We spent Part I discussing Bionic Women on TV and speculating as to why they spent $55 Million on Jaime Sommers in the show but couldn’t fix actress Michelle Ryan’s chin. Now we’re going to get into actual science - not perceptual science, like how Michelle can take photos like this …

Yayyyyy!

… yet still most often looks like this …

Oh my.

… but actual science, like how we would build a Bionic Woman today if we didn’t give a crap about television ratings. It’s a good thing I am writing this now because television ratings are important and this show could be cancelled any day, making it a lot less culturally relevant. How will I get you to buy a book on science if it doesn’t have relevant pop culture and cute girls?

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We all know that if there’s one thing certain to happen to professional tennis players who get hurt in skydiving accidents, it’s that a clandestine para-military organization will swoop in and replace the now defective natural parts with über-awesome cybernetic ones. Thus began the saga of Jamie Sommers in a 1975 episode of The Six Million Dollar Man

The episode garnered the actress her own series which ran for three seasons before losing its charge but the concept was so riveting that it could work at almost any time so I was always surprised that, TV movie specials aside, it never got re-made.

That’s why I was excited about the new Bionic Woman television show when I first heard of it. With the advancements in medical technology leading to new story ideas coupled with improvements in special effects, it could be a huge leap over the original which, let’s face it, doesn’t hold up very well. That’s not to say I didn’t watch it. I did, but only because of Lindsay Wagner, one of those natural beauties who never needed makeup to look terrific. And she won an Emmy for the show, so I guess she can act.

No makeup needed and she wears fur. Everyone hearts Lindsay Wagner. The fur is probably fake but the rest is au naturel.

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Dorian was the artist. GG was the model.

Let’s be honest. Science by itself is mostly useless. It takes someone with a plan to make science into technology and then it takes people to embrace the technology. Being embraced by the right people often overcomes superior product development. Betamax was better in every way than VHS but the porn industry, and therefore porn customers, liked VHS. Exit Betamax.

Likewise, while I totally heart science, I recognize that the practical application of it is much more important than the research. Silicon was discovered by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1824, for example, but it wasn’t until some of its atoms got polymerized and made into silicone breast implants that anyone in science cared much about it. Oh yeah, and I guess that computer nonsense has something to do with silicon too.

Scientists respect anyone who can take science and make cool things out of it but, at the top of the application pyramid, are old school movie industry special effects guys.

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Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

So we can’t just let someone claim they have wiped out a millenium of folklore by doing simple ( very simple ) math. First, let’s deal with the premise behind his numbers. Professor Efthimiou’s research assumes that each vampire bite results in another vampire being created. People, if there’s one thing I know, it’s vampires ( and Thai transvestites, but hey, that is a post for another time ) and I need only point you to the definitive work on the matter, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, to state unequivocally that vampires don’t always create more vampires. They only create vampires out of people they really like, or who have waistlines like Vampira:

Yes, she looks as all women should look; like a sexy, zombie skeleton.

Additionally, back in 2000, in the British series Ultraviolet, it was clarified that vampires wouldn’t feed themselves to extinction any more than we would keep on killing buffalo until they were almost gone.

This was on TV, people. If you can’t believe what you see on TV, I can’t reason with you.

Professor Efthimiou’s simple and surprisingly jingoistic math and logic errors mean that there is still at least some statistical chance that vampires could exist. However, there is also some statistical chance I am a Chinese jet pilot. Yet, since the chance exists that vampires are roaming the earth, it can’t hurt to have a vampire slayer handy.

Everyone goes for Buffy. I’d rather have a little Faith.

AstroGlide - The Video Game

If there’s one thing I hate it’s rumors about me and women I am not actually nailing. And, frankly, this thing about me and Kate Beckinsale has gotten out of hand. I am not responsible for the collapse of her marriage, no matter how bad it looks.

Okay, because your opinion of me is important, here is what happened: I happened to be in an internet cafe in Japan and Kate is noodling away on a computer. Now, this is Japan and it ain’t like any of these people watched Pearl Harbor at the multi-plex, if you catch my political humor, so they don’t recognize her. And all Americans look alike. Especially the English ones.

And danged if I don’t look over her shoulder and she is at the Astro-Glide website playing a video game. Now, I don’t know about you, but it isn’t every day a girl is at a sexual lubricant website playing something called Astro-Blasto, which seems to involve nothing but some blobby thing spitting at some other blobby things. Kinda hot now that I think back on it.

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