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Last week, our friend Jim came to visit. Because my hours are far more flexible than Eileene’s, I flew the tour guide role solo on two days. I am not the ideal choice to direct someone to the joys of New York City, since I don’t like it much, and have avoided it for much of the eight years I’ve lived here in New Jersey. Jim’s visit was my first visit to Liberty Island and the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Really. I’ve observed the Statue of Liberty from across the sound, and I’ve walked through the Empire State’s basement, but hadn’t yet taken the full plunge.

The Empire State’s observation deck has several large, metal plaques pointing out every landmark you can see from the height. The buildings aren’t much to look at; they were designed to be seen from the ground. Neither are the neighborhoods much to look at, unless you already understand the layout of the city too well for the view to help. But I appreciated one plaque that outlined ethnic neighborhoods, because it also outlined where the neighborhood borders used to be in earlier generations.

Chinatown has been giving Little Italy a serious demographic beating, spreading to cover pretty much the whole of the lower east side, while Little Italy has shrunk to a few blocks skirting the edge of the financial district, giving a distinct impression of surviving only on the curiosity of tourists. But I expect the Italians – or rather, Italian-Americans – are mostly happy with this state of affairs. It is powerful evidence of integration. They no longer need to congregate in order to find someone to talk to, or some decent groceries, or neighbors who won’t prey on them because they wear funny clothes.

The Irish and Polish neighborhoods are gone, a nucleus of the latter moved to outlying boroughs. The Chinese, Russians, and Pakistanis are moving in (though not necessarily to Manhattan, where rents now range from high to astronomical). And, in time, they will move aside for newer waves of immigrants. Divisions of skin color are powerful in this country, but so are deliberate efforts to overcome them.

We lose something with integration; it’s hard for all us outsiders to get exposed to real old world culture when children and grandchildren start adapting new ways. I’m told that, while Jewish delis abound, and we can find something labeled “knishes” on half the streets of New York, the “real thing” is a rarity, and even the most hardened of traditionalist restaurateurs inevitably lose some authenticity – to higher-class, more expensive ingredients, if nothing else. But such losses are microscopic beside what we gain. If it’s harder to spend a day immersing ourselves in a foreign neighborhood, the bits and pieces we really like are so common as to be invisible.

I wish I could see which countries future immigrants will come from, and where they will settle. I wish I could glimpse what the country will look like when the current immigrants are fully incorporated into the melting pot. I wish I could get a better look at what the face of America will be as new genetic combinations become common. And I wish I could watch these patterns somewhere other than the observation deck, because it’s way too cold up there in January.

Posted by at 7:59 PM | Permalink

As game consoles continue expanding their memory and console games thus become more sophisticated, will consoles eventually supplant computers as game platforms? The debate smolders along, sustained by newsgroup cross-pollination. Right now, consoles are superbly suited to video games and near relatives, but unable to cope with the intensive strategy simulations like Civilization, SimCity, and Age of Empires. Oh, there may be adaptations – my brother had a SimCity (I) cartridge for his Nintendo – but the interface handles badly, and some of the more complicated features go missing when a game migrates from computer to console. So the question of computer games’ survival worries those of us who like to test our analytic skills rather than our reflexes.

For a while, I was reassured by an argument that went something like this: until and unless consoles can do what home computers do, they won’t be able to compete, and computer games will survive; if and when consoles progress that far, no one need care that computer games die. That made a lot of sense, but I’m beginning to fear it overestimates the strategy market.

Game design shares two traits with the rest of the electronic media industry: it’s a high-risk business, and it thrives on uniformity of format. Together, these facts create a dreadful Darwinian environment, where mass marketing trumps actual quality. Given a choice, some customers will buy one system, others will buy other systems. But whichever system has the largest customer base enjoys an enormous advantage: software developers will naturally be attracted to the largest market share. More titles will come out for the more popular system, or at least a version compatible with that system will hit the shelves first. New customers, attracted by the greater availability of titles in the most popular system, will buy into that market, creating a positive feedback. Customers who want to share data with their friends tend strongly to buy what their friends already own. When competing systems are evenly balanced, quality can play a decisive roll in tipping the scales, but more often, market share alone determines the fate of competing formats. Witness how VHS wiped out Beta, and PCs stole the market from Apple.

