness as it is possible to get. 'We're mad, we just thought lets come to the party in cowboy hats, for, like, no reason! I know, we're insane.'

Some times madness is just the loss of a faculty we're not really aware of. If someone doesn't recognise you because they're blind, we accept it. The faculty of sight is gone and we can understand that. But if someone has lost their faculty to interpret visual signals as 3 dimensional objects, and they don't recognise you because they thought you were the Lake District, we think they're mad. There are loads of cases like this in 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat'. One chapter is devoted to people who can only interpret words literally. Which make it impossible for them to talk to sarcastic policemen without getting arrested. Another group had lost the ability to interpret language, but had an increased ability to interpret gesture and tone. The chapter ends with an anecdote about both groups laughing at a presidential speech, the 'literals' because the words actually didn't make any sense, and the 'tonals' because they could tell that whatever he was saying it was bullshit.

Well, I'd be mad (ho, ho) to waste any more time on this today.