Karl Marx: Even hairier than the Wolfman. Coincidence... OR IS IT!?

[I want to thank Professor David Graeber, whose anthropological dissection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and accompanying lectures) very much forms the basis of this post.]

Let’s begin with two observations. First: the Vampires that inhabit our most recent pop cultural works differ so dramatically from the classic archetype of Golden-Age Hollywood that they are are almost unrecognizable. Second: Werewolves are lame.

Or at least, compared with their undead, blood-sucking, vaguely-Carpathian cohort, werewolves of late have occupied a far less enviable position in the collective pop cultural landscape. These are not the subtle, nuanced, infinitely malleable characters vampires are–the sort capable of carrying their own novels, TV-shows, Movies and crappy Movie-Tie-In Video Games. Rather, lycanthropes end up as the stock types passively added to spice up a Vampire vehicle. Sure, some immortal genius might figure out a way to breathe new life into the old dogs, but for now, Buffy’s Oz remains a werewolf’s best case scenario. In the worst cases it’s… well… I’d rather not say.

However, there is something to be said about the sheer frequency with which werewolves pop up in Vampire works. Is your horror-story turned teen-abstinence-parable getting a bit too stale to survive a sequel? Throw in some werewolves! Is having a psychic heroine dating a vampire proving an insufficient allegory for southern race relations? Make her boss a werewolf! At least…sorta’. The point is, as the length of a Vampire epic approaches infinity, the probability that the spinning “let’s throw in a different kind of monster” wheel will stop on “Werewolf” approaches 1. And it does so far earlier than all of the other forms. As the old aphorism goes: no ghosts, witches, reanimated corpses, mer-people, vengeful pagan gods or giant, radioactive slugs before werewolves. And for heaven’s sake, NO MUMMIES.

The delicious exception that proves the rule.

Yet–and this is important–despite the number of appearances Werewolves (or the equivalent) make in predominantly Vampire (or equivalent) works, the converse is never true, because Werewolves remain lame.

But why? What is it about our culture that causes us to perpetually dwell on one classic occult figure, while paupering the other of such attention?

The answer, of course, lies in the failure of Marxism.

X-Ray gun? Yes. Pants? Not bloody likely.

Greetings, Earth-People:

Against the advice of some, and as many of you may know, I gladly (if not always ably) serve as the Overthinking It staff scientist™.  It’s an odd amalgam of roles, requiring mostly that I be at-the-ready if one of my fellow overthinkers needs a formula derived, has questions about standard units of measurement, or if something they took a pill for keeps on doing its thing for more time than they wanted/expected it to.

(I’m talking about erections, there.)

(…well, mosly.)

On rare occasion, though, I also get the chance to directly OverThink an aspect of Science in the popular culture.  The last time I did this for any serious length, actually, one of you responded to it by trying to debunk Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

We in the Scientific community hope you get the help you so desperately deserve, Joe Nahhas, anonymous OTI reader.*

Still, if nothing else this may serve as some general indicator of a demand for sciency-type-stuff on our humble website.  Now, said sciencey-goop finds its way into our popular milieu through more venues than that most obvious route of Science Fiction.  As has been beautifully enumerated elsewhere, action movies are particularly adept at taking the kinds of “liberties” with Physics (both stunt- and plot-based) that can only be considered awe-inspiring.  But beyond that, arguably any cultural element for which characters, say, depend on some trendy (if not fictional) electronic devices, or suffer from/receive medical care for a fictional (if not trendy) ailment, evokes the Specter of Science in that work.  Not to mention those pop culture artifacts that, though not ostensibly about science, per se, feature a character who’s a scientist…

This isn't helping things... for anyone.

The thing is, I have my favorite examples of where Pop Culture gets it right, (and wrong), but listening to me gripe about it isn’t much fun, is it?  It’s time to crowd-source it.

