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Ted Stevens, Alaskan senator, is in the news again. The last time around, he was the poster boy for pork barrels and boondoggles on the federal dime, including the infamous “bridges to nowhere.” Stevens was a popular senator, at least among Alaskans, precisely for those boondoggles. Stevens is widely known as one of the most skillful figures in Congress for bringing home the bacon, and Alaskans voted for him, and for Republicans nationally, on the strength of that skill.

This time around, though, he’s done something scandalous in Alaskan eyes, and not just in the eyes of the rest of the country that has to foot the tab for his popularity. He’s been indicted for ethics violations, specifically failing to report millions of dollars of gifts from the VECO Group oil interests—part of a broad swath being cut as a result of VECO coming under investigation for fraud and bribery, including convictions for its leaders, who are now “cooperating with authorities.”

Everyone knows he’s guilty. The lifelong Republican loyalists are pretending otherwise, of course. I’ve read comments to the contrary, apparently made in all seriousness. (It’s hard to be sure in discussion forums.) Some say he’s been framed by a partisan witch hunt, which is patently absurd in reference to a DoJ which has been aggressively subverted for the past ten years by the creeps running the Republican party, and the country, placing party loyalty ahead of competence or ethics—we just got the report this week. Some say he’s innocent until proven guilty, which principle only extends to the power of legal reprisal, not voter responsibility, and which is hard to accept from hypocrites who have spent a lifetime voting for and excusing “law and order” platforms that operate on a presumption of guilt. (Certainly, we have more reason to think Stevens is guilty than we do to believe some of those Gitmo prisoners were guilty of anything more than being Arabic without US approval.)

But the party faithful don’t bother me nearly as much as the independents who have proudly voted for Stevens in the past and still publicly state they intend to continue to do so, if they get the chance. And there’s a lot of these nominal independents, too: although Democratic challenger Begich is mounting a strong offensive in a very red state, Stevens still holds over 40% of the popular vote, and that in a political environment turned against Republicans and incumbents generally. Stevens remains afloat on the voters who argue that, okay, he may be a crook, the argument goes, but we really owe this guy a lot for all he’s done to bring money to our state.

In other words, “My vote is for sale. I will knowingly help to put criminals into positions of power, as long as I get a piece of the action.” Such voters are corrupt, too, even if they don’t have the moral fortitude to admit it. They just get paid less for their influence than Stevens does for his.

Posted by at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of forty, Eileene announced that I should join her as she consults our new family doctor over her Bell’s Palsy (from which, blessedly, she has already made an almost-complete recovery), to get a checkup. I didn’t think it entirely necessary, since I’d had a physical just a year ago, when what I thought was a second kidney stone proved mercifully to be just a bad case of piles, but not until after I had befuddled three or four different medical facilities and needed a physical as part of the process of un-befuddling them. That physical found nothing wrong with me—apart from the abdominal pain, of course—and I feel well. Still, to satisfy Eileene, and to try out the new doctor, and out of a recognition that annual physicals are supposed to be the sensible way to avoid serious problems, I went.

Turns out there’s nothing wrong with me, unless the pending blood test produces radically different results from the one I had last year, which doesn’t seem likely. In fact, I’m apparently doing great for my age. Blood pressure 120/80, which is fair, pulse of 60, which is good for anyone, and it’s terrific given my tepid exercise regimen of a half-hour walk most days. (The pulse of 80 to 88 that I register when I give blood seems more plausible, but apparently it only comes in so high because I have always just finished a two-mile walk carrying a laptop and library books when I do so.) Regular EKG, no chest blockage, weight acceptable for my height—although I would still like to shed the slight but undeniable spare tire I’ve developed in the past ten years.

All of which has proven surprisingly heartwarming. I didn’t expect much of either fanfare or anxiety over turning forty, nor did I experience much. But I hadn’t reckoned on how the natural joke of attributing every momentary lapse—forgetting some movie star’s name, dropping silverware, sweating during my walk, that sort of thing—to the onset of old age would make me self-conscious of advancing age.

Let me hasten to point out that I drop silverware all the time, and have all my life. I sweat on my recent walks because it is over 90°F and wretchedly humid. My memory is decaying noticably from the Rain Man-like steel trap it was in my childhood, but the particular case of forgetting a movie star’s name has more to do with not being interested in learning it in the first place than actual memory loss. Nonetheless, chuckling at everything as a sign of age insidiously makes one actually feel as though aging, unnaturally fast.

It’s nice to have hard evidence to the contrary, in place of mere wishful thinking.

Posted by at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Through the Brownian motion of the web, I bounced into a page devoted to great opening sentences from science fiction. Lists like this are terribly subjective, but this particular list honorably, and uncharacteristically, provides its criteria: a good first sentence hooks you, “But a great first sentence…establishes a tone, it sticks in your mind, and it’s like a little otherworldly koan, confounding your expectations. And maybe freaking your shit a little.”

So I was saddened not to see my favorite opening line from any book—science fiction or otherwise—make the list, although I confess 1984’s credentials as science fiction are debatable. Someone offers it for consideration in the comments, but he doesn’t explain why Orwell’s immortal words belong on the list, so I’ll do so here.

1984 opens with the words, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Let’s deconstruct that sentence.

Bright, cold day in April. Clear weather, conducive to and metaphorical of a clear mind. Sunlight makes things visible, subject to observation and analysis; cool air keeps one alert. (Contrast the frame of mind you experience in hazy summer doldrums, or fog, or storms, or the wee hours of the night.) Calm. Attentive. This frame of mind is reinforced by the use of simple, short, common words that are part of everyone’s working vocabulary. Nothing elaborate, just simple facts, told with simple words. There’s the establishment of tone.

So when we learn the clocks are striking thirteen—something clocks manifestly should not do—we are made to feel that it isn’t some kind of accident, or misperception or illusion. Wrong things are happening, and they are doing so in the calm, rational light of day. There’s the confounding of expectations.

There is an explanation, of course: the clocks are on military time, as in “1900 hours” for 7 pm. A clever reader, or one used to living on an army base, might pick up on that immediately, in which case the sentence does double duty in establishing tone: the setting is one of civilian life—clock towers don’t survive very well on the modern battlefield—but a civilian life which has been militarized, to fight the Eurasians and/or Eastasians in the service of Big Brother, we soon learn. Yet such an explanation must come after the moment of confusion; a military rationale does its work without preventing the initial moment of surrealism from doing its work. There’s the koan.

For readers who anticipate this explanation, however, the sentence performs yet a fourth function, although its significance will not be clear until later, by which time the first-time reader has forgotten the opening line. If the reader is sufficiently on the ball to explain away the thirteen-striking clocks, he has already engaged in the rationalization of the absurd, which for Orwell includes the state of war, especially of perpetual war extending to encompass civilian life. Rationalization of the absurd in the service of the state, especially the willful denial of reality known as doublethink, is the crux of 1984’s message. Orwell seduces his brightest readers into participating in the very intellectual self-sabotage he wants to warn us against, as a way of illustrating how insidious the trap is. Insidious enough that you won’t know it until you read the book a second time. And that should freak your shit a little.

All in fourteen words, not one of which would trouble a six-year-old. That is a master wordsmith at work.

Posted by at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I heard an interesting complaint recently about World of Warcraft. The complainant feels WoW is immeasurably more professional and polished than its predecessors, notably Everquest, and generally more fun moment to moment. But no cloud is without its silver lining, and every ray of sunshine casts a shadow, so even the vast improvements in the MMO that WoW represents mark some kind of loss. In particular, the endless grind of EQ and the sharp penalties for death, among other obstacles, contributed to a greater sense of community; people would chat more extensively in EQ because they spent more time bored between fights, and would cheer major accomplishments because they actually were major, and rare, as opposed to a conveyor belt of guildies turning in Onyxia’s head. Players who got to high levels could feel they’d accomplished something, if only enduring the grind that long. And this guy missed that community of adversity.

