{"id":2452,"date":"2007-02-25T14:43:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-25T22:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=2452"},"modified":"2007-02-25T14:43:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-25T22:43:00","slug":"2452","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=2452","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

This<\/a> is an amusing and interesting idea, but it also seems sort of pointless:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pointless, mainly, because Ebeneezer Scrooge is a fictional<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

Then again, this<\/a> is probably equally pointless, and yet I find it sort of fascinating:<\/p>\n

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

There are a lot of obvious problems<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Links, respectively, via Boing Boing<\/a> and TV Squad<\/a>.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an amusing and interesting idea, but it also seems sort of pointless: 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, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-2452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}