Hot for... bank teller??

There's something about a woman in uniform. How else to explain the seeming proliferation of websites/Yahoo groups/etc. dedicated to female news anchors and weathergirls... er... Gender non-specific Meteorologists (who are hot). These women seldom dress provocatively, often are only seen from the chest up, and usually only from one camera angle. Yet apparent teams of shut-ins with Tivo hooked up to laptops spend hours making grainy screen grabs and putting them up to share with fellow meals-on-wheels recipients.

And bless their obsessions.

Some of the slightly less single-minded among us have fallen into the WIU (woman in uniform) undertow. How else explain the raptures and adorations heaped upon Gillian Anderson during her stint as Scully on The X-Files. Chris Carter, the show's creator, seemed to have tapped into a dormant gene in male viewers that reacted to a "less-is-more" trigger. True, Sci-fi fans have a certain affinity for uniforms... but even on the flagship Star Trek series the female uniforms were essentially go-go dresses and all the alien women were swathed in togas and bathed in soft-focus lighting.

The current crop of CSI/FBI/CIA shows perhaps owe their success to this template as well. Or maybe I'm thinking about Without a Trace's Poppy Montgomery too much. But if your name is Poppy I'll think about you too. Promise.

In the meantime today's track is from the 1996 musical tribute to The X-Files, Songs in the Key of X. It's a compilation that collects seemingly disparate artists like Sheryl Crow, Nick Cave and Danzig... yet somehow manages to sound cohesive. Some versions of the CD sported nifty-keen hidden tracks you could only get to if you pressed stop as soon as the disc started then backed up to before Track 1! If you did you were treated to Dirty Three's rendition of the theme song.

One standout track was by The Foo Fighters, not especially a favourite band, however they do a slightly muscled-up version of Gary Numan's Down in the Park... a track that appeared on his 1979 album Replicas.



Foo Fighters-Down in the Park