February 2009 Archives

Obama's budget, predictably, is under fire from the right. I want to call particular attention to the criticism of Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House budget panel:

"They're taking the highest level of spending in the war--the 2008 level--and they're inflating it into the baseline. And then the inevitable drawdown accrues $1.6 trillion in savings that they then take credit for to spend and grow government.

"That's not real good budgeting. That's not honest budgeting."

Now think about that for a minute. Set aside the question of which year should be used as a baseline if not 2008, the war spending of last year. Set aside the complete fabrication that 2008 was the high point from which a drawdown is inevitable; the costs of Georgie's Big Iraqi adventure have risen every year, and up to Obama's budget the trend was onwards and upwards. Set aside the larger criticism of a $1.75 trillion deficit alongside impicit approval for $1.6 trillion spent in a single year on a pointless war.

Just focus on the claim that it's dishonest to count actual expenditures as costs, or to count reductions in those expenditures as reductions.

Wha...?

The Bush administration and its Congressional allies hid the costs of the war--$1.6 trillion in one year alone, by Ryan's accounting--by simply leaving it off the budget. The argument was that, golly, we can't estimate how much the ongoing war might cost (untrue), so we won't budget for it at all; we'll just pay for it with emergency measures...and since it isn't on the budget, it isn't an expense. And hey, since expenses are now so low, let's give the wealthy another tax cut! Now that's not honest budgeting.

The war was, and is, a very real expense, not a fiction "inflated into the baseline." If Obama and his Congressional allies cut it, that's a real savings. Alternately, if they spend that money elsewhere, they aren't growing government; they're merely substituting one, hopefully productive, governmental expense for one which is not merely wasteful, but wholly destructive.

The quote above is part of a general trend I've seen lately of Republicans falsely accusing Democrats of misleading the public using a variety of techniques. The GOP should be able to recognize such methods; they've been using them quite successfully for a generation. Congressional Republicans are complaining that they aren't being included in policy, that Democrats are simply steamrolling legislation and calling it bipartisan. (As best I can tell, they're not included because they keep refusing the invitation.) They also crow about voting against a bill they hadn't read, complaining they hadn't been given time to read it--not that that stopped them for approving the PATRIOT Act or authorizing the president to start a war when he demanded immediate cooperation. Newt Gingrich--who championed his party's partisan obstruction under Clinton--is now leading a self-titled non-partisan group, dedicating to resisting every move Obama makes, in a purely non-partisan way, regardless of what party he happens to belong to. Just this morning, I heard Limbaugh warning us that Obama is exploiting a climate of fear to push his agenda, and actively working to create that climate.

It's more of the Big Lie strategy. But the Big Lie only works by drowning out the opposition; when more voices are lined up against neocon doublethink than actually spread it, the herd mentality on which it depends dissipates. At long last, and motivated by the threat of a depression, we've finally stopped taking the right wing line as canon. But Republican spokespeople have lived with their Bizarro World black-is-white rhetoric that they can't give it up, even now that the political winds have shifted against them. Perhaps they have come to believe their own propaganda. If so, they've got a long, painful road back to relevance--if they don't hoodwink us one more time and persuade the voters to blame our current mess on the Democrats cleaning it up.

I don't know the date, precisely, but it's been a while since our last dental checkup, so we should be about due for another one, give or take a month or so. That means I need to start researching dental plans again.

We don't have dental insurance; it's too expensive for what we get out of it. Our teeth are in pretty good shape, and, even when I needed two wisdom teeth removed back in '05, and we had to scramble to cut the cost of it somehow, the cost of insurance, year after year, was easily greater than the one-time cost of extraction. Instead, we adopted a different kind of dental plan, which doesn't pay all but a small-to-medium deductible, as traditional insurance does, but instead offers a discount on common dental procedures. The discount varies with the specific procedure and the specific plan: one plan might cover half the cost of an enamel filling, another 40%; one plan might offer cleanings free, another half off. Many plans exist. We picked the Patriot plan from a list of around thirty, all accessible from the same web site, then picked a dentist from those who participated in the plan. It saved us a lot on my oral surgery, and didn't object to a "pre-existing condition." It's saved us very little since, but it has saved us a little. The more dental work you need, the greater the savings, since there's a flat annual fee, and as I noted, our teeth are pretty good.

