My ideal date should be: 1] very sexually experienced 2] moderately sexually experienced 3] somewhat sexually experienced 4] sexually inexperienced 5] doesn't matter

More than a product, the electric corset was science in action. Let's hear from a satisfied user, in this case, a fashion writer from the New York Times who tried the corset out (or at least took Dr. Scott's advertising to heart) in 1887:

The improved corset which is attracting so much attention from the lady portion of the community which values a corset for its ability to perform the duties demanded of it, is the electric corset which Dr. Scott has introduced, to the everlasting benefit of its fair wearers. These corsets are constructed on purely scientific principles, and while they are thoroughly charged with electro-magnetism, they impart no shock to the body, but rather a delightful sensation, rendering instant relief in many instances from the severe aches and pains to which all flesh is heir.

I would probably just ignore this show, or chalk it down to a spoof, it wasn't created by David Nutter, who directed the pilots of Smallville, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Supernatural, Dark Angel, Space: Above And Beyond, and various other shows. He's become known as the go-to guy for pilots, because his pilots have a higher-than-average batting average of getting a show to series. And he's worked on a lot of science fiction, including several episodes of the X-Files and M.A.N.T.I.S.

Scarlet stars Natassia Malthe, who appeared in such fine films as Bloodrayne II and Alone In The Dark II. The miniseries' official website refers to it as a "hit TV show" (which seems a bit optimistic) and says it's coming out at the end of the month... but no mention of which network it'll be on. Is it direct to DVD? Or online somewhere? I'm not sure. (As someone says on IMDB, "It seems a little off.") I actually spent a fair bit of time today trying to talk to Nutter's reps to find out the deal. But the trailer is so awesomely over-the-top and Alias-esque, I figured I should share it. [Scarlet: The Series]

Taking testosterone actually strengthens bones weakened by the natural aging process, a process that is accelerated after women go through menopause. Could testosterone be the new wonder drug women have been looking for? In a release, the researchers said:

Testosterone administration appears to reduce bone turnover, perhaps closing the gap between resorption and formation . . . and the effects of testosterone on long-term bone metabolism are unclear, but are expected to have at least a protective effect on existing bone mass over time by preventing unwanted increases in bone turnover that are frequently associated with osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is often associated with high bone turnover (increases in bone resorption as well as in bone formation) which results in decreased BMD.

Testosterone Replacement Therapy Beneficial [Eurekalert]

For my money, two of the scariest science horror flicks out there are David Cronenberg's 1980s version of The Fly, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. What stands out about them, aside from the fact that they are eat-your-arm scary, is that they are both sustained, visually-arresting movies about men going apeshit because they are men.

The Fly is a simple tale of a guy who has invented a teleportation pod that has a bug in it — literally. One day when our mad scientist Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is zooming between pods a fly gets stuck in there with him and the computer decides the best way to deal with the situation is to merge the two creatures genetically and create BrundleFly.

The film's special effects sometimes look strange and jerky to our CGI-trained senses, but Cronenberg manages to use a puppet-and-prosthetics infrastructure to his advantage by sticking to visuals that look as real as possible. When our mad scientist Jeff Brundle merges genetically with a fly and starts to transform, we are truly grossed out by his mulchy face and sudden need to eat sugary food by barfing on it first and then slurping it up fly-style.

Brundle is a stereotypical male science geek, totally obsessed with his machines and teleportation experiments to the point of caring about little else (though he does take some time out to get with Geena Davis — who wouldn't?) He's your basic guy nerd who doesn't give a crap about his body or meatspace. It's all about the machines. Brundle's rapid physical deterioration into half-fly, half-man is as pathetic as it is terrifying: He makes us gag and we feel sorry for him, so when he goes lethal, we sort of understand why. His gooey revenge is exactly what the Star Wars Kid has in mind for us.

28 Days Later draws its frenetic horror from another stereotypical idea about what dudes are like when given the chance. A virus turns most of the population of England into bloodthirsty, mindless superzombies, and one of the only holdouts against the diseased hordes is a military squadron holed up in a fortified mansion in the country. Our heroes, who have also managed to survive and escape London, join the military dudes for safety.

But then they discover the truly scary shit. These military guys, led by Christopher Eccleston at his most eye-buggingly Naziesque, have been trying to lure women into their little lair so that they can imprison them, rape them, and "restart the human race." Unfortunately, two of our heroes are female and now they're trapped between zombieland and a dark, dudely place.

