Matthew Wrather hosts a panel including Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Jordan Stokes, and David Schechner to Overthink™:

  • Our New Theme Song
  • New Year’s Resolutions
  • Reality Television
  • Quantum Mechanics (including a pretty detailed explanation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle)
  • Oscar® Contenders
  • and, the return of…

Overthink This
Our occasional listing of things you should buy. And if you use these links, we’ll even make a few pennies off you.

As always, email us at podcast AT overthinkingit DOT com with your comments, or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401) to leave a voicemail.

Download Episode 27 (MP3)

Top Posts of 2008

posted by Matthew Wrather on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 1:32pm

A couple days late, here are the top ten articles (by page views) of 2008, a year which saw 383 posts, 735,403 page views, and 629 RSS subscribers.

  1. 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes
  2. The Philosophy of Batman
  3. Why Strong Female Characters are Bad for Women
  4. Fixing Pirates of the Carribean
  5. Eight Hit Songs from Obscure Movies
  6. The Nazgul = EPIC FAIL
  7. The Math of Steel
  8. The Blockbuster Bell Curve: Are We Running Out of Good Movies, Too?
  9. The Joker’s Magic Pencil
  10. The Philosophy of Batman, Schopenhauer Edition

We’ve been working hard on OTI all year, but still we’re amazed at the success of what started as a lark (”Hey, guys, want to write a website?”) in January of 2008. Needless to say, we owe it to our brilliant, opinionated, passionate, fantastic readers; on behalf of all the writers, thank you for making OTI a part of your compulsive web browsing on company time!

We’ve got great things planned for 2009. We’ll let you know what they are as soon as we’ve figured them out. Happy New Year!

The Punn Diagram

Matthew Wrather leads a panel consisting of Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and eventually Matthew Belinkie to overthink:

  • Listener Feedback
  • One Man’s Pun (see Venn Diagram)
  • The Tenets of National Socialism
  • Various Attempts to Kill Hitler (one by Tom Cruise, one by the Highlander)
  • Anglo-American Relations

Disclaimer: We are all ANTI-Nazi. Nazis are bad.

As always, email us at podcast AT overthinkingit DOT com with your comments, or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401) to leave a voicemail.

Download Episode 26 (MP3)

[Venn Diagram by Mark Lee]

OTI on Holiday Hiatus

posted by Matthew Wrather on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 8:22am
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Happy Holdiays and New Year from all the writers on the site. (We all chipped in and got Belinkie a copy of The Wire.)

We’ll be on holiday hiatus until the new year, and doing a little technical housekeeping in the meantime. We’ll still be updating the Twitter feed and recording the podcast (iTunes link), but you won’t see a new post until 2009. Unless there’s a really good Gossip Girl or something.

See you on January 1!

Thursday Grammar: Christ puts the X in Xmas

posted by Matthew Wrather on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 8:20am

Thursday Grammar is back! Did you miss me?

One thing grates on my nerves more than the the egregious examples of poor usage and idiocy I have tackled in this series: When people correct others incorrectly or, more bluntly, when people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and are snobs about it.

Case in point: “Xmas.” The nuns who taught my father in Catholic elementary school would rail against this abbreviation, claiming that it was a sacrilege worse than claiming you’re bigger than Jesus or something.

Apparently, they couldn’t be bothered to look in a dictionary. Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2000):

Xmas has been used for hundreds of years in religious writing, where the X represents a Greek chi, the first letter of , “Christ.” In this use it is parallel to other forms like Xtian, “Christian.” [Or Xtina. —Ed.]

But people unaware of the Greek origin of this X often mistakenly interpret Xmas as an informal shortening pronounced (ksms). Many [idiots] therefore frown upon the term Xmas because it seems to them a commercial convenience that omits Christ from Christmas.

OK, I added “idiots” in the paragraph above. But the dictionary wasn’t being snarky enough.

A funny postscript: As an adult, my dad decided, nuns be damned, he was going to write “Xmas”, figuring that because the letter “X” is cruciform it is an acceptable symbol of Christianity. This is an example of speculative folk etymology, something I’ve taken up before. Though you have to admire the brand integration: X, chi, the cross — they do all seem to fit together.

Merry Xmas!

Episode 25: Silver Podcast

posted by Matthew Wrather on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 11:50pm
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Matthew Wrather hosts a panel including Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Ryan Sheely, and special guest Rachel Dougnac, to overthink:

  • Mike from LA, his exact latitude and longitude
  • Hipsterism Eats Itself
  • Earony

As always, email us at podcast AT overthinkingit DOT com with your comments, or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401) to leave a voicemail.

Download Episode 25 (MP3)

Episode 24: A Map of Los Angeles

posted by Matthew Wrather on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 11:29pm

Matthew Wrather hosts a panel including Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, David Shechner, and special guest “Al” to wrap up Karate Kid Week, including:

  • A final word on the racial message of The Karate Kid
  • An extremely detailed look at LA’s San Fernando Valley
  • The 1987 Ford Tempo
  • Digressions into Barbie, Spaceballs, and Winnebagoes
  • Some more about the geography of Los Angeles
  • The Coming Remake (reboot? travesty?) of The Karate Kid

As always, email us at podcast AT overthinkingit DOT com with your comments, or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401) to leave a voicemail.

Download Episode 24 (MP3)

Mr. Miyagi vs. the Tanks

Word comes today (via Defamer) that the coming remake of The Karate Kid set to star Will Smith’s son Jaden will be less a remake and more–um–a fucking travesty.

It seems that due to the financial participation of the China Film Group, the film’s location will be moved from the San Fernando Valley to China, where a Chinese mentor will instruct young Jaden in the ways of a martial art other than karate. Will Smith is at pains to explain that this is in fact a good thing:

“Fortunately, karate is originally a Chinese art form, so that’s the area we’re playing around in.” (Ed. Note: Though karate was developed in Japan, it is based upon Kenpō, a Chinese fighting style.)

I’m not sure I’m willing to grant that adverb… “Fortunately” implies that we should somehow be glad that the source material needed slightly less lube before violation (or, rather, “playing around”). As if she deserves it for dressing in such a skimpy gi.

We’ve had some spirited debate on the site this week about the racial implications of a character like Mr. Miyagi who, for better or worse, became a kind of pop-culture mascot for American perception of its rising Asian population. Kidding aside, I can’t help but think that taking such a monumental change (can they even call it The Karate Kid anymore?) so lightly conceals the insidious racism that minimizes real differences in customs, history, and culture among Asian peoples because, after all, they all have slanty eyes.

In other words: “Those martial arts all look the same to me.”

To coincide with the DVD Release of The Dark Knight, here’s a look back at some of our Overthinking™ on the subject.

Video

The Philosophy of Batman

LOLJokers

General Overthinking

Matthew Wrather hosts a panel with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Ryan Sheely, considering:

  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Overthinking It (the state of the blog)
  • The Craptacular state of Popular Music
  • All About Academia (a brief digression)
  • Karate Kid Week, which starts today!

As always, email us at podcast AT overthinkingit DOT com with your comments, or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401) to leave a voicemail.

Download Episode 23 (MP3)