In the pleasant fuzzy warmness following brunch mimosas, I was hanging with Dan and discussing our movie-viewing options and was veering into a Star Trek direction. He has the entire run of the TV series, and all the films! And he shared with me a product of his having too much time on his hands when he was unemployed and job hunting a few years ago: a Star Trek metric: an amazing, maybe even slightly insanely detailed spreadsheet of the different shows in rows, lined up against columns of categories of endemic (or at least seemingly endemic) Star-Trekish phenomena.
You know, things like the number of characters wearing a red shirt, and the number red-shirted deaths; the number of people being transported and the number of transporter malfunctions (subdivided between malfunctions attributable to the ship’s equipment, and malfunctions due to the interference of an alien lifeforce). Whether an alien encounter was hostile or friendly, and if hostile, then whether that led to the death of a crewmember. Spock's saying "that's illogical." Scotty's claim that "they're breaking up."
It went on and on; the level of detail and the logical structure of his categories blew my mind and I about wept from laughing so hard from the joy at this thoroughly geeky accounting. Some of the things we think must have happened a lot because they seem SO typical, didn't happen as often as you'd think. It was pretty awesome.
Dan ALSO has all the James Bond movies. And I am a huge Bond junkie. So I suggested that we work up a metric for them. Ignoring whatever movie it was we had finally chosen to watch, we came up with some categories. What follows is the fruit of out initial intellectual labor:
Quintessential utterances:
“Oh, James!”
“Bond, James Bond”
“Shaken, not stirred”
Gadgets:
Being killed by an unusual object (villain-gadget?)
Gadget count (how many gadgets Q lends to Bond)
Number of gadgets Bond actually uses
Method by which Bond kills another (employing gadget: Y/N)
{Calculate gadget usefulness}
On a somewhat related note:
Bond gives Q a hard time
Bond goofs around with gadgets in Q’s lab he doesn’t understand
Non-fatal phenomena:
An assistant spy to Bond does a dumb-assed thing
Bond plays a game of chance/gambles (with villain: Y/N)
Villain has physical deformity
Moneypenny goes all mooney-eyed over Bond
Occurrence of sexual harassment
Character has a suggestive name
Villain attempts to kill Bond in a slow, overly complicated and ineffective way
Occurrence of super-human hand strength
Occurrence of bizarre physics
For instance: car tires squeal/burn rubber upon peculiar surfaces (sand/dirt road, etc.)
We – or perhaps just I – became obsessed with coming up with a way to calculate the effects on one’s life expectancy upon being around James Bond. Where is the fatality radius? Is the situation worse for you if you’re a woman than if you’re a man, and worse still if you have sex with him? (And if you’re a woman, is it a foregone conclusion that you’ll sleep with Bond if you meet him?) Thus comes the following categories:
Male character is newly introduced to Bond
Female character is newly introduced to Bond
Woman sleeps with Bond
Character is killed by Bond
Character is killed by non-Bond
“Collateral damage” (don’t actually meet or sleep with Bond, but die in his general vicinity anyway due to being caught in the cross fire or a bomb going off, etc.)
Ratios:
Character meets Bond/character killed by Bond
Character meets Bond/character is killed by non-Bond
Woman meets Bond/woman sleeps with Bond
Woman sleeps with Bond/woman killed by Bond
Woman sleeps with Bond/woman killed by non-Bond
As I’ve said, this is the first draft; ambiguities remain to be worked out and there assuredly are plenty of categories we haven’t thought of yet. Any suggestions? This scientific study welcomes your input!
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