I am certain that this TV commercial for Soy sauce would be much less interesting if I could make sense out of it (cat-headed shrimps: why? the cat who hangs itself: why? the little girl who goes to bed with him at the end: why?) As it is, it becomes a zen cohen: what is the sound of one fish-headed soy-superhero clapping...?
...
Over at Strange Horizons they've got a Fiction Submission Guidelines, Stories We See Too Often page up, which is fascinating -- lots of plots they get in all the time and don't want to see again. I found myself pondering one of them, though... It's their Plot 2e, which is:
Creative person meets a muse (either one of the nine classical Muses or a more individual muse) and interacts with them, usually by keeping them captive.
Which as many of you reading will know, was the story of Sandman #17, Calliope (May 1990)(It's collected in a book called DREAM COUNTRY). Now, I have a fairly good memory, and don't recall ever reading any captive-muse-for-someone-with-writer's-block stories before I wrote mine. (I'm not saying there couldn't have been any, just that it certainly wasn't around enough to have been any kind of meme, as far as I know.) So I wonder if it's a) Calliope just sort of edged out into popular consciousness, or, more likely, b) In Steam Engine Time People Build Steam Engines, and I just happened to build my particular steam engine first (I knew that if I didn't write a Serial Killer's Convention story someone would, for example; it was an idea whose time had come.)