Do You Know This Man?

I've found that when you watch something three to five times a week on your favorite cable affiliate and then you catch a new episode on a network, it's a total mindfuck.

For example, when you see Tim "The Toolman" Taylor adressing the importance of honesty with young JTT and even younger Mark and then the other one who's name I think was Brad, that shapes your view of Home Improvement. When you see it on whatever channel airs syndicated sitcoms you form the picture in your head of a cast eternally frozen in a three-ish year span. Plot lines are never resolved, nothing is in chronological order and no one ever ages.

Then when you accidentally watch Home Improvement in its prime time slot (no longer possible as it is badly off the air) everyone is old and everything is serious and Jill kisses another man and there's drugs and sadness and you think maybe it was another show entirely.

That's kind of how I feel about Law and Order: SVU. I don't know if you've had a chance to catch an SVU marathon -- they run them several times a month -- but they're mostly "Olivia has short hair" and "Stabler exists". Richard Belzer isn't yet old enough to only show up periodically back at the station and District Attorney Alex Cabbot is an asshole and has not yet been fake-killed.

Importantly, Liz Lemon's future boyfriend Dennis is not on the show (first season) and the go-to psychiatrist/FBI Guy is not the professor from Farmers' Insurance commercials (also, the Nazi from Oz).

The role of the team's go-to FBI pscychologist is played by none other than a Bradley Darryl Wong; credited as BD Wong.

His character's name is Dr. George Huang -- which to my mind shows a certain lack of imagination.

Trust me, I'm a doctor.

BD Wong shows a tremendous range as an actor. You may recognize him from the new breakout hit on NBC's Awake. 



Dr. John Lee

He's traded up the sweater for a vest. Also interesting? He's playing a doctor.

Digging deeper we see that in All-American Girl, a mid-nineties Margaret Cho TV vehicle, BD Wong spread his wings a bit:



Dr. Stuart Kim

Actually no, that's a doctor again. But his hair used to be way long! Let's step back a bit further.

Did you know he was in Jurassic Park? Had you perhaps forgotten?


Dr. Henry Wu

According to the Jurassic Park Wikia, Henry Wu was the park's chief geneticist and at this point to the surprise of no one, a doctor.


Not all of his roles were large enough to be easily Googled (which for me is synonymous with research) so I'll just throw some cherry-picked screencaps from imdb in here:



Those all say "Dr."

 

Is BD Wong a real doctor? No, BD Wong is not a real doctor.

Why does BD Wong continue to play doctors on screen? Unresolved. Unless...

Let's suppose though that you, as a young actor, were approached to do a film with Martin Short and Steve Martin. You'd say yes without reading the script, right?

If you did, then that would make you the guy on the right:

One of these charcters is Howard Weinstein. It is not Martin Short.

So way back in 1991 you play a buffoon and spend the rest of your life playing the Serious Asian Doctor to atone for it.

Right? Maybe he has a good doctor voice. I don't know.

What's in a Name?

Names are handy. Instead of snapping your fingers at acquaintances or yelling loudly until the right person turns around, you can just call out their name. When you do, your lady friend "Toni" or your pal "Tony" might then turn to you and say, "Why are you yelling?"

No one has a friend named Tone.    

Names are also clues to gender in conversation. "John" is a dude. So is "Tim".

"Kandi" is a lady (stripper).

Thanks again, Google Images!

We know this because we know what genders names have been assigned. We even know it for those weird, English names like Geoffrey (dude; douche) or Isolde (lady). There's no system here, it's a cloud of names that simply exists. In other languages it's even easier. If you speak Spanish, you can usually just rest on adding an "a" to the end of a name. Para exemplar, Juan is married to Juana and their daughter's name is Juanita. If they wanted to nickname their little boy, they could call him Juanito. Also maybe they should buy a book of baby names or something because they're displaying a George Foreman-level lack of creativity.

"A grill -- wonderful! But what shall I George Foreman, father to innumerable Georges and Georginas, call it?"

Mario and Luigi are plumbers brothers (dude names) and I have to assume that if they have a sister, her name is Maria.

Also if you live here, your sister's name is Maria.

That's fine and ultimately kind of uninteresting. But it gets tricky.

What about Stacy? Or Kim? Those are pretty common names that can go either way. I'm having a hard time not assigning genders just typing them.

If "Kim" was short for "Kimbo Slice", you'd know because you just swallowed your teeth.

We soon start to see that we don't have to leave the English language to wonder whether or not the date you just set up with Ashley will not end awkwardly and immediately. But certainly the e-mails you've been exchanging with Sam and Jesse are on the level.

