The weirdness of slight fame

People want to be famous.  In fact, nowadays they seem to want to be famous just for the sake of it and probably expect to get money and power with it, or something, maybe sex.  Yes, probably that too.  Not something which occurs to me.  Anyway, here's this:

We are very slightly famous on occasion (despite my apparent complete lack of telegenicity ^^^^).  Namely, the children have been on the TV and newspapers, i've been in TV documentaries and news and current affairs programmes and Liz has of course been in magazines and newspapers and on the TV because, to quote "Black Books", she quaffs pints of her own whizz (or is it "wizz"?).  However, fame is a weird thing because it just goes off on its own and has a life of its own, apparently.  You don't have any control on what you're famous for, and the things for which you are known float away and have a life of their own, which is hard to handle because you sort of put stuff out there and then people draw their own conclusions about who you are.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote about this in his story Borges y Yo.  He describes the situation of writing stories for publication and having knowledge of the stranger out there whom everyone calls Borges.  It's a short-short and he notes at the end that he doesn't know who has written the story.  He also notes that he finds himself pompous and annoying and i share this dissatisfaction with him about the other person depicted up there who did this video.  I'm also irritated by the person who wrote this blog, and i wonder if they're the same person in fact.  Maybe this blog is actually written by someone who is stalking the person uploading the YouTube vids, though goodness knows why they think it's worth the effort.  They are both me of course, and neither of them are me.  For more on this aspect, you might want to read the story itself here:

http://anagrammatically.com/2008/01/31/borges-and-i-borges-y-yo/

There's also a PDF on certain philosophical aspects of the story here:

http://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/perry2007_ALP.pdf

However, i also afflict Liz with this problem.  For years after we married, i used to have the occasional experience of seeing a real woman in the distance (these were not hallucinations - the people i saw really existed so far as i know but in a sense that doesn't matter) and mistake it for Liz.  The following thought would then occur:  "Hmm, that looks like Liz Gray.  I wonder what she's doing nowadays."  This impression finally faded when i observed her as part of a training course in adult education.  I sat in on one of her excellent Yoga classes and took notes, and i finally discovered what that figure in the distance with whom i was vaguely acquainted was doing:  she had become an excellent Yoga teacher.

Once i had had that experience, my previous weird impression that Liz was both my wife and a virtual stranger i hardly knew was gone.  I knew what had become of that stranger and that she was both a Yoga teacher and my wife.

I have this image of our rather weedy, pathetic fame which is constantly on the blink and needs the occasional thump to keep the picture from constantly flickering as being a long stick with us at one end and "us" at the other.  It seems absurdly easy to generate tiny bits of fame but it doesn't matter at all, they seem to mean very little and have no apparent connection with any kind of success.  Also, they seem to move along railway lines and we can't control the brakes or the points.  Fame is a train, not an off-the-road vehicle.

Is Donna Noble's soul a magic Mars bar?

First of all, credit to charlieissocoollike for the idea of the magic Mars bar (other chocolate bars are available too):

The basic idea is that filesharing is less immoral than stealing Mars bars because the latter involve a lot of work to produce each time, but files such as music or videos, or ebooks for that matter, will still be available after they are "stolen".  Douglas Adams might say they're freemantled.  As it happens, Adams himself had one of his ideas freemantled - Cannock Chase - and was not amused, so maybe he wouldn't, but then again H2G2's plot is reminiscent of "Kilgore Trout"'s 'Venus On the Half-Shell', so i'm not sure he's in a position to complain.

Another thing Douglas Adams did, of course, was write three excellent Doctor Who adventures and edit Doctor Who scripts for several years.  Then Jon Nathan-Turner showed up and, according to some, decided to ruin the whole thing, resulting in it being taken off air.  A few years after it came back, Donna Noble appeared as the Doctor's companion. In an episode referred to as 'Silence In The Library'...

SPOILER ALERT!


 ...she suffered what Adams would call a "total existence failure" and woke up in a virtual world as herself.  The Doctor later found a way to restore her to existence, but of course by that point she had in a sense been replaced by an identical copy, a fact about which he seemed rather relaxed.  Some might say she had died and been replaced by an identical copy with all her memories intact, but now of course in a sense false.

SPOILERS OVER!

Back to the magic Mars bars, and of course the question of selling your soul (forgot to mention that).  Souls are apparently like magic Mars bars, because when you sell it on Ebay its still there to sell and unless you have either a contract or maybe uniquely numbered bits of soul like Voldemort or someone might do.  Therefore, clearly souls are intellectual property and when you sell them to the Devil, you sign a contract.  You might do something similar when you join a religion.

Now my suggestion is that the Doctor was so relaxed about Donna's recreation from a completely different set of materials with no overlap because he does something similar when he regenerates.  I see a regeneration as like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly:  the Doctor's matter rearranges, so far into a similar form in the sense of being a white male humanoid, but with potential new characteristics such as ginger hair or no legs.  Clearly the tenth Doctor didn't "want to go", so it's not a case of simply changing your face.  Major physical characteristics can change too - Romanadvoratrelundar, for example, was at one point a blue dwarf for a few seconds (a life form, by the way, not a star).

So there are a number of issues here.  Firstly, this version of a soul is a culturally constructed thing and seems to have nothing to do with consciousness, an afterlife or reincarnation.  Secondly, it constitutes one's identity in the same way as the Doctor is the "same" person throughout all his regenerations, and even apparently Donna through her experiences, of which there are many.

This is the sense in which i mean soul, and it's even possible that i use the word in this sense when i think about the afterlife and the resurrection.

I realise that there's a poor fit between the two parts of this video.  I have had a tendency for things not to link up well when i've done them, and that's happened here too, so in future, as well as getting better at making videos from a technical perspective, i will also endeavour to do some joined up planning.