When Tom Brady's last Hail Mary pass knocked harmlessly to the turf and the game was sealed (Quakers over Pilgrims, 41 33), my father and I, and many fellow-lifers (and I'm talking about those of us who did not have a hankering for mayhem or horse dung) tried to make sense of this alien sensation.
You see that in the early films of someone like David Cronenberg, and obviously in Alien: this sense that all that was familiar and secure starts breaking down.
But it can go too far: I recall a hopeless "new" Sherlock Holmes drama a couple of years ago, starring Rupert Everett in a story that was in almost every sense alien to Conan Doyle.
Cannibalism of a clutch with a high proportion of alien eggs makes sense for the fish, because it avoids putting a lot of energy into producing offspring that carry another fish's genes, and because by eating the eggs it gets energy to rear future clutches of its own eggs.
(Later, an enraged audience member found his words, and responded to the passage by saying, "That sentence strikes me as somehow so deranged, so alien to a sense of the real.... Anyone who is capable of that sort of argument cannot be trusted to think". A few people — by no means everyone — applauded).
Vectorial content is unfamiliar and alien to common sense.
For definiteness, let φ be the formula 'Ax' expressing that x is an Alien (in the sense of 'Alien' introduced above).
In his 1995 book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, he referred to the Clinton administration as a "black-Hispanic-Jewish-minority white (Southerners used to call them 'scalawags') coalition".
Being a fan of Pink Floyd and The Beatles (and especially the experimental concept albums both bands produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s), Adams wanted the programme to have the feel of a "rock album...to convey the idea that you actually were on a spaceship or an alien planet — that sense of a huge aural landscape".
We seem to have forgotten what genuine love is, and when someone walks by us with a smile, it's as if they're a fucking alien, because our senses think we must be in some great danger.
