Before Alfred Kinsey took up human sexuality, he studied wasps — thousands and thousands of them, whose bodies he minutely examined. Yet when asked what he could say about The Wasp, he replied that he hadn’t really seen enough specimens to generalize.
David berreby, “Quelle Différence?” slate, SEPT 11, 1996
This song is on my extensive “Mysterious Café” playlist. “The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships.” I’ve joked for a while that with its combination of an ethnic Chinese singer, lounge-like sound, and moderately smoky vocals, it evoked Shanghai in the art deco 1920s and ‘30s. Now I’m paying more attention to this official video, and… It’s shot in Shanghai! And those lyrics!
I guess I got it right.
I like looking at data. One thing I like is trends of names over time. Why? Because if you’re writing something, it makes sense the name of your character should match their age.
I like the Babynames.com site. It shows trends since 1910. (Though be careful. Enter names in the gray field right by the graph, not the darker one higher up the page — that way you’ll get results.) Here’s an example, using Jennifer, made famous for this kind of thing by the book Beyond Jennifer and Jason.
All right, but that’s not the only source. What about Social Security’s web site? (Go down to the “Popularity of a Name” box, and fill it in.) They’re using actual birth records as they come in.
The Social Security site shows a decline, just like Baby Names… but it’s much less sharp. What’s going on?
I had to think a while, and squint at the graphs, but I figured it out. In 1985, when the Social Security site tells us Jennifer was the 5th most popular name, the US birth rate (yes, it’s there, although not on the easiest site) was 15.461 births per 1000 people. In 2021, the most recent year listed, Jennifer was the 493rd most popular name, and the birth rate fell to 12.001 per thousand people — a drop of 22.4%.
Why is this important? Well, the Babynames chart is showing how many kids get a name. The Social Security chart shows the rank of the name among all others.
So while Jennifer was becoming less popular among names, people were having fewer babies in the first place.
Double-whammy. And that’s why the graph looks so much more spiky.
Yes, probably few people care. But it was a fun puzzle for me.
This comes from a sub-section of the original BBC Radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a bit intricate, so here’s the whole thing:
“May (or may not)…” pops up all over in my lexicon.
“Some of you may (or may not) remember the story I told…”
Although on re-hearing it, I admit a fondness for “Representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons.” Let alone, “(W)e demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
Lexicon. You’d think it wouldn’t come up much, but there I was, watching an episode of Property Brothers on HGTV, and after the reveal they were talking about how they had so much more “space…”
This is from Creature Comforts, a short similar to Wallace and Gromit by Nick Park and his Aardman clay animation crew. As the jaguar speaks, the Brasilian accent is vital.
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert A. Heinlein, time enough for love
Lexicon. Used more by Ulrika than myself. Example:
“Stop trying to use logic with these guys. They’re bureaucrats, who probably just have a script they can work from. You’re annoying the pig.”
Taco Bell used to have a whole series of commercials featuring a talking Chihuahua. This was my favorite, a movie tie-in with a US Godzilla:
I like this particular one because of the ‘tude. “I can take him… I just need a bigger box.”
This reminds me of a prank pulled by Harvey Mudd College against CalTech. The two colleges have a longstanding rivalry, both being engineering schools. (A rivalry Tech’ers insist doesn’t exist — even as they think up their next prank.)
There’s a large cannon in the middle of CalTech’s campus. A group of enterprising Mudders decided it would be fun to steal it. They consulted a recent alum on how to do this. He reportedly got a faraway look and said:
“You guys are going to need a big crane.”
Not, “No, that would be wrong.” Not, “Have you considered what the jail terms might be?” No… You guys can take ‘em. You just need a big enough box. Er, um, crane.
The spirit that builds great things.
The year: 1991
The setting: Pasadena’s Hastings Ranch theaters
The film: Hamlet, directed by Zeffirelli, starring Gibson, Close, Bates, Scofield, Holm, Bonham Carter, etc.
So, we get to the nunnery scene. Ophelia’s nearly in tears.
One grey-haired Pasadena matron turns to her companion, and says, just above a stage whisper:
“He’s going to drive that poor girl crazy!”
{blink}
Never seen this story before, have you, ma’am?
From a long-time favorite novel, Steven Minkin’s A No Doubt Mad Idea:
“On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer’s Salons, call them, franchise chain.”
If Lucy Fell (1996) would be a mostly forgettable movie, except for the way some of the performances are plainly early versions of characters the actors would take up later. Lucy Ackerman, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is the template from which her portrayal of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was drawn. Bwick Elias, flower-child idiot artist, is the ur-goon of every idiot Ben Stiller has played thereafter (notably Zoolander).
But there’s also this great scene, at 0:56. Lucy and Bwick are on a date, at Bwick’s apartment:
^^^
{Bwick joins Lucy on a couch, facing a painting we’ve seen him working on previously.}
BWICK: It’s symbolic. {He gestures at the painting, which stays unseen.} Life equals love which actually equals death. Life equals death.
{We cut to see the painting}
LUCY: It’s symbolic?
BWICK: Yeah.
LUCY: Symbolic death?
BWICK: Symbols of life, and death, and love. Life equals death which is in the middle. The sub-set is love. Which is really what the symbol is. Love. Life equals love equals death. It’s symbolic.
LUCY: Wait. {She gets up off the couch, and walks over to the painting} You have a woman with “LIFE” painted on her, uh… area, and she’s stabbing to death a man with a knife that says “LOVE” on it. And then in big, bold letters it says, “LIFE=LOVE=DEATH.”
{beat}
I don’t know that it’s very symbolic, Bwick. It’s kind of spelled out.
BWICK: So… It sucks. HANS!
LUCY: No. It doesn’t suck. It’s just that it’s not really… You know, it’s… It’s a literal painting.
{As she says this, an assistant who looks like Fabio — long blonde hair, overalls, no shirt — splashes some sort of fluid onto the painting.}
LUCY: It’s not symbolic. Which is… Fine.
BWICK: Hm-hm.
LUCY: It’s literal.
BWICK: Right. It just… Literally sucks.
{We see that Hans is patiently standing next to the painting, now with a blowtorch in his hand.}
LUCY: No.
BWICK: No, you’re right. You’re right. It just symbolically sucks. HANS!
{Hans turns on the blowtorch, and sets the painting ablaze.}
BWICK: It certainly isn’t very literal any more, is it?
{Lucy turns to the painting, as it continues to burn.}
LUCY: No, it’s… It’s symbolic.
Interestingly, this morphed when we got a Mercedes wagon. When trying to figure out some arcane feature of the car, I always imagined some engineer in Stuttgart, whom I had to think like to understand: HANS!
(Although sometimes I would credit his partner, Fritz.)
This method also is required for Microsoft products, both apps and operating systems. Step back, and think like a programmer in Redmond, not like a general computer user.