Battle of the Silent, Weirdly (In?)Competent Predators (My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad)

My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad takes two pop culture things that occupy the same slot, and determines which would, or should, win in a fight. Or whatever.  Look, this isn't rocket science, okay?  Rules? The rules is, there ain't no rules.

TODAY'S FIGHT: Wile E. Coyote

vs

Tom.

Introductions are in order:

Wile E. Coyote, super genius, has a literary pedigree.  Chuck Jones, who created the Wile E./Road Runner cartoons to parody "chase" cartoons like Tom & Jerry (and who reportedly was disappointed when the cartoons caught on) based the character on Mark Twain's description of a coyote from Roughin' It:

The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spirtless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! -so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.

Wile E. is frequently referred to by his Latin names.  Do you have a Latin name? I do.  It's Boniface Tullus, which I kind of like.  Boniface Tullus.  (I got that from this Latin Name generator.)

As I, Boniface Tullus, was saying, Wile E oftentimes is referred to by his Latin names, which include "Eatibus Anythingus," "Famishus-famishus," and "Famishius vulgaris ingeniusi," which if you put that through a reverse translator comes to the exact same thing, indicating to me that perhaps the universe is no longer expanding but that instead at the exact moment that I hit translate the universe began to contract and so time reversed itself and we're all now running backwards, which might alarm you except you probably won't notice anything.  If every physical law in the universe reversed itself, you would remember the future and be ignorant of the past.

Wouldn't you?

I don't know.

Tom, meanwhile, appears to have a much shakier past, including an alias: when he first came into the public eye, Tom was known as "Jasper."  To be fair, this may have been a stage name to separate himself from other Tom cats in Hollywood, including Sylvester, who originally went by Thomas.

But it's probably not, as "Tom & Jerry" is a phrase long associated with hooliganism, or at least rakish behavior.

In January 1821, a well-known journalist and sportswriter (sport meaning prize fighting and horse racing) called Pierce Egan wrote a monthly journal under the title: “The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and sprees through the Metropolis.”

Says "Victorian Footnotes," which goes on to note that beer houses in London were referred to as "Tom And Jerry" shops, from which we can learn that Victorian England was not what we would call pithy with its titles.

Strengths:  That stuff is all well and good, a phrase that suffers from the same extra wordage as "cease and desist."  The other day I got a letter from a lawyer demanding that my client "cease and desist" something, and I was tempted to write back "We will cease, but we will NEVER desist."

It's all well and good to get caught up in talking about phrases, but what about what each of these animals can do?  I am ready to give you an answer on that, or, rather, I would be if I were actually ready to give you an answer on that.

I have been diligently researching that very question -- what can these animals do? -- since almost 10 minutes before I started writing this post, when I sat down with some cold pizza for breakfast and decided to watch a "Wile E. Coyote" cartoon.  I watched that cartoon, which was this one:

But that one wasn't really very good; it was just the first one I found.  But as I watched it I began wondering about how Wile E would stack up to Tom, and so I watched a Tom & Jerry cartoon, too, the first one I found being this one:

Which honestly is a little creepy.  I watched about 1/3 of that, getting up to where Jerry tracks tar onto the deck, before giving up because I was bored, and going back to Wile E cartoons, which I had playing in the background as I typed up all that introduction to this post, including this cartoon:

But I had them playing on my Kindle, next to me, because I had to type this post and what I learned in college is that you do not research-and-then-write, you just make it up as you go along, reading only as much as is necessary to make your point.  That is how American knowledge works.

Unfortunately, my Kindle battery was low because I was up late last night, alternating between taking Mr F for rides three times (at 9 p.m., 10 p.m., and 11 p.m.) and reading Girl Genius because I was too tired to read anything else, and I forgot to charge it, so my Kindle ran out of power and I asked Mr Bunches if I could use his iPad to continue my research, but he said "no" because he is watching "My Friends Tigger & Pooh" on his iPad, so that was the end of my research.

Instead, I will go off my memory, which, if I am wrong about the course of time reversing, ought to be at least reasonably accurate, and also off of Wikipedia, which fortunately for us completely neglects telling anyone anything about the government program for allowing drone strikes on US citizens, but does list all of the ACME products Wile E. Coyote uses in his efforts to capture the Road Runner, including ACME Giant Kites

ACME Bumblebees

ACME Rocket Skates

and ACME Dehydrated Boulders

There is, if you are interested and you know you are, a complete online catalog of every ACME product ever bought by the Coyote.  Because we are a nation without a purpose.  (I've spent over an hour there today!)