SO, dear OTI readers, I’d like you to chime in on a semi-regular piece I’ll write called “Ask A Scientist.”  I’d title it something more creative, but it takes enough self-restraint for me not publish these posts with an abstract and Materials/Methods section.  We’ll worry about the nuances of “clever titles,” “word order,” and “not using swear words to describe other peoples’ work in print” later.

Let’s get the ball rolling.  Got something you’ve seen on TV, in a movie that makes you think, “Is that really how that would work?”  or, “there’s no way a platypus could survive that!” or “can you really tell if it’s human DNA just by looking at a cartoon of it?”**  Sound off in the comments.  Or, you can always send me an email at mlawski@childfriendfinder.com shechner at overthinkingit dot com with your questions/observations regarding science in the popular media.

The lucky ones will get their questions addressed in an OverThought and moderately comic way, by me: Dave Shechner, professional scientist™.  Unlucky ones will be publicly harangued by me: Dave Shechner, semi-professional harague-ist (RM; patent-pending).

Extremely lucky ones will get a T-shirt bearing the likeness of Mr. Peter Fenzel.

And of course, members of the OTI writing staff, or its parent corporation are eligible to enter, and are encouraged to do so.

Nanoo nanoo.

* It was Joe Nahhas.
** Don’t get me started.  Seriously.

Many fundamental physical properties obey what we scientists call conservation laws, meaning that the universe contains a finite amount of them which cannot be exceeded.  Think mass/energy, linear/angular momentum, quantum/molecular orbitals, or the number of times I can be expected to engage in conversation with a grown male  Miley Cyrus fan before somebody ends up dead.

That last one’s perilously close to being exhausted, by the way.

Now, one can be trained in this manner of thinking for only so long before it becomes habit to assume that anything of importance must  fall under the constraint of a conservation law.  Economist Charles Issawi, for example, postulated that in a closed system the total amount of Evil remains finite, but can change its form.  (Hence, say, the dissolving of a single, enormous totalitarian regime in the Soviet Block would result in many smaller civil wars and incidents of ethnic cleansing.)  I for one have a hard time not assuming that things are conserved; despite Fenzel’s numerous, herculean efforts at proving to me otherwise, I remain unconvinced that there isn’t a finite amount of money in the world.  Maybe if I had actually ever held some money with my own two hands, that might make the argument more convincing.

But lately I’ve been thinking less about the intangible, fundamental building blocks of the universe, and more about the paralogous bits from which our Pop Culture is composed.  Take Soul: after Ray Charles died a few years back, did the large agglomeration of R&B harbored in that man’s body disperse itself back into the pop culture ether?  Or does it pass, chose-one-style from one generation to the next?  Am I the only one who noticed that Justin Timberlake got appreciably more soulful after The Genius passed on? There’s almost certainly some interesting math there, somewhere.  The kind of math you do by candle light, clad only in white silk bedsheets, and while humping.

Mmm, girl.  That’s some fine-ass analytic topology.  Damn.

Anyway, I digress.  On Tax Day I suggested that we collectively seek out the Good News offered by one Mr. James Brown.  I’m a huge J.B. fan, and something I’ve marveled at for some time now is the large, eclectic list of nicknames he collected for himself during his career.  A good number of these were bestowed upon him (“The Godfather of Soul,” “Soul Brutha’ Number One”…), but then, a good number were literally just  the name of a number-one hit he’d gotten, sometimes preceded by “Mr.” (“Mr. ‘Please, Please, Please,’” “Mr. ‘It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World’,” “Brother Rapp”…).  Really, when the final outro for your live performances is just the enumeration of your complete list of monikers, and when said outro takes ~8 minutes to complete, it’s time to consider if you’ve just started naming your songs things you’d like to hear yourself called in public.  It is perhaps the most grandiose example of resume padding ever achieved outside of Russian Politics.

