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My toenail clippers were missing this morning when I went to get them. I like these clippers a lot; they're heavy, they fit my hand, they have a built-in file/lint-digger, the blades are deeply concave, and they don't have one of those chintzy peeling chrome jobs. I keep them tucked away in a purple box with some other low-priority toiletries, like band-aids and disposable razor blades.

Eileene has often wondered, aloud and pointedly, why I don't put them in the medicine cabinet, the sensible place for all toiletries. I keep them in my purple box because they're mine, and I don't want to share. If I put them in the medicine cabinet, they will no longer be mine; they will be ours. And if they're ours, then somebody will use them, drop them wherever they happen to fall, shove them into a corner a week later, and lose them. And then, instead of being somebody's, they will be nobody's.

Part of me feels petty for getting worked up over a lousy pair of toenail clippers. Hardly a matter of life and death, is it? On the other hand, inconsequential objects have a knack for becoming important to us: a favorite mug, a particular chair, the mechanical pencils that survive for seven years without getting lost. I wear jeans long after they've ceased to be wearable in public. (Occasionally, I wear them in public.) Eventually, these treasured artifacts succumb to entropy; they wear down, break entirely, or just drop through the cracks somewhere. That's life. And, ultimately, all these treasured little things are just stuff.

But while that stuff is still around, it's still important. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a little proprietary about trinkets we like, guarding them against theft or destruction.

Witness: we have at least three pairs of nail clippers in the house ? maybe four; I lose track ? but it's the nail clippers buried in the terribly inconvenient purple box that Eileene went to get when she needed some. Obviously, they need guarding.

Posted by at 12:13 PM | Permalink

Though we're experiencing what the radio describes as a last cold spell before spring begins in earnest, I got a little omen of spring during my daily walk today. It wasn't my first robin of the year; that was a couple weeks ago. Rather, it was just under a hundred robins trotting about the same field, a little neighborhood baseball park. They were as evenly spread as you could possibly hope, given that they moved about a bit. They behaved like an ideal gas, each robin acting to keep maximum distance between itself , its neighbors, and the borders of the field.

They were all cocking their heads, listening intently for worms. Or so I've been told. Is that an old wives' tale, that they can hear worms crawling beneath the surface, and thus know where to peck? I don't question that robins' hearing can be sensitive enough to pick up a worm, but that it can pick out a crawling worm, which must make a good imitation of white noise, over the noise of nearby traffic, when tires and air currents make a good imitation of white noise, too.

Still, they must have been getting something, because every once in a while one would stop and peck, and bring a morsel up. Heaven knows if it was a worm; I can't see that clearly.

I stopped and watched them for several minutes, trying to determine if the robins over the sandy areas of the diamond were having any more luck than the robins in the grass. I tried to guess which were male and which female from the intensity of color on their breasts. I speculated on what robins do when summer comes; they are still around, but you don't see as many. Do they tend to move a bit farther north? Do they just hide in the darker spots, away from humans enjoying the summertime outdoors? Or do they just seem to be rarer because we see so much more wildlife that they don't stand out? I reminisced about the only year that I ever saw a robin before my mother. I was still walking a few miles a day to and between classes, rather than locked inside, and downstate, where it was a few degrees warmer.

And just as I reached this thought about how I rarely see many early robins, something spooked them, and they took off for the trees.

Posted by at 12:12 PM | Permalink

As I got out of the shower this morning, Eileene informed me that plans to visit her parents, sister, and her sister's friend had changed.

?They [Ella and Sarah] are coming here instead. For dinner.?

?Oh!? I replied. This would require rethinking my plans for the day, and working out a menu.

?They're going to help cook.?

?Uh,? I pointed out, pensively poking my tongue into my cheek.

?Sarah's a vegetarian.?

?Uh,? I added.

This presents me with a minor problem, in that I generally cook by ear. Typically, I create the menu by seeing what ingredients are in the fridge, and fine-tune the inevitable variations on the basic dozen or so recipes I use by intuition, often while the ingredients are already in the pan. If we're out something, I need to come up with a quick substitute, or rework the dish entirely. (Can I use yellow onions in place of scallions?) If I'm trying something new, I have to watch carefully and see how things are progressing, tinkering the whole way. (Does breast meat have enough fat to keep the dish savory, or do I need a shot of olive oil?) We're not vegetarians, and despite Eileene's new low-fat diet, I have as yet only gotten the kinks out of one vegetarian dish. That means that whatever I make tonight will be something new.

Coordinating a kitchen staff is tricky enough when they don't know their way around, when the kitchen is small, and when your helpers are inexperienced. Doing so when you don't know yourself what comes next borders on impossible.

Now, I could shoo them away, claiming it's all under control, relax, you don't need to do anything, make yourself comfortable. But Ella may be looking forward to a cooking project; she's still in college, and so hasn't yet learned to cook, but is interested. I think my kitchen is a particular draw because she generally prefers western cooking to the Filipino dishes she gets at home. Shooing her off, even tactfully, could still be rude. I need to work out a menu ahead of time, no surprise ingredients, and a carefully chosen item to give to my assistants.

Of course, if they have a particular plan in mind, or bring particular foods to cook, that will pretty well disrupt any menu I work out ahead of time. Puts me in mind of a song I learned as a child:

?And some kind of help is the kind of help
That helping's all about,
And some kind of help is the kind of help
We all could do without.?
--Shel Silverstein, ?Helping?

Postscript: Certain persons mentioned in this column may well read it later. Please take no offense; I'm more than willing to share my kitchen. I just don't know if sharing it would be especially helpful.

Posted by at 12:12 PM | Permalink

When Mr. Coscolluela beefed up my computer, he left the default connection to the Microsoft Network spades game on the menu. Curious, I played a few rounds and was reminded that spades is a fun game. But MSN spades is not fun, and not just because the chat menu is painfully limited. The players themselves ruin it.

