Tenser, said the Tensor

Either a Prediction or Free Advice

Joss Whedon's upcoming series Dollhouse is about people who can be temporarily programmed with any personality or skills.  The Actives, as they're called, spend time between missions at a facility called The Dollhouse, where they have only rudimentary personalities of their own, and their names reflect this; the characters announced so are called Echo, Sierra, Victor, and November.  Get it?  They're named according to the phonetic alphabet.

Fact-checking Ray Bradbury

James Lileks dug up an amazing bit of pop-culture this week: a TV commercial in which none other than Ray Bradbury appears, hawking Sunsweet pitted prunes.  No kidding.  Check it out:

At the end of his post (it's the most recent one at the moment, the permalink isn't working) Lileks writes, citing Bradbury's own words, "It's true: he didn't mention prunes in any of his stories."  But is this true?  The answer may shock you!

Mysterons vs. Mysterians

I suppose confusion is understandable—the names are so similar, after all—but I think it's important that we get this straight once and for all.  So pay close attention:

Blogging the 2007 Bee

Although we missed the live broadcast, thanks to the miracle of TiVo we were able to catch a late-night repeat of the final rounds of the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee.  What follows are some observations about the Bee and a discussion of the particular words the kids had to spell.  Fair warning: lots of spoilers, including most importantly the correct spellings of the words. 

Video Free Association

After the jump: a random walk though pop culture and my subconscious via YouTube.

Star Trek vs. Jefferson Airplane

Check out this awesome video mashup.  I hope you relish it as much as I:

Most linguisticky moment: "smoking caterpillar"—the edit is in just the right place to get you to reanalyze hookah-smoking caterpillar in the intended way.  The "remember" bit is clever too—referencing a scene from Wrath of Khan by using a similar scene from TOS without breaking up the visual feel of the video.

It's amazing how close to the surface the drug subtext was in Trek.  For a similar mashup addressing a different subtext, see Closer [NSFW].

"Darmok"

[This is part of an ongoing occasional series about linguistics in science fiction.  Fair warning: spoilers.]  I've been meaning to write about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" for years.  In fact, I had it in mind when I started this blog, and I promised that a post about it was imminent in September of 2004.  (Doh!)  Well, during our ongoing sojourn in Germany, we discovered to our horror that we'd run out of English-language TV.  Fortunately, I remembered that I've had an AVI of "Darmok" sitting in my hard drive since July of 2004, so we fired it up and watched it.

"Darkmok" is easily the most linguistic of the Star Trek episodes I've seen.  Unlike a lot of the SF I discuss, it's pretty well-known, so I'm a little nervous about writing about it—I'm sure you can find many, many essays about it online, but hopefully I have something to add.  For a comprehensive review, check out this page by Raphael Carter, which includes both a summary and a glossary of all the alien utterances in the episode (and from which I got the official spellings of most of the proper names).  I'm going to summarize the linguistic aspects of the story, then analyze where I think they're wrong—which is, unfortunately, pretty often.

Metropolitan?

Pop quiz, hotshot.  In the opening credits for the old Adventures of Superman TV show, is Clark Kent described as:

...mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper...

or:

...mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper...

You make the call!

Whedon and Feminism

For those of you who are into this sort of thing: an interesting post on the new-to-me blog Wax Banks titled "Is Joss Whedon feminist enough?"  Follow the links, there's a lot more where that came from.  (hat tip: jobbi)

Credit Where It's Due?

Some of you may recall that I took Stephen Colbert to task a few weeks ago for an elementary error he made on his show.  Well, this week on the 7/12 episode of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien", Our Steve finally decided to do the right thing and come clean.  (Thanks to commenter Robbie on the aforelinked post for calling my attention to this.)  I feel vindicated...more or less.