Which makes me wonder where the heck their revenue comes from. If we, customers who gain about the bare minimum from the plan, still gain something, that means the dental plan is paying the dentist more than it takes from us. I can only guess such plans get a kickback from the dentist for sending him the business: the plan rounds up customers and directs them to participating dentists, who find the increased business worth the loss.

That would make the dental plans something of a parasite on the dental profession. Orthodontia may be largely elective, but dentistry isn't, and patients will seek dentists with or without the plan. An individual dentist can profit from the deal, especially if he's just starting out and needs to build up his practice, but does so at the direct expense of other dentists competing for the same patients, and the dental plan rakes in a percentage of the medical charges without providing actual medical service, but merely for shuffling patients around. The business model, then, is radically different from that of insurance, but it fills the same niche of reducing the cost of medical care, and similarly leeches money out of the doctor-patient transaction. And, like other economic parasites--catastrophic insurance, shipping middlemen who charge a fee for transferring goods from one transport to another, speculators whose removal of wealth from the markets is tolerated because they help keep markets liquid--seek to make themselves indispensable without adding value.

I've got a cold today, which is sapping my energy and making concentration on my schoolwork difficult. I got through my two morning classes all right through a combination of sunshine and caffeine. Sunshine is a powerful "upper" for me, especially in winter, and, because I rarely drink coffee, I experience a tangible jolt when I do--cola and tea build up some immunity, but their caffeine content simply can't compare to coffee's.

Which brings to mind a dubious anthropological theory I encountered once years ago, I believe through a role-playing game that built its setting on a presumption that many dubious theories are, in fact, true, and that the world is weirder than we know. If the archaeological and paleobotanical sources underpinning the theory are to be trusted, plant remains like birch bark, kit, khaf, coca, kola nuts, and so on are much more common among prehistoric human habitations and even burial sites than they are among our close relatives and competitors like homo erectus and homo habilis. Unwilling to note a mere positive correlation, the theory goes on to posit a causal link: humans triumphed over near-humans because we used drugs. Taking mild stimulants at the start of the work day, and mild depressants to hasten a restful sleep at its end, allowed humans to regulate their working energy more effectively; the Neanderthals either never discovered the effects of these or similar plants (unlikely), or their body chemistry was sufficiently different that they could not take advantage of them (also unlikely). Humans thus enjoyed a decisive evolutionary advantage over other hominids.

Or so goes the theory. I'm distrustful of it, and of a long list of similar speculations about evolutionary advantage, for three reasons. It's hard to separate significant advantages from insignificant ones. A case can be made for almost anything to be an evolutionary advantage, including a lack of a specific advantage (the argument being that the advantage, while useful, is too expensive in biological terms to maintain). And, that kind of post facto reasoning is suspect by its very nature.

I blame my classes for this fringe theory being on my mind. (Apart from being a little loopy from the cold caught in class, I mean.) Educational theory and educational psychology are pretty thick with dubious theories. Like the bulk of social sciences, various attempts to simplify human psychology to simple rules provides insights rather than conclusions. Unfortunately, this truism doesn't stop the creators of such theories, or their disciples, from latching onto a promising idea and reinterpreting all successive data to match it. Skinner's robotic learning-by-stimulus. Binet's IQ-is-intelligence. Kidder's let-students-decide-what-to-learn.

Coming from a background in math, where the answers are much more clear-cut, I find the slovenly logic and scientific method backing such theories frustrating, and the pressure to subscribe to a professor's preferred theory more frustrating still. I want to say, "...mmmmaybe" to everything in class, which has earned me a few B's on papers where I could be earning A's. I think.