Beyond his solid-gold credit rating and apparently unlimited ACME account, Wile E. Coyote is pretty fast, and pretty strong (for brief moments), can sometimes hover, and has the ability to create new realities that intersect with ours:

And survive even the heat at the center of the Earth:

And those abilities are what separates Wile E from the regular person.  Absent his unique reality-twisting powers, Wile E is pretty much a poor man's Bruce Wayne, above-average physical skills combined with a bunch of expensive gadgets to pursue a single-minded  obsession that is more about his own personal gratification than   of giving benefit to the world.

Tom, on the other hand... paw?  No, I'm not going to stoop to the lowest common denominator, here.  For a change.

Tom's powers appear more limited, and, frankly, less obsessive, as noted by Wikipedia, which comments that many times, Tom and Jerry cooperate with little to no friction, and also that Tom has a real love for the ladies:

Tom changes his love interest many times. The first love interest is Toots who appears in Puss n' Toots, and calls him "Tommy" in The Mouse Comes to Dinner. He is also interested in a cat called Toots inThe Zoot Cat although she has a different appearance to the original Toots. The most frequent love interest of Tom's is Toodles Galore, who never has any dialogue in the cartoons.

Tom is, in short, a pretty skillful guy who seems to more or less lack the financial wherewithal of Wile E, and also has no real powers whatsoever other than his ability to come back from the dead.

WAIT WHAT?

Despite five shorts ending with a depiction of Tom's apparent death, his demise is never permanent; he even reads about his own death in a flashback in Jerry's Diary. He appears to die in explosions in Mouse Trouble (after which he is seen in heaven), Yankee Doodle Mouse and in Safety Second, while in The Two Mouseketeers he is guillotined offscreen.

Yep. Tom is some sort of demigod, who uses his power to woo earthly females.  That being pretty much what demigods do,  if my understanding of them based on reading 1/3 of The Odyssey is correct, which I will assume it is (see "research methods in US," supra).

Like other demigods and minor deities, Tom has a variety of abilities that crop up when necessary, a jack-of-all-trades whose one major symbolic purpose (catching mice) has come to be overshadowed by the plethora of other traits tacked on over time.

But still, a demigod.

So who would win in a fight?

It seems as thought Wile E would never win, doesn't it?  Despite his better financing and his inability to be killed, how can he fight a god? In fact, his inability to win in this fight might be presaged by his inability to win, ever, against a lowly roadrunner.

But, then, would Tom even fight?  The gods are mercurial, after all - -sometimes they decide to make one guy's life miserable for decades and decades and sometimes they just go back to trapping Ares having an affair and laughing at him while he's trapped on the bed.  The Attention Span Of The Gods needs a little work, is my point, while Wile E. Coyote's single-minded obsessiveness suggests that he would never give up.

Can obsession win out over near-absolute, but dissolute power? That is the question that has plagued me, and mankind, ever since I posed it way back at the beginning of this paragraph.

Despite the fact that Tom has lingered on in cartoons and movies that apparently are aired to this day, I am going to give this one to obsession.  We all know that Batman beat Superman the time they fought, not by actually physically overpowering him, but through treachery and deceit:

...that eventually helped corrupt even the incorruptible Superman.

Tom is no Superman.  He wasn't raised by Ma and Pa Kent, and is obviously prone to giving in to his more dissolute pursuits -- women, golf, pizza, whatever -- and it would be easy to see Wile E. Coyote  wearing him down over the years until finally, one day, Wile E. Coyote tricks Tom into running into a wall that doesn't turn into a tunnel, and then disintegrates him.

Which leaves just one lingering question.  Since it's been decided that Wile E. Coyote would beat Tom in a fight, all that is left to wonder is:

Just how afraid of the Road Runner should we all be?

If that thing ever stops just wanting to run, and instead starts wanting to subjugate all of humanity to its will, we are in trouble.

The Best Song About Wishing Wells (My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad)

When two (or more) things attempt to exist in one place in pop culture, My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad helps determine which one wins.  More posts like this can be found here.

TODAY'S MATCHUP:  "Wishing Well."

I have been thinking lately about what it says about people that among the first things we think of when given a chance to get three wishes--

-- I am speaking hypothetically here since as we all know you cannot actually get three wishes because wishes don't exist, not the way we think of them, which I am aware of, so when I say given a chance to get three wishes I'm talking about if you were, say, a character in a story that got three wishes, say, a character like in this story I wrote just now:

************************************************************************

Two Wishes

“So I have three wishes,” he said.

“How’s that again, now?” she answered.

(That not being the kind of thing that one usually hears on a first date.)

“Three wishes,” he said. “I have three wishes.”

There was an awkward pause during which she wished she had ordered appetizers, after all, because maybe some mozzarella sticks would have helped fill in the gap in conversation that had just occurred.  Plus she might have liked some mozzarella sticks even if her blind date had not just said he had three wishes.

“Um…” she said, and stirred her drink.