Now, I never played EQ, or ever got much of anywhere with an MMO other than WoW, so I have to take such claims on trust, but they seem entirely plausible to me. I’m not much impressed by their appeal—if I want to enjoy community and human interaction, I don’t log onto a computer and /cheer some guy named Lord DrAgOnZkIlLa, about whom I know nothing but that he reached level 50 today, for reaching level 50 today. Maybe I’m just a product of a pre-internet generation, but online interaction always seems far more shallow than the same amount of contact and effort produce in real-life interaction. Nor do I agree with the attitude among hardcore players (including the EQ lead developers) who feel that tedium is a positive virtue in games, separating the heroes from the dabblers. Someone who endures tedium to save a life, or inspire a student, or protect the innocent is a hero; someone who endures tedium to reach level 50 is just indulging himself in wasting more time than his neighbors. Nonetheless, I can sympathize with a more general desire to recapture some of the fun bits of old games eclipsed by their glossier, more sophisticated progeny, even the fun bits that could only exist as a byproduct of broken game elements.

I’m not talking here about game elements that only seem fun through the haze of nostalgia. I’m not talking about, say, Germany 1985, one of those attempts to bring clunky old wargames with hex maps and a million little cardboard chits and painstaking rules directly to the computer, preserving all the workarounds forced upon such games by the limitations of hex maps and a million cardboard chits, instead of designing a game to take best advantage of what a computer can do. I had a lot of fun with Germany 1985, picking through a sea of statistics to grind my opponent down, but I would never point to it as something that’s missing from computer games today. Nor am I talking about the nostalgia itself. I have fond memories of Sargon, that ancient, ancient struggle against inevitable collapse where you spent grain and plowed fields trying to keep your population fed and productive without spiraling out of control, which it inevitably did, because random catastrophes trashed any attempt at stability. The fickle finger of fate made Sargon a bad game, but I enjoyed it, and I miss that willingness in my youth to engage enthusiasm—a willingness which no game could ever recreate.

No, I’m talking more about games—or rather, game elements—which were fun for being bad, or which could only exist in the frame of a larger collection of fun-killing bad ideas. Civ4 is better than Civ1, hands down. None of Civilization’s sequels have fixed its fundamental problems of micromanagement or the sheer complexity guaranteeing that computer opponents will suffer exploitable blind spots, but the sharpest edges have been hammered down, and new game elements like strategic resources and customizable maps keep making the game richer. But I will never recreate a game of Civ1 wherein I got a couple lucky draws of cavalry (2-1-2) out of my first few goodie huts, and those horsemen zipped across the Asian steppes grabbing more goodie huts and wiping out my Paleolithic rivals before they could get a leg up. I reached “future technology” (worth extra points because Sid Meier ran out of material benefits) and settled the entire eastern hemisphere by 480AD, and shortly thereafter stormed the western hemisphere with tanks and battleships to the Babylonians’ chariots. I had to give up Civ1 forever at that point, because it was clear beyond all doubt that I had beaten the game in the broadest sense: cracked the design flaws so badly that it could never, ever present a challenge again. It was terrific fun, despite being possible only because those mutually-reinforcing exploits existed, and finding those exploits over the course of multiple games and learning how to use them to best effect was stimulating.

Some of those grand old games are gone for good, unless you’re the kind of OCD victim who keeps his Tandy and his Apple IIe “just in case.” Certainly we’ll never see their like made again, but then, I don’t see why we should. Oh, someone could make a true “retro” 8-bit reproduction, but the old coots already have their nostalgia to keep them warm, and the young whippersnappers couldn’t share it anyway, even if they wanted to, even if they tried their hardest. I don’t often get the urge to go retro, but when I do, many of my favorites simply won’t work any more, even on so-called emulators. The programs simply break down over arcane graphics incompatibilities. Fortunately, text is easy to reproduce. It will survive forever. So, whenever the pressure of the graphics arms race gets to be too much, or the dumbing down of games to fit onto consoles, or the ultimate victory of the FPS over the strategy game, there is still now, and will always be, a way to go home again, if not at this link, then in another that will take its place.

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>_

Posted by at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eileene made me watch a bit of a new show today, as part of her practice of fishing about for shows that I might enjoy. I confess I’m not a very fruitful soil for such plantings, I have little patience for mediocre entertainment, despite what would for others be redeeming features. Tut this one, a television program called “Middleman,” looks rather promising.

There’s no way I could catch the whole nature of the show in the span of five or six minutes, but from my brief glimpse, it seems to be a very tongue-in-cheek tale of a young, semi-employed art major encountering the hypercompetent Middleman and dispatching or concealing treats to society. I could be way off in my understanding of the premise, but the premise is probably less important than the tongue-in-cheek, of which I’m certain.

Which is good. I almost turned up my nose at the worrying “ABC Family” logo in the lower right-hand corner. When it comes to entertainment, “family” rarely means “something your family might enjoy watching together,” but is instead usually shorthand for “sanitized of anything that might offend dogmatic Christian parents.” “Family” programming is terribly dull, because almost anything is guaranteed to offend dogmatic Christian parents. Scary images might frighten children. Friendly images might give them the wrong idea, if they include strong female characters, or mixed-race relationships, or homosexuals, or homosexual actors, or vaguely effeminate characters, or anyone wearing pink. Moral dilemmas might confuse their understanding of a Manichean universe, where the faithful are good and everyone else is evil. In a world where even Sesame Street and the Teletubbies have come under fire as “unsuitable for children,” there isn’t much left. (Although I suppose wholesale slaughter of the Philistines, crucifixion, and the death of every firstborn Egyptian, including innocent newborns, would be acceptable.)

So I was astounded to hear, within a few minutes’ viewing, a joke about hentai tentacle monsters (“Hentai” means “perverted” or “unnatural” in Japanese, and usually refers in the US to pornographic Japanese comics and cartoons, which include gigantic tentacle rape scenes with alarming frequency.), a reference to John Shaft (one bad dude), an illegal sublet, blood-flinging animal rights protest, and the use of the word “lesbian.”

Now I don’t have an ethical problem with any of these appearing in a TV show, even a family TV show. I’m not sure they qualify as family entertainment, because so much of the show, including the general weirdness, is likely to fly over children’s heads, but I wouldn’t have any concerns that the material would corrupt my hypothetical children. In fact, I’m rather happy to see them pass muster as “family” entertainment; perhaps they signal a sea change, in which families who aren’t chipper picket-fence white Christians eager to deny depiction of uncomfortable truths can participate. But I sure am glad I don’t work the ABC customer service lines right now. They must be handling a mind-boggling host of believers who have grown used to “family” meaning “congruent with my own particular faith.”

Posted by at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s surprisingly little talk about vice presidential candidates these days. I remember more interest expressed in my childhood, when I didn’t follow the news closely, and when the vice president didn’t really matter. The power and presence of Dick “fuck you” Cheney should wake us all up to the fact that veeps can matter, and matter a great deal, even if the president doesn’t die in office. But nothing stops political junkies from speculating, any more than sports junkies can stop predicting next year’s lineup, so you can find the predictions if you bother to look.

All the likely choices have their ups and downs. One of the names to watch is Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. The theory goes that, while the Katrina debacle hardly covered him in glory, he’s a fresh young face (which could work for or against the aging McCain), a committed neocon who could reassure a party leadership unsure of McCain’s patrician credentials, and also an outspoken Christian who could energize the religious wing of the party disappointed to see Huckabee’s ejection. The kind of Christian who feels the separation of church and state should operate in only one direction.