It's hard to trust myself right now. I'm coming down from the caffeine and sugar from breakfast, and I'm a little foggy in the head. Plus I have a cold. Or did I mention that?

MSU is having some trouble with its bathroom plumbing. Several locations have urinals that won't flush, or sinks with sputtering pressure. Presuming the problem isn't just that their phys plant plumbing detail either can't or won't fix these problems, I'd have to guess there's something seriously wrong with the cold water pressure throughout the system. Perhaps that's why the toilets in several locations fill with hot water.

The first time I noticed this, it was a startling experience. At first, I thought the bowl beneath me was warm with my own, er... exhaust, but the heat lingered far too long for that. After a minute or so, I began looking for some explanation. For a moment, I figured it was an unnoticed air vent dispensing central heating, but no vent was in sight, and pumping air into the restroom to spread from there into the rest of the library, would be fabulously stupid design. Only when I reached behind me to feel for the presumed airflow and follow it to its source did I catch on: the feeder pipe behind me was palpably warm across the better part of a foot's distance. Hot pipe, hot water in the pipe. Simple. I don't know why they're pumping (more expensive) heated water into the toilets, but, again, I think they're having troubles with their water system generally, and this is a necessary measure to keep things under control until the cold water works again.

In any case, it's been that way for more than a week, now. And, while a heated toilet seat is, in itself, rather nice in winter, I'm getting tired of some of the side effects. I dislike the sudden cooling sensation that comes with standing up. I dislike even more the condensation that collects on my cheeks if I'm there for more than a minute or two. And I really hate the way the warm air rises out of the bowl to carry the odors back up to me. The whole experience makes me suspicious of patented heated toilet seats. While the effects wouldn't be so strong, heat has a way of dissipating through a system, and a warm toilet isn't nearly so nice as it might seem at first blush.

I don't even remember how I came across this drill sergeant's advice on gunfights this morning, but I did. Speaking from complete ignorance about guns and gunfighting, it looks like good advice to me, from the basic and obvious ("Don't drop your guard") to the kind of tactics that sound like they come from experience ("If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running.") Although I don't own, much less carry, a firearm, nor intend to, it was an interesting read, simply because it falls in the general category of strategy and tactics. I'm an armchair tactician, whether the subject is chess or shootouts or World War III.

The exercise left a sudden, unpleasant taste in my mouth before I was done, though. Somewhere in the stretch between numbers 18 and 22--especially #21: "Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet if necessary, because they may want to kill you."--it became clear that this advice was unsuitable for a general audience, and began to look like an exercise of a handgun fetish.

It still looks like good advice...for someone already in a gunfight, or about to be in one. For someone in the slums of Somalia, or on a tour of duty in Baghdad, or even some of the scarier parts of our own US metropolises, where everyone you meet may indeed want to kill you, sure. Maybe good advice for a cop, too, although it's hard to reconcile it with what I understand to be a fruitful strategy of engaging the citizenry as fellow humans, rather than targets to be greased. For someone simply going about his daily business, the advice sounds pretty fucked up. I read to the end of the list, hoping Sergeant Frick intended his advice for people in war zones or high-crime areas that compare to war zones, but when he wrapped up with advice to tell the police "He said he was going to kill me. I believed him," whether or not this actually happened, it was pretty clear he didn't. Frick's advice on unarmed combat: "Never be unarmed." And, by his estimation, that means armed with a gun, preferably two, definitely large caliber.

I'm sorry, but I can't reconcile this whole package with Frick's number one option for personal security: a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation. Deterrence, maybe. Avoidance, probably not. De-escalation, absolutely not. His brief call for avoidance aside, this is a primer in starting a gunfight and winning.

Bring a gun. Preferably two.
Decide NOW to always be aggressive ENOUGH, quickly ENOUGH.
Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
And, when you're done, tell the cops he started it, because the dead can't argue.