“I’m only telling you because I really like you, already, and I think we will probably hit it off,” he said, and after a moment added “So I want to be completely honest with you.”

He also felt a boyfriend (maybe a husband?) who had three wishes, ready to go, was something most women would want.  

But he kept that to himself, for now.

“As in…” she looked for the right words, “Wishes, like on a birthday cake?”

“Or from a genie,” he said.  “But that’s not where I got mine.”

“Where did you get yours?” she asked, wondering if the answer would matter.

“From a lizard,” the man said.

(The answer, she realized, mattered.)

It suddenly occurred to him that this was not going well.

He muttered something under his breath. 

There was a flicker.

“What did you say?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” he said. “Should we order some appetizers?”

************************************************************************

That's a 250=1 story, just for you!  (What's a 250=1 story? Find out here.)

Anyway, if you were a character in a story and had three wishes, would your first instinct be to wish for more wishes?  And if it is, and it seems like it is because that's become a trope in pop culture, wishing for more wishes, then what does that say about us?

 (Dinosaur Comics, here).

Anyway, I think it says something awful about me and humans and probably you that someone says "I give you three wishes" and the first thing we think of is to say "I wish for more wishes," that first thing being so automatic that by now we can't have a story about wishes without saying "I give you three wishes but you can't wish for more wishes,"

Because upon being given almost unlimited beneficence, the only thing we can think of is "I want more almost unlimited beneficence." And that makes us seem terrible.  Just awful:  Not only is nothing good enough, but even things that are beyond-believable-good aren't good enough.

I remember once talking to my dad about winning the lottery, and what we would do if we won the lottery, and my dad said this:

"I wouldn't want to win the lottery because do you know how much they take in taxes?"

Never mind the grammar; that's the flip side of the I wish for more wishes thought: I wouldn't want this great thing unless this great thing is even better than it actually is.

Imagine turning down free money because someone keeps part of your free money you wouldn't otherwise have if you didn't get offered the free money!

That kind of thinking reminds me of "The Ultimatum Game." But before I get to the Ultimatum Game, I'd better first introduce the first of the Wishing Well songs from today:

That's Terence Trent D'Arby, "Wishing Well," a song I remember from when I was a lot younger than I was now.  It mentions, in its lyrics, "butterfly tears" and "crocodile cheers", which seems to me to be really mixed-up, metaphorically speaking.

I tried a search to see if a butterfly tear was a thing, and apparently it's a phrase that's used in various titles and stuff, so a lot of people must think it means something to talk about a butterfly crying, but I can't think what it means.

A crocodile tear, I know: It's a mock crying, a fake-out, based on the old legend that crocodiles cry as they eat people.

I know, that's not the legend you know.  You know about the legend that says crocodiles cry to lure in their prey, but that's not the actual story.  The actual story was  first written by John De Mandeville, back in the 1300s, when he talked about his travels and wrote about crocodiles crying as they ate.

Which isn't the whole story, either, as there was no John De Mandeville, not really: According to this site, "John De Mandeville" was the made-up name of John de Bourgoigne, who wanted to write a travelogue but had never been to anywhere but Egypt, so instead of going somewhere he just plagiarized others, wrote it under a pseudonym, and presumably got rich and famous before being exposed by Oprah De Winfreyoign.

The Ultimatum Game, which I mentioned, is an economics experiment in which two people are asked to divide up money.  The first person is given $10, and has to offer to share it with the second person in a take-it-or-leave-it deal.  If the second person accepts the offer, both keep their share.  If the second person rejects the offer, both get no money.


So, if Person 1 offers Person 2, say, $5, and Person 2 accepts, each gets $5.  But if Person 2 rejects the offer, neither gets anything.

What would you suppose would happen, if that game were actually tried in real life?

Song number two is Wishing Well, by The Airborne Toxic Event,

That's the acoustic version, which I like better than the original one.

Frankly, I like this Wishing Well a lot better than D'arby's weirdly-metaphored song; the extended metaphor of having a terrible night while wishing you could yourself become a coin tossed into a wishing well appeals to me.   "Like you were just a wish that could turn out well" is a line that is both hopeful and sad at the same time.

Anyway: what would you offer the other person if you were Person Number 1 in the Ultimatum Game?

The answer might surprise you, given how we deal with wishes: In an experiment studying just that, most people offered more or less equal shares of money to Person 2, which economists tend to explain as being motivated less by a sense of fairness and more by a fear that Person 2 will reject the offer, which really makes no sense, economics-wise -- I mean the person rejecting the offer makes no sense, as if you have no money and I offer you some money, you should take it no matter what, even if I get more than you.

But Person 2 often rejects the offer if the offer is perceived to be unfair, and so we learn a little something about ourselves when offered something for nothing: Person 2 is the more important person in that study, I think.

