Transition Girl

Why transition girl?... Best answered by a quote from the Iliad....."The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence."

Thursday, May 12, 2011

eye candy quotient

After last week's melancholy reflections on last thoughts in life, I thought I had better venture into something a little fluffier this week to lift my mood. So this week's entry will be a short explanation of my eye candy quotient (ECQ) procrastination efforts.

In between the fiction writing and the day job story telling (advising for a living means I have to pitch ideas based on facts and the best way to do that is to tell a story from those facts), I spend some time reading various forms of electronic media and watching (far too) much television. In a bad week, my viewing habits will reach the double digits in terms of hourly viewing.

I was chatting about new shows with a friend this morning, and ran through with her my current suite of must see and optional viewing. It was several shows into the list when I realised that at least a half a dozen of them fell into the viewing solely for the purpose of enjoying the "talent" of the actors on the show.

"Talent" to me can mean either one of two things generally - the skills of the player and/or the eye candy appeal of their look. I watch Australian Rules Football for both. I seem to watch television and movies for either yet rarely both.

For example, while my interest in a certain tv series, Supernatural, derives largely from an interest in all things mythological (and more recently its delving into a raft of religious mythology), I readily confess that the two male leads on the show are super easy on the eye. I'm never really sure if the over acting is the pair hamming it up or if the pair have managed to get away with their good looks in securing roles and they may never be thespians awarded for their acting prowess. The Winchestor brothers (their characters on the show) allow me to enjoy genuine "check your brain at the door" down time when it comes to my viewing pleasure.

There is such a thing as a good looking skilled actor but I find that the combination of looks and skill together is distracting from any film or television series intended to be more cerebral. I am less likely to take an actor seriously or value their work if they are good looking. I am less likely to think at all if their physical presence dominates a screen. It means that the actors I rate for their skill are far too often known as "character" actor specialists (and rarely leads). This is a bias in my viewing. It took me years to acknowledge Brad Pitt could in fact act well at times. And it is why I rate Ben Foster as a skilled actor (who isn't unattractive by the way, just not in that league worthy of eye candy status).

My hypothesis: the larger my ECQ is in any given week, the lower my IQ is! Now there's an economic regression analysis I might like to test one day but I cannot quite nail my choice of dummy variables or the direction of the correlation (perhaps because I've been supplementing my television viewing this week with YouTube videos of some of my favourite scenes from the shows that do not feed my mind).

I do not think it is a permanent reduction in IQ (like the consumption of alcohol would do), as I was able to have an extended conversation with another friend today about the nature of idea generation, concepts of philosophical spheres, and present another theory about how married life/kids seems to lead to a reduction in idea generation. The latter is based on evidence that shows all the great 'science' thinkers came up with their ideas while they were young and/or single. Nash (nobel prize winning economist) would argue that it was just game theory and the scientists were out to impress girls with their ideas and no longer needed to do so once they had snagged their prize.

I will need to gather more data to see if I can draw some meaningful conclusions about ECQ. And that folks establishes my procrastination parameters for this weekend as I continue writing part 2 of novel number three.

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