Daily Archives: January 14, 2009

Ricardo Montalban, RIP

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More sad news for Star Trek fans.

Ricardo Montalban of "Fantasy Island" fame, best known to Trekkies as KHAAAAAAAAAN!!!!, died today. He was an excellent actor and brought humanity and scenery-chewing mania to the villainous, but sympathetic Khan.

"Fantasy Island" received high ratings for most of its run on ABC, and still appears in reruns. Mr. Roarke and his sidekick, Tattoo, played by the 3-foot, 11-inch Herve Villechaize, reached the state of TV icons. Villechaize died in 1993.

In a 1978 interview, Montalban analyzed the series’s success:

"What is appealing is the idea of attaining the unattainable and learning from it. Once you obtain a fantasy, it becomes a reality, and that reality is not as exciting as your fantasy. Through the fantasies you learn to appreciate your own realities."

That’s from Moby Dick, by the way.

Links: What Is Evil?

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Are you evil? No, seriously. A researcher is creating a computer image of a person who is truly evil. If life were a movie, it would probably attain sentience and attempt to take over the world. … let’s hope they’re being very careful.

Other researchers are attempting to find the roots of psychopathy. Clearly this is work that needs to be done, but I don’t know how they sleep at night after talking to some of these very scary people.

Scamming people certainly isn’t nice, but is it evil? People have felt very scammed after visiting an apparently very badly-done theme park.

A researcher has replicated one of the very most disturbing studies on evil, mirroring the Milgram study. People actually had to be stopped from administering what they believed were electric shocks to people screaming in pain.

Some people just want to stop evil. I hope they’re careful out there.