There's actually a third "Wishing Well," this one by Blink-182:

 That's the least hopeful yet: A wishing well leads to what sounds like death, or at least terrible experiences:

I went to a wishing well, but sank to the ocean floor
Cut up by sharpened rocks and washed up along the shore
I reached for a shooting star, it burned a hole through my hand
Made it's way through my heart, had fun in the promise land

And it's probably not the wisest thing to do, looking for meaning in Blink 182 lyrics,  but it brought up the other dark thing about wishes

which is that, as they are written in fairy tales, and in our imaginations, they often can seem really superselfish, although that characterization isn't really fair.

When someone asks what you'd do if you had three wishes, they aren't really asking what you'd do to make the world a better place, and so answering "I'd wish to cure cancer" is all well and good but that's not really the thought behind the question, and answering that way is kind of like when you'd ask your mom what she wants for Christmas and she'd say something like "All I want for Christmas is my kids to get along with each other," which was a dumb thing to say and you were hoping she'd say "gloves," but, then, who really asks for gloves for Christmas?

Which is as good a note as any to end on, because I've run out of things to say.

Winner: "Wishing Well," by The Airborne Toxic Event.

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Overthinking Commercials, 2 (POP!Best!)

What, you thought this blog was going to be nothing but the Star Wars Blogathon? Think again. I've got tons of other pop culture-y stuff to post. (But the Blogathon continues. I'll be posting that later.)

So have you heard the one about how people are too stupid to understand what a "sale" is, or too overwhelmed with life to deal with some coupon inserts?




A while back, JCPenney began running annoying ads of people shrieking hideously in response to opening their mailbox or their magazines, screaming like their very souls had been plucked out of their bodies by a Grim Reaper we could not see.

I found those commercials annoying.

And I didn't understand them, at all, until one day a "news" "story" about the commercials said that they were heralding JCPenney's new (already failed) strategy of not having any more sales.

JCPenney, we were told, was dealing with (a heretofore unknown) problem of consumers being overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the modern shopping experience.

Since the average family spends over $5,000 per year on what can roughly be described as consumer/luxury goods, ("luxury" meaning "non-necessity") per year, and did so even at the height of the recent Second Great Depression, I took issue with the idea that going to the mall is so confusing that people scream in terror at the thought of navigating sales.

But that was not all JCPenney was concerned with: They are, apparently, going to reinvent your entire shopping experience, or at least claim to, not only by dealing with problems that do not exist but by creating procedures that cannot hold up.

Let's look at JCPenney's conception of you, the average consumer, and life in these United States.

Consider again that Western Coupon commercial:





Ellen, opening a newspaper (perhaps the same newspaper every actor reads all the time) for the first time in her life, is familiar with the concept of coupons, but not so familiar that she expected them to be in her newspaper, which is why the coupons flutter to the floor, having been previously unnoticed and therefore flung headlong as Ellen tries to get the news.

And it's not just that coupons exist. It's the the sheer numbers of them! I froze the frame, because I am a scientist, and counted seventeen! Such a plethora of coupons has clearly not ever existed in history.

(Nor have the type of newspaper inserts Ellen has in her newspaper ever existed in history. I imagine they largely automate this now, but when I was a kid, I was a paperboy, and I know that coupon inserts were not created with the newspaper. They are preprinted and shipped to where newspapers are assembled, and then are stuck into the newspaper just prior to delivery, by people, or by machine, and so the inserted "coupons" are large enough to be handled easily, not Fake Dollar Bill Direct Mail-Sized. It would be very time-consuming and expensive to print all of those smaller coupons and then hand-stuff them, whereas printing coupons on foldable fliers that are roughly newspaper sized [as happens in real, non-Ellen/JCPenney life] takes advantage of existing printing presses.)

Stunned by the discovery of these... coupons, is it?, Ellen then travels back in time to when Americans were even less sophisticated than they are now -- a time when reaching into one's pocket meant you were going for a gun (as opposed to going for money; apparently nobody had ever carried their money in their pocket in that town before.)

Here's the thing about that commercial: Ellen imagines (?) a time when there were no coupons -- but that time is clearly not better, in that it smells and people think you are constantly going to shoot them.

I would much rather live in an era where, if someone reaches into their pocket, I assume they're going for a piece of paper entitling them to pay 50 cents less for the detergent, as opposed to a six-shooter.

