D

Daedalus

The father of the machine is Daedalus, who invented the potter’s wheel, the surveyor’s compass and the carpenter’s saw. He also made the artificial cow used by Queen Pasiphae when she desired to be mounted sexually by the king-bull Poseidon.

sex with a bull = the labyrinth / mind = death

Pasiphae gave birth to the Minotaur: half man (Minos) / half bull (Taurus). Daedalus was commissioned by King Minos, Pasiphae’s cuckolded husband, to build a maze, the labyrinth, to imprison the Minotaur. The labyrinth was meant to mirror the convolutions of the human mind. Minos was also, significantly, the judge of the dead.

[S. Sunderland, Soul Avatars, pp. 207-8]



13 lines / 7 faces
7 facets / 13 spaces[*]

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[*] See >Zodiac.

Derren Brown Mind Control

Whilst watching Derren Brown playing blackjack and winning thousands of pounds at a casino tonight, I heard him remark that he used a >Memory Theatre to do it:

“I have a big Florentine house, and upstairs is the card room, and in the card room there are fifty-two objects, and as each card comes up I attach a sticky label to one of the objects – so all I have to do to keep track of the four packs of cards is to go from object to object.”

Funnily enough, even as he was speaking I thought he might be lying … that he’d read about memory theatres somewhere and thought it would be impressive to have one. It’s hard to see how it would really help, but maybe I’m being too suspicious. It seemed to me to resemble the rest of his technique of indirection, distracting you from the main objective in order to leave you open to his machinations.[*]

[D. Jennings, ‘Boob-tube Review’, TV Times (17/9/03), p.16]

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[*] See >Short-term Memory Impairment.

Doctor Who

Classic cult BBC TV show. It concerns the adventures of a renegade Time Lord exiled from the planet Gallifrey, who travels around the universe in his ship the TARDIS [Time And Relative Dimensions In Space], which froze in the form of a blue police telephone box in 1963.

The actors who have so far portrayed the Doctor in his nine[*] incarnations are, in order:

• William Hartnell (1963-66) – Old Father Time
• Patrick Troughton (1966-69) – the Chaplinesque tramp
• Jon Pertwee (1970-74) – insufferable dandy
• Tom Baker (1974-81) – scarf-sporting teddy boy
• Peter Davison (1982-84) – crisp in cricket whites
• Colin Baker (1984-86) – garish and ungregarious
• Sylvester McCoy (1987-94) – the poison-dwarf
• Paul McGann (1996) – the feature film: a new beginning
• Richard E. Grant (2003) – animated audio production
• Christopher Eccleston (2004-) – return to live action

[J. Standish, Doctor Who: XL Glorious Years, p. iii]


Is >Time-travel possible or impossible?
Can ten men [9 + 1] all be the same person?

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[*] See >Zodiac.