That's how Amidu Dialo got killed, standing out on his stoop, along with five unarmed innocents killed every day in the US, because some big shot figures that every encounter with another human being is potentially "him or me," and decides to make sure it'll be him. All the hims, until every last one is dead. The gun nuts are very fond of citing gun violence as a reason to go armed, the need to protect themselves against a killing. They rarely, if ever, acknowledge that a major cause of gun violence is their very eagerness to defend themselves, aggressively and proactively. Simply carrying a gun dramatically raises the probability of dying in a shootout, because it dramatically raises the likelihood of getting into a shootout. Not to mention the dramatic increase in chances of shooting an innocent, even if "victorious." There's more than one way to ruin a life in a gunfight, even if you're the one still standing at the end. Two lives, if you care to count the one you just spattered all over the pavement.

Some ideas for enhancing an RPG experience look good on paper, but rarely work very well in practice. Murder mysteries, for example, or campaigns where PCs are enemies--not just willing to swindle one another, which happens all the time, but literally aim to cause one anothers' downfall. Background music is one of these tempting bad ideas. It should be a terrific way to set a mood. On the whole, it's just noise. Literally, noise that the players must filter out while trying to hear everyone clearly. Even if you can find the right balance of volume, it doesn't stay there for long; music, especially if you cadge it from a movie, swells and fades in time with what happens in that story, not yours. Tracks run out, forcing the GM to drop what he's doing and hastily peck at his iPod, or whatever he's using, before your gritty gunfight's theme music changes from The Terminator to Mary Poppins. Musical punctuation--dun dun! stubbornly refuses to cooperate, even if you think you know the music well:

"As you wrestle on the ground, the door slams open!" [Pause. Shrug.] "Okay, roll for initiative. Pete, are you still worki--" dun dun! "--ng on the safe, or are you diving for cover?"

Or if you do measure the interjection right, some pesky player will ask a question at the wrong time, throwing you off your stride. It just doesn't work. Which is mighty frustrating, because music should be great.

I've got an idea for taking advantage of theme music: musical cues. In place of theme music, playing continually in the background, create a sound track of three- to twenty-second themes, use them to introduce scenes, then leave them the hell alone. (Trying to use them during a scene brings you back to fumbling with the recording equipment when you should be narrating.) Now that we're in the digital age, and don't have to fiddle with forward and rewind as we did with cassettes, it should work, right?

I still need to worry about a few pitfalls. Apart from the temptation to use them during the action, there's the danger of using recognizable music. Sometimes, that's okay: a Star Wars campaign can freely steal music from the Star Wars movies. Other times, it's not so good. I'd like to slip the dramatic "Ecstasy of Gold," into the big showdown, when the PCs, returning from a war and swearing never to pick up a gun again, finally decide they can stand no more, and strap on the guns to take down one more bad guy who really, really deserves it. It's terrific theme music. But it's also recognizable. When we reach the climax, I don't want the players thinking about Tuco running through a graveyard, looking for the spot where the gold is buried; I want them thinking about their own story. Unless you're really, really into musical clips, it's very hard to find the good stuff without also risking having it recognized. Maybe I can get away with other, less obvious performances: Yo Yo Ma's cello version, or an acoustic guitar, until the players come to think of the music as "their song" and the big, operatic climax doesn't make them think of spaghetti westerns. Getting everything together could be a lot of work. Recording form certain media may prove impossible. If I burn the music into a CD, I'm stuck with that CD; I can't add songs later.

Still, I expect it should work, if I get my act together well ahead of time.

Knowing me, that means the effort is doomed.

