The Phantom City

Chris Knight reviews Sophie Scholl: The Final Days — the story of a member of the White Rose — and finds the cover blurb “Chilling authenticity” goes further than anyone would think.

The first issue of Studies in Language and Capitalism is online. Looks interesting. The editorial advisory board includes the inimitable Jeremy Hunsinger.

That is apparently at least one possible sound made when you hit Dick Tracy in the head. The only thing I’m wondering is if that sounds more like KLUNK or CU-LUNKW?

I was glad to see this blog post from Scott Adams, in which he describes thinking about topics in the form of hypothetical conversations with people he knows. I was glad to see it because it’s how I do a lot of my thinking, and it’s hard to describe to others. (Except in my head, I guess.)

The point where our experiences differ is that Adams concentrates on particular people in the role of hypothetical listener, while my listeners tend to either be particular people for the day, or people who make sense depending on what I’m thinking about. It is one of those things that’s hard to explain to others, though. Adams says it best:

I don’t tell a person he or she is my hypothetical listener because that conversation would turn awkward. “Hey, Bruce, I was imagining you for 18 hours yesterday, as I do every day.”

Usually my listener is my wife, so I can tell her I had an imaginary conversation with her because she already knows I’m weird. The biggest problem I have, aside from the possibility of creeping someone out by pointing out that you think about them a lot more than they think about you, is the fact that I sometimes have problems remembering which conversations I actually had with people vs. which ones were imaginary. Nothing works better in a conversation than when you start on a topic with the assumption that you’ve already discussed it.

Time’s Person of the Year is me! I didn’t even realize I was up for it, but now that I’ve found out, I pledge to use my newfound status to…wait…never mind. Time’s Person of the Year is You. That’s right…You. Not me. All of You. Everyone else besides Me.

Guess there’s always next year. That should just be down to me, and all of the babies born next year. I think I can beat out a bunch of babies. (Who am I kidding? They’ll be cute.)

The blog Girlfriend ‘07 lists ten fictional women who make it difficult to date real women:

Hollywood has a tendency to create female characters who make it nearly impossible to ever be truly satisfied with real women. Because not only do these women tend to be beyond beautiful on the outside, but they’re always unbelievable on the inside too. They’re cool. They’re fun. They always know what to say. And they always have that one little thing that makes you fall in love with them. Maybe it’s because they usually have guys writing their lines and making them perfect, but either way they’re a tough act to follow.

I either don’t agree or I’m not familiar with much of their list, except for Terry Griffith from Just One Of The Guys. That was pretty cool, although disturbing for the male lead. Anyway, I decided to put together a list of fictional women that either have or do set expectations for what I expect out of real women.

Betty and Veronica (Archie Comics)
I don’t know how popular they are now, but when I was growing up a boy could be defined by his preference for Betty, the quintessential girl next door, or Veronica, the rich, hot girl. I was always more of a Betty fan, but as I grew up I appreciated how the Veronicas of the world could be really distracting. Now? Let’s see, the girl next door who’s good-looking, modest, compassionate, smart, low-maintenance, and loves sports? Definitely Betty.

Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell)
Intelligent problem-solver. Intuitive thinker. Independent, yet still ends up being a great daughter and a better girlfriend than her boyfriends deserve. She’s a college student who solves murders. What else do you need?

Willow (Alyson Hannigan in Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Great with computers, willing to fight vampires, one of the most powerful witches in the world. For the sake of this list, we’ll ignore the lesbian part. Considering the fact she acts almost the same part in How I Met Your Mother, it just leads to the idea that maybe the character is a real woman.

Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin in Firefly)
A Companion of the future, she’s highly educated, psychologically astute, and a diplomat on a crew that needs one.

Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian in Babylon 5)
Second in command of the most difficult outpost in the galaxy, Ivanova can charitably be described as “prickly.” That being said, she was honest, direct, and could likely kill you before you realized she was moving. There’s something sexy about that, particularly when it wrapped up a conflicted soul who had felt guilty for most of her life about tragedies she couldn’t control.

Elizabeth Bennet (Pride & Prejudice)
Independent, intelligent, witty, and outspoken, during a time when women were encouraged to be anything but. Played by Jennifer Ehle in a memorable movie version, the written one is still the best.

Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby)
The best of the screwball comedies, Bringing Up Baby features Susan, a person who, if older, would probably be described as eccentric, looking for a lost leopard with an uptight Cary Grant. Sometimes you need a woman who’s a little crazy.

Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter)
Well, it is Wonder Woman, and we’ll just say there were a lot of guys who were watching this show when they first realized they really liked women.

Drusilla (Juliet Landau in Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Take Susan Vance’s craziness, add to it the ability to rip out your throat, mix in a cool accent, and you’ve got Drusilla. You’d enjoy it, for a little while.

Marion (Solveig Dommartin in Wings of Desire)
Sad, lonely, only one foot in our realm, and able to draw an angel down from heaven just to be with her. Hard to argue with that.

McMurphy (Dana Delany in China Beach)
Sad, lonely, stuck in a war she didn’t start, a compassionate person who was forced to watch people die for little reason she could find, Colleen McMurphy was distant in a way that begged for people to try to get her to open up.

Irene Adler (A Scandal in Bohemia)
Only appearing in one Sherlock Holmes story, Adler is an adventuress who outsmarts the great detective. Holmes called her the woman, and one can only agree.

Rebecca (Ivanhoe)
Completely overwhelming the traditional heroine (Rowena) in Scott’s work, she keeps the protagonist alive and has the antagonist fall in love with her. A classic character, highly intelligent, resourceful, and practical.

Honorable Mention: Lauren Bacall
Real person, so she doesn’t really belong on the list, yet throughout her career she played some of the sexiest characters in film, a status she imparted to them.

Luckily, unlike the guys at Girlfriend ‘07, I’ve already found a real woman that I dated and married. Note any common themes above? It’s possible to find smart, resourceful, sexy, caring, independent, a little crazy, and mysterious women in the real world, and I have, thank goodness. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to watch much TV.

Original link courtesy of Best Week Ever.

Update: Can’t say I expect this out of real women, but I can’t believe I left out Joy from My Name Is Earl! Yeah, I’m kind of a redneck from North Carolina…Want to make something of it?

It’s Christmas, and therefore the time for various media outlets to list dangerous toys. Radar has a good one, listing a few toys that were out when I was a kid. What I like about this sort of list is the indication the corporate world of the Seventies not only wasn’t concerned about us swallowing small toy pieces, but they actually wanted us to use open hot plates for melting plastic and to throw weighted metal darts at each other. Survival of the luckiest, or at least the kids who preferred to read.

My score on The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test:

Modern, Cool Nerd
(86 % Nerd, 52% Geek, 47% Dork)

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

Nerds didn’t use to be cool, but in the 90’s that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn’t quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and “geek is chic.” The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

Take the test.

From Wil Wheaton’s blog:

I love that. NASA kept Spirit awake so it (and we) could watch the sunset. Isn’t that just beautiful? We sent a robot all the way to another planet, and then had it do something humans have been doing since before we touched the monolith. We didn’t even learn anything from it . . . or did we?

The picture which inspires.

I have a domain — clockworkmind.com — that I have an idea of using for development purposes, but I haven’t set anything up yet. In the meantime, I set all email messages coming to that domain to forward to my Gmail address.

Today, I received 200+ bounced messages from where a spammer used random usernames combined with [at]clockworkmind.com to send out spam to addresses that either didn’t exist or were blocked. There’s a great introduction to the world.