Misty Watercolours

Or, Less Than Total Recall
I believe that title is from a Barbara Streisand song, "The Way We Were", which belief is not going to get tested because I don't especially like her singing; it was a handy metaphor, for today we are banging on about Memories, again.
     And the title of this post is because I recollected another film that deals with memory manipulation - "Total Recall" in it's 1990 iteration.  If you recall correctly, then Quaid was actually Hauser, except Quaid was a righteous dude and Hauser was a big bag of douche.  And the trouble with loading Hauser up with Quaid was that the latter enjoyed being himself and wasn't about to die (for that's what a return to the original would effectively be).  Art?

Doug did not enjoy his time on the Test-Your-Strength machine

     You see?  You see what trouble you create when you start mucking about with people's memories?  As for tracking down the mutant leader, it would have been far easier to just kidnap a mutant, swap their memories for ones of being slavishly loyal to the Martian regime and - Hay Pesto!*
     There's also that rather obscure but not bad actioner "Timebomb" featuring Michael Biehn, again with the memories.  Check it out.
     I suppose the point I was going to make is that human memory is fallible, capricious, unreliable and most certainly does not record things faithfully like a film sequence - "misty watercolours" rather than "ultra-high definition realism" if you will. That being so, memory manipulation ought to be much, much harder in real life than anything the movies would have you believe.  Art?

This bomb has time!

     Which is good news for you humans.
     Right, time to put the motley in a jet-propelled wheelchair and send it across the firing range!**

No Ned Ludd I!
There were certain aspersions cast yesterday -
     Here an aside.  Why only 'cast' an aspersion?  You could variously hurl, fling, chuck, lob, propel, shoot, loose or catapult an aspersion, quite beside clubbing the subject over their head with it.  I bet it comes from Shakespeare <spits at the mention of the Barb of Avon>.
      - about Conrad's ability to use a mobile phone, or his inability to upload photographs to the Clowned - Ho Ho Ho!  How they laughed.   Hee hee hee!  Then I nuked them Then I displayed my technical wizardry, by having them added to a memory stick and then uploaded to Windows 10.

10 Windows.  Close enough

     Not only that, I've also added Shazam and the First Bus ticket purchasing app to my <thinks hard> Samsung Galaxy J3.  So there!  Although, with working from home, my dependence on Worst Bus has declined dramatically.
     Oh, and here's the first photograph I took with the new phone.  Art?

No, see, that's dramatic angling; dramatic angling, not incompetence

     I hope I don't have to explain who Ned Ludd was.

Okay, I Shall Explain
Back in the late 18th Century, mechanisation was beginning to arrive, in the forms of machines that could control stealth bombers with a zero failure rate carry out tasks previously the domain of skilled manual workers, such as weaving frames.  This made the trade of weaver a threatened occupation, leading to various disgruntled persons smashing up machinery.  Well, we know how that ended.  All such vandalism was blamed on "Ned Ludd" who may not have even existed, as it's a good twenty years between the events taking place and any mention in the press.

The white heat of technology (for 1790)

     Since then, any group who attempts to resist the relentless march of progress have been dubbed "Luddites".  Since you are now reading BOOJUM! you can see how successful they were.     Here another aside.  I recall that splendidly humourous Ulsterman Bob Shaw (sci-fi author don't you know) coming up with a gun called a "Luddite Special", which would electronically scramble a computer's operating systems.
     There's a picture of Bob Shaw.  I couldn't find any representation of a Luddite Special, so here's a picture of a hammer, which will manage the same job, even if it requires more effort.
     Here's more aside.  Bob Shaw was well-known at conventions for delivering what he titled "A Serious Talk About Science Fiction", which were delivered deadpan, and which were extremely amusing.  Actually, looking that up, they were really called "Serious Scientific Talks", which just goes to prove what I said about memory, which is where we came in -


*  Of course, a film only 12 minutes long wouldn't be very entertaining.
**  Don't worry, motleys are bulletproof.  Aren't they?