This is a gory movie, but its horror doesn't come from looking at decaying bodies like it does in The Fly. Instead, it's scary because we're watching a decaying society. In Boyle's vision of the apocalypse, a bunch of guys with guns are more horrifying than any genetic disaster. He seems to suggest that men automatically revert to a state of violence and rape when provoked, and the inevitability of that transformation is what terrifies — the fact that these men seem so blind to the fact that they've become monsters.

And yet one of the heroes of 28 Days, Jim, is a guy who refuses to join Eccleston and his rape gang. He has no interest in possessing his female companions, and his blood-soaked rescue of the women takes up the latter half of the film. I think seeing the evil military guys through the eyes of another man who doesn't want to be like them makes this movie even more of a nail-biter. It would be easy for Jim to join up, to stay safe in the house protected by their guns, and to have a little gang rape for fun on the side. But he fights tooth and nail (literally) to stop that from happening.

In fighting the monstrous men, of course, Jim has to become a little bit like them. Those fight scenes are some of the most chair-grippingly intense I have ever seen. Scary, gory, shocking.

That's true horror, people. And never a vadge in sight.

At least the pre-torn skirts and tops will save the cyborgs a lot of time, when they catch up with you. And it's good that one skirt says "CANNIBAL" on it, lest your captors forget what they are.

Meanwhile, self-proclaimed postapocalyptic designer Yeohlee Teng unveiled her fall 2008 collection last month, and it actually does look like stuff that might offer some protection from falling satellites and spattering monster blood. Could this be a rare instance where mainstream fashion is actually smarter than subculture wear? Look at this gallery and decide for yourself: Yeohlee photos by Scott Gries/Getty Images for IMG.

Basically, last night's first episode was all about how it takes a Terminator to teach humans the violence behind tenderness.

The Sleeping With The Enemy sequences, where we see through the eyes of a random Terminator who's married a woman in order to get access to the traffic-light system she's beta-testing, were incredibly well done, and super disturbing. And I loved the chat between Lena and Brian Austin Green about whether they'd know if they were married to a machine. It turns out that faking a marriage, even a rollicking sex life with ocean cruises, is way easier than impersonating an FBI agent.

When we've seen through a Terminator's eyes before, it's usually been just a sort of "Kill The Mutherfucker (Y/N)" screen with a grid framing their squirmy victim. But this was way more sophisticated, just like the "infiltration model" whose vision we were seeing through. It definitely lent a bit of weight to the Terminators=Cylons thing the show is starting to have.

The first hour of last night's two-hour Terminator: SCC finale was pure sleaze. From the dorky goth boy who shivers as he talks about crowd-surfing at a Bjork concert, to the double shower incursions (first Garret Dillahunt's Terminator and then Lena Headey both walk in on boys in the shower and stare at them) it was just all kind of crazy. And the moment where John Connor cuts Summer Glau's head open and lovingly rips out her cyber-brain was actually weirdly tender and sweet, and yet ridiculously sexual. (And then when Summer reboots, she catches John giving her the post-coital moon-eyes.)

The second hour was mostly just another one of the show's random who-has-the-chess-playing-computer episodes, where there's a lot of running around and spy drama. I hope the show gets a second season, but I also hope it isn't all about the chess program and which random gangster has it this week. It's already starting to get a bit silly. And wasn't Skynet (the super computer which takes over the world in the future) supposed to be a miiltary project? I know, I know, the military buys the chess computer or something. It's just a bit tenuous.

There were two awesomely random bits in the otherwise serviceable second hour: the Johnny Cash music playing over the lingering ballet of the Terminator tossing dead FBI agents into the swimming pool. And the scene where Brian Austin Green takes his nephew, John Connor, to see John's dad (and BAG) as kids, playing ball in the pre-apocalyptic sunshine.

Altogether, the two episodes back to back made a pretty strong argument for giving the show a second chance next fall. And since the show squeaked into second place behind ABC and did well among 18-to-49-year olds, it's looking a bit more optimistic. Fingers crossed!

Healey writes:

The BMI range of Marvel women is much less varied than that of all other groups and tends to the low end of the "normal" BMI range. This result is surprising, considering that many of the women sampled are martial artists or extremely capable physically and should, if anything, have a BMI that indicates a higher body fat level than is actually present.

The BMI range of Marvel men is more varied and tends to just over the upper limit of the "normal" BMI range. However, it is still less varied than that of the "real world" male and female groups.

