"Mars Needs Women."

Movie title invoked by me in the context of critiquing philosophy departments. That's participating in my own comments thread section, where I also say something I'd like to reprint here:

The question of politeness is important.

The notion that women are "polite" in some special way needs examination. Women may have developed a strategy that gets called politeness that works in many situations. But let's be honest about what that really is and why it developed, both biologically and culturally.

No one is engaging in physical combat here. It's verbal sparring, and there's an emotional element that affects your predisposition to that kind of fighting.

There's no reason to think women are less able than men in verbal argument, but there is an emotional aspect to it. Still, when you do verbal argument, you are using emotion. You can't extract all emotion.

Lawyers know this perhaps more than philosophers.

Philosophers are stewing in their own juice. They think the juice needs more women, because lack of women is not the current taste.

They're going through an awkward phase of trying to add women. But women are not passively accepting the role as ingredient in their foul stew.

Why should they?!

Where do those female undergraduates in philosophy go if not to philosophy grad programs?

I bet they go to law school, which would be an extremely rational thing to do.

Although if philosophy departments are desperate enough [about needing] to display chunks of female floating in their gloppy gumbo, it may be a good bet for a few individuals to offer themselves up as the women philosophers, at least for a while, and these women may play the game especially well if they package themselves as specialists in "women in philosophy" issues.

Circa 1970, females entering law teaching would do "Women in the Law" and "Family Law" topics. When I was graduating from law school in 1981 and going into a law teaching job search, one of my female lawprofs advised me (and other women) to resist getting assigned Family Law or any of those women-associated topics. Get right to the seemingly "male" things like Contracts and Corporations.

The cooking metaphor began in the post proper, and the philosophers introduced it.

I just want to warn women to be very careful if any of these aliens displays a text — written in abstruse language — titled "To Serve Women."

"Little Chrissy, say sugar."

Here's a clip from one of my favorite movies, "Pecker"...



... which I was watching this morning, because I saw that I'd been mentioned on Facebook. It was Annie Gottlieb saying "Ann Althouse, do not watch" about a pre-production trailer to a movie called "Squirrels."



I said, " So... that did make me click, but I stopped at 0:43. I don't want to see the squirrel bite off the girl's finger. And isn't that the girl who played Little Chrissy in 'Pecker'?"

I looked it up and saw that "Pecker" was made a long time ago, in 1998. I am getting old! So is the actress that played Little Chrissy, whose name, I see, is Lauren Hulsey. She looks like this now and seems to work not so much as an actress, but in visual effects. Perhaps she got into that through her experience making "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," where they made her look like this.

I guess there's a creepy kid category within child acting. Back when I was a kid, the #1 creepy kid was Billy Mumy. And I mean pre-"Lost in Space," particularly the "Twilight Zone" episode "It's a Good Life."

Recommended Amazon Instant Video: "It's a Good Life" and "Pecker."

"Things I Learned in My Twenty-Four Hour Althouse Comment Withdrawal."

From betamax3000 (at 12 midnight):

• the Shakes -- they Get Real Bad;

• Twenty-Four Hours is A Long Period of Time When You Deny Yourself;

• the Baby Spiders are Real;

• I Love the Commenters: Read All the Posts, All Day, Tongue Bound, and Realized in Retrospect that -- Perhaps -- I Occasionally Suck Too Much Oxygen From the Room;

• Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

• the Scientology "No Fear' Paradigm Crosses Neuropaths with Cruel Neutrality: when I get it Down to Four Paragraphs I Will Thrust it Sideways Into a Thread about Gabe Kaplan;

• it -- Technically -- is Not a Burning Sensation.

I do not discount the role of  El Pollo Raylan's summoning: "Beta come back!" — which took us to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.

Lem sighed relief:

I think I can say tonight that we are in Betamax debt. From now on it will be possible to risk loosing wifi knowing that it is a survivable non-event thanks to the courage and determination of one man. and his name is Betamax.

And:

Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

Its like Althouse politics, I think.

That's exactly right. And then betamax3000 said:

At the Metaphorical Althouse Denny's I want More hash Browns and Non-Dairy Creamer: I am building a Mountain.

And I say: This means something. This is important.



Loose the WiFi!

Pope Francis looks like...

... Ed Wynn!



A lovable face, I think. Something very sweet about it. Ed Wynn's real name was Isaiah Edwin Leopold. He made the middle name — we're told — into his whole name "to save his family the embarrassment of having a lowly comedian as a relative." You may remember him from the "Twilight Zone" episode "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" — about an old man who believed he would die if his clock stopped. Can you remember whether the clock stops and, if so, whether the man dies?

Jack Klugman has died.

At the age of 90. You probably think of "The Odd Couple" or, maybe "Quincy," but here he is in a 1960 episode of "The Twilight Zone," called "A Passage for Trumpet":