Now, if computers and consoles weren’t competing for market share, there would be no problem. Unfortunately, many gamers like both, and companies seeking to broaden their base find it much easier to get a hardened micromanagement grognard to spend a few hours popping soldiers in Field of Honor than to get a twitch-gaming sniper to spend several months plumbing Master of Orion. Maybe the liquidity of teens, time constraints on adults, and shortening attention spans of both are taking their toll, but I see the invisible hand of market pressure at work.

Back up my claim? Consider worrying trend one: the progression of revolutionary computer games, and of the dominant genre following in their wakes. There has been a clear evolution from 4X games following the lead of Civilization. through RTS games in the mold of Warcraft, to first-person shooters pioneered by Doom. Every step has been towards speed, graphic flash, and portability to consoles, at the expense of planning, depth, and exploiting the computer’s advantages.

Worrying trend two: shelf space devoted to computer games shrinks yearly in mall outlets, making way for more platform games. We’ve reached a point where used console games get more space than new computer games. Whatever the gamers may claim they want to see, you can bet the stores are voting their pocketbooks.

Worrying trend three: an increasing percentage of computer games are rapidly ported to console. The turnover is fast enough that reviewers in CGW complain of needlessly simple game design, and needlessly awkward interface – needless, that is, for computers. The “dumbing down,” by coincidence, is just great enough to handle a game with two joysticks and eight buttons.

That’s the flaw in the argument that computer games will survive as long as they do things consoles can’t: consoles can do almost everything a computer game can do these days, nearly enough that short-sighted executives will order designers to cut important corners. Consoles just can’t do it all as well, or as smoothly, or as fun. Take the fun out of the computer games, and gamers will stop buying them. Stop buying computer games, and quality companies will stop trying to write them.

I worry that games that I will play are going the way of the dodo, and I’ll be stuck rehashing my favorites forever. At least it will save me the need to upgrade my system periodically.

Posted by at 4:57 PM | Permalink

Eileene gave me a cast iron skillet for Christmas. It raised my enthusiasm. My experience with an enameled cast iron pot from Le Creuset has been terrific. Pot roast, beef stew, a spicy pork-and-beef mixture… mm-mm! The pot won’t do everything, however. It’s important to sear meat before putting it into the stewpot, for flavor. Technically, I could do this in the enamel ware, but the small cooking surface on the bottom, the very short handles, and the high sides all make the task far too awkward. Using our Circulon pan for the searing has pretty well ruined the non-stick coating, so I asked for a plain cast iron skillet just for searing stew meat. Turns out, it’s good for steak, too, and could probably conk a burglar, in a pinch.

Nonetheless, I’m developing misgivings about this pan. Let me quote instructions 3 and 6, from the “Use and Care for Lodge Logic” tag.

3. After cooking, clean utensil with a stiff brush and hot water. Using soap is not recommended, and harsh detergents should never be used…

6. NEVER wash in dishwasher.

Not that we have a dishwasher, but that closes the last door to actual cleaning. Bear in mind that this pan’s whole purpose revolves around heavy grease, whether it renders out of meat or you add it yourself for frying. By the time I finish cooking, there’s a thick layer of grease covering the whole pan. And this isn’t just lard, it’s a sticky black filth, shot through with charred particles of meat. Anything that touches this stuff is contaminated. Have you ever heard the old saw that oil and water don’t mix? Guess what! It’s true. Washing this pan with hot water is like trying to sterilize the New York subway system with a toothbrush.

Let me describe the routine. It reminds me a lot of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, where the Cat in the Hat leaves a mess in the tub, and uses a series of household items to clean the spot, and clean the cleaning utensil, and that utensil, and so on, with the spot getting larger each time, until it covers the whole neighborhood.

First, warm the pan gently to help liquefy the grease. Stick it directly under the hottest water the sink will give, and scrub with a brush. This will remove the crusty bits from the pan, but leave any grease that does not adhere directly to the brush behind. Once the brush is thoroughly coated with black gunk, switch to a scrubber pad. This, too, will develop a heavy black coat, rendering it useless for cleaning any other dishes. Rinse the pan once again. Set it aside. This is as clean as it will get. If you like, you may now try to clean the brush and scrubber, with the benefit of soap. This will not work, but will cover your hands in a film of grease. If you are careless with a brush, the bristles will flick black, greasy droplets on any other dishes you may have cleaned, the counter, and any nearby walls. Industrial strength cleaners may fade, but will not remove, the consequent stains. Wash your hands in the bathroom sink. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Industrial strength cleaners may remove the gray sheen now on the inside of the sink basin. Or they may not. Return to the kitchen and dry the pan thoroughly with a towel (instruction 4). This will blacken the towel, leaving it unfit for any other purpose. Now – wait for it – “apply a light coat of Pam or vegetable oil while utensil is still warm.”