At first, I thought the problem was just the skill level I'd chosen. Naturally, I got my feet wet with the beginner difficulty, and the engine tries to match players of like ability. ?Beginner? in this context, judging by the quality of play I saw, means ?incapable of tactical thought, and quite possibly ignorant of the rules.? When your partner bids zero tricks and holds the ace and king of spades, you have to wonder what the point of playing is. More frustrating, perhaps, was the common habit of quitting a game immediately upon losing a hand badly, leaving the remaining players in the lurch with a dim-witted computer opponent filling in. It spoils the game to be denied a well-deserved victory, or to lose a chance to fight back from a disadvantage. Some players take this breach of etiquette one step farther, bidding double nil ? an enormously risky ploy with a huge payoff if it succeeds ? on the first hand. If they get lucky, hey! Clear sailing. If they blow it, well, there's always a new game to join once they dump the one they've demolished.

I hoped this behavior would cease when I moved up to intermediate difficulty. It diminished, but players still quit when they start losing.

MSN spades is not unique in suffering spoilsports. On-line RPGs (and I use the term under protest) have ?player-killers,? or ?PKs? who delight in killing other players' characters and making them start over again. On-line strategy games have players who sever the connection, later to claim their system crashed, the moment they fear they're about to lose. And of course, there's cheat codes. Coders who make the games often find it useful to alter settings at will to test whether everything works properly. Later, these cheat codes make their ways to public forums, and a handful of players can't resist temptation.

For all the joys of easy connection to fellow players, the internet and its associated anonymity is also to blame for an explosion of bad sportsmanship. Friends would ostracize a jerk who demanded restarting any game, score set to zero, the minute his own bone-headed ploy failed. But with easy access to new players, and no repercussions for abusing the old ones, spoiled brats run amok. For extreme cases, pissing people off becomes the object of the game. Perhaps it's just as well that MSN spades has a limited chat menu.

Posted by at 12:11 PM | Permalink

Mmm?

As I sit down to write this, I have a fresh pint of Ben & Jerry's Coffee Toffee Crunch before me. Dinner was? disappointing, shall we say, so I'm rounding out my diet with a half-cup of butterfat. It will be difficult to type and eat at the same time, but I'll give it a whirl. And if I have to choose, well, you readers aren't melting.

Generally speaking, desserts don't tickle my fancy. A piece of chocolate after a meal is plenty, and most days I have nothing at all. But I do love my ice cream. On occasions when dinner doesn't satisfy, I lie to my body and tell it we're still eating real food. It's not a healthful habit, I know, but I learned it from my mother, and how could Mom be wrong about nutrition?

The seal of approval for the ice cream diet was delivered at the now-defunct Burns drug store, about a mile from the house I grew up in. Burns kept an ice cream fountain, complete with fixed stools at the counter, and had the best malts in the country. (That's not just my opinion; they received credit in a newspaper's national search for the best malt.) They were thick without being lumpy, yet thoroughly mixed, a difficult trick to master ? I never mastered it during a half-year job as a soda jerk in my senior year ? and didn't overdo the syrup. I only vaguely remember my family being out running errands or returning from Grandma & Grandpa Lake's house or something that threw our daily schedule off. Mom suggested we have our lunch at the soda counter, and Dad agreed, and Dan and I suddenly found ourselves having ice cream for lunch! Wow! I think Dan was still too small to finish one himself, but I wasn't.

We instantly underwent Pavlovian conditioning. For months afterwards, when we passed the area around lunchtime on weekends, I would ask if we could have malts for lunch again. Of course not; we had to eat healthy food. But I still like chocolate malts about as well as any ice cream treat.

That's chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream. On the east coast, you have to be careful. Few places serve malts at all, and those that do don't really do them right. Ask without elaboration for a chocolate malt, and you'll get chocolate ice cream, no syrup, if you're lucky enough to get that. All to often, you just get a blank stare. In all my college years in Boston, gourmet ice cream capital of the world, I never found an ice creamery that stocked malt powder, or had even heard of using it in ?frappes,? and I looked. Eileene had never heard of them, either, until she went to U of I. Burns has been gone lo these many years, but if you want a proper malt, I'd still recommend heading for the Great Plains.

Guess I'll just have to content myself with the rest of this pint.

Posted by at 12:10 PM | Permalink

We have an upscale toy shop just a few blocks from our house. It stocks plenty in the way of erector sets, junior chemistry sets, and learn-to-read books. I used to love the place, but I don't think I'll be going back much any more. They got rid of their bins of 25-cent toys (often more like $1.95 these days, but you get the idea), which was the only draw for me. I have a small sack of party favors and cheap diversions: whee whistles, pocket Slinkys, Silly Putty, snap bracelets, one-finger squirt guns, Boinks, powerful mini-magnets, holograms. They range in price from 25 cents to two dollars, and each has provided at least an hour's entertainment per dollar spent. In memoriam to the passing of what I called the cracker-jack toy bin of Learning Express, I pause to describe three great two-bit toys you may not have seen yet.

The tippy-top. A tippy-top is a nearly spherical top with just a nub of a handle, closely resembling a cherry pepper. They tend to be heavy for their size, usually made of wood. The amazing thing about a tippy-top is that, when spun, it flips itself upside down to spin on the handle, with the large mass perched precariously on top, in defiance of all intuition that would have masses seek the lowest available point. The physics underlying this phenomenon have yet to be explained to my satisfaction.

Boinks. A boink is a sleeve of woven plastic fibers, resembling a Chinese finger trap. They can be stretched or squashed, or have their ends tucked inward to produce a neat funnel shape. What they're best at, however, is springing. Just compress the four-inch tube into a half-inch one, trying not to let your fingertips slip into the dilated ends, and hand it to a friend for inspection. When released, a boink can easily jump five or six feet. If the air currents are on your side, it can cross a small room. I have yet to see someone who wasn't surprised at how much jump so weak a spring can demonstrate.

