I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Things that I am enjoying:

Haagen-Dasz’s “Five” ice cream: five ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and one flavor. Coffee and mint are excellent, very soft and creamy and still lower-fat than many others, and I look forward to brown sugar if I ever get tired of coffee.

Harper’s Island: Cheesy and soapy and unrepentantly gory, with plenty of familiar faces and a promise that at least one person will die every episode and the killer will be revealed at the end of the short season: guilty pleasure.

Fringe: yahtzee’s enjoyment finally got me to mainline the first season over the past few days. It took me a few episodes to get into the story of how FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and her father-and-son team of science geniuses investigate unusual happenings related to something called The Pattern. (The father has been released from a mental hospital into his son’s custody at the request of the FBI, because he’s the expert on the “fringe” science at issue in The Pattern. A special unit in the FBI has divined the existence of The Pattern before Olivia shows up, but doesn’t know much more than that.) The “science” is laughable almost even by X-Files standards. But! There’s Olivia.

Imagine James T. Kirk, except without the dickishness. Self-confident and fully justified in that self-confidence; able to crack jokes and speak multiple languages and remember small details to make connections and take out several assailants at once. Olivia has an angsty family backstory that makes her even more awesome in a way female characters are rarely allowed to be; plus she also has a tender and supportive relationship with her sister and her niece. She begins the series with the discovery that her lover (and partner) has betrayed her and her country—and those betrayals are always linked by everyone around, including her—but she still has faith in herself and she still has men who’d love to have more of her attention. When the agent in charge of her division tells her she’s being too emotional, she first calls him out on the sexism of that judgment and then explains exactly why her emotions make her such a very fine agent. I’d actually rather have my daughter grow up to be Olivia Dunham than Wendy Watson.

I was thinking about why I love Olivia so much more than, say, Sydney Bristow. I find Olivia (played by Anna Torv) to have huge amounts of charisma, but I also think it matters to me that she doesn’t have a secret identity. Everyone around her, with the exception of the bad guys, knows exactly how awesome she is. Young science guy and FBI ally guy spend a fair amount of time just sort of gazing at her with raw admiration. OK, maybe that’s mostly me and young science guy, but her team trusts her and follows her orders without hesitation, even when those orders are a little bit nuts. Even though there’s plenty of intrigue and mixed loyalties around her, she is secure in her own judgment and it carries her through.

A few other things about Fringe: (1) If you ignore the ludicrous premises, the writing is solid. Casting/dialogue for victims of the week is often quite good, making them sympathetic in a hurry, and as noted Olivia has an excellent sense of humor, which is put to good use when dealing with young, often resentful science guy and his crazy old dad. (2) The years between Fringe and the X-Files have been well spent for TV visual effects. (3) The FBI guy with whom Olivia often works is Jared Padalecki’s vocal twin, though physically they’re not much alike. (4) Old science guy has a bunch of tics that are the kinds of things usually presented as endearing even though they’re obviously so infuriating as to nearly justify manslaughter. A couple of those tics, but not by any means all, turn out to have a wonderful plot-based justification: a great twist fully backed up by a season’s worth of canon, hidden in plain sight.

Not Awesome: giandujakiss has posted about this before, but here’s another version of the story of the former head of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), who warned everyone about the need for regulation of complex derivatives and was derided, ignored, and stripped of power. Why? Some of the culprits say it was her tone:

Some of the other regulators have said they had problems with Born’s personal style and found her hard to work with. “I thought it was counterproductive. If you want to move forward ... you engage with parties in a constructive way,” Rubin told the Washington Post. “My recollection was ... this was done in a more strident way.” Levitt says Born was “characterized as being abrasive.”

Her supporters, while acknowledging that Born can be uncompromising when she believes she is right, say those are excuses of people who simply did not want to hear what she had to say.

“She was serious, professional, and she held her ground against those who were not sympathetic to her position,” says Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who was a top aide to Born at the CFTC. “I don’t think that the failure to be ‘charming’ should be translated into a depiction of stridency.”

Others find a whiff of sexism in the pushback. “The messenger wore a skirt,” says Marna Tucker, a senior partner at Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell in D.C. and a longtime friend of Born’s. “Could Alan Greenspan take that?”

A whiff of sexism? You think?