Jindal was born into a Hindu family, which might cast him under suspicion among the True Believers, but is more likely to work in his favor: Americans who “vote Christian” are likely to eat up his story of conversion as a young man, a lost soul drawn by the undeniable light to find his way to Jesus. To be sure, his Christian branch of choice is Catholicism—a sect only recently superseded by Islam in the minds of fundamentalists as a threat to America—but, given his account of exorcising a demon from a fellow college student (a function Catholic dogma reserves to priests), it’s a less-threatening pick-and-choose sort of Catholicism. Like Catholics who practice homosexuality or birth control, but far more agreeable to the fundies. Jindal is a real success story by the Christian right’s lights.

Which has me wondering: how many of the same people who are delighted at Jindal’s brand of religion and politics continue to believe Obama is a crypto-Muslim. The evidence, such as it is, that Jindal is a crypto-Hindu is the same, if not stronger: both were born to non-Christian parents, although only Jindal was raised outside Christianity, and they both are (gasp) sort of darkish-colored. Yet I don’t doubt that the True Believers would have little trouble convincing themselves that only one of these men can really be trusted by protestant fundamentalists to infuse the White House with proper Christian values. Perpetual war, disenfranchising the poor, and hating fags.

Posted by at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the end of an era. A very small-scale, personal era, but still… The Civilization product line has finally come up with a game I don’t want to play. I’ve been a complete Civ addict since the dawn of the series. And even though many good games have come since Sid Meier first popped a disk into that box with skyscrapers sprouting over a Pharaonic tomb—many games better than Civ, to be honest—it’s always Civ I return to. I’ve got Civ, Civ2, Civ3, Civ4, the Civ2 expansion, the Civ3 expansion, the Civ4 Warlords and Beyond the Sword expansions, the daring but disappointing Conqueror the World spinoff, the even more clunky Fantastic Worlds spinoff, and even the Civ2Gold expansion so I could have imbalanced fan-made scenarios on hand instead of getting them off the internet where they belong, just for a little variety. I realize that gamers who can boast buying every title in a series are about as rare as gravel, but there is only one series good enough to put me, mister negativity, into that category. I’ve played fan maps and fan scenarios and designed a couple myself, long after the world had moved on to shinier packages with more instant gratification.

But I have to draw the line at Civilization Revolutions. When I first learned of the adaptation to console, I was hesitant, along with many dedicated Civ fans. Unwilling to prejudge, but concerned. The original Civ was, by current standards, quite crude in many respects: a single map size littered with long, stringy continents, for example, or the infamous battleship-sinking spearmen. New bells and whistles don’t always improve a title, but Civ has only improved in its continuing efforts to whittle away such awkward lumps and corners. The game still cheats to compensate for the fact that the AI can’t move its units sanely, much less intelligently. How far, then, would a console version regress in its need to quash the package down into limited memory? Could this version of Civ capture that epic sweep of history, when it actually boasts the absence of a “save game” function on the grounds that it’s unnecessary because every that can be finished in a sitting? How many compromises with simplicity need be made?

Alas, a lot. Many of the simplifications are predictable. Gone are the customizable maps. All games include precisely five nations, who share enough map room for a mere 3-5 cities apiece. The tech tree has shrunk along with the roster of playable nations, and with it the selection of military units and building projects. Such losses, while lamentable, are forgivable. Small can be good—though you won’t convince most die-hard Civ fans of that—and clearing away some of the city management and overspecialized units could produce an amusing Civ lite, even if it doesn’t preserve the stately historical march of the original.

Other losses, however, are not forgivable. The Civ AI, which has only recently risen from defective to merely dim, has apparently regressed once again to the point where automated opponents qualify for mercy killings. In a desperate effort to present a challenge, the developers have restored a lot of the old cheats: triremes allowed to sail deep waters, planes which never run out of fuel, automatic coalitions against the human player. Sadly, even this isn’t enough; CivRev needs creative new cheats to function, like armies that materialize out of nowhere to menace your empire—even when the host nation doesn’t have the necessary weapon technology, or the ships to transport them to your shores.

As I’ve noted before, there’s cheating, and there’s cheating. Giving the computer some extra resources or similarly subtle handicaps is less than ideal, but acceptable; it’s entirely appropriate when a player asks for it by selecting a high difficulty level. Asymmetric cheats, like unsinkable triremes, are considerably less acceptable; human players understandably resent the discovery that their opponents can do things they can’t. Armies materializing out of nowhere and invisible, unthwartable saboteurs who destroy your defenses without warning raise the cheating to an entirely new level, one which destroys the rise-and-fall-of-nations narrative the game is supposed to simulate. The player no longer cleverly plans the strategy which will defeat his foes; he merely endures the caprices of a spiteful god until his foes self-destruct. It’s like playing checkers with someone who can flick one of your pieces off the board whenever he feels like it, or turn any of his pieces into kings no matter where they are on the board—but still loses because he’s too stupid to do it in a way that works.

So, at long last, I’m going to take a pass on a Civ title. I appreciate the desire—motivated by both love and greed—to bring the game to a new audience, and the unfortunate need to compromise certain facets of game design to do it. Unfortunately, there’s a line beyond which the necessary compromises make the ultimate goal of tranporting the experience impossible, because the experience doesn’t survive the operation. Judging by player commentary, I think CivRev has crossed it.

Posted by at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Within arm’s reach of where I write this is my water bottle. Although it is labeled “Poland Spring,” it no longer contains Poland Spring water, but ordinary tap water—which I gather is all it originally contained. The fact that most bottled water, despite some suggestive advertising, is no more pure or healthy than tap water—sometimes measurably less so, depending on the brand and your public health system—is no longer news. So widespread is this knowledge that Poland Spring no longer even bothers trying to tell you it compares favorably with tap water on its own label.

This is not to say that they aren’t still misrepresenting themselves as healthful. Don’t be silly. They’re just going about it in a more roundabout fashion. In place of the text that once told you how much better bottled water is for the purity of your precious bodily fluids, there is now eco-friendly copy:

“Our bottle looks and feels different because it is purposely designed with an average of 30% less plastic* to be easier on the environment. We can all make a difference, please recycle.”

Despite my boundless trust in my fellow man and especially in corporate ethics, I had to doubt this claim. For starters, putting 30% less plastic in their bottles saves Poland Spring a small fraction of their production costs, and probably another fraction of related costs like cleanup. Not a lot, I’m sure, but still, a fraction of a penny per bottle is still real money given enough volume. Call me a skeptic, but I think the prospect of shaving a couple million from annual production costs, and not a desire to go easy on the environment, is behind the decision.

More to the point, if you look the bottle over, you’ll notice that the design includes some odd ridges and a low waist, rather similar to what you’d see on a Coke bottle. As far as I can tell, they serve no purpose beyond esthetics and marketing, the need to “brand” the product by bottle shape as well as logo, label color, font, and so on. A couple small ridges might help someone grip the bottle, but this swoopy bottle molding goes well beyond that useful minimum. I don’t have any sensitive measuring devices on hand, but judging by careful eyeballing of the bottle’s outline and a quick bit of calculus, I estimate that removing, or even reducing, those unnecessary ridges might save another two percent of the plastic required to make that bottle. If the design is intended to save Mother Nature, why not remove them?

If they really wanted to be eco-friendly about it, Poland Spring could pare the plastic use down even further by shaping the bottle like a sphere, the shape with the smallest surface-to-volume ratio. That would give you maximum interior (water) for minimum surface (plastic container). A true sphere might present other problems, I suppose—it could be difficult to handle, or troublesome to pack for shipping—but any move towards a spherical shape, like making the rough cylinder of the bottle more squat and wide, would help. No matter how you cut it, concavities like that low-slung waist are pure waste material: spreading them out to meet the cylindrical space defining the bottle’s minimum convex outline would allow the bottle to hold more water (or rather, allow the manufacturer to shorten the bottle, and thus use less plastic, while holding just as much water).

Did you notice the asterisk on that 30% claim? I sure did. I had to hunt around to find the footnote, because it’s in smaller font, in an entirely different section of the label. It doesn’t do nearly so much for the old PR image, after all. It reads: “*Versus comparable size, leading beverage brands.” Not leading water brands, mind you, but leading beverage brands, that is to say, compared to one-liter bottles of soda pop.

