The Liar’s Paradox meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer

1978 is a momentous year for many reasons: David Berkowitz, aka ‘Son of Sam’, is given a life sentence for seven murders in the USA before going on to inspire comics, films, books and songs; Karol Wojtyla becomes Pope John Paul II – the first non-Italian to be elected to Papal office in 456 years, and the first ever Polish one. In England, Louise Brown gives birth to the first ‘test-tube’ baby, even as Japanese explorer Naomi Uemura reaches the North Pole all on his own - if you don’t count the dogs – the first person ever to do so. And up above them both, in the heavens, another kind of endurance record is being set, as several Soviet cosmonauts remain in orbit on the Salyut 6 space station for 139 days and 14 hours. But forget all that – mere trifles! For this was the year that also brought us such miracles of celluloid as The Deer Hunter (who had heard of Russian roulette, or The Cavatina, before then?) and Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata; close on the heels of these masterpieces come two more films that would soon stand as landmarks for the seventies: the very imitable National Lampoon’s Animal House, and the seminal one-word titled Grease, that boosted the sales of spray-on latex jumpsuits by about four and a half billion, which, by chance, is the approximate population of the world at the time. All time-lines are by necessity incomplete, yet we cannot leave 1978 without marking the passing of Kurt Gödel, inventor of the Incompleteness Theorem, which dragged the Liar’s Paradox into the 20th century, and squeezed it until it screamed…

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