More than you needed to know

Little brother dream

I'd met my younger brother for a drink somewhere in Corstorphine. The pub was very old and charming and a waitress was handing out free steaks from a platter. It was great. However, we were having such a nice time that, before we knew it, it was after 10 at night, which meant that my brother had missed his bus back to the west coast.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

The remarkable thing about this dream is that it's the first one I've had in which Andrew has been his actual age. Indeed, it's the first dream in which he's been any age other than four, which is an odd fact that I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been keeping this blog. I've never been sure why my subconscious picture of Andrew should be of him as a little chap wearing corduroy dungarees and sporting an Egon Spengler-style bouffant (which he cultivated as an outward manifestation of his utter devotion to the nerdy Jewish one out of Ghostbusters), but that has been the case for as long as I've been keeping records.

Until Sunday night, as I said, when he shows up as his full-grown 22-year-old self.  I'm sorry if you're looking for some sort of insight into why that might suddenly have happened, but I can't supply one. All I can give in the way of Freudian material is a suggestion that the free steaks are probably derived from the platter of delicious roast lamb slices that I liberally scavenged at a friend's 40th birthday party at the weekend.

Wait a minute -- a 40th birthday party? And Andrew is usually four? There's clearly more to this than I first thought. But nothing that I can see, sadly.

The Unsung Joe

Some people don't feel the need to have a blog. Others are quite happy with just the one. However, Two Blogs Mogg is not like those people.

For years, every time I've watched a film from the 30s or 40s, I've checked out the interesting looking minor actors on the IMDB and have discovered many fascinating and wonderful things about them. I don't know if their lives are any more or less interesting than the lives of the famous actors in the films, but there's often a poignancy about the traces of the lives of forgotten bit-part actors that appeals to the part of me that's prone to indulging in melancholic nostalgia for places and times of which I have no personal experience.

Hence the new blog.

I've named it after something that I came across in a 1941 newspaper article by Dee Lowrance, which profiled various character actors who specialised in playing stiff-necked dowagers, country buffoons, stern schoolmarms and plug uglies. The last paragraph reads: "They are the Jane and Joe Unsungs of Movieland whose function is to set off the stars on the silver screen ... Stars come and go but these human back-drops go on forever."

Click to go the The Unsung Joe.

9/11 dream (another one)

I was working at my desk when I became aware of the fact that my colleagues were talking about a terrorist attack on America that they’d just read about on the internet. Apparently, some crazy guys had flown jumbo jets into some skyscrapers in New York or something. Details were sketchy, but it seemed that other planes had gone missing, too. Who knew what buildings they were going to end up crashing into?

I couldn’t believe they didn’t realise that they were reading old reports from 2001 that were still floating around the web. One of them must have been looking through an American newspaper’s website and come across a story from September 11, then forwarded it to other people in the office. They were going to feel pretty stupid when they found out!

But some time passed and still no one seemed to have noticed. I slowly started to suspect that I was wrong -- perhaps it was all happening again.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

The second 9/11 dream in two months! An undeniable sign of something or other!

Before going to sleep, I began Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, which is about a kid whose dad was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. There was only one mention of the attack in the little that I’d read, but it was obviously enough to spark the dream: “Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place. So if you wanted to go to the ninety-fifth floor, you’d just press button 95 and the ninety-fifth floor would come to you. Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you’re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone would be safe”.

The idea of me sitting in my office while news of the 9/11 attacks come in is clearly inspired by memories of me sitting in my office while news of the 9/11 attacks came in. I’d tried to keep working with one eye on the text I was typing, one eye on the television news and another eye on the internet but, predictably, I made some errors. The most notable one was discovered the next day by a sub-editor who wondered why I’d reported Dorothy-Grace Elder MSP saying the words, “And burned the plane!” in the middle of a discussion about a petition.