The third of my el cheapo toys doesn't have a name, at least none that I know. I got mine as an advertising gimmick, like ballpoint pens with the company logo. It's made of hard, transparent plastic, and resembles half of a long, narrow ellipsoid, cut lengthwise. It isn't a true ellipsoid, though, as the mass is distributed at an angle to the major axes. Set curved side down and given a tap to start it spinning counter-clockwise, it slows as it spins, at the same time beginning to rock from end to end. Eventually, it stops spinning entirely, and the potential energy built up in the rocking motion translates into spinning again ? in a clockwise direction. Ask an engineer to explain it to you; it's fun to watch them try to put the mechanics into terms a non-engineer can grasp.

Get a few of your own. They're swell for fidgeting, make long lines at the bank bearable, and can start some interesting conversations, especially if you hang out with scientifically sophisticated friends.

Posted by at 12:10 PM | Permalink

I'd just like to take a moment to air a pet peeve of mine in game design: the inclusion of money as a resource in many empire-builders.

Money can go by many names. It can be gold in the goblin kingdoms, dollars in the industrial age, or energon crystals in the distant future. What it is, in game mechanics, is a universally exchangeable good, often with special properties of its own which no ordinary good can imitate. Running short of steel for your armies or silks for the privileged classes? Just head down to the local market and part with your hard-earned gold to get some. That's the way money has always worked for you, right? If you want some groceries, a new television, office supplies, as long as your wallet is full or your credit good, you can buy some locally.

The problem is, money doesn't always operate the same way for grand empires as it does for individuals, but game designers, used to thinking of money like an individual, don't always stop to realize it.

The difference is whether a system is open, meaning material passes between the system and an external pool, or whether the system is closed, meaning it doesn't. For example, your car has an open atmosphere; air passes readily in and out. A space station has a closed atmosphere; air inside stays inside, and if there were any air outside, it would stay outside.

Some games, like Railroad Tycoon, have open economies. Your company doesn't control all the steel foundries or coal mines you need to keep your rails running. Those resources come from sources outside the game. You pay for the coal and steel with money collected from your passengers, another element whose inner workings lie outside the game model. This is all well and good. In an open system, money is not only acceptable, but desirable game design, a powerful tool for abstracting behavior which would make the game more complex without adding anything interesting for the player.

For a game like Civilization, however, you represent the entire state and its resources: oil, timber, food, labor, communication, social attitudes, the works. Your economy is closed, except insofar as you trade with a very limited number of like nations. Money, especially when it is a poorly defined mishmash of ?other resources we haven't explicitly included,? leads to some awkward situations. Here are a few examples.

1. In Civilization, when you scrap an SDI complex for 200 gold, to whom do you sell it? Presumably not to your neighbors, who might still be working out the secret of gunpowder. But it's difficult to imagine your citizens needing to protect their house from the Jones's nuclear warheads. Perhaps the gold represents, not actual bank credit, but a collection of raw materials that go into an SDI complex ? but then, how can you spend the concrete and electronics to rush production on a paratroop division? Last I checked, the 82nd airborne didn't consider cinderblocks standard issue.

2. In Imperialism, money is a necessary ingredient to several functions, including conscription and rail-building. If your bank account runs low, you can have all the steel, lumber, coal, and labor in the world, and be unable to lay a few miles of track. How, pray tell, will a shipment of gemstones speed the creation of a rail network?

3. In Alpha Centauri, energy can be collected and spent to rush building projects. Okay, I can buy that: maybe high-powered tools can get the job done faster. But how can energy be turned directly into scientific advancement? Using it to help build libraries and computer centers, fine; but technical brilliance requires more than giving the labs twice as many overhead lamps. (Or is the assumption that anything but 100% devotion of energy to science means a large portion of your scientists can't turn on the lights? If so, why train such an excess of scientists, knowing half of them will be squatting in cold, dark research facilities?)

4. In Age of Kings, if you should run low on food but have a ready supply of gold, you can exchange them at a market. If the other players are hostile (and thus not unwilling to trade), whence does this extra food come? Farms are built and sheep slaughtered only at your command; there are no ?extra? farms stashed away somewhere to provide bread for the right price. Cities isolated by siege learn very quickly that mountains of cash won't feed anybody if there's nobody around to sell.

5. Again in Civilization, a city with an excess of cloth can set up a trade route with another city having an excess of cloth. Both instantly enjoy a healthy boost to happiness, income, and/or scientific progress. Why? One is put in mind of the joke about stockbrokers marooned on a desert island who become rich within a year trading shells back and forth between themselves.

Silly? You bet. So what's to be done about it? Designers must force themselves to think twice about just what money is in their games. If it's simply credit for supplying other players with materials they need, money will behave one way. If it's a reserve of labor you can draw from your own citizens, it will behave another way. If it's consumer goods, it will behave an entirely different way. Define carefully. Further, it helps to consider how the model will react to extreme settings of money. If a nation has nothing but a reserve of cash ? no food, no minerals, no labor ? what can it really do with its money? If a nation has no money at all, but heaps of actual material goods, will it be self-sufficient, or succumb to paralysis because one critical material has been abstracted as ?money?? Simply pinning a model down to a concrete meaning goes a long way toward making sure the model behaves plausibly.

Posted by at 12:09 PM | Permalink

I used to read a lot of science fiction, though very little these days. As a teen, that was almost my entire literary diet. There are strong concepts and weak concepts, good writing style and bad writing style. More than anything, though, I found my enjoyment of sci fi to depend most upon the ?science? of the fiction ? not so much whether it was consistent with the universe as we understand it, but whether the science motivated the story. I rank science fiction in three tiers.