Aside from making it so that you never have to fear opening your newspaper again, except that it won't because while JCPenney may not print these... coupons, was it?... all the other stores still will, so you will have at most exactly one less coupon in your newspaper, Ellen/JCPenney also improves your life by promising you that they will never ever ever run out of goods to sell you:





JCPenney promises no doorbusting -- no early sales that require you to get up at 5:00 a.m. to save money. But the problem in the modern-day example that leads Ellen to imagine a polygamous 1950s marriage is not that the sale started too early, it's that the goods that were being sold lasted only 2 hours, 2o minutes. Presumably, if the store had opened at 8:00 a.m. (which seems a little early for a typical retailer; Ellen's there at 8:20 but I usually assume most department stores open at 9), all of the shoes would have sold out by 10:20. So what's JCPenney promising? They say "no doorbusting, just great prices all the time," but again, it's not the price that's the problem in that store at 8:20 a.m.; I assume the price is okay because Ellen has gone there to buy something that was on sale. (Ellen, it seems, is not against sales, which makes her an odd spokesperson for JCPenney in this case.)

I think, based on this ad, that if you walk into JCPenney and they don't have what you want, you can sue. That's what they're really promising, right: You won't have to get up early (which is good, because you're probably tired from picking up all those coupons on the floor), and we'll still have the stuff you wanted to buy no matter what time you show up.

(In the 1950s fever dream, I noted that the people were getting at 6 a.m., which in the modern-day real world is the time the sale started. The 1950s people would have been late for the sale anyway.)


Let's do one more, the one that really gets me:





Ellen tries to return a skort.

There's no explanation of why Ellen has a "skort." Was it a gift? Did she buy it, only to then decide she didn't want it? Was she buying it for someone else, only to realize that this other person may not want a skort? Do people wear skorts? Who are these people? Do they feel awkward now that Ellen has made fun of their apparel of choice? Shouldn't they feel awkward, since they wear skorts?

But we don't need an explanation, as we quickly learn. Ellen doesn't want to explain to this man why she has a skort but doesn't want it, and that leads her to ponder how it is that our society ended up in such an unfair system, demanding that you have reasons for doing things.

Note that the man accepts Ellen's reason. That's important. Confronted with "It's... a skort," the man doesn't even hesitate. He's okay with that. He doesn't waste any time asking all those questions I asked, maybe because he's not as thoughtful as I am. But he does ask what on the surface is a reasonable question: Does Ellen have proof that she did not shoplift this skort, or at least that it came from this store?

"Was it always this way?" Ellen muses, wondering whether society has always demanded that you behave in a commercially reasonable manner.

Turns out that the answer to that is yes, it in fact always was this way.

The Western commercial, remember, answered Ellen's always this way question with "No, it wasn't, because back in Olden Times, people used to shoot each other in the face." The answer to the other two questions in the commercials I've chosen here are yes, that's how we've always done it. It's a mixed message JCPenney is sending here: Everything retailers have ever done, and everything they've never done, is wrong. (Somehow, these retailers, and the bewildered shoppers confronted with their mysterious ways, have managed to make a go of it, but that clearly won't last more than the few centuries retail has existed.)

Ellen's remembering proves that it always was this way as in Ancient Rome, where sundials are not required to lay flat even though a sundial stood up on it's edge (0:13 into the commercial), would not work, everyone is required to have a receipt, too, and (it seems) everyone but Ellen does have their receipt.

Seriously, one has to ask at this point how it is Ellen comes into possession of all this stuff without receipts. Especially as, when asked when she bought it, Ellen isn't able to give a straight answer, instead coming up with the kind of evasive response I'd expect from my kids when asked why they weren't home by curfew.

Ellen, though, won't be tied down by Ancient Roman practices that are accepted by everyone and commercially reasonable, because they are also, she points out, ridiculous, and so she leads the crowd in chants of "ridiculous," with the Ancient Romans speaking Ancient Romanese, which sounds a lot like English with a vaguely Italian accent, but it was all for nought because despite Ancient Ellen's AntiReceipt uprising, Western Civilization continued on requiring receipts right up through the Skort Era (2012 A.D.), when JCPenney changed that all by letting you return any item, any time, without a receipt.

We apparently will still need reasons -- but those reasons will not be bars to our returning it, because you can return any item, any time, which, when I saw that ad, caused me to conjure up this scenario:

SCENE: A JCPenneys: We see a serene, gauzy view of a retail department store where it is clear that the bewildering stressful chaos of shopping is no more. Perhaps there are clouds upon which cherubs sit, playing harps. Or free Orange Juliuses. Either way.

Me [holding a pair of jeans, standing at a counter]: I would like to return these jeans.

Employee: Reason?

Me: I have had them for three years now, and am tired of them. Also, they appear to have shrunk considerably and I can no longer button them. Also, I got pizza on them accidentally and it's still there. And I think there is a raccoon in the pocket. And one leg of the pants is actually on fire, if you can see here.

Employee: [hesitates]. I see.

Me: I don't have a receipt. Can I have my money back?

