I saw a book the other day in Carrboro's best used book store, Nice Price Books. It was Candace Havens', Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy. I couldn't buy it due to lack of money, but I'm really wishing I had now. Having a chance to flip through it I noted that it's pretty much up to date on the entirety of Whedon's career, ending with Firefly the television series (pre-evil-cancellation). What struck me the most, though, was a blurb on the back of the book, "[the author] nails the man who nailed the zeitgeist." Mentioned this to Gerry and all hell broke loose. Next thing we knew, we were trying to figure out what most typified our zeitgeist, which symbols were universal to the zeitgeist, and which were more ephemeral.

Lots of reviews of it on the web. Here's a link to Amazon, if you want to buy it. (and bonus, we get a percentage.)

Here's space for Gerry to put some links I'm sure you'll love: (can he find those things he was talking about?)

[GC: Yeah, I found it. It was basically just some dude's quip on Metafilter combined with Ezra's memory of the Whedon blurb that led to our whole discussion. Dude said, "Monkeys, Pirates, Robots, Ninjas: One of these always expresses the Zeitgeist." Other people in the thread came back with vampires and/or zombies as other possible expressions of the Zeitgeist. So that's how it started. So we got to talking about what other things might express the Zeitgeist, but got hung up on the notion of Michael Jackson. Does he horrify us because he repels us, or because he reflects us?

Meanwhile, Jaimee keeps trying to pour water on the whole thing by telling us that that's not quite what zeitgeist means, but I'll have none of it. None! Anyway, back to Ezra.]

And here's a link to google's Zeitgeist page, near the top on my new-required-reading list.