Right?

...right?

Things are getting tricky and I can't keep setting up scenarios for a gender-indeterminate audience. Let's finish this "names sounds like" game and go straight for Sanskrit. That's probably one of those languages that makes it easy to figure out.

Hitting the internet quickly I find Aadi, Aadideva and Aaditya.

Clearly we we are only at the beginning of the phone book.

Those all sound like great names for this lady right here:

Hi!

But they're not. They're dude names. And your flight to India to visit your pen pal Aatmadeva (also a dude name) now seems interminably long.

And so it goes. There's nothing innate about a name. They're just more mouth-sounds with meaning (sometimes) associated with them and then another layer that says "girl or boy". And I guess there's another layer on top of that indicating how much of a douche you are (Prescott).

It's a Girl (or Boy)!


Incidentally, I defy you to do any research on names on the internet and not come across a minimum of one dozen baby name sites. I certainly did. And among the oddly hypnotic banner ads for stretch mark creams I found a trending tool.

According to this unattributed chart from thinkbabynames.com, the name "Maximilian" has taken a big hit after what looked like a steady rise to Number One.

It hurt my eyes too. Go buy some glasses.

This is confusing, because the last guy I know named Maximilian had a suit of armor invented for him.

My curiosity further piqued I arrogantly threw Google Trends at this problem, as I do all problems.

The results?

Unsatisfying!

But, there was a spike in late 2007 - and more in 2009. What was the cause? Taking the maxim "Correlation does not imply causation" and soundly telling it to fuck right on off, I've made the following leap of opposite-of-logic:

Maximilian Hecker.

I don't know who this guy is. Beyond the fact that he's a German musician who blah blah blah Wikipedia, I have no idea.

Only this: his major album releases roughly correlate with the spikes on the chart.

It may just be a coincidence; the chart may not mean anything, there may not be anything inherent to names and maybe I should stop spending so much time trying to analyze things that don't merit analysis.

In conclusion:

Randi with an "i". 

Randy with a "y".

Can I Get Pregnant If I Yahoo Answers?

The Internet is many things to many people. Surely many people take it for granted. To others, it's just a tool; they can depend on it to do their job but it's just a means to an end. I think if anyone stopped to think about it while they're waiting for their cat video to finish buffering, they'd find that it's kind of amazing.  It's amazing that it exists at all and then the things that people have done with it are even more amazing still. I'll give Google a break and point at WolframAlpha. It's a magic answer-machine that can take very complicated mathematical formulas and natural language queries and spit out answers.

It's a tremendous wealth of information for free, at your fingertips. In that regard, it's a microcosm of the internet itself. It is also like the internet in that it can be used for less than noble reasons.

Like when I type in "awesome", I get a bunch of great trivia.

And a swear! I made the computer swear!

Optional Punchline: "Now I can go back to doing the NY Times crossword puzzle in pen!"

Obviously this is bordering on Watson-level computing power and it's free and accessible to any student fudging their way through a calculus assignment. If the Internet was your house, WolframAlpha would be the boudoir picture of your wife in the $600 custom frame you show everyone to make them jealous.

And while WolframAlpha can clearly make people jealous of your newfound crossword skills, sometimes we need internet answers with more substance.

"10 Across; 5 letters: Your virulent infection was the inspiration for the
1995 thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman!"

Occasionally that need for substance manifests itself as an urgent, alarming yes/no question hit far and high to the internet's outfield. Occasionally, those questions get fielded by Yahoo Answers. Then someone drops the ball and I think that gets recorded as an error?

How about this: it's just a bunch of people inexpertly answering questions asked inelegantly.

Technically that first one is a statement.

You cannot answer those questions (or the 700,000 like them) with your computer.

Unless you have one of these with a USB connector at the other end.

So, in the absence of a USB Pregnancy Test (typed here for the inevitable copyright battles that follow million dollar ideas), the best answer to that question would be, "See a doctor." Unless it's Dr. Crossword from earlier, they'll probably know better than even the most seasoned Yahoo Answers answerer. And even if you did get your question answered by a doctor who also happened to be on the internet, I would follow up their answer with:

"Hey, shouldn't you be golfing!?" (Zing!)

On that note, let's dive into the shallow end and see who, exactly, is answering these questions. If I was writing a scholarly paper, my hypothesis would be "Not doctors." Let's test that hypothesis with "Can I get pregnant from..." and see who's out there and what insights they're sharing.

