The Hotness Constant
Sullivan’s Travels, originally uploaded by Koosama.
Joel McCrea (1905-1990) starred in many fine movies including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Foreign Correspondent, Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story, and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride The High Country.
In Sullivan’s Travels (1941) he plays a successful Hollywood director of lightweight comedies (Ants In Your Plants; Hey, Hey In The Hayloft) who wants to make a “serious” movie (O Brother, Where Art Thou?—a title the Coen Brothers used much later) about the plight of the common man. For his research he hits the road disguised as a hobo and encounters a failed starlet played by Veronica Lake. She declines his offer of an introduction to Ernst Lubitsch, but convinces him to take her along on his research. She’s actually more interested in the guy than in what he can do for her career. This makes perfect sense because he’s hot.
Hotness is inversely proportional to the awareness of one’s own hotness. McCrea who, being a big, handsome lug, is intrinsically hot, does not seem to know the effect he has on women, which makes him even hotter. So H = x/a, in which H is hotness, a is awareness, and x is the hotness constant which spells the difference between a man who is merely attractive and one who makes your chromosomes go boink, boink, boink.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
May 17th, 2007 at 21:26
Other factors to consider:
H=x/a*BAL where BAL (blood alcohol level of the observer) is determined immediately after the declaring his/her observation. If the BAL obtained is within legal limit then BAL=1. Validity of the result is subject to observer’s proper use of eyeglasses & lighting.
Other factors may also affect the outcome e.g. observer’s age, sex, etc.