There's honest-to-god sci fi, the kind that really plays ?what if.? What if life evolved on a neutron star? (Forward, Dragon's Egg) What if the behavior of large populations were minutely predictable, though individuals were not? (Asimov, Foundation) What if we could dramatically increase human intelligence, but only for a brief period? (Keyes, ?Flowers for Algernon?) The whole purpose of these stories is to speculate, and then pursue the speculation to its logical conclusion. Sometimes, the story doesn't appear to be science fiction ? not a laboratory or bug-eyed monster in sight. Niven's ?Not Long Before the End? describes a sword-and-sorcery duel, but the real point is to ask ?What if magic were subject to the second law of thermodynamics?? You can generally count on finding something new in these stories, and an interesting tale woven around it. Even if the writing itself is second-rate, the ride is worth your while.

The second tier is what most people think of when they describe science fiction: space ships and aliens and rayguns and, more recently, cybernetic implants. But here, the science has nothing to do with the story; it just provides some flashy props. Sometimes it works, if well-executed; Star Wars is a thrill, even though the same story could be told with frigates and Caribbean natives and dueling pistols. (Actually, the equivalence of mythic story lines was an intentional point of the movie.) More often, though, you're just getting a Flash Gordon adventure using wild costumes to hide the fact that you've seen it all before.

And down at the bottom comes the stuff which isn't science fiction at all, but a half-baked excuse for some other genre. The original Star Trek series started using el cheapo excuses like this to put Kirk on way too many alternate earths when the writers started running dry on ideas. (The prohibition gangter planet, for example.) When warriors take their laser lances and ride their robot horses into battle, you're reading medieval fantasy (and pretty crappy fantasy, at that). When ?alien DNA? turns a human into a man-eating horror, do not be fooled by the words ?science fiction? on the paperback's spine, or the book's inclusion in the sci fi section of Barnes & Noble. When ?cosmic rays? turn astronauts into superheroes, their transformation is about as scientific as fairy godmothers.

Posted by at 12:08 PM | Permalink

I can't suppress a mean-spirited chuckle at the outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease and the slow spread of mad cow disease among European cattle. I say ?mean-spirited? because the simultaneous loss of cattle and collapse of demand for beef is going to be ruinous to some farmers who don't deserve it. On the other hand, it's delightful to see Mother Nature deliver such a dramatic poke in the eye to European protectionism.

It's a long-standing conflict. Europe and the US are perpetually engaged in a low-intensity economic war, each trying to keep up their own exports while sheltering home markets from the other's farms. Naturally, the air in the World Trade Organization is think with accusations of protectionism from both sides, and many of the accusations are correct: the US subsidizes home growers to undercut foreign markets, and the EU taxes imports heavily. There is always an excuse for taxing or restricting or banning altogether somebody else's produce.

A few years ago, it was bananas. US fruit companies operating out of Latin America were in a snit because several European countries, notably Britain with its own banana plantations in its former empire, wouldn't let American bananas in. They successfully sued the EU in the WTO to admit American bananas on equal footing, to no effect. England just dragged its feet and, pushed hard enough to comply with the ruling, replied ?Well? we're not gonna. Our case is right and the WTO is wrong, so we're not gonna.? And of course, the WTO had no real enforcement powers; that would tread on the sovereignty of member states. The threat of retaliation, or even the dissolution of the feeble WTO, worried the Economist no end.

And there's the grand hoopla over genetically modified produce, or ?frankenfoods.? Many Europeans are unaccountably afraid of produce making use of nascent genetic technology. I could accept complaints that frankenfoods, like vegetables bred for appearance and storage rather than flavor, don't taste good. I could accept concerns over the appearance of a specific allergen. I could accept condemnation upon a proven link to birth defects. But European consumers have seen enough horror films to realize the real problem is that eating the wrong DNA turns people into tentacled monsters or something equally awful. The rationale is that, since scientifically ignorant people don't understand it, it must be dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. Or it hasn't been tested enough. Or something. We might grow tentacles. And the trade lawyers wring their hands and plead there's nothing they can do; the public demands alarmist labeling.

With the discovery that some damn fool supplemented cattle feed with bone meal from the cows that had to be slaughtered because they were infected, all European beef and feed is suddenly suspect. The French could use soybean meal; it's cheap and readily available. But it comes from America, and has those icky gene splices. Fearing the outside chance that strange genes will harm their cows, the French are slaughtering them instead. I laugh.

Best of all, the US has placed tight controls on European beef, on the grounds of containing hoof-and-mouth. We haven't shown much concern over mad cow disease, but hoof-and-mouth, while not dangerous to humans, is horrendously communicable in animals. European trade lawyers who have argued that a ban on American fruit is warranted because it contains new protein now argue that a ban on European beef just because it contains actual disease bacteria is criminal protectionism. Oh, the hypocrisy!

Posted by at 12:08 PM | Permalink

This entry is pretty macabre. Those of you who are offended at making light of the dead should just go back to the March calendar. Okay, if everybody's now where they're supposed to be?

Last night, I read an essay in the New Yorker by a surgeon describing his ambivalence about mandatory autopsies. He sort of backed into his article by way of a family offended at the thought of further abuse to a woman who'd been hit by a car. ?An autopsy? Hasn't she been through enough?? Not to beat? er, not to belabor the point, but the woman was already dead. She couldn't go through any more. I found myself thinking of what to do with my body after my death.

Respect for the dead is, of course, for the living rather than the dead. Paying our respects helps ease the passage, and offers a left-handed assurance that our own death will be treated with dignity. Whatever my next of kin want to do with my body is entirely up to them, whatever makes them feel most comfortable. But if the departed lived a full life, and saw it coming, death is normal and natural. It's not a grim subject, though I suppose it isn't cause for celebration, either.

Or maybe it is cause for celebration. I've never been to an Irish wake, but I'd like to try one. When Grandma Roth died, we all had Sunday dinner together at her house, much as she liked to do, and I thought that was a fine wake. And I love John Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman, including lines like ?Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard. I hope he fries,? and ?[Chapman's spirit whispered] 'I want you to be the first person ever at a British memorial service to say ?'fuck.?'?