So the investigation, formal and otherwise, into Alex Rodriguez and his doping continue in their slow, agonizing spirals into the truth, penetrating layer after flimsy layer of finely-parsed cloud cover. By his testimony, A-Rod claims that all these years he didn't think he was doing anything wrong, but also didn't want to ask anyone about it, because he didn't want to know the answer--a frame of mind that can only accompany a suspicion that he did, in fact, know he was doing something wrong. Even now, after the confession is out, he's not being entirely forthright. Just who, exactly, gave him the steroids? A cousin. Which cousin? Oh, you know, one of 'em. One you don't know, probably living outside US jurisdiction. What about his statistical record? Well, that will be under question, of course...not that he's admitting the drugs had anything to do with his scorecard--the boost was half placebo effect, by his reckoning, so, really, how can you know for sure he wouldn't be a great success without the drugs?

Really, Alex is a victim in all of this. Just ask him. "I've been through divorce, tabloids...you name it." Poor Alex is suffering a lot for one, little youthful indiscretion, years of playing under false pretenses, and years of lying about doping specifically. You can't understand the anguish he's been through. In an earlier statement, he blamed his mistake on the high pressure environment. He had to take performance-enhancing drugs, because it was expected of him. He had to justify his obscene salary. He was competing with Barry Bonds. Besides, everyone else was doing it; he was just unlucky enough to get caught doping.

Listening to his lengthy mea culpas, his explanations as to why he shouldn't be penalized in any way for his bad decisions, his pleas that he's already suffered more than he deserves for his mistake. Publicly embarrassed in the press, and the terrible shame of knowing he will never again be held in adulation by his fans. No need to make an example of such a public doper, and certainly not to punish him for his actual crimes; he's learned his lesson already. No, he wants us to judge him from this point forward; the past is past. But that he'll keep the money and awards and the trophies, thanks all the same...I sometimes get confused as to whether I'm listening to a news story on a doping scandal or the financial meltdown.

The money market speculators were young and foolish. They were in a high pressure environment, forced to take risks to justify their obscene salaries. They were competing with government bonds. Besides, everyone else was doing it; they were just unlucky enough to get caught short. They've suffered oh-so-terribly since the meltdown, publicly embarrassed in the press, not to mention the terrible shame of asking government for a few hundred billion to get them through the month. Why, some of them are even being asked to live on a measly half million a year in exchange for government aid, like a common servant or something. They've certainly learned their lesson now; no need to make an example of them in the hopes of preventing future irresponsible banking, and certainly not to punish them for fraudulent practices. No, they hope we will judge them from this point forward; the past is past.

But they'll keep the money and the bonuses and the trophy wives, thanks all the same.

Watching Tales From the Green Valley with Eileene gave me a bug to try one of the old city-builder series. The show depicts five historians and archaeologists attempting to run a farm by the methods used in 1620. How well they do depends on how you measure their success. They discover that they really can do things certain ways, and dispose of a few bad ideas when they find they can't--good scholarship. But they don't produce nearly enough to sustain themselves, which leaves the methods they use in doubt: do the academes produce so little because they have insufficient experience with methods the Elizabethans would practice for a lifetime, or because they are just fundamentally doing something wrong?

Anyway, in discussing the program with Eileene, we drifted into a tangent where I explained that I generally prefer to learn at the boundaries, exploring how a method was invented or first employed, rather than the umpteenth refinement--for example, the ancient Egyptian making of beer over the Elizabethan fashion. This got us both thinking about Caesar III, Pharaoh, and Zeus, and both wanting to play them.

I don't have time to replay any of these, but I figured a quick dip into Pharaoh by means of the demo would satisfy the urge. So I went online and downloaded the demo and played the three scenarios over the weekend.

Well, most of the three scenarios. To my chagrin, I found the demo didn't actually work; before completing the third scenario, it got hung up on a bug and wouldn't deliver clay from my storehouses to the brickworks. No bricks, no mastaba. No mastaba, no completion of the scenario.

The bug was irksome, but not enough to ruin my fun; I just quit there, urge satisfied, having completed the game once long ago, along with several subsequent games in the series. The bug wasn't any more disruptive of my fun than many of the intentional design features. For example, firehouses aren't introduced until after your city's first fire. My relationship with Osiris stayed in the pit all game, despite building enough shrines to collapse the empire--I'm not sure whether this was a bug or a simplification for the demo. Most frustratingly, roadblocks, which are essential to controlling traffic in what is, essentially, a traffic control game (!) don't appear until halfway through the third scenario. It's like the designers wanted the game to look impossible.