Mate, this pan is coated. It’s bleedin’ layered. Enwrapped in protective oils, it touches no atmospheric corrosives. It’s greased. It’s swaddled in fats. Slicker than a greased pig. It’s frictionless. Jellied. This pan wouldn’t oxidize if you went after it with a blowtorch. If it weren’t nailed to the wall, it would be lubricating the linoleum. This… is a preserved skillet.

Just how sanitary can this be? I tried to reassure myself that people used cast iron cookware for centuries, but gave it up when I realized these same people regularly died of horrible diseases before they reached thirty. Oh, I know that heating the pan is supposed to kill any microorganisms lurking on it when you start cooking again, but that isn’t very reassuring. People can get food poisoning from tinned food, consuming bacterial waste long after the bacteria themselves are gone. Is even a spectacular pot roast worth that.

Mmm…pot roast.

Posted by at 7:38 PM | Permalink

Okay, folks. We’re going to go through this one more time, because some of you still haven’t got it, and even periodically knock on my door in your confusion.

The wondrous complexity of the universe is no evidence of a creator god. The basic argument that it is derives from William Paley, who suggested a pocket watch as a metaphor for a biological organism in Natural Theology in 1800. (Eager students can read this excerpt.) He proposes that, should we come across a watch in the wild, we would not conclude it simply appeared there by undirected natural law; its complexity and its apparent purpose prevent us. How, then, can we conclude that equally complex and purposeful organisms are natural products? At the time of his proposal, Paley’s argument was a powerful one. There were no satisfactory explanations of the mechanism by which life might appear or evolve, except as something engineered. With the benefit of molecular biology and the theory of natural selection, we are in a position to offer undirected natural law as a plausible creator. If metals formed imperfectly self-replicating compounds, and watch-like behavior improved self-replication, we could well find natural watches in the wild.

Because we can now plausibly assert the existence of spontaneous natural phenomena, the metaphor, and thus the argument, rapidly falls disintegrates. So evangelists have altered the metaphor, likening a watch to the entire universe: “A simple universe might exist spontaneously, but a complex and sophisticated one such as this could not; therefore a creator exists, and this creator is God.”

1. A watch in the wild is an anomaly. We may see any number of stones, leaves, and bugs on our nature hike, but few if any watches. While this does not prove a watch is artificial any more than a nugget of gold lodged in ten tons of rock must have been placed by intelligent design, it is suggestive. A watch is sufficiently different from the environment to imply it is not there naturally. By contrast, the universe does not appear out of place within its surroundings; there are no surroundings to which we might compare it. By definition, the universe includes any environment we might witness.

2. We are familiar with other examples of watches, and know them to be manufactured. By induction, if we have seen a thousand watches in people’s vest pockets, and know them to be manufactured, before finding one in the wild, we might well conclude that it, too, is artificial, though we must offer some mechanism by which it may have come there – such as a careless hiker dropping it. By contrast, we have no other universes from which we might deduce a pattern of creation. By definition, the universe includes all with which we are familiar.

3. A watch whole apparent behavior reflects a purely artificial institution, namely the subdivision of the day into twenty-four equal parts. A sundial might occur naturally; a sixty-minute hour is an implausible natural occurrence. By contrast, the universe exhibits no unnatural behavior; nature is by definition the behavior of the general universe.

But even if we were to grant the point, and admit that the universe is too sophisticated to exist without design, the argument would accomplish nothing. If we grant the premise that all sufficiently sophisticated things must have a creator, and that the universe is sufficiently sophisticated, we must grant a creator. But the syllogism must apply equally well to the creator itself. Any entity capable of designing the universe must itself be terribly sophisticated. Who created God? Granting the premise forces us immediately into an infinite regression of creators. Simply snickering and saying, “that’s silly, so we may as well stop at God,” as medieval scholars did, is insufficient; the syllogism rigidly demands it. Conversely, anyone willing to grant an uncreated God should be willing to admit to an uncreated universe.

