Breathe
easier, all you who yearn for explanations for the inexplicable: I’m here once
more to make your lives make sense again. You remember me—I’m…
…Science Boy.
Uncle Fun
thought it would be appropriate for me to address all of you on the subject
that keeps him from having time to blog this week. This year, he’s chairman of
the decorations and kitsch committee for Funsville’s annual Russell Johnson Day
festivities. The name “Russell Johnson” may not ring as many bells as, say,
Quasimodo or Mike Oldfield, but he’s probably a familiar face to most of you. Perhaps
too familiar, some of you would say, since he’s best known for his role as the
Professor on Gilligan’s Island.
It’s a
thankless job, but somebody’s got to do it. AC generators powered by stationary
bicycles constructed out of bamboo don’t just make themselves, you know. Russell Johnson
Day recognizes the necessary but often overlooked contribution made by those
selfless men, women, and sometimes androids who have set aside dreams of personal
glory to keep film and television plots moving along by providing exposition
phrased in long-winded and confusing scientific-sounding jargon. Having served in this
capacity on many occasions, I can tell you how hard it is to keep a straight
face as I look at a more important character and say words that amount to
“something akin to magic is about to happen, because the writer has written us
into the impossible situation of having to rely on magic while still believing
that magic doesn’t exist”. So here’s to you, all you folks in lab coats and
vaguely unfashionable haircuts, who have to use phrases involving words like
“interface”, “matrix”, “threshold”, “anti-matter” and “polarity”, as if they
actually meant something. I salute you.
At the
same time, I have to warn you that your days may be numbered. This development
is thanks to rave reviews generated at trade shows and supermarket
demonstrations by the ExposiTech 1550. This
bold advance in user-friendly expository dialogue operating systems was
achieved by combining software used to predict complex weather patterns with
the random sequencing platform originally developed to help Jerry Bruckheimer
create forty-seven “CSI” spinoffs using a single limited premise and set of
characters. Not only does the ExposiTech
1550 deliver exposition with a higher degree of accuracy, relevance, and
narrative continuity than its predecessors, but an improved wireless capability
and a wider range of downloadable apps make it compatible with almost any
hand-held device. The day is not far away when all a main character will have
to do to get plot-ready science talk is subscribe to a Twitter feed.
Even the
venerable James Bond franchise, which boasts a state-of-the-art level of
pseudo-scientific exposition, may soon hand it all over to the next generation
of ExposiTech products.
.jpg)
If further
field tests prove successful, the ExposiTech 1550 will soon replace the
venerable but much-maligned Expositron “C” series as the new industry
standard…not to mention replacing a host of underappreciated but essential
secondary characters. No more will a crime lab need a computer tech who can
mine the most heavily-encrypted networks at the Pentagon for traces of code so faint that a Commodore 64 could conceal
them on its hard drive. Coroners in cop shows will be mute walk-ons,
handing their reports to detectives and district attorneys, then scurrying back
to the morgue. Spock and Data will fall silent. Doctor Who will be played by a different actor
every nineteen seconds, since no-one will bother to ask why he shouldn’t keep
bumping into an infinite number of versions of himself.
By the
same token, though, the origin of the Doctor’s evil adversaries the Cybermen
will finally be revealed. As it turns out, each Cyberman
is a replica of a prototype designed by a robotics engineer and
entrepreneur named Cy Berman.
So it shouldn’t be a total loss.
No comments:
Post a Comment