The banana would be a modern art reference

If your favourite band from college was The Cure, it was always inevitable. Robert Smith was born for moaning about the miseries of a lifetime’s losses and regrets.

Genesis from the point where Adam already exists.

So, Genesis, only with extra misogyny?

The idea that Latin is the language of magic sounds like some Victorian bowdlerisation, entrenching the public school system that trained the administrative classes of the British Empire as having not only worldly but esoteric significance, and/or fetishisations of that era by those too conservative to look beyond. Before, they would use (actual and/or made-up) Hebrew or Arabic (orientalism, IKR?), or actual constructed languages or pastiches thereof occultists believed existed and had magical significance, like John Dee’s Enochian.

I would imagine that, if magic in the spell-casting sense existed, it would be in an ancient language the last of whose speakers died unfathomably long ago. Perhaps imperfect fragments had been passed down for millennia like script-kiddie sploits, gradually degrading with each transcription; perhaps, every so often, some sensitive soul would get a dream-revelation of long-lost parts of it. It would not be a language adjacent to the corridors of power, and would not be Latin, Classical Greek, Sanskrit or anything with worldly prestige (perhaps the scions of wealth would learn something supposed to be it at Eton, or the well-connected in sufficiently advanced Masonic initiations, but these would be either completely made up or else so mangled that they may as well be). Perhaps there’d be some of the old language in what linguists speculatively call Proto-Indo-European, though it may have died out long before this; surviving remnants of lost language groups like Basque would be more likely to have fragments of it, though even that would be grasping at straws. Though some would say that it somehow lives on in, of all places, the chaotic and insalubrious creoles, argots and cryptolects of the most wretched slums, travelling among the hidden networks of superstitions, resistance movements and informal economies in ways that would have kept H. P. Lovecraft awake.

And their most famous rock bar was in New York

A “flying car” would be just an aircraft that can fit in a traffic lane. For good reasons, aircraft are regulated much more strictly than cars, requiring regular inspections which are checked, as well as having requirements for flight plans, pre-flight checks and more. Mass-market “flying cars”, if they gained adoption on the same scale as their earthbound precursors, would have to be deregulated much like cars, to the point where Joe Sixpack can drive/fly to the shops on a whim without going through the kinds of pre-flight procedures private-jet-owning multimillionaires pay good money to employ people to take care of for them. Which would mean skies full of poorly maintained rustbuckets piloted by people living paycheck to paycheck who need them to get to their job on time. From time to time, these would fall out of the sky and crush or incinerate people in their homes. If this came to pass, society would have to accept this as the price of progress, in the way it accepts road deaths and mass shootings.

In Europe, 200km is a long distance

In the US, 200 years is a long time

As a jazz musician once said, you’ve gotta know the rules to break them.

While Britain participated in the slave trade, they went out of their way to not do so in Britain; the slaveholders kept their slaves abroad and out of sight, in places where the laws of civilisation which rule such institutions to be obscene are waived. (Sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean were one such place.) And it was impolite to inquire too hard about the sources of fortunes that built stately homes.

The difference being that when the N-word was uttered in Britain, it was belittling and condescending in an exoticising way, like a colonial-era picture book of funny foreigners in their traditional costumes. In America, however, it had a more immediate edge of aggression and violence, implying an other that’s here rather than far away, and firmly below the speaker in the established racial hierarchy, and who must be kept there using tools including designating them as a (N-word).

The word carried somewhat less of a charge in the UK at the time, where black people were relatively uncommon until waves of labour migration from the Caribbean in the 1950s, than in the US, where it was freighted with the weight of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and such. Agatha Christie could call a book “10 Little N_s”, alluding to a children’s rhyme. This was an age in which the children who casually sang that rhyme probably had golliwog dolls.

( looks at harried, sleep-deprived parent wrangling four squawling children into a minivan) “This person fucks.”

Not only a serial killer but also a cat burglar, pickpocket, arsonist and numerous other crimes. A regular Doktorin Mabuse.

“Here I will confess that I was anticipating the Schwebebahn to be a novelty, more of a gimmick than a real transit route, like Los Angeles’s Angels Flight funicular or San Francisco’s cable cars… I was immediately proven incorrect”

Tell me you’re American without saying you’re American.

Vibe-coded?

But can you lick lycanthropy?

Soon after this, you start seeing more ads for alcohol, gambling sites and religious cults, as the algorithm flags you as a potentially lucrative prospect.

The only thing a true Melburnian would use instant coffee for

Any dude with hair plugs or a loud, powerful car would confirm that it is.

Nude models from the 1890s when someone’s gaze lingers on their daguerreotypes slightly too long in an antiquarian shop.