Employee: Um...

Me: You can keep the raccoon. I think the fire will eventually scare him away.

I just thank God that JCPenney has managed to come up with a way to save me from the hellish existence I didn't know I was suffering under. Now, I know that when I go to the mailbox (which I don't do because I have email) I will not be confronted with coupons offering to save me money on something that I'll only just want to return anyway but I will have had to go through the extremely unfair hardship of proving that I bought it, and I can instead get on with paying more for things on an everyday basis, but at least I get to sleep in before I do it.

I'm not even gonna ruin this with words. Much. (My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad)

Recently, the cast of Community posed for pictures recreating iconic scenes from high school movies. Alison Brie wore the red bikini from Fast Times At Ridgemont High, but said that she could never compare to Phoebe Cates.

I never saw Fast Times. But I have seen Alison Brie.

Here's the evidence:

Winner of "The Best Girl In A Red Bikini": Alison Brie.

Once you get past all the "Ship of Thesus" philosophical questions, you'll realize this could only end one way... (My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad!)

Recently, William Shatner went on the record as calling Star Wars a "derivative" of Star Trek -- a slap in the face not just to Star Wars fans but to Western Civilization, as well, because, as this whole feature is intended to point out, Star Wars is at this point the basis for every single thi people say, do, or believe.

Shatner -- who's cool enough to make the top 3 of my list of people who I would want to have lunch with, earning an automatic spot on that list -- is simply wrong about his Star Trek vs. Star Wars assertion, and when it comes to people being simply wrong, what are you to do?

There's this feeling in America that you can believe any old thing you want, say any old thing you want, tell people any old thing you want, and we for some reason are supposed to respect that any old thing you say/think/feel.

That belief, like Shatner's, is simply wrong. I know where it comes from, but it's still wrong.

We have freedom of speech here in America -- freedom of speech and religion and protest and privacy and as a result of that, we have freedom of thought, meaning: You are free to think any damn fool idea you'd like.

That's a given, and a good thing.

But the fact that you can think it does not mean that the thought is worthy of respect, and that's where people go wrong.

All people are created equal -- but not all thoughts. Some thoughts are created... well, stupid.

So the fact that you can think something doesn't mean I have to respect it, or that it's worthy of me even paying attention to you.

That's where those teach the controversy people go wrong: Just because you have an idea, even an idea that you really like, doesn't mean your idea is the equal of all other ideas. Because your idea might be just plain wrong.

If I, for example, want to believe that when I hold my coffee cup up in the air and let it go, it will not drop and will not spill but will levitate there nicely, I'm free to think that. But it won't, no matter how often I insist it will, and arguing that I should have my opinions respected because nobody really knows how gravity works is pointless. My opinion is wrong, it cannot be proven empirically, it runs contrary to everything people know and observe in the world.

This isn't about evolution, but it could be. And it should be, except I'm writing not about what has been relegated to the second-most important idea in human history (the Theory of Evolution) but the most important idea in our lives: The Grand Unified Theory Of Star Wars, which posits that every single thing in the the world can be traced back, now, to The Little Movie That Could back in 1978.

William Shatner has, by saying that Star Wars was derivative of (and not as good as) Star Trek, challenged that theory. And though I should not dignify his opinion anymore than Sweetie dignifies my opinion vis a vis Coffee Cup Levitation*

*she just hands me a mop.

I will, because I need something to post about today. And so I will dignify his opinion, by determining, via the patented My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad! method, which really is better. Sit back and get ready for:

Star Trek v. Star Wars.

Since Shatner picked this fight, we'll do it on his home court, as it were -- fighting out the areas which he said proved that Star Trek is better than Star Wars. (As if!). Those areas are, according to the summary of his remarks I read because I'm too busy to watch the actual interview and also I don't really care for celebrity interviews, "Relationships and conflicts among the relationships," "stories that involved humanity," "philosophical questions," and "Girls who were prettier than Princess Leia."

Relationships and Conflicts Among The Relationships: I will confess that I am either hamstrung a little here, or have slanted the conflict, because I have watched only approximately 1 1/2 episodes of the original Star Trek series, plus about 2 1/2 of the movies. I've seen The Wrath Of Khan, of course, and because that was very good I was then duped into watching The Search For Spock, but after that I wised up and never watched another one again until I watched part of That Original Star Trek Movie About Voyager on cable one day.

I also, though, to be fair, owned several dolls -- the GI-Joe sized guy dolls that were cool to play with when you were 8 -- and a cardboard playset of the bridge of the Enterprise with a real teleporter, so I've got that going for me.

I did not have a Klingon bad guy doll, though: I had as my Star Trek bad guy "The Lizard," who was technically a Spider-Man bad guy, but I got this whole thing as a present from an uncle one Christmas, and when I said:

"How come you gave me The Lizard instead of a Klingon?"

