« PREVIOUS ENTRY
Some stuff online …

NEXT ENTRY »
Kids and Kong

“You blundering bag of bolts!”

When I was a kid, one of the greatest joys of the TV series Lost in Space was watching the interactions between Dr. Zachary Smith and the robot. Smith would lose his shit about every two or three minutes and hurl an insult at the machine. Since the show ran for three years, that’s a whole lot of name-calling — as the folks at Promised Planet discovered, when they watched all the episodes and transcribed every single epipthet in an alphabetized list. It’s online here, and this is a sample:

cackling cracker-barrel
cybernetic simpleton
dehumanized lie-dispenser
ferrous Frankenstein
fugitive from a junkyard
hardware hyena
incompetent walking ingot
misguided mechanical misery
servile mechanism
tin-plated traitor
veritable transistorized tiger

That’s only a small fraction; there are a couple hundred epithets there! Someone should perform that at a poetry reading.

(Thanks to El Rey for this one too!)


blog comments powered by Disqus

Search This Site


Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (Penguin Press). You can order the book now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells, Indiebound, or through your local bookstore! I'm also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. Email is here or ping me via the antiquated form of AOL IM (pomeranian99).

More of Me

Twitter
Tumblr

Recent Comments

Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson