X Theme Quotes

Nature—cue the theme from The Twilight Zone—somehow knows calculus.

In keeping with its code-breaking theme, the opening credits of Sneakers has the names of some of the film’s major players presented as anagrams before they get unscrambled: “BLOND RHINO SPANIEL” becomes “PHIL ALDEN ROBINSON,” while “FORT RED BORDER” turns into “ROBERT REDFORD” and “A TURNIP CURES ELVIS” reveals itself as “UNIVERSAL PICTURES.” Not all cast members got their names shuffled—if they had, the world might have discovered that one anagram for “RIVER PHOENIX” is “VIPER HEROIN X.

factual evidence to the contrary. • Delusions are held with absolute certainty, despite their falsity and impossibility. • Delusions can have a variety of themes, including grandeur and persecution. • Delusions are not of the bizarre variety (“I am being poisoned by the CIA”) but, rather, seem like ordinary figures of speech except that each word is meant literally: e.g., “I alone am the chosen one, invincible, extraordinary beyond words, the very best of the best in every way.” • Delusional people tend to be extremely thin-skinned and humorless, especially regarding their delusions. • Delusions are

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

The taps mimicked the theme song to The X-Files.

Excuse me? Who here had the bright idea of healing a gunshot wound with the bullet still in it?” All eyes turned to another doctor that had stepped into the hallway. Toriel narrowed her eyes. “That was my doing. You must be Doctor Akron. Doctor Ross mentioned you might stop by.” “I'll bet. Listen to me. What you did put that girl's life in danger. You left contaminated shrapnel in an open wound and sealed it up without even trying to sterilize it.” “I... I am not familiar with the details of human medical treatment-” “Exactly! You have no business making those kinds of calls! All you did was make things worse! Even with the X-Rays we had to perform exploratory surgery to find all of those bullet fragm-” Hal Greene suddenly pushed past the queen and stood face to face with Dr. Akron. “Hi there doctor! You sound cranky, you could use some fresh air!” Before anyone could respond, Hal grabbed the doctor's shoulder, knelt down, pulled, and twisted in one seamless movement that left the doctor in a fireman's carry across his shoulders. “What in the- PUT ME DOWN THIS INSTANT!” “I can't put you down here, you silly billy! The fresh air is outside the building! Let's go! DAH NAH NAAAAAH DAH NAH NAHHHH....” Every person in the hallway watched in confusion as Hal carried the angry doctor on his shoulders, running down the hallway, into the lobby, and presumably outside the building. “...WAS THAT THE ROCKY THEME HE WAS TRYING TO SING?” Papyrus scratched his skull in confusion. “Yeah.” Justin shrugged. “Hal loves underdog stories.

Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me now to recite. Inspire me, O gods…and spin me a thread from the world’s beginning down to my own

A great editor sees the Story globally and microscopically at the same time. He has x-ray vision. He looks down from thirty thousand feet. A great editor can break down a narrative into themes, concepts, acts, sequences, scenes, lines, beats. A great editor has studied narrative from Homer to Shakespeare to Quentin Tarantino. He can tell you what needs fixing, and he can tell you how to fix it.

Theme Song: Your Man – Down With Webster Bling Bling – ALTÉGO Let It All Go – Birdy & RHODES I Think You’re the Devil – Ellee Duke Legendary – Welshly Arms Wonderland – Taylor Swift Skin – Rihanna MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT – Elley Duhé Blue – Madison Beer Devil I Know – Allie X MONEY ON THE DASH – Elley Duhé & Whethan Way Down We Go – KALEO How Do I Say Goodbye – Dean Lewis Do Me – Kim Petras Crying On The Dancefloor – Sam Feldt, Jonas Blue, Endless Summer & Violet Days Wicked – GRANT Love and War – Fleurie Silence – Marshmello (feat. Khalid) Fire on Fire – Sam Smith

Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me now to recite. Inspire me, O gods…and spin me a thread from the world’s beginning down to my own lifetime.” —Ovid, Metamorphoses

Defiant exuberance was the theme of the playlist, featuring Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It!,” A-Ha’s “Take On Me,” X-Ambassadors’ “Renegades,” Fall Out Boy’s “Immortals,” and then Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal.” Ward selected the Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water Burn,” leading an enthusiastic, rousing chant of support of rooftop arson. Elaine declined to sing to “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Alec crooned an off-key version of Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” to Katrina.