He responded: "Wouldn't you rather have a Lizard than a Klingon?"

I couldn't refute that argument.

Star Wars, on the other hand, not only had all those toys but also I've seen all of the movies, many times. To balance things out, I also own the original comic-book miniseries serialization of Return Of The Jedi. It's in near-mint condition.

Which I figure qualifies me to comment on relationships and conflicts among the relationships, because I know the two main relationships in each series.

In Star Trek, the only relationship anyone cared about was Kirk vs. Spock. Kirk embodied the impulsive, emotional, hotheaded side of people, always charging off to beat up aliens with a rock and then make out with a blue woman, while Spock stood in for the calmer, more rational side of people, the higher-functioning intellectual core that separates us from the beasts and lets us try to achieve something better than mere existence; Spock and Kirk were the two sides of humanity, the hunter-gatherer and the intellectual, and the entire span of the Star Trek universe, from tv shows to movies, can be seen as our attempts to grapple, via metaphor, with the way our baser instincts seem to always be in charge while we strive to get something better.

And that, my readers, is how you turn "Watching TV" into "A Master's Thesis."

Oh, and remember which side of us wins?

Didn't look like Kirk fought very hard to get in there, did he? Oh, well -- that just means we can go on making out with blue chicks without all those higher thoughts holding us back.

Meanwhile, the only relationship anyone cared about in Star Wars was Han and Chewbacca.

What, you thought I was going to say something else? Why would I? Despite half-hearted stabs at developing relationships in the first three movies, there never really was a love story to speak of, and what seemed like it might be became super-gross when Lucas decided on the spur of the moment and most decidedly not as a part of an overall story arc to make Leia be Luke's sister, because if you did plan that in advance, then isn't their kiss the grossest thing you could have had them do?

Han and Chewie have their conflicts, too -- just as Kirk and Spock did, but Han and Chewie's conflicts were more grounded in reality and more humorous ("Just fly casual") -- and they shared a greater bond than Kirk and Spock ever did: The Millennium Falcon.

True, Kirk and Spock had the Enterprise, but that was not really their ship; it belonged to the Federation, and required a crew of 760 to run it. Calling the Enterprise Kirk's or Spock's ship is like calling The Love Boat Captain Stubing's ship. Han, meanwhile, owned the Millennium Falcon, and Chewie half-ran it.

On the subject of spaceships, I must point out something that Shatner apparently overlooked, or deliberatly didn't bring up: Which series had better spaceships? Obviously Star Trek, not just because of X-Wings, which were awesome and could travel at light speed even though they were a single-seater ship, but also because of that aforementioned Millennium Falcon, which was so great that Star Trek copied it.

Yep, it's true: from Wikipedia, this being the only kind of thing that site is good for:

The Falcon and the Falcon's distinct shape appear in Star Trek: First Contact,[14] Blade Runner,[15] Spaceballs, and Starship Troopers.[16] The manga series Berserk includes a "Millennium Falcon" arc.[17] In another manga and anime series, Hellsing, the Millennium Falcon is referenced briefly for comedic effect.

I don't recall ever seeing the Borg cube in Star Wars.

Back to relationships: Han and Chewie were far closer than Kirk and Spock, who simply became friends because they went to Starfleet Academy together, or whatever the backstory explained in "Kirk and Spock's Big Adventure," the Chris Pine version of Star Trek.

Han and Chewie, though, had no such prosaic meeting. According to the Wookiepedia, which, why would that exist, since that's what Wikipedia is in the first place, but anyway, according to it, Han quit being a pirate and smuggler after the woman he loved went to a Rebel, and then

Han Solo then entered the Imperial Academy at Carida, serving with distinction. He was kicked out, however, when he stopped an Imperial officer from beating a Wookiee named Chewbacca with a neuronic whip. In gratitude, the Wookiee swore a life debt to Solo.

Um. I really need to research these things before I write them. But that makes no sense. He loves this woman and she goes to be a rebel, so he goes to be in the Empire? And then, when he does hook up with the rebels entirely by accident (having, apparently, come to the realization that the Empire isn't the nice, gentle, organization he thought it was) he never looks up that other woman?

Made up on the spot: A LucasFilm tradition going back to 1978.

But Han and Chewie had one thing that proves their friendship was stronger, despite all conflicts, than Spock-and-Kirk: Han could arrange to have Chewie make out with whoever he chose.

Those Wookies take their life-debts seriously.

Advantage: Star Wars.

Stories That Involved Humanity: I'm not entirely sure what Shatner means by this category, unless he's simply talking about human beings being in the storyline, in which case, sure, Star Trek wins, because, as Rogue Mutt pointed out long ago, Darth Vader isn't technically a human. Which means that it's only coincidence that the "people" of Star Wars look anything like us...