In that spirit, may I point out the opportunities for dada art your cadaver presents? I humbly suggest my friends and family consider attaching cords to my limbs and performing a unique marionette show. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, and they could relax knowing that I wouldn't mind. Or imagine being put on display in segments, complete with a diagram like those you see of disassembled cows in butcher shops. If our laws allow it, and if my flesh isn't all old and icky by then, they could even go so far as cannibalism. Wouldn't you like to be able to tell your friends what human tastes like? I wouldn't object to being mummified or stuffed and mounted. I could continue to give visitors a start, sitting by the fireplace with a book in my lap, staring ahead like a mounted deer head.

I suppose a practical joke wherein a remote-controlled device snaps my eyelids open is going a bit too far; you can't be sure how a victim will react.

On a more serious note, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has a stairwell in which are suspended two human bodies sliced into ¾-inch layers and sandwiched between glass for display. One is cut horizontally, the other vertically, so visitors climbing the stairs can see the inner machinery of the human body a slice at a time. Kids have stopped at that display for generations, and a few may have been galvanized to pursue a career in biology or medicine. What more could you ask of a corpse? If a museum can use my body when I'm done with it, they can have it, wholly or in parts.

Oh, one more thing. Get out your driver's license. See that area on the back where you can mark that you're willing to donate organs? Even if you're squeamish, there's no excuse for not filling that out right now. You could save a life. Keeping the casket closed at your funeral is a small price to pay for that.

Posted by at 12:07 PM | Permalink

Today was my third trip to the dentist, the day we tackled the big cavity on between my upper left bicuspid and molar, and, fortunately, the big one wasn't quite what the dentist feared it might have been. (Difficult to tell from the x-rays whether it was a tunnel viewed end-on, or just a spot.) More fortunately, though, are we to live in an age of modern dentistry. The anesthetic has worn off, and I'm sore, and my gums are bright red, but the actual drilling was virtually painless. By tomorrow, I won't be able to tell the difference.

As recently as twenty years ago, drilling hurt. Novocaine no doubt helped substantially, but you could still feel dull jolts deeper in your jaws, and a weak but direct discomfort at the surface. When the novocaine wore off, ouch!

A few generations ago, there was no local anesthetic, nor tiny high-speed drillings; you went under ether and had major restructuring done.

A few centuries ago, there was no anesthetic at all; you just gripped the chair while the barber yanked. And, of course, there were weeks or months of discomfort before the treatment, because, without brushing and twice-yearly checkups, you had teeth pulled when they'd rotted through.

We've had pavlovian conditioning to cringe at the sound of the drill, admittedly unpleasant to start with. I wonder if that will cease to be true in another fifty years. I'm especially curious what miniaturization will do for the effectiveness of the dentists' tools.

Posted by at 12:06 PM | Permalink

I've become a gaming widower! How's that for a gender reversal? Typically, it's a guy who gets too wrapped up in his latest computer game to pay attention to his partner, but Eileene is deeply hooked by our recent bargain bin purchase of CaesarIII, Pharaoh, and Cleopatra. She's spent the past three days doing nothing but, and that includes coming home early after business meetings and skipping dinner while her face is pressed remora-like to the screen. That's not a complaint; I've been down that road many times, myself.

We're both slowly working our way through the Pharaoh tutorial - slowly, because the game isn't so much a win/lose challenge as a building exercise. Efficient players can progress more quickly, but given enough time, even a ramshackle city can construct a monument and win. You spend a lot of time waiting at the end, watching the pyramid go up. Fortunately, there's a lot of pretty buildings and individual activity to watch, but, once your industry is self-sufficient, there isn't much to do.

That has me wondering again about the success of the Sims, critically acclaimed and popular even among non-gamers. The game is very similar to the Tomogatchi gizmos: the player's electronic people (sims) go about their lives, and meters monitoring their hunger, exhaustion, comfort, and so on gradually worsen. When your sim gets hungry, push the "go eat" button; when he's dirty, push the "go wash" button. The Sims include more variables to watch, and a variety of cosmetic choices (Blue wallpaper or yellow? Be a doctor or a policeman?), but that's the essence of the game.

The game isn't a game, in the technical sense of the word; there is no winning or losing, just the occurrence or non-occurrence of events. (Maxis takes great pride in making "toys" instead of "games.") So the appeal isn't the challenge of winning. It's not even the challenge of maxing out all the obvious goals: successful career, high income, a really nice place, and an expansive social life, since such goals only take patience, not skill. When I consider what the appeal, I don't like the answers I keep coming up with.

There's voyeurism. While there's no sex more graphic than kissing on screen, the Sims are a promiscuous lot. Affairs are common, easy to keep secret, and hardly a trouble even if you're caught. Complete strangers can fall in love within twenty minutes, if you're on the ball, so there's no shortage of partners.

There's sadism. In a relatively short time, you can give your sim a perfect life; thereafter, there isn't anything to do but deliberately neglect your sims, just to learn the amusing ways their lives can fall apart. And there are many more ways to make your sims miserable than happy. You can keep your sim swimming in a pool until he drowns. You can wall him up in a cul-de-sac and watch him repeatedly wet himself, pass out, and starve. You can fail to pay the bills and watch your sim's household repossessed.

Most disturbing of all is the game's pseudo-vicarious nature. We can waste a lot of time on computer games, neglecting more important facets of our lives, largely because games give us the vicarious thrill of slaying terrorists or forging empires or exploring lost cities, thrills we either couldn't have or don't want in reality. But the Sims gives you a chance to vicariously be? a guy in a house, going to work, paying bills, fixing the toilet, and calling friends over to watch TV. Sims junkies go through all the hassles of getting a life, without actually getting a life. When someone wants the hassle, but not the life, something is deeply wrong.