Such.... evenhandedness. If we are exploiting one kind of animal, by this standard, why then it is only fair to exploit all others of comparable capacities. From there Mr. Komatsu returns to his "collective guilt" theme: Who are we to judge X when we ourselves are doing the same thing, and where do Westerners get off judging Japan or any other culture, and just what is so special about whales?

Such.... evenhandedness. If we are exploiting one kind of animal, by this standard, why then it is only fair to exploit all others of comparable capacities. From there Mr. Komatsu returns to his "collective guilt" theme: Who are we to judge X when we ourselves are doing the same thing, and where do Westerners get off judging Japan or any other culture, and just what is so special about whales?

Imagine you were composing a symphony, and you’d written it down by hand onto sheet music, of which you have only one copy. If you wanted to experiment with the theme, you’d be crazy to write over the only copy you have, and risk messing it up with something that doesn’t work. You’d photocopy it, and use that one to play around, while making sure the original was preserved intact as a back-up. That’s not a bad way to think about genome duplications. A working gene is constrained by being useful, and is not free to mutate at random, as most mutations are likely to be deleterious. But if you duplicate a whole section of DNA containing that gene, the copy is free to change and maybe acquire a new role, without the host losing the function of the original. That’s how a primate ancestor of ours went from two-colour vision to three – a gene on the X chromosome encodes a protein that sits in the retina and reacts to a specific wavelength of light, and thus enables detection of a specific colour. By thirty million years ago, this had duplicated, and mutated sufficiently that blue had been added to our vision. This process has to happen during meiosis, where sperm and eggs are formed, if the new function is to be potentially permanent, as the new mutation will be inherited in every cell of the offspring, including the cells that will become the sperm or eggs. Primates seem prone to genome duplication, and the great apes particularly. Something like 5 per cent of our genome has come about from duplications of chunks of DNA, and about a third of that is unique to us. Duplicated

It shouldn’t take long. I’ve got snot pouring out of my nose and this insane ringing in my ears, the theme of the X-Men show in my head. That one tune over and over, soundtrack to me scrubbing fury holes in the goddamn carpet: Da-na-na-na NA na na! Da-na-na-na NA na na!! It’s so loud in my head, I honestly can’t tell if it’s coming out of my mouth or not, but it must be because Stoner starts yelling at me to shut the hell up. And I’m screaming back at him Da-na-na-na NA na na! because by this point I’ve pretty thoroughly lost my mind.

The videos I do watch embroil me in a world that knows no boundaries when it comes to lame attempts at scaring the viewer. A world that never settles for just the one exclamation mark and knows nothing of the apostrophe’s correct function. A world that owes Mark Snow, the composer of The X-Files theme tune, millions of royalty dollars.

Days later, I saw an X-ray of a Bose speaker inside someone. “And it was still connected to Bluetooth,” the woman who showed it to me whispered.

The future of the human organism is here phased out by a tumefying mechanosphere and, as Butler wrote, the ‘servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master’. In using machines to adapt our environment to our ends, we instead end up becoming increasingly adapted to the machine. In this sense, the tool—which was once a mere means—transforms ‘into the master’. Günther Anders picked up on this theme beautifully a century later. He wrote that, through mechanisation, we are constructing our own extinction-by-obsolescence. By ceding everything to the machine in the name of convenience, we are wilfully manufacturing a ‘world without us’—in so far as we will eventually be adapted out of the rat race, a casualty of evolutionary parsimony. Where others had spoken of humans becoming parasites of the technological realm, Anders spoke of the technological realm ‘parasitically exploiting’ us. Technology is a ‘skin cancer’ on the planet, he wrote (hours after receiving treatment for the lung tumour that later killed him), a ‘metastasis’ that lives ‘parasitically’ off the biosphere. Indeed, we might classify industrial modernity itself as a mechanical, planet-enclosing brood parasite: just as the Sacculina is a diversion of resources away from crab reproduction, hijacking the crab’s instincts to nurture the next generation of barnacles, so too does industry divert and capture the resources of humanity, utilising our ancient appetites to pollinate and propagate itself by luring us with artificial pleasures, from sugar to screens, while our own fertility collapses.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are full of the twin themes of immortality of fame conferred by the engine of print, as well as the petty futility of daily existence as measured by the clock: When I doe count the clock that tels the time, And see the brave day sunck in hidious night … Then of thy beauty do I question make That thou among the wastes of time must goe. (“Sonnet X”)