Now there’s a problem with this comparison, in that pop bottles have to contend with the pressure of carbonation. I buy bottled water once every few month—for the bottle, not the water. The one-liter bottle is a handy way to measure my water intake for medical reasons, and after several months’ use, they start to get a cruddy buildup inside, despite washing. Occasionally, I’ll put something other than water, like pop, in my water bottle. And when I do, the carbonation causes the walls of the bottle to bulge out so hard that the little cup-shaped bottom pops outward and cause the bottle to wobble or even topple over. Just can’t take the pressure. Pop bottles use more plastic because they have to, in order to hold the contents in. So Poland Spring hasn’t designed its bottle to use 30% less plastic than other water bottles; it’s designed its bottle to use 30% less plastic than something completely irrelevant, like boasting they cost less than an aircraft carrier. They use just as much plastic as any bottled water company; they just want you to think you’re supporting the environment by buying their product because they use less plastic. That boosts sales, and to hell with the actual environment.

Of course, if you’re really inspired by the label, if you really want to cut down on plastic use to be easier on the environment, you can. Just stop getting the bottles entirely. Just go straight to your own tap. I’m sure the ecologically-minded folks at Poland Springs would be delighted with your commitment.

Posted by at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had a visit from evangelists this morning. Typically, I receive them with good humor. I respect the right of people to be wrong, if not the actual willingness to remain wrong in the face of compelling evidence, and a cheerful face is more likely than righteous atheistic fury to shiver someone’s shield of faith. Besides, I enjoy a good argument. Evangelists rarely put up much of a fight—my hypothesis is that anyone equipped with even the basics of reasoned argument wouldn’t be evangelists in the first place—but compelling them to admit that they’re arguing from faith after all, and not common sense, is good mental exercise.

Today was a little different, however. The opening line, before introductions even, was whether I believed “the Bible contains words which might provide comfort after the death of a loved one.” I had to agree: some people undoubtedly have found comfort from biblical teachings in their grief. Some people have also found comfort in the belief that their loved ones were whisked away by aliens in flying saucers, or that their loved ones miraculously escaped an exploding building and chose to go into hiding for unspecified reasons rather than speaking to authorities or their surviving family, or that their loved ones are still alive despite seeing the corpse, so I wouldn’t take that as much of an endorsement of biblical doctrine, but I digress.

The opening question was something of a fishing expedition: usually, it’s somewhat irrelevant, but every so often, the evangelists will ring the doorbell of someone who has lost friends or family recently, preferably (for the evangelist) recently enough to still be deep in the grieving process, offering a chance for the believers to exploit the emotionally vulnerable, to push their message of obedience to the Invisible Man in the Sky on someone who is in no state to think straight. That’s playing dirty. I’d be mildly offended at such tactics in the best of circumstances.

As it happens, however, I’m currently in that segment of the population who has recently lost friends or family: my brother died in May at the age of 37. And the attempt to exploit my loss to spread superstition got my hackles up. Instead of playing defense and settling for holding atheism up as a perfectly reasonable doctrine, I went right for the throat. I pinned our visitors into a definition of cruelty, and demonstrated a presumed God’s behavior fit that definition (Without even needing to get into the Midianites!), although the evangelists didn’t quite see how satisfying the definition means then that God, if he exists at all, is cruel. I drove them back into admitting that they believe the bible because they believe the bible—that exact phrase—although they wouldn’t admit the argument is circular. I called on the junior member of the pair, a girl who couldn’t have been more than 16, to answer a few questions herself, without her grandmother’s well-worn answers to fill in.

…and suddenly the meeting was over. Good-bye, thanks so much for your time.

When youth are brought along on evangelistic tours, they are there to learn. That is, they are there to learn how to convert the unbeliever, AND NOTHING ELSE. Any other form of learning, or even answering questions for themselves, is not to be tolerated. It’s dangerous. Which should tell you something about just how self-evident evangelists actually feel their self-evident truths are.

Posted by at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier I commented on John “you cunt” McCain’s tactic of attempting to equate Barack Obama with Jimmy Carter. Peculiar because Carter, widely held in contempt during his presidency, has become quite admired since; peculiar because so many of his unpopular policies have proven wise and prescient, especially his attempts to wean us off of oil; peculiar because Obama so little resembles Carter in appearance, demographic appeal, or policy; peculiar above all because Carter was president so long ago that painting him as emblematic of Democratic folly does more to highlight McCain’s own advancing age than to denigrate Obama’s youthful idealism.

Perhaps he or his staff realized quickly—if not quite quickly enough—that the tactic wasn’t going to work, because it dropped from sight within a week. Snarky punditry was probably a big hint; McCain is sensitive to looking like a boob in ways Bush could never be. But maybe there was another reason.

McCain named Phil Gramm, he of the golden parachute, as his financial advisor. (A bad sign for a candidate who admits to a weak grasp of economics.) Gramm shot his mouth off last week in a claim that there was nothing wrong with our economy. The statement echoes one of Carter’s own greatest embarrassments, under very similar circumstances. When Carter characterized our economy as essentially sound, but suffering under a cloud of irrational despair, a “malaise,” he was roundly derided for this attempt to brush off a very real combination of inflation and stagnation as imaginary, although Reagan was worshipped soon after for saying essentially the same thing in his “morning in America” campaign. It’s all in the delivery, I guess—Carter seemed to be pleading where Reagan was commanding.

Gramm, of course, is a post-Reagan Republican, so, like the neocons who have grown used to unchallenged power, chose to accompany his malaise speech with abuse. Everything is fine, says Gramm, and those who think otherwise are just a bunch of whiners. (Easy for Gramm to say to losers like you; he has feathered his nest quite well with consulting and lobbying jobs from the banking firms he championed in the Senate. Also, his wife was on the Enron board of directors when he pushed legislation making the Enron scandal possible. So suck it up, whiner.)

Which does indeed leave the candidates in a situation much like Carter-Reagan showdown—with McCain on the wrong side. Both are saying the economy is basically okay, but place different spins upon it. Obama, with his message of hope and looking toward the future, is free to point to serious problems and lay blame where it belongs, promising better when he’s in office; McCain, trying to hold onto his base, is in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why the current situation isn’t so bad, and why it isn’t his fault, anyway. Which leaves McCain looking more like Carter than the opponent he hopes to define.

Posted by at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Governmental distortion of truth through statistics is nothing new. We’ve seen irrelevant distractions, like the Johnson administration’s reporting of Vietnamese troops killed instead of actual battles one or territory gained in Vietnam—and a fading desire to discriminate friend from foe to keep those figures inflated. We’ve seen fudged values, like the Reagan administration’s technique of ignoring inflation when announcing only minor absolute cuts in social programs, when in fact they were making enormous real cuts. We’ve seen outright redefinition of values for comparison, like the Clinton’s announcements that unemployment was down—after they ceased counting people who had been looking for work within the past year, but not in the past six months. I suppose it should come as no surprise that the current, most secretive and deceitful of presidencies should employ all these tactics on a regular basis. But I have to take particular exception at their approach to inflation.

Officially, the current rate of inflation is 1.7% a month. This figure is already fudged a bit, being measured against the average of the most favorable spread of months to be found in the previous year. It is only by virtue of this hedging that Bush has been able to claim (incorrectly) that we are not in a recession. But even this fudged value 1.7% is still really high; that comes to 22% a year. (We no longer report annual inflation precisely because it looks so scary in print like that.) So the White House wants you to stop looking at inflation. Just look at the core inflation rate. That’s a measure of the increase of the cost of living attached only to the essentials, unaffected by changes in the price of luxuries.