22 Down, 67 letters: Can I get pregnant from grinding?

To be totally fair the answers are voted on and in a way, curated. I'm sure this helps push the trolls out of the top spot and keeps the trips to Planned Parenthood down to a manageable amount.

It also serves to showcase the world's most talented teen obstetricians.

The problem is, the people asking these questions - questions they're terrified to have answered  - are desperately seeking assurance. They're vainly hoping that the internet will tell them everything is okay and they can carry on with their lives. Honestly, they probably know the internet is going to turn its back on them in their time of need. They're looking down at the sand and seeing one set of footprints and it's not because Internet is carrying them, it's because Internet abandoned them to watch cat videos. People who should know better are asking people who don't know any better for help. It's Nimrod from the Divine Comedy babbling incoherently at Gossamer.

Gossamer looks like he might actually have all the answers.

 


So really if the questions is, "Could this change my life forever?" the answer is "Ask literally anything else in the world." You're better off screaming at passersby or swearing at the cold, dark night.

Except if you're this guy you could probably go ahead and ask WolframAlpha:

You win this time, Yahoo Answers.

How Many Punches?

As the saying goes, roughly, "'Tis better to give than to receive."

I've heard that this is true of generosity - unconfirmed - but I can confirm that it's true of punches. No one likes getting punches and everyone loves to punch something.

There are times, however, that turn this convention on its head.

Rob Cockerham, of Cockeyed.com, has devised a sort of misery index. Not this Misery Index or even this Misery Index. He describes it as a "list of bad things that can happen to you" and has assigned a unit - the dolor - to these events. This is good, it's a good list and I feel like it's arranged in a reasonable order.

The problem is, the dolor seems to be defined relative to the events. I can't see it. I can't define it using known physical constants. I can't design a dolor gauge. If I'm building a ruler that's a meter long I would simply cut it to the length that a beam of light would travel in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

With this in mind, I set propose my own standard for a misery index. I would start out with a known entity. Something that can be identified, defined, put in a bell jar and stored in the basement of a university in Paris.

I propose the Punch.

You may have thought, "I'd rather be punched in the head than go visit the in-laws." If you're on good terms with your in-laws then this thought may not have crossed your mind. I believe that this line of thinking can be extrapolated to other common events.

Let's say, for example, that you hate going to the dentist. Maybe you'd rather be punched? That's too vague. You may not want a punch in the mouth. That might result in DENTAL SURGERY (no link here). A punch in the stomach doesn't sound that bad - if you really hate the dentist you'd need more physical pain in exchange for your mental suffering. Maybe three punches in the stomach? That sounds very reasonable indeed. Accordingly, we can peg a trip to the dentist at a three-hit combo to the gut.

For the record I love the dentist. Were it not for all of the Cenobite hooks gouging my gumline I believe I could nap. It beats the hell out of an ice skate

Now that we've warmed up let's try a more complicated scenario. You have a one hour meeting to go to but you're not on the agenda, and you don't really understand why you're there in the first place. That seems to me like a clear cut case for a punch to the head. One. Suppose instead that your meeting is two hours, conducted remotely but still requires you to leave the comfort and safety of your cubicle so you can go sit in a room and listen to people yell at a speakerphone. Even though it's just one hour longer, I would hate this scenario so much that I'd be willing to get punched in the head three times. The Punch does not scale arithmetically.

Imagining some sort of hellish 9 hour meeting using this same conversion factor I get 13.5 (9 times 1.5) punches to the head. As in, "I'd rather be punched in the head 13.5 times than go to that damn meeting." This is kind of like getting punched to death - and that still seems like a very reasonable compromise in this situation. One half of a punch to the head would be more like a shot in the ribs. To really grasp the fractional Punch, picture the difference between kilometers and decameters and then punch yourself for having such a solid grasp of the metric system.

Now we've defined the Punch we can safely build some tabular data.

Activity	Punch(es)	Location
Rush hour traffic (light)	2	Stomach
Rush hour traffic (heavy)	4	Stomach
Wedding Reception (Cash Bar)	4	Head
Wedding Reception (Cash Bar; speeches)	10	Body blows; Head; Uppercut to finish
IKEA (browsing; weeknight)	1	Gut, unexpected
IKEA (shopping; weekend)	4	Groin
Walmart, for any reason	*	*As many punches as it takes to render you unconscious

Armed with this information, you can now go about defining your daily misery in an easily understood, easily digested manner.

And if you're still having trouble wrapping your mind around the Punch, I'm sure a friend or loved one will help you start building your own personal scale.

Happy Punchings!