It never fails. After I do a show, really almost moments after, I find something - sometimes it's a song, sometimes it's an image for the blog, sometimes it's a quote - that I could've used for the show. This time it's a nice paragraph from Eric Idle's new "sortabiography" Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. What a nice thing I could have shared:
"After Brian, I took a long sabbatical, immersing myself in astronomy, learning about the immensity of our Universe, & generally self-educating myself in cosmology. I spent the nights gazing at the unbelievable numbers of stars wheeling overhead in the Milky Way, & wrote a lyric about it.* I also read life science books, trying to understand evolution & the extraordinary appearance of life in the Universe. I could understand the physical Universe expanding & banging away, but why does life evolve over billions of years to become you & me? This opened my mind to the central question of the Universe: What is life?** To my mind, nobody has yet answered this question adequately. Well, alright, Professor Brian Cox did, but we were both pissed at the time, & we have completely forgotten what he said. Steve Martin, a philosophy graduate, said that life exists so the Universe can experience itself."
Yeah, the book's got a lot of name dropping. It's weird, Elvis Costello's autobiography is like that, too, like, I'm reading about someone I admire, I don't know why he or she needs to tell me they were friends with famous people. Anyway, it's quite fun & funny & that quote would've been nice to insert into the show. But oh well. I'll just insert it here.
* He & his wife were living in France at the time, in a place with electricity or running water, so it must've been fucking gorgeous at night.
** This question was italicized in the original.
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