Month: April 2026

The Scooby Doo Gang Believed in the Supernatural

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, TV & Movies, Uncategorized2 Comments

I recently game across a fantastic tweet:

If it disappears, the text is:

Scooby-Doo is a devastating commentary on the prejudices of the Moderns. In their single-minded, one might almost say fanatical, desire to unmask all supernatural phenomena as the products of cranks and criminals, the Gang blinds all they encounter, and are indeed blinded themselves, to the supreme supernatural phenomenon which their enterprise – in point of fact, their collective ontology as such- is actually predicated upon: they are in the company of a talking dog.

This is both hilarious and true of moderns. The only thing is, it’s not actually true of Scooby Doo and the gang. At least in the original show—Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!—the gang always accepted the supernatural explanation at first, and only changed their mind once they were presented with evidence which made the supernatural explanation impossible, or at least highly improbable. “Wait a minute, what does a ghost need with…” was the response to more than a few clues.

The only real exceptions to this are the episodes in which the alleged phenomenon was entirely natural, such as the ape man in Never Ape an Ape Man or the beast in The Beast Is Awake In Bottomless Lake.

I’ve watched all of the episodes of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! at least a half-dozen times in the last ten years with my children, and I must confess I’m not sure why people remember it as being out to inculcate naturalism or to debunk the super-natural. Yes, the explanations always turned out to be something that a detective could detect, but everyone in the episode always took it for granted that the explanation could have turned out to be a ghost, or a phantom, or a mummy, or a headless specter, or whatever the creature was. It just turned out to not be, this time. But the gang always took a very reasonable attitude—just because the last 23 ghosts turned out to be fake doesn’t mean that this one is fake. Every one of those ghosts was fake in a different way.

I can only think of one instance where anyone doubts the existence of ghosts, which is in Haunted House Hangup:

Shaggy, the nonmaterial embodiment, or essence or organism that’s seen as a specter, wraith, or apparition has been scientifically proven to be a sheer myth. In other words, ghosts don’t exist!

Of course, Shaggy immediately replies:

Yeah, but does the ghost know that?

And about two minutes later, Velma is running away with the rest of the gang from a ghostly floating candle and before the halfway point Velma exclaims, “Yikes! There is a headless specter!” before running away from it, too.

Poirot is a Stage Frenchman

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s an interesting book, published in 1930, called Masters of Mystery. An overview of detective fiction until that point, it made the interesting observation of Hercule Poirot:

Presumably for the benefit of the stupid Captain Hastings, Poirot talks in broken English—the broken English of the music-hall Frenchman… Moreover, should this music-hall Frenchman interpserse his lines with a few phrases of his own tongue, the supports of M. Hugo (the Correspondence King) expereince a superiority complex: while the embarrassed monoglots captivated by the flavour of the genuine are compelled in self-defense to join in the laugh… Poirot talks atrocious English: he cannot hold a candle to Hanaud. But it is comic: it does help the caricature. And as regards the [French phrases], Mrs. Christie has been wise enough not to expect more from her readers than a public-school smattering of the French idiom.

I’ve come to appreciate this more as I’ve been playing a mobile game, which has a built-in translator, with people from around the world. As I’ve begun picking up a few words of several different languages, I’ve come to appreciate that Poirot says in French only those words which are the first ones that anyone learns of another language if one is learning by exposure rather than in a classroom. “Hello,” “Good morning,” “thank you,” “my friend.”

It is ironic that the only things Poirot says in French are exactly the things that a French speaker would begin to say in English after two days of living in England. But there is an excellent reason for this irony: they are also exactly the things that the average Englishman has a hope of knowing in French, so that the lack of translation is not a problem for the reader.

You can contrast this with Dorothy L. Sayers who will have Lord Peter and Harriet Vane say entire sentences in French without translation, and most of us need to simply guess at the meaning, shrug our shoulders, and move on. (She’ll do the same with Latin, too.) The way that Poirot uses a few recognizable French words and a bit of French grammar or literally-translated idioms may be unrealistic, but it does a much better job, I think, of getting across how foreign he is while keeping him intelligible.

(And, of course, it’s also interesting how he explained it himself at the end of Three Act Tragedy.)

Thermodynamics and Reducing Fat

On By Christopher LansdownIn health, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There is a popular view on the subject of trying to reduce the amount of fat on one’s body, which is that the first law of thermodynamics states that if you eat fewer Calories than you burn, you must lose weight. This is, of course, false, since the laws of thermodynamics have to do with energy, not with weight. What is true is that if you consume fewer Calories than you expend, the total energy in your body must go down. But the laws of physics say nothing whatever about where that reduction in energy will come from.

As far as the laws of physics are concerned, it’s entirely possible that the total energy reduction will come from your glycogen stores, your muscles, and your internal organs. Heck, as far as the laws of thermodynamics are concerned, you can actually increase your fat stores on a Calorie deficit, so long as the energy added to them comes from someplace else in your body. Indeed, I’ve read about some interesting experiments on hibernating ground squirrels where after surgically removing fat, the squirrels (who were eating nothing because they were hibernating) added to their now-depleted fat stores.

The problem, I think, is that the people who love to talk about Calories-in-Calories-out or the laws of thermodynamics have an extremely mechanical view of the human body—by which I mean they think of it as if it’s the kind of machine that human beings build. They think of fat stores like the gasoline tank in a car. When human beings build a machine, we tend to have only one place where energy comes from because that makes it much easier to build. Though even in truth, even our more complicated machines have multiple energy storage sites. The typical car has the mechanical system driven by the engine and also an electrical system driven by the car’s battery. And the two systems are linked because the battery is recharged (and the electrical system can be partially powered by) the alternator (a kind of generator) which is powered by the engine.

So to be more accurate, the people who talk about thermodynamics tend to talk about the human body as if it’s the kind of machine that they would design, if they knew enough about machines to design them. It never occurs to them that the human body can break down every part of itself and will if it deems it necessary. It also never occurs to them that it can significantly down-regulate its metabolism. It never occurs to them how many forms down-regulating the metabolism can take, from feeling colder at the same temperature to reducing the amount of exercise taken with a feeling of lethargy, to reducing immune function, to slowing down healing, and still other things.

It also, I think, never occurs to these people the degree to which the body will abandon almost everything in the pursuit of food if it feels that it’s starving, and that includes things like sleeping more than four hours a night and being able to carry on a modern job.

That all this never occurs to them makes it much easier, I think, to talk about the laws of thermodynamics in the context of reducing the amount of fat on the body.