Is it really worth planning a makeover for the new year? When Facebook renamed itself Meta and Google rebranded as Alphabet, few seemed to care
he human body is like the Sugababes. Or Plato’s paradox of the Ship of Theseus, whichever you prefer. You look in the mirror and you seem, more or less, to be the person you’ve always been. You dial up a childhood memory and it replays in your head, a familiar set of pains or pleasures that belongs, uniquely, to you.
The point, perhaps, is that some transformations cannot be avoided. Change is written into our bodies as it’s written into the culture. Daoism knows this. So do the Sugababes. “I know everything changes,” they sang in 2008. “I don’t care where it takes us.” And they’re still touring.
The revisions to the original script would come in the second act: Marlin would change sex, find a male mate and produce new offspring, who would all be undifferentiated hermaphrodites. If Nemo was the only other male around – as he seems to be – his transformed father might even mate with him. Should Disney ever be courageous enough to tackle these possibilities, I’m sure Randy Newman would be more than capable of writing the song.
Amused, but not mystified. Today we expect to get all the details of a film star’s life, as if we were their shrink or obituarist. In the early years, most were known only by their association with the studio that made their pictures. The studios retained power over their leads by creating fictional identities for them.
The most remarkable feature of this change is that so many brands survived it. Dr Collis Browne’s Mixture, for instance, is still giving “warming relief for diarrhoea”, but without its cannabis content . The soda sector has cleaned up completely. The cocaine in Coca-Cola was phased out during Prohibition. The active ingredient of 7Up – lithium citrate, often prescribed as mood stabiliser – disappeared by 1948.
All this would have baffled the firm’s founders, who set up their engineering business in 1859, became the largest arms manufacturer in the Austro-Hungarian empire by turning out triple-barrel gun turrets for battleships, then diversified into car production in 1925. Skoda models of the inter-war period were big, sleek and expensive. But nationalisation under the new Communist government of Czechoslovakia brought stagnation: in the 1980s it was still making cars to 1960s specifications.
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