Curious linkage

Strange how sometimes you can be thinking of something completely at random, without even a prompt to the subconscious, let alone being actively aware of it, then, in a short space of time after conceiving of it, it is a news item.

This can be of a sad nature.  I was thinking back to a particular scene in Eastenders, the Harold Pinter of soap operas, just before I stopped watching it regularly eleven years ago.  Yesterday, one of the main actresses in that scene – Gemma McCluskie – or at least her limbless torso was found in Regent’s Canal in east London.  She was only 29.  As Kerry Skinner, McCluskie played a slut, cheating on her fiancé so completely that the man she was having an affair with also proposed to her, unaware that she was already engaged.  My mind was harking back to the scene when she got her comeuppance with Robbie (played by Dean Gaffney).  Tragic that she had so much life ahead of her when in real life she was murdered.

I was also ruminating on Alan Turing, coming to the view that Steve Jobs gave his company the name Apple not because he worked in an apple orchard when he was in his early twenties or once subsisted purely on a diet of apples for one week.  No, I am convinced it was because Turing, the father of the modern computer, ate an apple laced with cyanide, in imitation of Snow White, after he was chemically castrated for being found out to be a homosexual.  This monstrous treatment induced Turing to take his own life.  That is why the Apple logo has a bite taken out of it.  Strangely, in all the tributes to Steve Jobs, this was never even hinted at.  Not being an overly tech-savvy person, the new iPad was released within days and I didn’t even know it was going to happen.