So I watch my tiny Egyptian populace wander about town, grow crops, mine stone, drive off Nubian raiders, and slave away to raise a pyramid to their pharaoh. They're cute. Their city is beautiful. It's fun to watch their houses improve and their industries prosper. But I think I'm a little relieved to find their lives boring when I don't have to work to keep things progressing towards a specific goal.

Posted by at 12:05 PM | Permalink

It's been a long day; I did a review, writing exercises, a preparation to expand my web page, and now this, all with my computer crashing every hour or so.

Eileene's dad is heavily into computers, and likes to build his own from factory parts. And, like any good technophile, insists on upgrading every other week, whether he needs to or not. Every time he decides he's had enough of one of his computers (yes, there are three or four in his house now), we inherit whatever he's just rejected, with gobs of memory and performance on par with the top-of the line PCs on the shelves today. Almost.

See, because the computers are in a continual state of upgrade, and because Eileene likes to prowl around for the latest software utilities, nothing is ever 100% compatible with everything else. And, since computers are such delicate creatures, that means my machine is always a little wonky. This month, it's a lot wonky, and crashes at least four or five times a day. I've learned to save often.

There's a joke list drifting about the spam lines describing how automobiles would work if they were made by Microsoft, jokes like, ?You could only drive using Microsoft gas,? and ?Sun would make a car with better mileage, more features, at half the cost, but it could only drive on 10% of the roads.? My favorite line, the one that really rings true is, ?Every so often as you were driving along, your car would just stop, for no apparent reason, and you would have to restart it. We would consider this normal and acceptable.?

Why do we consider it normal and acceptable for computers to crash frequently? Obviously, if it goes under every couple of hours, something is wrong, and I'll get mine fixed shortly, but if it only went, say, once a day, I'd just deal with it. Unless their computer were running an air traffic system or nuclear power plant, a lot of people would just deal with it. ?It just does that sometimes.? And why, given the PC's flaky behavior, hasn't someone stridden confidently up with a more tractable model and swept the competition aside? Perhaps, now that Microsoft is sitting on the lion's share of the market, the bugs are indirectly part of a plan to keep things that way. Not that some executive is ordering his engineers, ?Make it crash a lot,? but rather the quirkiness of the system is a way to restrict compatibility. And if it crashes, well? you can just restart it. It's perfectly normal and acceptable.

Posted by at 12:05 PM | Permalink

I miss the winters of my childhood. As I write this, the blizzard which was supposed to pounce upon the Boston-DC megalopolis is sort of frittering away outside, steadily downgraded in the radio reports from ?possibly as much as three feet? to ?as much as three inches, more in the suburbs.? We have been spared the awesome might of old man winter, and all in all, I have to approve. Nobody really wants industry to come to a standstill, or to shovel two tons of snow, or to drive everywhere at 20mph. But somehow I feel cheated. Not just of this storm, but of winter generally.

I grew up in Elgin, Illinois, on the western edge of Chicago's suburban collar. For those who don't study weather patterns, the jet stream cuts into Canada through the coastal tail of Alaska, veers sharply right to dip through the Midwest, and cuts up again to exit through Laborador, so we share our weather with the great white north, rather than with the rest of the US. (What the north-central Canadians get hit with is too horrible to contemplate.)

Though winter back home is cold and snowy, there's something nice about the location, too: being so far inland, our winter air is predominantly dry and clear, having lost its Pacific water over the Rockies. Certainly there are gray days, but there are plenty of brilliant ones, too, and that's important with shortened daylight hours. Winter wasn't always nice, but it was exhilarating; the sting on your nose was proof of your participation in the grand schemes of nature.

Now I live in New Jersey, and winter is all wrong. It's warmer, but that's the only thing to like. The snow is ugly. Dense traffic makes it all cruddy before a week has passed, and warm weather makes it collapse into wet mounds littering the treebanks. The sky is drab for weeks at a time. Unlike Illinois, you can go outside any time you want, but why? To slog through the permanent slush puddles in the sidewalk dips? We always get enough weather to keep things from being spring, but never enough to feel like we're really passing through the calendar. Five straight months of February.

In New Jersey, winter is all whiny and boring and goes on and on and on reminding you that life is a burden, and I see it makes me all whiny and boring and go on and on and on reminding you that life is a burden. Where's my sunlamp?

Posted by at 12:04 PM | Permalink

I want to say something about the destruction of the great Buddha statues. Perhaps you've heard the story: the Taliban, the extreme fundamentalist Islamic movement calling the shots in Afghanistan, recently proclaimed its next step in the nationwide purge of all things not Muslim is to be the destruction of all statues, including two great Buddha statues carved into Afghan mountains. I assume the decision has its roots in a Muslim prohibition against creating human images, the rationale being that such art presumes to imitate or usurp God, who, of course, created mankind. The international community is in a tizzy over the matter. National governments, including Muslim nations, are begging the Taliban to change their mind. Art museums and religious organizations have offered in vain to remove the offending ? if that is the word ? monuments at their own expense to preserve what they consider national treasures.

I've wanted to say something about the destruction for several days. I haven't yet because no commentary seems adequate. How does one describe the emotional response to such gross vandalism? How does one do so without simply repeating what news commentators have already said? It is a great crime against art, against religion, against the human community, against peace. It is hateful, it is shortsighted, it is offensive, it is wrong. I am appalled. The decision to destroy great and ancient labors of art is fundamentally incomprehensible to me.

I'm aware of other gross acts of destruction by other cultures, but can generally see why they were performed. The destruction of historic buildings to make room for another strip mall, or the clearing of forests for timber or for oil lying beneath are almost daily occurrences, but, though they may be poor decisions, they make some sense. The destroyers aren't so much smashing something beautiful as making way for something useful; if they could get the oil or the strip mall while preserving everything else, they would. The suppression of art critical to a regime, while reprehensible, makes sense. The government wishes to preserve itself, whether out of selfish power hunger or misplaced faith in their programs; if it could preserve itself without choking off free expression, it would.

