Month: February 2007

A pair of medico-literary sleuths claimed last week to have tracked down the illness that haunted Scrooge. They concluded that Charles Dickens brilliantly observed the symptoms in A Christmas Carol.

Robert Chance Algar, a Californian neurologist, and his aunt Lisa Saunders, a medical writer and physician, believe that the affliction that made Scrooge a byword for miserliness and redemption was Lewy body dementia (LBD), a disease so complex that doctors did not include it in the medical lexicon until 1996.

Pointless, mainly, because Ebeneezer Scrooge is a fictional character and his “symptoms” are whatever Charles Dickens (inadvertently) made them to be. I think the standard reading of a miser’s Christmastime redemption is a lot more likely than Algar’s reading — and, while nevertheless a new and interesting view of the text, I think his theory sort of drains a lot of the life out of it.

Then again, this is probably equally pointless, and yet I find it sort of fascinating:

The Tommy Westphall universe hypothesis, an idea discussed among some television fans, makes the claim that not only does St. Elsewhere take place within Tommy’s mind, but so do numerous other television series which are directly and indirectly connected to St. Elsewhere through fictional crossovers and spin-offs, resulting in a large fictional universe taking place entirely within Tommy’s mind.

There are a lot of obvious problems with this theory, but then again it’s not really the sort of thing that can be proven or disproven. It’s just an interesting thought experiment.

You know, that “Angel turns into a puppet” episode of Angel is probably the peak of the whole Buffyverse saga…it’s cute, it’s funny, it’s self-mocking, it’s actually as good as some hardcore Buffy fans think every episode is, and for some reason, every time one of the licensees dips into the puppet well, it diminishes the original for me. I’ve spoken before about the multiple Angel-as-puppet dolls, and the apparently based-on-fanfic Spike-as-puppet doll (resolicited this month, in fact!), and now this comic, featuring a Angel puppet story. Hey, maybe it’ll be great, but I’m all puppeted out.

• Guilty Pleasures of Literary Greats [via]
• Wanna smell like an old book? Well, now you can! [via]
• 1424: a medieval parody of 24 [via]
• A really awful old Microsoft promo
• A cute Flash game: Tube Crisis [via]

A fishing crew has caught a colossal squid that could weigh a half-ton and prove to be the biggest specimen ever landed, a fisheries official said Thursday.

The squid, weighing an estimated 990 lbs and about 39 feet long, took two hours to land in Antarctic waters, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said.

Is this dread Cthulhu? Well, no, probably not. At least they didn’t do what these Russian fishermen did when they hauled in a weird catch, and eat the the thing:

However, ufologists and scientists were greatly disappointed when they found out that the fishermen had eaten the monster. They said that they were not scared of the creature so they decided to use it as food. One of the men said that it was the most delicious dish he had ever eaten.

Link via Neatorama.

Despite the weird photo that accompanies the article, there’s evidence that it was nothing more exotic than a guitarfish. But it’s the “we didn’t know what it was…so we ate it” that gets me. If and when we do make contact with alien life, will the first thing we wonder be whether or not they taste good with chips and tartar sauce? “To Serve Man” doesn’t seem so farfetched anymore, now does it?

Anyway, while I’m on the subject of putting you off your lunch, one final link, also from Neatorama: a Japanese sushi restaurant where you can pretend to be a cannibal.