We stress that given the physical and biological vagaries of the Marvel Universe and the relatively small sample sizes involved, these results are not conclusive. Data comparing male and female athletes from both world might provide more accurate comparative results, and we suggest this as a point for further research.

However, advance data indicates that Marvel women are portrayed as having a disturbingly low BMI compared to the healthy BMI range of their male counterparts. Furthermore, the range of body types expressed by Marvel women is surprisingly small. The distribution of BMIs in Figure 1 is by far the sharpest, with little variation from the mean compared to Marvel men, and far less variation than we see in actual men and women. This is true to a lesser extent for males in the Marvel universe as well.

The Marvel male is predisposed to be on the heavy side of healthy, which can be explained by the increased muscle mass of intense physical acitvity. The average Marvel female is approaching underweight despite a presumably active lifestyle. This may corroborate sociological and literary observations that in the Marvel Universe, women must fulfil criteria for being attractive by Western standards before fulfilling the criteria of biological realism.

The "real" age of Marvel Universe persons is frequently altered by the powers or mutations of individuals, non-Euclidean time, cryogenics, magic, biochemical solutions, alternative dimensions, radiation, cloning and resurrection. The 20-29 year old age range was chosen as the most appropriate range comparison for the apparent physical age of most adult Marvel characters.

Comparative Sex-Specific Body Mass Index in the Marvel Universe and the Real World [paper]

It turned out that men and women use exactly the same parts of their brains to engage in the imaginative exercise required to imagine, a future scenario. Even more intriguing was that both genders relied heavily on the Hippocampus, a part of the brain that's usually associated with memory. Write the authors in a study published earlier this year in the journal Hippocampus:

Behavioral, lesion and neuroimaging evidence show striking commonalities between remembering past events and imagining future events. In a recent event-related fMRI study, we instructed participants to construct a past or future event in response to a cue. Once an event was in mind, participants made a button press, then generated details (elaboration) and rated them. The elaboration of past and future events recruited a common neural network.

Image by Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP.

QUIZ

1. Do you fight with your friends over whether Starbuck and Apollo would be better for each other than Starbuck and Anders on Battlestar Galactica? Or insist that Martha would be a more fit girlfriend for the Doctor than Rose, on Doctor Who? If you have these kinds of debates about any couples (real or potential) in a show, add 5 points to your score.

2. When you buy DVD box sets of your favorite show, do you skip to the episodes that show the most tension between people in your favorite couple? Plus 5 points for that. If you have ever bought a DVD that is specifically related to one relationship, like the Buffy/Spike special edition, give yourself 20 points.

3. Do you suspect it's just a scam to boost ratings when when two characters get together for a romantic liaison and then conveniently break it off one episode later? Take 5 points off your score.

4. Have you ever had a dream about your favorite couple from a TV show? Plus 5 points. Plus 20 points if you dreamed that you were one member of the couple.

5. Did you think the whole Han Solo/Princess Leia thing was either A) a lame plot diversion to get chicks to see a Star Wars movie, or B) a sexist plot to undermine Leia's power? If A or B, take 5 points off your score.

6. Did the love scenes between Padme and Anakin in Revenge of the Sith make you yearn for a fast-forward button? Well, that makes you normal. No points added or subtracted.

7. Have you ever thought maybe certain characters in the Star Trek universe are too slutty and need to settle down with certain characters who are more faithful? Give yourself 5 points.

8. Do you know that people write Shipper fiction on LiveJournal and share it with each other? Simply having that knowledge, even if you've never read any, means giving yourself 2 points.

9. Did you squeak - out loud OR in your mind - during the scene in Serenity when Kaylee and Simon got it on? Give yourself 5 points.

10. Are you bummed that Ripley from the Alien movies never hooked up with anybody? Plus 2 points. Have you tried to match her up in your mind with spaceship captains from other movies or TV shows? Plus 10 points.

SCORE

Less than 0 points. You're pragmatic about pop culture and maybe a little cynical about love.

Less than 10 points. You're just a normal person who enjoys science fiction and has occasional naughty thoughts.

10-20 points. Your ship is veering into Shipper territory. We suspect you fast-forward to the shippy parts of stories.

20-40 points. You've read at least one piece of fanfic, and more likely a thousand.

More than 41-50 points. Not only do you have a LiveJournal where you write about your favorite Ship, but you probably have a gang of friends who hate the rival Ship. You also refer to yourself as a Shipper in mixed company as if everybody knows what that means.