They didn't, of course. It only seems that way from a perspective lying past Cleopatra, Zeus, Poseidon, Emperor, and a few more radical successors like Caesar IV, wherein Sierra fixed up many of the annoying eccentricities, including transportation glitches, to be found in Pharaoh. (I seem to recall needing to restart several scenarios when the computer stopped hauling stone blocks to the pyramid site for no apparent reason...)

Going back to look at some of these old favorites can be an instructive exercise. There's brilliancies to be found in old games like Zork, Civ, and Doom, brilliancies that shine through the limitations of years past: crude graphics, clunky interfaces, and AI that would shame a Pac-Man machine. And old games deserve study as old masters deserving imitation. At the same time...great old games have a lot of shortcomings, too. Reminding ourselves of those is an important part of learning from the past, too.

If you read much history, you'll encounter a recurring depiction with minor variations, especially popular among the "geography is destiny" crowd. It goes something along the lines of "Nation A was perfectly situated to take advantage of the trade opportunities between regions B, C, and D, lying exactly between these important areas and their precious exports."

I don't know where I read (or heard) it first, but I've heard it a lot. Italy lying across the Mediterranean. Phoenicia lying between Greeks, Egyptians, Perisians, and/or Hittites. England acting as gatekeeper between Europe and the New World. China nicknamed "the middle kingdom" for lying between Mongolia, Tibet, Annam, and, later, Japan and Korea. And the more I see it, the more irritating it becomes, because the same description is used to credit everyone with being a major trade center, almost without regard to the ease of transport, volume of trade, or the demand at either end.

One book describes the medieval fairs of central Europe as the natural center for English and Flemish wool, French crops, Bavarian metalwork, Russian furs and timber, Scandinavian timber and ore. Another describes the Hanseatic League's sea trade, and their headquarters along the North Sea as the natural center for precisely that same set of goods. How many natural centers can there be? And how much variation can natural centers have? I mean, if hauling cargo by ship is the natural way to do it, how could central France and western Germany, notably inland, be "the" natural trade center, more natural than any other possibility?

One historian describes Crete as the natural center of trade between Hattus and Egypt, or even Phoenicia and Egypt. Another describes Phoenicia as the natural fulcrum of trade between Crete and Egypt. At least one of these depictions, and possibly both, must be wrong. Judging by how obviously Sidon does not lie between Knossos and Memphis, nor Knossos between Memphis and Sidon, when you look at a map, I'd say both are wrong.

The general rule is that these many, many exceptional positions as trading hubs aren't really very exceptional at all. Nation A lay exactly between nations B, C, and D? Well, duh!

What nation doesn't lie between some other two nations, with the potential for enjoying the seat of middleman in a lucrative trade route? Go on, pick any populated spot on the map. (Preferably heavily populated--nations of historical interest usually are--but not necessarily, as the exaggerated "trade empire" of Samarkand attests.) What lies north, south, east and west of that spot? Congratulations: you've just described a hub of trading activity. About the only way a country can fail to be surrounded by trading partners is to lie on the coast of an ocean--which virtually guarantees lying between trading partners along that coast, what with seacoasts being so heavily populated, and with coastlines being the easiest routes for heavy shipping and all. Exceptionalism in describing the geography of trading nations is largely a fiction, possibly born of each historian in turn becoming too attached to his particular subject. If a nation becomes a great trading nation, it isn't simply for the good fortune of lying between two neighbors, because if it were, everyone would do it.