But this stockpiling of stage names could be seen as another way in which not only J.B.’s musical sensibilities, but his showmanship would help establish paradigm for the next thirty years or so.  Consider the number of alternate monikers and/or personae taken on by his contemporary George Clinton, his acolyte Prince, or frankly, the entirety of the Rap community.  Heck, I can’t even bring myself to make a joke about Kool Keith; I’ll just advise that you block out a good 2-3 hour chunk of free time, and direct you to this page.  One day, SAG will demand that, like actors’ names, nicknames must be unique identifiers.  On that day, Kool Keith’s hilltop castle will be stormed by swarms of pitchfork-wielding wannabes, each demanding their fair share.

He will lay waste to them all.

So, do stage personae obey a Pop Culture Conservation Law?  Now that Mr. Brown’s new bag is, in fact, a pine-wood box, and he just might literally have ants in his pants, what becomes of his collection of nicknames?  I postulate that the existing community of people who’d lay claim to them might very well take this opportunity to coopt them.  Click on the pic below to see a small rogue’s gallery of those I suggest might fit the bill:

Soul Brutha Number 24601

So, did I miss any of your favorites?  Got better suggestions?  Any other artists whose ability to rebrand themselves has been a subject of your fascination?  Sound off in the comments!

Hello, America.

Those of us you who are gainfully employed have probably noticed the special significance today, April 15th, the ides of April, holds.  Yes, today is the day for which years of standardized test-taking have prepared each and every one of us.  It is a day that encapsulates the very core of the American political soul – the great social equalizer.  Today is the day where some modest but precious modicum of our meager salaries are joined together in great union, the ultimate confluence of national cohesion.

Today, we celebrated our Taxation Day.

We’re going look at taxes as viewed from both sides of the Atlantic, through the lens of pop music.  Read on – but if you qualify for the Earned Income Credit (EIC), please make sure to first fill out the worksheet on page 15.

(Belated)

Well, I just couldn’t help myself.  After my Über-Gedanken^TM experimental ramblings last week on some scientific caveats to time travel, I got to thinking–er–OverThinking^TM how the scientific process itself would play out after such a monumental discovery.  After all, while most people–even scientists themselves–see science as the abstract pursuit of truth, the elucidation of the workings of the universe, in reality it’s also a business.

Some thoughts and an original webcomic, after the jump…

There come times, in the course of human events, whereby an official-unofficial OTI Staff Scientist such as myself feels compelled to write about pop-cultural issues which he or she (statistically: he) finds irksome on a professional level.  Back to The Future is a nearly endless font of these issues for me—from the obligatory complications surrounding causality in time-travel paradoxes to hoverboards which don’t work above water to the continued reminder of the sheer mathematical improbability of  Huey Lewis and the News.  But as my esteemed colleagues have already touched on these with great aplomb, I’ve got some another problem to Overthink™ today.

And oh yes, there will be math involved.

In response to Mr. Stoke’s excellent recent post, I decided to do a little image searching on my work computer. I can’t even begin to understand the result:

What terrifies me the most is just how frickin’ sexy I think it is.

[We at Overthinking It are pleased to welcome David Shechner as the newest member of our dysfunctional blogging family. Dave is a scientician (biochemist), cartoonist, and saxophone colossus (anyone? anyone?) and today weighs in on the death of Arthur C. Clarke. —Ed.]

With the jarring loss of Dubba-G behind us, most of us in the Anne McCaffrey reading community had only recently reached some sense of closure, and returned to our daily lives this week. Pi day helped (Look ma! I DO go out on Friday nights! Yeah, it was to a math lecture…). Again, however, our comfortable little worlds were rocked like Alderaan, when we learned this morning of the passing of another great Sage of dorkdom: Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Excuse me if my typing seems a bit cramped but this is being written – as per my usual idiom – from within the confines of my locker, into which I’ve been unceremoniously stuffed. Frankly, I’d hoped that such treatments would see their conclusion when I graduated from High School. Twelve years ago.

Stupid Chuck Peterson, thinks he’s so great.