None of this disproves the existence of a creator, but then, the burden of proof lies with the affirmative. Anyone wishing to establish an invisible, ineffable being had better have some mighty strong evidence to back it up, and neither Paley’s argument nor its modern revision are up to the job.

Okay, is that settled? Right. Take a deep breath, believers, because the door-knockers always give up and move down the block before I can point the next part out, and I'm going to finish this. If we define God as the logically necessary creator of the universe, there is no logical connection between God and any moral code. Stop and think about this. The great monotheistic religions take it as given that the guy who made the universe is the same guy for whom we shalt and shalt not. It’s not there in the definition. Even if Paley had been right, and the universe must be the product of intelligent design, the argument makes no reference to any ethical frame. The universe could just as easily be the work of an ineffable demon, or, for that matter, an omnipotent being who created kumquat trees in its own image. Hey, it makes as much sense as what you get in some of the holy books I’ve seen.

Posted by at 9:32 PM | Permalink

This is a bad time of year. The thrills of the holidays are past, and so is the sense of a blessed return to quiet normality. Now all we have is several dreary months to ride out before spring returns events to the community calendar. I’m in a serious funk, which I won’t write about here. Other people’s personal problems are as boring a topic as you can find – and yes, that includes Michael Jackson. But I will write about the merry hell depression plays with writing.

Some blessed writers find putting words to paper as easy as thinking; often, the processes are identical. E. B. White once wrote a letter to an interviewer after an unsatisfying interview, offering answers in full, and apologizing that he (White) could not think adequately without his typewriter. No doubt that’s annoying for such writers in their daily routines (“Which floor?” “Uh…just a second.” tak takka tak tak tak “Seven, please.”), but there can’t be any terror of the blank page. There’s no worry over whether the writer has anything to say. He doesn’t know until the words are written, and by then, the work is done. It may not be good, but the dreadful blank page has been slain.
I work from the other direction: first decide what to say, then grapple with the word processor to work out how to say it. I don’t want writers wasting my time; why should my readers be any different? And on those days when I have nothing meaningful to say…*thud*.
The catch is that I’m a poor judge of whether the day’s thoughts are interesting. Ideas which are old, or seem obvious, to me are new to somebody. Maybe you. Eileene harangues me often, and in various contetxts, about my exaggerated notions of general knowledge. Depression magnifies misgivings about content tenfold. When you want the whole frustrating world – dust, missing mobile phones, weight gain, paper cuts – just to go away for a day, it’s awfully hard to get enthused about sharing it with folks. In desperation, it’s possible to try a stream of consciousness exercise, but depression, almost by definition, stultifies thought. If you can’t pull off stream of consciousness writing in a good mood, you surely can’t pull it off in the doldrums.
Worst of all, there is little more discouraging to future writing than writing badly. Writing improves only through vigorous exercise. The process feeds on itself.
Don’t stop.
You may not be able to control your mood, but you can force yourself to put something down. It will stink. That’s okay; all writing stinks without some serious blue pencil work. But without working past to something worth reading, it will remain stinky forever. If you have to be miserable, what better time to do work that would make you miserable, anyway? Have faith something good will bloom from the labor.

Posted by at 11:07 PM | Permalink

New Year has come and gone, and we have dutifully received directives for municipal Christmas tree removal. Many houses, unsure of the schedule, simply dumped their trees on the treebank, so that the trees will be out there whenever the truck comes by. I suppose some of my neighbors find the sight depressing, a firm reminder that the holiday has shuffled off to wherever holidays go to die. Not me.

No, I think the trees look rather pretty, even discarded on the curb. New Jersey suburban sprawl is drab at the best of times, and positively awful in the gray of winter. The trees are thoroughly dried, through inattention and dry air and sapping over the sawn trunk, so they keep the same shape they had standing in living rooms. Around here, the predominant style is short-needled, 5’ to 6’ egg-shaped trees, which, next to 12’ monsters, are my favorites. The needles remain miraculously green, possibly with some help from food coloring. They all look ready for another months service; all someone needs to do is brush them off, and stand them upright, preferably far from any heat source.

Which brings me to the real reason I like seeing all those trees: I like to imagine watching them burn.

