King of the Potato People moments

Mr Flibble's very cross. You shouldn't have run away from him.
What should we do to them, Mr Flibble?

In my previous post I mentioned that this blog is its own worst enemy in the way I mix up serious with more, er, more ‘marginal’ material

And here’s a cracking example

I like to refer to what follows as my King of the Potato People moment

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Fans of Red Dwarf will fondly the remember the episode where Rimmer assures his crewmates that he is not insane followed by this classic exchange of dialogue

Cat: No, of course not. It's just that we thought you had gone nuts! We were tryin' to humour you.
Rimmer: I was just doing a little test -- a little test to see if you had gone crazy. If there is one thing I can't stand it's crazy people.
Lister: Well we've passed the test, Rimmer. You can let us out.
Rimmer: I can't let you out.
Lister: Why not?
Rimmer: Because the King of the Potato People won't let me…

One of the most interesting qualities of a certain category of obsessive is that they appear to be perfectly rational - right up to the point where you touch on their pet obsession. Some of the finest moments in British Comedy, and real life, are based on this.

The supreme exponent of King of the Potato People moments is, of course, David Icke. You can listen to entire chunks of his speeches where he is talking about globalist control of our political and economic systems that sound relatively well researched and lucid, and then he says…

‘Of course, it’s all controlled by blood sucking pan-dimensional space lizards who have assumed human form’

Uh, OK

per Wikipedia’s entry on Icke…

‘Icke has strongly denied that he is an anti-Semite, stressing that the Rothschilds are reptiles, not Jews.’

Er, whatever

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I’d argue strongly that today’s obsessive is sometimes tomorrow’s visionary. Science is largely based on people collecting apparently unconnected observations and formulating an explanation that brings that data together. The process of honestly distinguishing a viable theory from a batshit one can sometimes be a lot trickier than popular culture would have us believe.

By and large, we live in a singularly uncurious age. People are certainly as cynical than they’ve ever been but it is a largely passive, unquestioning brand of cynicism.

In a previous post I referred to the form of psychosis known apophenia - the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. To my knowledge no one has coined a term for the exact opposite form of psychosis; as in not seeing patterns or connections in ordered or meaningful data.

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Anyway, my personal King of the Potato People obsessive thing is…

Seeing symbolic messages in architecture and street plans.

This obsession has become much trendier and altogether more mainstream since the whole Da Vinci Code thing got going. The only wee fly in the ointment thing being that virtually all of the encoded symbolism in the Da Vinci Code is bullshit. So whilst it has made my hobby trendier the Da Vinci Code has also made it appear to be crankier.

I suspect that this outcome is not entirely coincidental.

But I would, wouldn’t I.

And, going back to the anti-apophenia thing for a moment, it just baffles me how someone can walk through a cemetery and see something like this...

And not realise what it represents.

Short of painting the top purple and adding some bulbous veins I’m not sure how the symbolism could be any more blatant

I’ve just engaged in a protracted on-line discussion debating with some sceptics about whether this sort of thing is accidental or not. I even went so far as to set up a Flickr group entitled ‘Phallic Tombstones’ with the intention of populating it with as many ‘accidental’ examples of that sort of thing as I could find. It’s not a particularly large group yet, understandably people are a little bit suspicious when I invite them to submit pictures to it, but there are still some fine examples of the genre in there nevertheless.

I have also got involved in a discussion about the geometry of the Washington DC street plan, occult symbolism on dollar bills, the true identity of the Statue of Liberty and, well, all sorts.

The thing is, er, well so much of this stuff is verging on the undeniable it’s kind of interesting to see how people react to it; some people blow it off as coincidence, others as interesting but of no real significance and most just blank it out in a dissonant kind of way.

So, the fact that America is a country with occult symbols on its money, with a capital city based on a occult street plan, that wages war from a pentagon and has pentagrams plastered all over its tanks is not an interesting or significant observation?

I am, of course, clearly nuttier than David Icke on bad acid in a crocodile farm.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that a couple of posts back Antagonist switched me onto a couple of excellent 'coincidentally random' street plans, much nearer to home than DC, that tickled me pink. A quick Google search seems to indicate that they haven’t had much of an airing on the Interweb so I’d like to redress that shocking omission.

There’s Nelson’s Jolly Roger at Trafalgar Square...

And Buckingham Pyramid...

Neither of which looks anything at all like long-established occult symbols used by rich and powerful people. Nothing like these two here for example

And if anyone says you can see occult symbolism in anything if you look hard enough, I say…