More than 50 points. You are to blame for the scene where Troi shaves Riker in the tub in Star Trek: Insurrection. Go sit in the corner with this silly hat on!

Would you believe John if he threatened to beat you to death? Maybe if he said he'd slap you sorta hard. Oh, and then they leave sideburn guy stranded in a minefield. Cold!
So there's a lot of talk in this episode about FutureJohn and what he would do. Sadly, we can only hope that FutureJohn is smarter than the present-day version, who decides that sneaking into a soon-to-be Terminator factory without any sort of plan is a great idea. He gets trapped in a bunker with the world's shittiest boss. And of course he has to call Mommy (on the super-convenient rotary dial phone in the airtight bunker) to come bail him out. It's all because John is mourning for the Suicide Girl in the previous episode.

Meanwhile, what was up with Summer Glau not being able to work the television? She's the most advanced robot in the universe and she can't get Video 2 to pop up? And then there's the weird moment where Sarah's sympathizing with John having to deal with mega-complicated science homework to do with ionic bonding. And John's like, "Bitch, it's not that hard."

Sarah ends the show with a horrendous voice-over comparing our children to evil cyborgs from the future. And golems, just to make it more psycho. Because just like Skynet, we create our children but then we can't control them. (Although to be fair, Sarah hasn't tried using a cattle prod on John yet.)

This was definitely the first hit of Sarah Connor Chronic that felt sub-standard. It wasn't just all of John's dumb decisions, which we're supposed to think were gutsy and cool. Also, there was the whole plastic surgeon plot. You know you're in trouble when the young FBI guy is pointing out all the flaws in the plot, and we're all nodding along at home. So the plastic surgeon transformed that one Terminator (who suddenly has a name, Cromartie?) into the exact duplicate of this other guy. Using magical surgery pixie dust. And the surgery healed up instantly, thanks to hyberbolicsyllabicsesquidalymistic...wha huh?

The study focused on scratching, which is a common, slightly-painful thing that everybody does to relieve itches. Researchers stuck people in an MRI brain imaging machine and scratched their legs with brushes for five minutes, watching to see which parts of their brains were active or non-active. Areas associated with painful feelings became less active, as well as areas associated with memory. The researchers say:

We know scratching is pleasurable, but we haven't known why. It's possible that scratching may suppress the emotional components of itch and bring about relief.

The researchers suggest that further study might reveal a way to produce a drug that has the same effects as scratching or cutting does on the brain — thus preventing physical damage while providing the same relief.

Ah, that's the spot [Reuters]

Research suggests why scratching is so relieving [Eurekalert]

Dawn's mutant puss is her only source of power in the small, conservative town where she lives beneath a nuclear power plant and goes to a school where concerned parents have put giant gold stickers over pictures of the female anatomy in her textbook. Active in her local church chastity club, where she gives passionate speeches about virginity being a "gift," Dawn is a sexual innocent. And sexually repressed.

Inevitably, when Dawn starts to fall off the virginity wagon she does it with a guy who turns out to be a jerk. Instead of the heavy petting she's ready for, he tries to go all the way. And when Dawn resists, he knocks her head against some rocks and proceeds to have his way with her. Luckily, her puss never sleeps and we get our first glimpse of the extremely graphic results of Dawn's evolutionary advantage.

Terrified by what's happened, Dawn proceeds to fuck and bite her way through a series of awful male stereotypes (the molesting gynecologist, the sleazy pickup artist), slowly growing more confident that her vadge is there to protect her rather than plague her. Throughout the gore and stump-squirting and animals-eating-severered-penises (oh yes, we go there), Teeth exudes a genuine sense of dark fun and emotional urgency. You might even consider the teeth Dawn's fantasy, a way of coping with her tragic family life and a world whose sexual messages are often violently contradictory.

Director Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of the cartoony pomo artist Ray) wants his film to be a satire, and it works that way, though his targets are sometimes too broad and easy. There's a simplistic Red States = bad, men = rapists message here that comes across as a bit tinny at times. But you can forgive the film its excesses for the same reasons you forgave the brilliant rape-revenge flick Freeway, or the sexy-horror of werewolf puberty movie Ginger Snaps. Teenage sexual awakenings, especially for girls, are full of blood and guts and fear. That's what Teeth reflects.