But the Taliban's decision to destroy expresses a positive, active preference to destroy. The council has refused to allow others to remove the statues from the Taliban's sight, and refused a pretty penny in the bargain. The statues aren't in anyone's way, hide no resources, cost nothing to maintain. We can only decide the Taliban relishes the act itself, or its symbolic import, a gesture of defiance and scorn for the human spirit. Anything in the name of pure religion, and if the Taliban get to defy the world with the same act, so much the sweeter. With such an absolutist mentality, living people could be the target just as well as statues. It reminds me of the crusaders' rape of Constantinople. It reminds me of the French mob cheering the guillotine. It reminds me of Nazi book burnings. These groups, too, lost sight of principles in blind, furious, fanatical desire to destroy.

Fear fanatics. Try to reach them, try to understand them, but never forget fanaticism is dangerous, even in the name of your own cause. Never apologize for the excesses of fanatics. Never rationalize their fury.

Fanaticism is horror.

Posted by at 12:03 PM | Permalink

We had a weird time this evening, coming home from a combination of errands and window shopping. A passenger in a car that had pulled alongside us at a light got our attention and asked for directions ?to the nearest hospital.? The driver was a youngish man, and his passenger, probably his wife, was in the back seat. My immediate thought was that she was going in to labor, though it could have been anything ? a bleeding wound, appendix, a sick kid out of sight. In any case, ?the nearest hospital? indicated speed counted.

The nearest hospital wasn't very near. Worse, New Jersey roads are rarely straight, and often meet at peculiar angles. Anybody who hadn't lived here long enough to know where to find a hospital couldn't possibly follow directions to one.

Eileene volunteered to lead the way, driving to a hospital with the car behind us. The afternoon, which had been so pleasant, suddenly became very anxious. Somebody's health depended on us. I say ?us,? even though clearly I had no part in the situation. I tried to contribute by watching out the rear window to make sure they were still following, but what I expected to could do if the cars were separated defies explanation. We'd become involved, emotionally as well as functionally.

As the drive continued to stretch on, I couldn't help worrying that it was too far, that we were taking too long. Too long for what? How urgent was the problem? I don't know, but I was desperately concerned. What if seconds counted, and we needed to press the flow of traffic? What if the other driver got impatient and stopped following us? What if the woman were in labor, and started delivering right then?

WHAM! They rear-ended us. Traffic was squeezing up to a stop light, and we took a light jolt that seemed much harder thanks to the surprise and the tension. I thought the other driver was signaling us that we had to go, right now, never mind the stoplight. (Eileene later explained he had turned around to check on his passenger, and just wasn't watching. She saw the collision coming, I didn't.) Eileene waved and pointed, indicating we would work the matter out at the hospital, and that we should just drive for now.

The other car continued following us for another eight blocks or so, then suddenly turned off onto a little side street. We were no more than a half mile to the hospital. We never saw the other car again, though we looked.

The lack of closure to the incident still bothers me. Did they make it safely? Why did the guy turn off? Was he afraid of legal hassles stemming from the collision? Had the medical matter reached a crisis point? Had he simply lost faith in Eileene's guidance? Though there wasn't any damage to our car (it really was a small collision), I was peeved that there was no exchange of reassurances. I was worried for the woman, disappointed that we hadn't finished the job, frustrated that my curiosity hadn't been answered, resentful that we received no thanks, and embarrassed that I felt such selfish reactions.

We'll never know the story. We touched something important to someone, and never learned what exactly. I'll wonder about it for a long time.

Posted by at 12:03 PM | Permalink

There's a web site out there that, no matter how crummy I feel, gives me a momentary grin.

Remember the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant is safely sealed away in a crate, presumably to be studied by ?top men,? but the camera pans back to reveal that the Ark is really just getting buried in a vast warehouse of similar crates? The implication is that God is once again working to remove this ultimate relic from mankind's hands.

In my mind, that warehouse was stuffed with trivia, but some clever fellow had the wits to realize that every single crate in the warehouse had a similar adventure attached to it. The mind boggles. Once the suggestion was out, dedicated fans started a list of what else might be found in that warehouse. Many of the entries were icons of fanboy culture: Frodo's ring, kryptonite, a sonic screwdriver, transmissions received from Gilligan's island. But some of the suggestions were more imaginative.

The warehouse was the inspiration for an adventure game supplement called Warehouse 23, published by Steve Jackson Games. The folks at SJG have modified the atmosphere of the Warehouse from wondrous to sinister, reinterpreting it as the storehouse of things the Secret Masters want to hide from the world. (This is no surprise. The folks at SJG reinterpret everything in terms of the fictional Grand Conspiracy ruling the world. They never tire of the joke.) Warehouse 23 is full of isolated inexplicable phenomena: a window that opens onto a sunny field, a TV Guide from 2104, perpetual motion machines. It also hides all the things THEY don't want you to have: the 100-mpg carburetor, miracle grains that would end world hunger, the cure for cancer. It also holds things with powers nobody should ever use, but which the Secret Masters keep for the day they may want to try: antimatter hand grenades, deals with the devil, alien fetuses suspended in life-support tanks. Most darkly, it holds evidence that the Secret Masters already have used secrets man was not meant to know for their nefarious ends.

Nothing is too silly for Warehouse 23, as long as it's properly sinister. Once you know this ground rule, even cheerful innocuous things become menacing ? you just need to figure out why. Some of the items in deep storage have long histories, or profound implications, and deserve a few pages of description, but many, many more are one-liners; in two or three sentences at most, you know all you need (All you're allowed?) in order to spin ideas around them. SJG has made several thousand of them available for your exploration, and they'll take donations.

You can go look up a few right now. Come on, what's it going to hurt? (Certainly no any more than my dentist's appointment today. That's why I'm here.) Just click on over to http://www.warehouse23.com/basement/. Oh, and uh? don't drink the coffee.