... the type of coincidence that happened a remarkable amount of times on Star Trek :

And it's technically called convergent evolution, something I know because I didn't b.s. my entire way through school; I paid attention the 1% of time required to actually pass a class in an American school. (America: F**K YEAH!)

Star Wars never explained how come humans look like us even though they evolved the infamous long time ago, (see aforementioned LucasFilm tradition) but one person once on the Internet noted that while

There's no real mention of Earth in Star Wars, as it takes place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away - but in one comic story that is not considered canon, Han Solo and Chewbacca crash land on Earth - in North America, and Solo's remains are found by Indiana Jones, while the longer-lived Wookiee forms the basis for the Bigfoot legends.

That's from the UK version of Yahoo! Answers, so it's best if you read it with a British accent. Plus, you sound smarter that way. Everything sounds smarter in a British accent. Had Shatner said something like "Tally Ho! Chaps! Look like 'ere's a Star Trek that's a tuppence better'n' anyfing that ol' Artful Dodger ever biscuited" he'd have won this without a fight.

But, be that as it may, I'm not willing to buy that there were humans in Star Wars, so:

Advantage: Star Trek.

Philosophical Questions: It almost seems like I should concede this one to the Trekkies, doesn't it? That's kind of the thing about Star Trek is that it's supposedly very high-minded about its vision, that it's always been about philosophy and aiming to do what the best science-fiction is supposed to do, make a point about our society by telling us a story about our future.

And, of course, George Washington University is supposed to have once (and maybe now) offered a course in The Philosophy Of Star Trek, even though I couldn't find any evidence of that ever having existed when I did a quick search for it. ("Evidence of existing" in this case being "getting mentioned on the first page of Google results," because I, like every other modern person, have no desire to click next page to get to substandard Google results, except for the time I googled myself and went out to page 14 where I was reminded that I once filed a lawsuit over our cat getting sick. I'm awesome.)

I was going to get around to searching for something about the philosophy of Star Wars, because I saw a link to something that suggested that people actually thought about that, but I came across first a link to a philosophical question called the "Ship Of Theseus," which asks whether, if you replace every single component part in a thing with an identical replacement, that thing is the same thing it originally was.

That is: Say you take the Millennium Falcon when Han won it from Lando in a game of Sabacc. Then say over time, you replaced every single part that was in the ship at the time it was won in that game, but with an identical replacement. Is the ship still the Millennium Falcon?

Now, say you did that with yourself: replacing every part of yourself with an identical part into which you planted your memories. Are you still yourself?

Now, think of something harder: Suppose you take yourself, and each day you replace a cell in your body with a cell from, say, William Shatner's body. At what point would you stop being you and start being William Shatner? And, as a corollary, why isn't someone trying this?

That latter question is a version of the Ship of Theseus posed by a philosopher who was recently featured in The New Yorker, an article that was interesting to read because it turns out you can make a living simply sitting around thinking about stuff (and then writing books about it) but I can't recall his name right now, and I tried looking it up on The New Yorker's website, but that wasn't helpful, other than to give me a link to an article from 1926 about Will Durant selling 50,000 copies of a book called "The Story Of Philosophy," and 50,000 copies seems a remarkable number of philosophy books to sell at any time, let alone 1926 when all of America was occupied jitterbugging and flagpole sitting and not having Calvin Coolidge speak.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, philosophy. Here's the thing, Trekkies: Your Captain Kirk isn't anything of the sort. See, according to noted scientists and also the writer China Mieville, and also the movie The Prestige, when you teleport, what you do is create a copy of the thing you teleported, so that in Kraken, by Mieville, there were all these little dead spirits haunting the guy who teleported a lot, and in The Prestige you had bins full of old Hugh Jackmans, and in Star Trek you'd have a lot of old Captain Kirks who presumably had been disintegrated on board the Enterprise, and a lot of new Captain Kirks who then were created on planets to make out with those women.

So is Captain Kirk, and the rest of them for that matter, the same person? There's a philosophical question I bet nobody in the Trekiverse ever pondered. Depending on how you feel about the Ship of Theseus, you may no longer be such a fan of Shatner's/Kirk's.

Advantage: Star Wars, because there's no worrying that somewhere is a giant pile of moldering Luke Skywalker corpses.


Girls who were prettier than Princess Leia: This one's easy to solve using what our President recently reminded us existed: Math.

Total number of times Jennifer Aniston pretended to be a woman from Star Trek? Zero.

Total number of times Jennifer Aniston pretened to be Princess Leia in the metal bikini: One.

One is greater than zero, everywhere you go.

Advantage: Star Wars.

Winner: Star Wars.