You could not shut me up

If I ever have to do a filibuster speech - and I truly hope I never do, because it is definitely one of the most ridiculous mechanisms in all of politics - I know exactly how I'd do it. 

If I had to talk about one subject for 24 hours, completely off the top of my head, I'd talk about 2000ad or Doctor Who.

There is a serious chance I could run out of puff if I had to talk about a lot of the other great entertainments I've enjoyed - I could probably do an 18-hour lecture of the merits of Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez - but something like 2000ad had thousands of issues, and hundreds of stories, creators and themes to dig into.

There is a straight overall history of the galaxy's greatest comic over the past five decades I could explain, getting into the various creators and the various careers, all the background production stuff, the themes of the stories, the art styles that come in and out of fashion.

I'm sure I would start rambling nonsensically after a day or so, and might even resort to slagging off some of the creators. There are a couple of current writers and artists working for 2000ad whose work I really dislike, but I never really mention it here on the blog, because they seem like nice people, and there is a far greater than zero chance they could see anything nasty I say about them, and I always want to concentrate on the finer things in life, rather than spend all day moaning abut the crap - but I couldn't guarantee I won't start running my mouth off several hours into an unbroken speech about it.

I've read every issue of the first 2400 progs, and 95 percent of the spinoffs, and have probably read them multiple times. I've read almost every behind the scenes book by editors, writers and editors, and all that information is pent up inside my head, just waiting to spill out.

It's the same thing with the Who. There is just such a wide spread of it, and even though I haven't come close to consuming every Doctor Who story ever written - I'm hundreds of stories behind on Big Finish alone - I have been watching it and reading books about it my whole life, and have enormous amounts of trivia and opinions locked away. There's an hour's worth of blather about how Patrick Troughton is the most important Doctor, or why Bernice Summerfield is the best companion, or which Dalek story is the best, or a thousand other subjects. I think I could talk about Doctor Who until I keeled over.

I remain absolutely astounded by the human mind's ability to retain information, especially when it's mostly useless. All this information stuck in my head, millions of bits of data. There are thousands upon thousands of individual comics panels seared into my head.

I probably won't ever have to do any kind of filibuster, and will never be required to unload all the information I have on a British sci-fi comic or a very silly and extremely moving  TV show. At least I have the Tearoom to get rid of it, and if I could talk for days about one thing, I could get a few more years out of this thing.