ONLY IN WISCONSIN.

Mark Judge goes clickbaity on us.  "Why Oppenheimer Has Hotter Women Than Barbie."

We used to call them “cool chicks.” They were the girls who, when I was in college in the 1980s, were left-wing, wore their hair in an unorthodox or punk style, read books and didn’t take shit from anyone. They loved Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion and Anne Sexton, but could also talk to you about Henry Miller, Tom Wolfe and Naked Lunch. I still remember one, Tess. I fell for her when we met in a DC bar. A New Kids on the Block video popped up on the nearby video screen. “Twinkies,” Tess sneered, then smiled at me and lit a cigarette. She was self-confident. She wasn’t what Gen Z feminists are—hectoring, didactic, nasty.

The foremothers of the “cool chicks” of the 80s are probably the women depicted in the new film Oppenheimer. The main one that illuminated the screen for me is Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, a communist who has an affair with Robert Oppenheimer in the 1930s. Whereas in Barbie the male characters are useless morons, Tatlock and Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” set off sparks through a exhilarating back-and-forth about books, art, and politics. When they first meet at a party filled with communists, she starts explaining the dogma of Marx. He retorts that it’s different when you read it in German. She marvels that his library has so many books that aren’t related to science or physics. One of them is the Bhagavad Gita—in Sanskrit. She plants herself on top of him, opens the book, and tells him to read a line: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” That leads to sex.

He's trying to be funny while he's being serious.  Reality might be even more compelling.

“I don’t think Barbie and Oppenheimer want to be tied together in any capacity,” Miss America Grace Stanke told WTMJ’s Erik Bilstad on Wisconsin’s Morning News. “I’m super excited for both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Specifically for Oppenheimer as a Nuclear Engineer.”

Stanke, of Wausau, is perhaps the one person who can relate to both films. Stanke, who studied Nuclear Engineering at UW-Madison, was posed the tough question ‘Who is more influential? Barbie or Robert Oppenheimer?’ — a difficult choice to make.

“100% Robert Oppenheimer,” she said. “For me, seeing someone who is able to utilize science and think about it critically is really an incredible thing and an important part of human history and an important part of human future as well.”

Spoiler alert: she went to Oppenheimer first. The meming potential is pretty in pink.

#barbenheimer pic.twitter.com/CNB7VUN3lh

— Nuclear Power Memes (@nukepowermemes) July 21, 2023

I wonder if we can get the doomsday environmentalists to take nuclear electric power seriously for base load power plants and railway electrification without hoping for Mattel or Hollywood to bring out Nuclear Engineer Barbie.