For anyone who appreciates gory social satire, and thinks of high school as living on the Hellmouth, Teeth is your freaky date movie this weekend. The film is also a sharp rejoinder to the cloying Juno, which for all its great acting and true heartwarmingness, still got it wrong by reducing the nervous terror-pleasure of teen sexuality to sexless mommyhood. Dawn may be a mutant, but she's a real girl. And we're lucky that Lichtenstein isn't afraid to show us in graphic detail what that means.

Dr. Gladys Hobby was a Vassar graduate who received her M.D. at Columbia. In 1952, Woman's Home Companion described how she "tended thousands of flasks—as solicitous about her molds as an anxious mother might be about a sick infant." The same article also noted that chemicals were compounded during drug company research "in the hope that they will have valuable properties—just as an experimental cook will invent a new cake in the hope it will taste good." In other words, whipping up a batch of cupcakes gave you practically all the background you needed to be a girl scientist. "How do you make out in the kitchen?" Seventeen asked readers in 1951. "A good chemist needs the kind of imagination, ingenuity and patience that makes a good cook."

No cooking skills? A career in science might still be for you. "One scientist (male) said to us [Seventeen magazine again], 'Women in science? Yes, I think they're fine. You should see the deft way those girls handle animals in the laboratory.' Another one (also male) assured us women's ability for minute work came in handy on many an experiment." Nimble-fingered girls could juggle those lab rats and clean test tubes like nobody's business. Oh, wait, you didn't want to actually be in charge did you?

Here's the official episode summary. I love that she's a conservative talk-show host when she's not dressing like a freak:

THE GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY BATTLE IN SMALLVILLE — While secretly working for Oliver (guest star Justin Hartley), Chloe (Allison Mack) intercepts one of Lex's (Michael Rosenbaum) project files, but she is attacked by the Black Canary (guest star Alaina Huffman), a mystery woman with a subsonic cry. Dinah Lance, Black Canary's alter ego, is a conservative talk show host who is working at the Daily Planet and clashes with Lois (Erica Durance).

Photo by Getty Images.

• Summer Glau is a better foil than Katee Sackhoff. Both Bionic Woman and Chronicles give our hero a crazy-ish cyberwoman to bounce off. But Sarah Connor and her pet Terminator are developing an awesome buddy-movie vibe that will be fun to watch. They can play good-cop, bad-cop, except that Glau really is prepared to shoot the criminals that Headey only wants to intimidate. (Like last night's fake-ID crime czar.) The scene last night where Headey pretends to be Glau's stepmom to get out of a sticky cop situation was priceless.

  Sackhoff's crazy lady version of the bionic woman was the best thing about Bionic Woman, but she had no chemistry with star Michelle Ryan. And every time Sackhoff appeared, the message was clear: bro's before ho's. Jaime Sommer is way better off letting the boys tell her what to do than hanging out with other cybernetically enhanced women.

• 
  
• Sarah Connor is a good mom. Okay, we maybe could have done without the bit where Sarah tells John where to find the turkey in the fridge. It felt like the show was telling us to go make ourselves a sandwich. But we'd way rather have those unsubtle moments (like the "Sarah used to read Wizard of Oz to John" speech) than Bionic Woman's constant Jaime-is-an-incompetent-surrogate-mom subplot. If we had to sit through one more scene where Jaime apologizes for letting sis down, we'd be rooting for the terrorists.
• 
  
• Sarah Connor calls the shots. We see her being competent and making smart decisions, like the motorcycle thing and figuring out that Enrique is a snitch. And the scene where Glau tells Headey that she's the "best fighter," bar none got me kind of choked up. Sarah doesn't need the dumb suits at the Berkut Group stiffening her spine and aiming her at the bad guys.

One reason the pilot moves so fast is to haul us from the status quo at the end of Terminator 2 to the show's new status. At the start, Sarah and John Connor are still hiding out, but they think they've averted the creation of Skynet and the war against the machines. They find out differently when a Terminator shows up to kill John, and a nice Terminator (Glau) comes to the rescue. The Connors decide to try once again to prevent Skynet from ever happening. Several bad-ass action sequences later, they find a time machine and jump forward to 2007, the new start date for Skynet. (And that's why Glau ends up naked and kick-boxing.)

We also meet some new supporting cast members: the FBI agent who's chasing Sarah Connor, Tommy Lee Jones style, and the fiance she ran out on. So the Terminators, the Feds and the fiance will all be on her ass every week. The searching-for-Skynet plot is the show's best hope of not feeling like a weekly cat-and-mouse game.