Or rather, it used to be. Beginning in the Reagan years, the core inflation rate was repeatedly indexed against a changing, and ever cheaper, collection of products. A rise in the price of steak, for example, was ruled to be unimportant because, as steak got more expensive, people would switch to hamburger. So the figure was readjusted to hamburger—but still compared to the earlier figures including steak. Reagan introduced the core inflation rate as a way to detach official inflation reports from their ultimate purpose of accurately measuring the cost of living, substituting the cost of merely surviving. “Sure, you’re paying twice as much rent as you used to, but you could move into a slum for slightly less than you used to pay for a decent apartment, so your standard of living is going up!”

(But don’t take my word for it; Stephen Cecchetti was there in person: “As a young economist on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 1980, I saw US consumer price inflation hit its modern peak of nearly 20 per cent. In an attempt to improve appearances, we started computing various alternative measures of inflation. Half jokingly one of my colleagues noted that our job was to remove all the components of the price index that rose by more than the average. What was left was the core.”)

Unfortunately for the Bush administration, even the cost of surviving is going through the roof: food and fuel prices are leading the current inflationary surge. Government-sponsored economists would like you to focus on the core inflation rate, because they can redefine that as Reagan did to conceal a declining standard of living, but those pesky essentials are making even the core inflation rate look bad. Their solution? Eliminate food and fuel prices entirely from even the core inflation rate, on the grounds that continuing to include them in inflation figures would distort the inflation figures.

That bears repeating: The Bush administration feels that to include rising prices in the official formula for measuring rising prices would distort the measurement of rising prices. That’s not just debatable economic theory; it’s not just false; it’s tautologically false. It is logically impossible regardless of the meaning, purpose, or context of the official inflation figures. That anyone can offer an argument like that with a straight face demonstrates just how far we’ve slipped into Bizarro World, where where up is down, white is black, and ignorance is strength just because the president declares it to be from his own little existential bubble.

Yet they will continue to push this new definition without the slightest recognition that there’s anything wrong with it, and will cheerfully ignore, or even attack, anyone who disagrees, as they have ignored or attacked anyone who has questioned their other blatant lies. And this new, reality-free concept of inflation will enter the national dialogue as though it had any meaning. It is already; economic apologists appearing on CNN repeat the appeal to core inflation instead of asking on our behalf why we aren’t looking at actual inflation, simply because that’s what the White House wants to talk about. Why wouldn’t it? After all, it’s not like anyone actually has to pay a significant portion of their budget for gas, heating, rent, or groceries. Not anyone who matters to the Bushies, anyway.

Posted by at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Surely you’ve realized by now that I’m angry at the Republican party generally: its candidates, its rank-and-file, its machine, and above all its leadership, the criminals sitting in office or happily awaiting proactive pardons for all they’ve done for the Bush administration. Honestly, though, there’s plenty of blame to go around. They wouldn’t be in office, or abusing office as they are, without plenty of help—from compliant news services (if not entirely co-opted by right-wing billionaires like Zell and Murdoch), from apathetic voters who aren’t furious about current events and never bothered to do their homework before voting in the first place, and from Democrats who have either decided to yield without a fight or simply adopted conservative platforms wholesale as the new center.

It’s this last that’s got me most angry at the moment. When an angry public swept them into a majority of both Congressional houses in 1986, despite loaded dice and gerrymandered districts, that should have been a great, big fucking sign that we’ve had enough of the neocons, and that we wanted the Dems to stand up and drive those police state, war-mongering, treasury-stealing, spying, torturing, you-negroes-in-Louisiana-don’t-count motherfuckers out. Two years later, Americans still waiting for someone to push back, Barack Obama rose from the back benches to topple heir-apparent Hillary Clinton fueled almost entirely by the hope that he would succeed where Congress had failed.

Want to know what the issues are? Want to know what’s really on the voters’ minds, what they want from a candidate, what will make them stand up and vote in droves? You already know. So does Barack Obama. So does Harry Reid. So does Nancy Pelosi. But just to make sure, Pelosi has, for several weeks now, been sponsoring a Digg-style “Netroots Nation” questionnaire at askthespeaker.org, where people can raise issues. They can also bump the issues others have raised upwards or downwards in significance with a quick up-or-down vote. Guess what’s at the top of the list. Go on, guess.

Tough call? I know. There’s so much to choose from. We’re still hemorrhaging troops and money in Iraq. The housing crisis is hitting everyone, with serious fears of a general banking melt-down hurting markets worldwide. The planet is dying and Bush doesn’t feel we can afford to save it. Business is shrinking nonetheless, and paychecks with it, a shrinkage magnified by the biggest. Fucking. Debt. Ever. A debt accrued fighting an unjust war while restructuring taxes so the wealthy won’t have to pay them any more. These are huge problems, to be sure. But they don’t even make the top five.

The big issues are all matters of the rule of law. Why is Congress simply letting Karl Rove get away with ignoring a Congressional subpoena? Why is Congress even thinking about telecom immunity for aiding illegal seizure of private phone records? Presidential impeachment. Launching investigations of the current presidency once a new man is in office. Truth and reconciliation boards to deal with years of presidentially-approved torture.

People are angry. Not as angry as I, perhaps, but angry nonetheless. They know they’ve been sold up the river by a lying, cheating, spying, torturing presidency; even the crazy 27%, the jingoistic mouth-breathers and the religious zealots have begun to admit that, okay, maybe the past eight years haven’t been the kind of government they thought they were voting for (a base lie). And, at long, long last, the general public wants some accountability.

In this environment, playing to the center is precisely the wrong move. This is not a time for polite attempts to find a new center. This is a time to grab hold of that anger and turn it into a mighty electoral weapon. This is one of those rare moments when negative campaigning is not only a viable strategy, but morally justifiable—nay, desirable.

Yet the Democrats persist in trying to appear moderate, even as the Republicans continue to redefine “moderate” as something just shy of fascism. We can’t win by compromising with the Republican right; they’ve either forgotten how or never intended to in the first place. They’ve won every major fight for a generation by refusing to compromise, starting with the blessed Saint Ronnie, moving through Newt Gingrich, and right up into Dick “fuck you” Cheney and Scalia’s “originalist” belief that the founding fathers would approve of warrantless surveillance.

Obama screwed up by supporting the new FISA bill granting telecomm immunity and embracing as law the warrantless wiretaps once considered scandalous; his popularity and his campaign donations both dipped sharply after the FISA vote. Pelosi screwed up by announcing impeachment off the table, even as Bush persists in keeping war with Iran on the table. Congress screwed up by giving John Yoo and David Addington a pass in their contempt-filled testimony; it was more important that each congressman get his forty-five seconds to wag a finger than actually to hold them to answer questions. What is the matter with these people? Are they so whipped by the aura of failure that they’ve stopped trying? Are they individually so wrapped up in the corruption of the current regime that they don’t dare air out the laundry? Are the progressives simply gone—along with decent Republicans shoved aside by the neocons—replaced by “Democrats” like the DLC, who believe the country should be divided between the authoritarian rich who hate gays and love Jesus and the authoritarian rich who think gays are okay? The only way—the only way—to lose this election is to stir apathy, to play into the belief (nurtured for a generation by the right wing) that there’s not all that much difference between the parties, no reason to choose beyond a chest-thumping tribalistic devotion.

Stop it! Just…stop it! This country has drifted so far towards the right that it’s forgotten what the center looks like. Another decade of this one-sided approach to moderation, and it will forget what the Bill of Rights looks like. Just as its current leader, George W. “just a goddam piece of paper” Bush has.

Posted by at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday was my birthday, the big four-oh. I am now officially middle-aged, and officially on the decline, mental and physical. I know a lot of people consider the fortieth birthday a big deal, an occasion to make (or, more likely, endure) jokes about aging. But me? I hardly noticed.