In my youth, I assumed that all the refuse trees went to some good purpose, that the city would sell them for paper pulp, for particle boards, or for fuel, and earn a few bucks to defray taxes in the process. I was dismayed to read that the post-holiday glut forces most towns to pay someone to take them. (Can this be true? Where can I find reliable information on it?) Some trees just wind up landfill, though we may be getting better about recycling. After all, all garbage is somebody’s raw material.

But from those towns that just don’t know what to do with the things, who find scarce land taken up by annual pine deposits, I dream of receiving a letter asking me to help torch a six-story tower of Christmas trees, and reduce it to a more manageable ash. Since this is my fantasy, there is no controlled burn, where we carefully saw down every tree and feed them slowly into a furnace. The trees are just piled on top of one another, brittle dry, no water content to interfere, but full of the volatile ketones and acetones that make sap. I’d tunnel a hole into the center of the pile, where the trees’ weight would compress the pile somewhat, light a kerosene-soaked rag in there, and run. With the mouth of the tunnel facing the prevailing wind, I could get a sort of chimney effect, though the draw would be horizontal rather than vertical. Cracking and spitting, the mound of trees would burn from an inner core outward. It would look spectacular when the flames cut their way up through the center, but hadn’t yet reached the perimeter. Over the course of the next minute, the furnace would create its own draft, pulling air from every direction and funneling it skyward. No one could bear to stand within forty yards of the blaze. It would be glorious, if brief.

Locals might not show sufficient interest to buy tickets, but if the town advertised the spectacle enough to draw firebugs from a large area, I expect they could make a little money, or at least draw a little revenue from the sausage vendors and coffee stalls. It could be the small-town festival, right up there with the mushroom harvest and Lithuanian Pride Day. Whaddya say, mayors? Any takers?

Posted by at 9:58 PM | Permalink

Brownie mix is starting to worry me. Maybe not the classy brands like Girardelli, which still require you to add an egg and some oil, but definitely anything in the Betty Crocker tier, where you just add water.

I like my brownies heavy and moist, the consistency of clay. Every time we cut a new brownie out, a little dough sticks to the knife. Since a knife doesn’t need to be sharp to cut mere brownies, we usually just leave it in the cake pan. Unless that knife gets washed soon afterwards, the dough on the flat of the blade hardens to an unbelievably tough residue. It won’t yield to a scrubber, or to a fingernail. It will break, but only if you whack it good and hard. Fortunately, it softens readily under the faucet, and comes right off.

But here’s the weird part: if you let the knife soak carefully, rather than scrubbing it directly in water, the dough gradually soaks through and returns to a pasty substance just like the raw mix, once you stir the water in. Tastes the same. Feels the same. So does the gooey film left behind in the pan, and the crumbs, too, if you take the time to dry and pulverize them first.

Real dough does not behave like this. If you add water to some old bread crumbs, you don’t get a stretchy dough back out of it. If you rehydrate a pie crust, you don’t get something you can shape with a rolling pin. Oh, no. What we’re dealing with here isn’t real food. It’s cement.

The mechanism of cement is nifty. Add just enough water to pulverized rock to let it slop around. The water acts as an adhesive, to keep the dust from falling apart or blowing away in the wind. More importantly, it also acts as a lubricant, allowing the tiny rock particles to slide around one another so the cement can pour into whatever mold you have handy. Now, drain out the water. As the water drains, the particles or rock gradually settle up against one another. If you drain the water slowly and gently enough, the particles have the leisure to fit together…just…so. On a microscopic level, a near maximum of each particle’s surface comes into contact with other particles, with almost no space wasted between them. This allows every microscopic cranny to press into the surface of neighboring particles, catching in a manner similar to Velcro. When the last of the water goes, the tiny irregularities in every grain’s surface have become wedged into another grain’s irregularities. Voila! Rock dust now behaves (almost) like a solid stone block.

And that’s what we’re eating in brownies-from-a-box: chocolate-flavored cement. The likeness of a good brownie to clay is no accident. Presumably, you could dehydrate and rehydrate the mix all day without any appreciable effect, making brownies over and over from the same mix. I wonder whether Betty Crocker and company need to make them from actual food ingredients. Couldn’t some carefully chosen river silt, or even plastic, do just as well, with no calories for the diet-conscious? And then I wonder whether they already have.

Posted by at 4:51 PM | Permalink