There are a few bad signs: Summer Glau is great as a killing machine, but not so great when she's pretending to be a normal girl at first. So if it's true that future episodes will feature her character going to school with John and trying to act normal, that could be an issue. Thomas Dekker, as John Connor, has a bit of a mouth-breathing issue.

And then there's the wimpifying of Sarah Connor's character. It seems to be pretty deliberate, and is a major bad sign for the show. The original pilot which circulated nine months ago showed her character as a non-stop hardass. Her only weakness was an excess of paranoia and rage, which threatened to drive her son away. The televised pilot adds a new scene, where Summer Glau is stitching up Sarah Connor's wounds. Lena Headey, as Connor, whimpers and says that she can't keep running or she'll lose her mind. And her son will leave her. It feels as though the network wrote saying, "Have her show more weakness." And you can bet those moments of weakness will be written into future episodes as well.

And then there's the final monologue. Here's the original version. Note also the original actor playing Sarah's fiance:And then here's the televised version, with a nice outdoor swingset scene instead of the indoor gun-flexing:

He must escape or die.
. . . Almost instantly the shrill sound of a whistle broke to his right and a street guard stepped from a doorway, struggling to free her rifle from her garments.
"Male Pig!" she screamed. "Halt!"

Keith flees underground, literally and figuratively, where he meets Angela, a boot-wearing resistance fighter hottie. Luckily for Keith, while women on the outside reject all males, Angela and other female members of the Subterraneans resistance movement are "attached to the men with arm-clinging closeness." Soon he and Angela are working (arm-in-arm, of course) to assassinate the President, and reclaim gender supremacy for men.
The Feminists had about as much to do with the women's movement as Cheez Whiz does with a sharp Wisconsin cheddar but it probably simultaneously terrified and titillated readers threatened by the very thought of those uppity, "bra-burning" libbers. At least one person was thrilled by the vision it presented—don't miss the editorial comment scrawled on the front cover!

I want to call all these movies scifi because they're about technology doing strange things, which is pretty much the ultimate B-movie scifi plot. But of course then the whole ghost element gets in the way because homicidal spirits of drowned girls or neglected girls or raped girls or you-fill-in-the-scary-girl-thing are not the same as the smooth evil voice of HAL telling Dave about how he'll never open the pod bay door. And yet HAL and the drowned chick from The Ring have a lot in common.

I'd go so far as to say that the horror represented by the scary girls of haunted-tech flicks equals the fear of HAL and every other psychotic AI like say the one in Virtuosity (remember when the interwebs were haunted by Russell Crowe? how did they fit his hunkitude in those pipes?). What's the difference between a so-advanced-it-might-as-well-be-magic AI like HAL and a special-mental-powers-beyond-the-grave mutant girl whose spirit lives on a VHS tape? Pretty much nothing, except one pretends to be science and the other leaves it up to the viewer to decide.

After all, if you wanted to look at The Ring as scifi you really could. Before the psychic kid becomes a ghost, she has awesome mental powers that are right out of X-Men or Heroes (both of which are firmly scifi). Plus, scary girl's mom takes her to doctors who do tons of scientific tests on her, so there's your science, bitches. She has a power that can be measured by science, but not explained by it. Just like HAL, whose madness could never have been predicted by Grace Hopper or other famous computer science nerds.

Haunted technology even has a long and fertile tradition in real life. Sarah Winchester, who built the crazy Winchester Mystery House in Silicon Valley during the late nineteenth century, believed that she was haunted by ghosts in the Winchester Repeating Rifles that killed a zillion natives in the West and made her husband a fortune. Guns are a perfect technology to haunt, if you think about it.

Videodrome, David Cronenberg's mid-1980s scifi flick about haunted televisions, also includes a haunted gun. Or perhaps these televisions and that gun are just controlled by some kind of demonic "broadcast signal" with a pseudo-scientific origin. One could say similar things about the abysmal flick Event Horizon, about a haunted spaceship. Or is it just a ship inhabited by an evil alternate dimension whose properties can be explained in fake sci-babble? What difference does it make? It's all magic; it's all about how technology is mutating us and turning our future selves into something so techno-strange that it's as if the next generation will be monsters.

So I'm going to see One Missed Call, and I'm going to pretend that it's science fiction because whether it's ghosts or Cybermen taking over our bluetooth headsets it's all the same basic stuff. Whether or not it's good stuff . . . well, I'll tell you that in my review tomorrow.