Not to say I didn’t celebrate, a little. Eileene and I very nearly share a birthday—hers the 11th, mine the 13th—so we compromised and made a day trip of it on the 12th, at a high-end miniature golf course and a nice restaurant downstate. On my birthday proper, I bought a “tiramisu cake” (Warning for tiramisu fans: it wasn’t much good.) and cut it with my gaming buddies. Ignoring the birthday entirely would be another way of paying it too much attention, a pathetic attempt to pretend that it doesn’t happen if it’s ignored.

But I confess that my attitude towards birthdays gets more low-key every year. don’t want a big party or lots of presents, just a dinner out, maybe a book or a bottle of wine. Perhaps a deeply repressed fear of aging is responsible, but I don’t think so. I think it’s vanishing greed. As a kid, my birthday was a big event, because I could expect new toys. Now I can afford all the toys I really want. No, not “toys.” Other men reaching middle age suddenly decide they want a red sports car or an expensive mistress. When I talk of wanting toys, I literally mean a new board game, or a day out playing miniature golf.

I may be an old goat, but I’m still a kid at heart.

Posted by at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember all the promises we heard way back in the heady days of 2000, when certain politicians insisted that it was all onward and upward, if only you put them in charge? Slash taxes across the board—but mostly for corporations and the very wealthy—deregulate the financial industry while the benevolent hand of the free market nudges them into wise and ethical fiscal policy, do away with pesky environmental regulation, and we’ll all be rich, rich, rich! So how’s that going for you? Feeling rich yet? Feeling like your life is worth a lot more than it was before the neocons were in charge?

I ask because those same guys with the promises to make the pie higher have decided that your life is not worth as much as it was eight years ago. Take careful note, because this is an official evaluation, an estimate produced by the EPA. Where the value of a human life lay somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 million in 1996, it is now officially just under $7 million—and that valuation ignores inflation, including the sharp devaluation of the dollar which has accompanied the fiscal policies of the same yahoos described above. Measured against the more stable euro, the value of life has dropped from E7 million to just E4.3 million, a drop of over 38%.

The EPA valuation of human life is measured rather arbitrarily, according to an arcane and elaborate formula of how much extra money a worker can command for an increase in risk at the workplace—according to basic economic theory, the real valuation of workplace health risks. You may not consider it a particularly meaningful measurement of the value of a human life. The EPA claims to agree, insisting that people shouldn’t think of the number as a price tag on a life.

Unfortunately, that is precisely how other federal departments, including the EPA itself, think of it. It’s just that admitting as much would seem…tacky. The valuation is used to determine whether enforcement of health and safety regulations are worth the cost: multiply number of lives saved by the value of each life, and compare it to the cost of enforcement. If the price tag exceeds the value of the actual humans involved, to hell with them. The lower the value of your life, the less likely the law is to be enforced, which in turn lowers the value of your life even further.

And that explains why our current executive and his cronies, with a long track record of redefining such indicators as unemployment, inflation, or cost of living to make itself look good would be so eager to announce that your life is officially worth 12% less than it was before they took office—and unofficially, but more accurately, a whopping 38% less. Being able to claim they’ve improved your life would be flattering, but claiming they’ve ruined it is actually worth cold, hard cash. Between satisfying corporate greed and mere image, there’s no contest.

Your actual well-being of course, doesn’t even enter that particular calculation.

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eileene has come down with a case of Bell’s Palsy; briefly, one side of her face is paralyzed. Fortunately for her, it’s unlikely to stay that way. Typically for neurological disorders, Bell’s Syndrome can stem from any of several causes, including the ever popular “we’re not really sure,” but most cases (about 75%) can be cleared up in a week or two with antibiotics, steroids, or both—or even without treatment. Of the remaining 25%, few are disastrous; treatment may take longer, or the bulk of the symptoms can depart, leaving behind a permanent but minor loss of motor control that can be corrected with therapy. Still, some small fraction of cases are permanent, even with treatment.

(The diagnosis is somewhat confused by the fact that she had a popping jaw a year or two ago, with similar secondary symptoms: numbness, stiffness, a grinding sensation when she works her jaw. And indeed, it cleared up in a week or so with some muscle relaxant and antibiotics—whether they actually did anything, or the condition simply went away on its own is unclear. Perhaps she had the same thing last time, and it was misdiagnosed, or she may have had two different conditions on the two occasions, or one may contribute to the other.)

Eileene looks like she’s had a stroke: she smiles wrong, her speech is slurred, and she’s complained of trouble with dribbling a bit when eating milk and cookies. I’m very worried for her, although there’s nothing to do at this point but take the pills and hope for the best. In the meantime, she’s put on a brave face and encouraged me to do the same. (An absence of pain helps, no doubt.) Easier said than done. But there’s something else: the first time we discussed it, the first thing she said to reassure me was that she’d be willing, if it proved necessary, to go through physical therapy to be able to smile right again—which rather put me off at the time, and continues to bother me now.

The notion of a living with half my own face paralyzed is disturbing; I imagine a lot of inconvenience (the dribbling, biting my cheek, having people misread my expressions) and discomfort (from the asymmetry), and by extension, I find the notion disturbing for Eileene, too. That she should be worried foremost about physical beauty is mildly shameful; it implies that she thinks I’m more worried about how she looks than how she feels, and also that I haven’t put any effort into making the converse abundantly clear. It hurts my feelings to think that she thinks I’m that shallow, that my first reaction to the diagnosis was that my hot babe had become damaged goods.

Posted by at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I dunno. Last night, Eileene made me watch Doctor Who again, one of the episodes that “Mike might like.” Not so much, as it turned out.

The most recent incarnations of the show—and the Doctor, for that matter—are significantly better than they used to be. The show is enjoying a renaissance akin to the facelift Star Trek got when it returned as the Next Generation, for much the same reasons. A lot of credit goes to the writers. They’re at least as good as, probably better than, earlier writers, and they enjoy the particular advantage of having grown up loving the show. Writing for the series isn’t just a job; they have been given license to add to a sacred part of their childhood, and their dedication to making the show everything they possibly can shows. Actors, too, although the difference is subtle. But in the final analysis, I think just as much credit has to go to the increased budget.

A bigger budget obviously means better special effects, which is vital. Today, there’s some blue-screen moments and some obvious CG and some death rays not quite in line with their ray guns, but it’s enough to get on with, for a willing audience. Nothing like running past the same Styrofoam rock a dozen times or so while pretending to be in an incomprehensibly vast labyrinth of caves, or a blood-sucking monster that’s clearly nothing more than a puddle of congealed rubber cement, as the show used to offer.

A bigger budget has an even more profound impact on Doctor Who than gee-whizzery, however: the plot elements actually make more sense. Here’s why: all science fiction must bow periodically to the limits of possibility imposed by actual production. If the story includes a war involving the deaths of millions, you’re going to have to limit yourself to some cut-and-paste CG, or a half dozen representative soldiers buying the farm while death noises come from off-screen, or best of all let the whole war happen off-screen after which someone just comes in and talks about it. Cheap butt-splice “teleportation” has been improved with CG, but it’s still not perfect. Maybe your robot needs to talk in a robotic voice, just to make sure the audience gets it. Compromises must be made, and the smaller the budget, the more egregious the compromises. Star Trek did it. A lot. Star Wars did it. Lost in Space did it. Doctor Who did it, too.

But Doctor Who was particularly shameless about it, and that’s saying something in comparison to the original Star Trek and Lost in Space. Cheap sets affected the plot, invariably for the worse. The show lacked realism, not only in the depiction of natural law, but in the behavior of the characters, who, constrained by dirt-cheap sets, had to act in a manner consonant with the stage, rather than television. The aliens would really have to ham things up because you couldn’t understand their electronically distorted voices otherwise. Alien invasions regularly began in abandoned shale quarries, instead of somewhere socially significant like London or somewhere geographically significant like the north pole, because shale quarries were cheap to film. Villains placed hapless companions in “minefields” instead of proper death traps because land mines need no visible props at all—and, although the music rose to a fever pitch of anxiety, what you actually saw was a couple of actors in silly outfits mincing across an empty field. The Doctor finds himself confined in a cell without bars; the only restraint is some rubbery smudges which he declares will chop his limbs off if he moves too quickly. He therefore is able to escape by simply walking out of the cell ve-e-ery slowly. And because none of this made any sense, the show would wave its hands and explain it away with nonsensical technical buzzwords.

