Yeah, this is all kinds of awesome.

Truth: I’m just kind of shocked the Reid boys didn’t find their way into one of those Samoan gangs you always hear about in Salt Lake City. I mean, they’d fit in, right?

Steven Landsberg has this interesting, university-president career-destroying piece about how, in tennis women choke under pressure more often than men:

You can observe a lot of high achievers under pressure at a Grand Slam tennis tournament. Better yet, you can observe them under variable pressure: Things are a lot tenser when the score is 5-5 than when it’s 0-0. Professor Daniele Paserman of Hebrew University made good use of this variability at the 2006 French Open, U.S. Open, and Wimbledon tournaments. First, he assigned an “importance” to each point in each match. He did this by assigning probabilities to every way the match might unfold, accounting for players’ ratings, the surface they were playing on, and the identity of the server. That allowed him to say things like, “If Roger Federer wins this point, he has a 60 percent chance to win the match; if he loses the point, he has a 55 percent chance.” The 5 percent difference measures the point’s importance.

It turns out that by at least one measure—the number of unforced errors—men play equally well throughout the match. They make unforced errors on about 30 percent of the most important points, about 30 percent of the least important, and about 30 percent of all those in between. But women show a very different pattern: 34 percent unforced errors on the least important points, steadily rising to almost 40 percent on the most important. That’s almost surely too big a difference to be mere coincidence.

What, besides choking, could explain those numbers? Maybe the closest games are usually played late in the match, when players are more fatigued; maybe more of those games involve weak players; maybe more of them occur at the French Open, where the court is harder to play. But professor Paserman tests all these theories, and none stands up to statistical analysis.

Another countertheory: Maybe women play more defensively when the score is tight. If both players just keep lobbing the ball back and forth, there can’t be any forced errors, so all errors are recorded as unforced. In support of this theory, professor Paserman observes that women do play more defensively when the score is tight. (He measures defensive play by speed of serve, length of rallies, and so forth.) But, unfortunately for the countertheory, so do men. When the pressure’s on, both men and women get more defensive (and by about the same amount)—but only women make more errors.

Get Larry Summers on line one!

Massawyrm makes the case that Thomas Harris isn’t a hack–he just hates the character that made him famous:

Thomas Harris hates Hannibal Lector. No, I mean he fucking HATES Hannibal Lector. Hates the ever loving shit out of him. There’s no other explanation outside of mental illness. No, fuck you. It ain’t greed. Harris is a solid writer and Hannibal Lector books wouldn’t be a hard thing to write. He could write book after book after book of Hannibal eating his way across the world while a different cop narrowly misses catching him at the end of EVERY FUCKING BOOK and yet it would still be readable. It would have an audience. And an unending series of cinematic adaptations steadily declining in quality and budget. But this. There is no explanation for this. No explanation for the end of Hannibal. No explanation but that he has come to hate Hannibal Lector and keeps trying to write himself into a hole that no one will bother paying him to write himself out of.

Actually, the same thought occurred to me after reading Hannibal: Harris looked like he was trying to make Lecter so terrible that he’d never have to see his incarnation again.

Bonus: I’m not a big comments reader, but in the AICN comments section are two inspired bits. The first is simply, “Hannibal gotta eat.” Nice to see the Rev. Al Sharpton getting some love. The second is,

Read between the lines in the author’s end note in Hannibal. Harris hates the good doctor and doesn’t want him living in his head. He couldn’t get him to go away by giving him a ‘happily ever after’ with Starling, so now he’s trying to pull a Terminator and kill him off as a child.

Harris’s problem, however, is that he was on the leading edge–heck, he have even been the leading edge–of the torture-porn industry. And his efforts to wreck the franchise have only stoked demand.

Sony fanboy S.B. sends us this link to Onion’s AV Club list of the 15 best uses of pop songs in movies. It’s a pretty solid list–including Boogie Nights, Almost Famous, Goodfellas, and more.

We can all make our case for overlooked scenes, of course. I’d agree with S.B. and say that Aimee Mann’s “One is the loneliest number” from the opening of Magnolia should make the list. You make think otherwise.

How sad is this?

Last weekend, before Because I Said So, I saw the trailer for this summer’s Nancy Drew, and it’s just about as sad as you can imagine. The powers that be have taken a pretty decent teenage detective heroine and tweenified her, ditching the original premise in favor of a generic fish-out-of-water small-town girl moving-to-L.A. and dealing-with-fashion-faux-pas flick. The murder mystery seems secondary at best. It looks like a really pathetic version of Clueless for the Vacant-Stare Generation™, right down to another bad cover of “Kids in America.”

I mention this only as a segue to this tidbit: There is much unfounded speculation that Ben Stiller’s next project will be a buddy comedy with Tom Cruise, in which the two will update the freakin’ Hardy Boys with a film titled Hardy Men.

Galley Friend Michael Goldfarb has another disturbing post about the F-22 Raptor–maybe “disturbing” is too strong a word. How about bizarre: There’s talk of selling the F-22–to Japan.

Japan is, of course, one of our staunchest allies. But talk about one of history’s jokes. Goldfarb has the punchline at the end of this post.

Blog Crush sister-site With Leather points us to this video. I don’t really know how to explain it, except that it’s Marvel superheros, doing the volleyball scene from Top Gun. With Charles Xavier as the ref. And you can’t really imagine how awesome.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmUk-6wLe7E]

Galley Friend R.S. sends along this utterly amazing Pistol Pete highlight reel. If you’re too young to have seen him, this is must viewing. If you remember him, this will make your day. It’s about 6 minutes long, but stick around for the “wrist-pass” around the 3:30 mark and the unbelievable passing montage that starts around 5:00.

Enjoy.