Posted by at 12:02 PM | Permalink

Hey, faithful readers, today I have good news and bad news. The good news is that what follows is a proper essay, subjected to proofreading and everything, not just a quickie that I slapped down as verbal exercise. The bad news is that it's a reject. I've had it returned to me with a form rejection, so it may not be all that good. Normally, I send rejected essays on a circuit to various magazines, but topical columns have a painfully short shelf life. Already, the observations on vouchers are out of date; George minoris has included them in his education proposal, by another, safer name.

But waste not, want not; I'm going to stick it in the gap for a recent day I didn't write for the journal. Here's what was on my mind two weeks ago. Enjoy.

---

Is it just me, or is anybody else out there troubled by the course of the new presidency? Just wondering.

I mean, Bush the younger had a platform pretty light on substance, apart from tax cuts aimed at easing economic burdens on the wealthy. But I can remember two more definite promises, never fleshed out in as much detail as proposed tax cuts: school vouchers and an expanded military budget. Even his supporters recognized there wasn't much depth to his platform with endorsements like, ?Well, mebbe he ain't one o' them smarty-pants egghaids, but at least we know he'll bring morality back to the White House.? That subtext was Bush's real platform: ?I won't be Bill Clinton.?

The promise has its appeal, even to Democrats. Clinton was a disaster, morally speaking. He couldn't even make a graceful exit, instead hustling a dubious presidential pardon under the wire and making a grab for a Manhattan office at taxpayers' expense. Just a quick reminder of how to abuse the presidency to reward political friends and make a tidy sum for yourself. Presumably, Bush, pillar of virtue, isn't going to come anywhere near such practices.

And yet?

I dunno. Is anyone else suspicious of his gleeful response to the Californian energy crisis? In order to prevent such disasters in the future, he insists, we must open up new oil reserves, even if that means hacking down nature preserves to get at them. That's oil, mind you. Black gold. Texas tea. The energy crunch doesn't mean we should look into coal, nuclear or hydroelectric power, and heaven forbid energy sources the tree-huggers might accept. No, just oil, like?hey! Just like Dubya and his friends own. Huh. Now there's a coincidence.

His response has been gleeful, too, to the stock market slide. Obviously, we need to keep the American economy cranked to full blast, which means cutting money loose for investors, which means a big justification for a tax cut. Never mind that a certain slow-down is normal and healthy after the huge boom we've just undergone in the tech sector. Never mind that economists unanimously agree that, if we are headed for a recession, a tax cut won't save us, or that the attempt is likely to delay but worsen a possible recession. Get the budget through first, then worry about whether it will work.

School vouchers, on the other hand, have been cast to the winds. (Not that I'm complaining.) Apparently George recognizes what a hard sell they can be, and doesn't want to spend his political capital on such a shaky proposal. He'd rather spend it on garnering support for tax cuts, especially those taxes unfairly belaboring the wealthy.

The promised military budget has been cut loose, too, though not in so many words. A commission has been set up to reexamine the demands of an improved military, which, in the subtext of politics, means a report will be made and filed, and the actual support will vanish. See, now that he's made it past the campaign mentality of promising all things to all people ? politicians do it ? Bush has stopped and listened to advisors' reports that that kind of thing is expensive. Unless he wants to run up Reaganesque deficits, he may have to sacrifice the tax cuts. With the chips down, Dubya has decided industrialists need the money more than the army.

So the clear direction of Bush's administration, for the foreseeable future, has one goal: to relieve the awful tax burden on the upper and middle class. Well, maybe not entirely for the middle class. Small snags have developed in that area, like a discovery that, even if the tax rate is lowered for the middle class, they'll still rapidly bump up against a law designed to contain tax dodges: each tax bracket has a certain minimum necessary payment, regardless of how many loopholes one can find. The wealthy, however, can relax in the knowledge that tax cuts will benefit them dramatically, especially since Bush is lavishing so much attention on reducing or eliminating the inheritance tax. Never mind that a number of plutocrats ? who stand to benefit most from the bill ? have come out against it; inheritances must be preserved for people with the good fortune to be born into a rich family. People like?hey! People like Dubya. Huh. Now there's a coincidence.

So that's an honest commitment to one out of three clearly-defined campaign promises, by my count. Not too bad, really, compared with presidential candidates as a whole. Plus there's the commitment to bring morality and respectability back to the White House. No longer will the presidency be used as a vehicle to enrich the president himself and pay off his cronies.

Oh.

Well, maybe he'll promise not to have sex with the White House aides.

Posted by at 12:01 PM | Permalink

A college chum of mine, Jim Westbrook, recently became a licensed trucker, and we're hearing a lot more from him these days. Even if your butt can take the long hours, it's a lonely job, and he likes to call friends on his new cell phone when he's at loose ends between shipments, or before crashing at a rest stop, and I want to pass on his description of one particular hostel he went to.

Some rest stops are more than a place to empty your bladder and get food from a coin-operated dispenser; they have rooms, beds, television, even showers ? no doubt a big relief for a trucker coming off his shift. This stop had two TV rooms, and he stopped briefly in each. The first room had a bunch of guys watching The Game, joking, snarfing munchies, and generally behaving like you would expect off-duty truckers to behave. The second room had several guys intently watching the set, and they would swiftly rebuke anyone who spoke or otherwise disturbed the room. They had on the Discovery channel.

Isn't that terrific? What a gratifying commentary on human nature that, after the dull and solitary trip, the truckers who aren't too exhausted to do anything but hit the mattress find the craving for intellectual stimulus as important as the craving for social stimulus. (This is not to suggest one is more respectable than the other!)

Truckers are not, by and large, a cerebral crowd. Jim's story reaffirms my faith in the cherished but unproven beliefs that children want to learn, and that adults do, too, and will continue to do so given half a chance. If you turn on the boob tube after reading this, it better be either the Discovery channel or a show you're sharing with a lot of friends.

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Permalink