Why Tondelayo?

Steamy locales
Set upon by a spider

The linguistic appropriateness of a name like “Tondelayo” for a young woman from a bumiputera group somewhere on Borneo can certainly be questioned (although we should note that she tells us that it is not her real name).  But I wanted a tribute to a particular steamy namesake, the character played by Hedy Lamarr in White Cargo (1942).

Hedy has gotten tributes in the Gnosis College world before, and she well deserves it.  In Ecstasy (1933) not only did she do a very bold nude scene:

but she also created what might well have been the first depiction of female orgasm in a “mainstream” movie.

But were it just for those things alone Hedy might not deserve the multiple tributes.  What really puts her over the top is that in 1942 she, together with bad-boy composer George Antheil, took out one of the first patents for spread-spectrum radio communications — the technology your mobile phone uses.  (They were supporting the war effort by trying to create a torpedo that could be guided by wireless transmissions.)  The government took the patent and sat on it, but at least in 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy a special award in recognition of her pioneering effort.

I mean, can you think of any Hollywood sex symbol working today who you could see as an engineer? Talk about deserving tribute from Erotic Mad Science!

And never forget — the sexiest organ a woman has…is her brain.

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