Gene Roddenberry wasn’t shy about pulling nonsensical technical buzzwords out of his ass, either, when he’d painted himself into a corner and needed a dues ex machina. (“The resurrection chamber was able to work twice on this particular subject because of, uh, distortions in the quantum space-time continuum caused by Spock’s half-Vulcan metabolism.”) When he was stuck for an idea, he’d start with a gobbledygook premise. But, on his good days, he’d try some actual science fiction, usually of a social science nature: what happens to a world that eliminates disease, or how would we recognize radically different life forms, or what might happen if you change the past? The effort counted for something. Unfortunately, Doctor Who, to my mind at least, usually starts with a gobbledygook premise, and just goes downhill from there. An alien arrives in his own time machine and rapidly hatches a plan to steal the Doctor’s time machine, which will somehow make him omnipotent, bwa-ha-ha! Apparently, his own time travel isn’t good enough, or the Doctor’s time machine doesn’t make the Doctor omnipotent enough to stop the alien, or something. “Life energy” isn’t just a metaphor, but an actual energy force stronger than, say, a nuclear bomb, or the actual energy one could get from total mass-conversion of a living organism. Yeah, sure. When it comes to time travel, the nominal focal point of the program, the Doctor simply shrugs and tells the audience (via lectures to his companion) that it’s really complicated, so they shouldn’t bother trying to understand it. It got so that the audience pretty well took that attitude towards everything.

That tradition continues today. The show is a lot glossier, the acting generally better, and the writing waaaay better, and that counts for a lot. Unfortunately, even the good episodes, the ones Eileene thinks I will like, are full of twists that don’t even make sense once the half-baked justification is offered, and the actions of the characters involved at the time, who haven’t heard the half-baked justification at that point don’t make sense, even in that slipshod way of science fiction for the masses. So I’ll just take a pass for now. If I get the sci fi urge, I’ll dig up some Gregory Benford, who I’ve neglected; I’ve pretty much wrung Niven dry. Better yet, I’ll probably stick to non-fiction.

Posted by at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ran a number of shopping errands today: garden shears for the overgrown holly bushes, window shopping for Star Wars gaming material, birthday shopping for Eileene, and a replacement bulb for our AeroGarden. I had some trouble with the last, because I couldn’t find the Bed Bath & Beyond store.

It wasn’t my fault, either. I showed the presence of mind to call ahead to make sure they had the part, which required finding a particular store to call, so finding an address was part of the deal. Right up on Rte. 46, no more than five miles from our house, a route I’ve traveled many, many times. I even double-checked on Yahoo! maps: sure enough, right up in the stretch of strip malls shortly before the mall at the convergence of 23, 46, and 80.

Well, not exactly. Turns out there’s an extra strip mall tucked away in there, which I’ve hardly ever seen—the reason being that it’s set on end: only the Coconuts music shop is in fact visible from Route 46, and the rest of the strip mall is on an entirely different road altogether, an unremarkable little local road. The Bed Bath & Beyond faces this little road; the store is a couple hundred yards from Route 46. Its address is a courtesy only.

What has me wondering is why the store would want the courtesy. Perhaps they gain a certain amount of extra custom from people who, like me, figure “Hey, Route 46—I can get there,” but they must surely lose it to people who, also like me, wrongly conclude they know just where it is. I very nearly gave up and went home after my second loop through the tangle of New Jersey U-turns in the area and a drive several miles past my target; if I hadn’t spotted a stray sign (in the wrong color, red) hidden behind an overpass after deciding to head home, they would have lost my business entirely—and I had done enough homework that I knew it was in there somewhere. Wouldn’t an accurate, if less immediately recognizable, address be preferable? In this era of the Google search, complete with a link to the Google map in case you should want it, no one would remain baffled by the location for long if they got a proper address, while I lost half an hour or more and stopped at Target and Linens & Things first out of desperation simply because I’d been led to believe the store front was in the wrong place. It was only the good fortune of Bed Bath & Beyond that those two shops didn’t carry the product I wanted, plus a last-second glimpse, that got them my business.

Posted by at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Had a weird encounter with synchronicity today, apropos of nothing, but curious nonetheless.

It started with a link to an old article in The Huffington Post; which one isn’t important. That led me to some commentary on the presumed insult of comparing Bill O’Reilly to Ted Baxter—a fictional stuffed-shift newsman who Keith Olberman imitates when he quotes O’Reilly. Baxter was a character on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, played by Ted Knight. Yeah, I don’t remember him, either. That was a little before my time; so I drifted over into YouTube and href="http://wikipedia.org" target="_blank">Wikipedia to see whether I can find a clip. While searching for Ted Knight, I found that he was the voice of the narrator for the old Superfriends cartoon—remember that one?—as well as playing the father on a lousy sitcom called Too Close For Comfort, which I am also old enough to remember. Too Close for Comfort featured two college-age sisters (daughters to Ted’s character), a blonde bimbo and a brunette who passed for “the smart one,” although frankly, neither of them had all that much on the ball. That reminder got me to wondering: were they really as hot as I remember, or did they just have big hair, and I an adolescent lack of discrimination? Turns out they just had big hair, and I wasn’t yet old enough to distinguish between beauty and glitz, but that’s beside the point; the point is that Lydia Cornell, the actress who played the blonde sister, is no bimbo. After a lackluster acting career, she moved into blogging, earning awards for political commentary and a feud with Ann Coulter, which put her on the Huffington Post.

James Burke, whose praises I have sung here for his TV series “Connections,” allowed himself to be trapped by his own success. Having struck upon a winning formula in “Connections,” he tried duplicating it with “The Day the Universe Changed,” “Connections 2,” “Connections 3,” and “Circles,” all of which narrated surprising connections between widely disparate elements of human history and culture. Unfortunately, none of the imitations captured the original’s insight. Chief among the reasons for their failure is that relationships explored in the later shows weren’t always causal, and because they weren’t, they seemed trivial: two not-very-famous people being born in the same city, for example, or sharing a fondness for a particular breed of dog. Instead of Instead of describing how powerful and unpredictable the effects of advancing technology upon our lives are, the sequels descended into an elaborate version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” “Circles” was particularly guilty, a direct result of employing the variation of bringing the narrative back to its starting point, as I did above. The circular nature pretty well prevented a strictly chronological order, and with it, a causal one.

Okay, okay, I can learn a second lesson from Burke, albeit slowly. I promise not to inflict another one of these on you, at least not for a long time.

Posted by at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes ideas just spring upon you fully ripened, whole and entire in themselves, like Athena erupting from the head of Zeus. I had just such a moment this afternoon, in reply to someone speaking tongue-in-cheek about what makes Baby Jesus cry. Given that the people most likely to take that argument seriously are the same people who will use it to argue for the death penalty, for jailing dissidents, for launching unjust wars, and generally lashing out at the world, it struck me that if liberal agenda make Jesus—Prince of Peace, the professional dissident, the guy who was willing to die to get across the point that we should be good to one another, yes, even to our enemies—cry, then just about anything must make Jesus cry.

What a crybaby. The son of God really doesn’t come from the same fire-and-brimstone as his old man, eh?

Then it popped out, whole and entire in itself: “Show me a virgin birth, and I’ll show you a Momma’s Boy.”

The line doesn’t stand so well on its own; Jesus was a caring, if confused, soul, and so could reasonably be called a sissy by the kind of asshole who declares war in his name. The irony is lost, and with it, the humor. But in context, it’s a terrific line, if I do say so myself.

It works so well that it seems obvious in retrospect. Maybe too obvious. For all I know, the joke is original with me, but honestly, I’d be flabbergasted if someone—probably several independent someones—came up with it, too. So I won’t be getting rich printing it on bumper stickers. That’s okay; I’ll settle for making someone on the forum spit coffee on his monitor.

Posted by at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s early morning as I begin this, not my usual writing time. Touch of insomnia. I’d intended to gripe today about the crap the Bushies continue to shovel on the rule of law, but frankly, I don’t want to start the day that way, so I’m going to talk about a Filipino oddity instead.

Eileene often fails to finish her sentences. When a sentence ends in a noun or an adjective, she’s likely to slow down and hunt around for the word she wants. (It’s reinforced my bad habit of finishing others’ sentences, too, which is a bit worrisome, although my Mom seems to appreciate it as her aging recall begins to fail.) The oddest thing about this behavior is that the word almost always lies comfortably within her working vocabulary: if she were to use the same word in a different sentence, one where the word in question doesn’t come at the end, she won’t have the slightest trouble with it. She might say, “Could you get me that blue…whaddyacallit,” when asking for a coffee cup, but will also say, “My coffee cup is full of…uh, thingie.”

Often, the missing word is replaced by a gesture, or occasionally onomatopoeia. She might point, or lift her chin and point with her lips, Filipino style, or gesture the general size and shape of an object, or mime its use. But the word itself is gone.

It’s not just Eileene, either. Her mom does it too, only she says “Could you get me that blue…ano,” ano being Tagalog for “whaddyacallit,” literally “I don’t know [what].” Gestures, too. And she’s got it far worse than Eileene does, despite a perfectly respectable command of English—probably better than Eileene. Her uncles do it, too, although they have the excuse of poorer English.

I figured it simply ran in the family: either Eileene inherited some rare genetic kink in her grey matter, or she learned to speak by listening to her parents, and her infant mind grew into the notion that dropping the object off of sentences is normal speech, and by the time she learned otherwise, it was too late. But I was wrong. We visited a Filipino buffet recently—having married Eileene, I’ve learned they’re squirreled away in more strip malls and similar rent-affordable locations than I would ever have imagined otherwise—and the woman behind the counter asked if we wanted our water in individual glasses or in a… [two-handed gesture outline of a pitcher].

I had to grin. It’s hard to imagine so idiosyncratic a habit belonging to an entire nation, but there you are.

Posted by at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wall-E is the most recent offering from Pixar studios, its title character an adorably clunky robot, about the size of a large microwave with tank treads and coke-bottle glasses. Wall-E spends his days scooping garbage into his cubical chest, where it is compressed into blocks, which he stacks into towering mounds of compressed junk. He does this because it’s his job. Mother Earth has been so deeply buried in humanity’s garbage that humanity decided to head into space, waiting for the day when an army of robots manages to dispose of enough waste to make the earth habitable once again. The clean-up effort is a slow business. Judging by the mounds of trash, it may never be completed—indeed, judging by the non-functioning robots from which Wall-E salvages replacement parts, it may already have failed.

The clean-up effort is a lonely business, too. Wall-E may not be the last trashbot on earth, but he might as well be. While Wall-E dutifully crushes and stacks all day, day after day, he has developed (if not been programmed for) a need for companionship. He keeps a pet cockroach, and spends a few minutes every evening mooning over a pair of hands held in an old copy of Guys and Dolls before dutifully powering down for the night.

Wall-E’s world changes dramatically when a sleek, white robot appears. Eve, for that is the new robot’s name, is on a mission to find signs of life, and Wall-E is instantly smitten with her, the obsolete nerdbot too lovestruck to realize he hasn’t a chance with this cutting-edge beauty queen, not even after she proves prone to blasting anything that moves too suddenly. As fate would have it, Eve finds signs of life, a tiny curl of green vine poking through the wasteland. She snatches it up, radios a signal to the mothership, and goes into hibernation, waiting for an automated retrieval. Wall-E tends the inert Eve, and even leaves his post to pursue her into space, where we finally see what humanity has been up to in all these years.

Eating, or rather drinking nutritive milkshakes, mostly. And floating about in fully decked-out levitating recliners, yakking about nothing over their video screens while ignoring even the station they inhabit, leaving all the work to robots. And drinking nutritive milkshakes. Humanity has become very, very fat. Eva’s arrival, and with her evidence of green life on earth, precipitate a crisis between those who want to pursue the original mission of returning to earth and those who wish to remain in the womb-like station indefinitely, and mayhem ensues.

Wall-E is an excellent piece of work, fully restoring my confidence in Pixar after the rather tepid Ratatouille and the smarmy-preachy Cars. I heartily endorse it…if you’re a kid, or looking for something to take your children to see. Understand that Wall-E is very definitely a children’s movie.

You can see it in the pacing. While the long, establishing scenes of Wall-E, a tiny speck in an endless wasteland of…well, waste, are not without value, they felt rather long to me, a veteran sci fi fan already redundantly familiar with the notion of humanity burying its planet in a choking layer of its own trash. Children, who may be less familiar with the theme, need a good, long exposure to the set-up. The extended scene wherein Eve quickly falls for Wall-E (Of course she does. Duh!), and the way she whines “Wally” every three or four seconds in the dramatic conclusion, started to grate on me, because I’m a grown-up, and the scenes were trite. Kids might not see anything obvious about it all. The big reveal of the villain is telegraphed way, way ahead of time, thanks to an infamous icon which easily could have been downplayed until getting sudden attention along with the reveal, letting adults share in the moment.

The movie could have been much more powerful as a PG-13 show. If some bloated humans died, or at least been injured, as a result of their atrophied bones and musculature (or atrophied technical know-how!) when the effluent hit the exhaust pump, the dangers of pampered, vacuous life on a space station would be more meaningful. If Wall-E’s personality, his effective “self,” vanished (as it should) when his motherboard was replaced, the reality of his sacrifice would intensify the nobility of his actions. If Eva’s precious “imperative” were indeed imperative, it would heighten the pathos of the robots’ condition, and it wouldn’t cheapen her early use of the word as an excuse to blow Wall-E off. But if Wall-E had done these things, it would be a different movie, for a different audience, and it’s not quite fair to blame the film for taking the path it did.

As it was, the film lacked the kind of adult lens that Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and The Incredibles employed, along with a lot of sly humor aimed at adult tastes, and I found myself dismissing the cutesy robot leads in favor of an interest in the space station’s captain, who grasps the larger issues in a way that Wall-E and Eva do not, and who shakes himself out of a lifetime torpor to choose sides and fight. Wall-E simplifies the sophisticated issues of environment and the heroic ideal of teleos into a sort of rugby scrum over a potted plant in a way I found pointless and therefore dull.

Instead of being fully engaged in the plot and characters, therefore, I had to settle for appreciating the movie as craft, and there is considerable craft to appreciate. The work that went into Wall-E’s movement and anatomy is top-notch, just human enough to surprise when he does something the human body can’t do, yet, after you blink and think it over, his motions are perfectly sensible for something designed to bend in ways we don’t. The contrasting depiction of junkyard earth and gleaming space station is well executed. The inclusion of footage of actual humans (including Fred Willard as the too-slick CEO largely responsible for the mess) on display was a ballsy move, given the contrast to the very cartoonish blubber-butts seen throughout the station, but it works; even side-by-side, neither human form seems somehow wrong. The script wrings a lot of character out of a couple of robots who share a four-word vocabulary. And, while the movie carries a moral—two morals, in fact—it never crosses the line into preachiness.

I love Pixar to pieces; I have since catching the animated “Luxo” short as a freshman in college, well before Toy Story made the studio a household name. I am happy to see Wall-E meet the high standards we’ve come to expect from Pixar. Wall-E is a swell movie, even if it’s not my movie. And that’s okay. We teach our children to take turns. Today is their turn to play with Pixar. Maybe tomorrow will be mine again.

Posted by at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)