You see a similar form of exceptionalism in military history, although it generally works the other direction: Nation A is severely disadvantaged relative to its neighbors, being surrounded by frequently hostile nations B, C, and D--a description that ignores the very real challenges that nations B, C, and D face as a result of being surrounded by frequently hostile neighbors of their own. The duality of the characterization becomes even sillier when the same historian describes a body of water--the Atlantic or the Mediterranean are popular choices--as vehicle in one chapter and obstacle in the next: "Rome was within easy reach of trade in Spain, Greece, and Africa" followed by "Rome was safely isolated from her rivals by the waters of the Mediterranean." If you really want to crank up the contradictions, it isn't much work to find a second author who describes how easy the sea made it for Rome to invade its neighbors with a few troop transports, rather than needing to march its legions the entire distance.

Such "trading hub" and "besieged territory" theories aren't pure fabrications; Germany, for example, certainly was (and is) surrounded by trading partners...and armed rivals, invading and being invaded in turn, and trading in the periods between wars. Those facts of geography contributed significantly to her history. I don't want to pretend otherwise. I just want to drop the attitude that such opportunities and threats somehow make Germany unusual, or even unique. Likewise Crete, Carthage, Bokhara, Antwerp, London, Shanghai, New York City, Singapore...

As the Marketplace radio program wrapped up for the evening, they tossed out a brief observation, almost a footnote to the day's business news: Blackwater Worldwide, formerly Blackwater USA, parent company of the infamous Blackwater Security, is changing its name to "Xe," pronounced "zee." According to company president Gary Jackson, the name change "reflects the change in company focus away from the business of providing private security." According to a more honest company spokesman, the name change is a response to the company's name being too closely associated to its work in Iraq.

And how could that be bad, hm? Aren't they proud of their work in Iraq?

Silly question, I know. Pride in their work has nothing to do with it; it's all about money. Blackwater has been formally forbidden to operate in Iraq by the Iraqi national government--not that that has stopped them--but the bad press has also cost them contracts with the US State Department, which has. Neither Blackwater as a corporation nor its more deserving employees as individuals may suffer the kind of private and criminal lawsuits they should, but at least the corporation is feeling some of the consequences of its criminality. Not enough to make it regret operating under no-bid contracts with few if any legal constraints and an accommodatingly military-corporate regime in the US, but something. Enough that they hope, by rebranding the operation, State Department bucks can begin flowing again.

If there's any justice in the world, this name change will attach itself to the company like a case of syphilis. News services should do what Marketplace did tonight, and continue doing it forever, with the same glee they once reserved for "the artist formerly known as Prince." Xe should forever be known not by its technical name, but as "the mercenary group formerly known as Blackwater." Embellishments on the theme are permitted: "the corporation so eager to conceal its past behavior as change its name from Blackwater," or "the private militia once known by the now-tainted name Blackwater" are also fine.

Unfortunately, there's precious little justice in the world. Nor do I expect much here. I can't see major news services in the US doing the job, not in the hands of jingoes like Murdoch, Turner, and Zell. So what little justice we find, we'll have to manufacture ourselves. The only way Blackwater can be prevented from sleazing its way through this with a mere name change is if we make the old name stick. So spread the meme.

"The mercenary group formerly known as Blackwater..."

I've mentioned that my gaming group is engaged in a half-baked sort-of-temporary tag-team campaign, a product of our expected GM showing up missing and nobody possessing the combination of desire, free time, and table-ready campaign concept to take his place. The campaign is highly episodic, with PCs jumping from world to world through a magic/steampunk transdimensional teleportation gate built by the potentially megalomaniacal fringe technophile Count Yernev. The gate has roughly the same effect as the spaceship in Star Trek: every hop through the portal is a new adventure, with little or no attempt at maintaining consistency between worlds or pursuing consequences of past actions.

I've been saddled with creating the "frame story," which includes that whole portal business in the first place. I just finished letting everyone explore the isolated and now abandoned Siberian town where Yernev used to operate before vanishing through the portal and taking his Cossack regiment with him. I also created a very, very shallow adventure for them to get their feet wet, where PCs find a primitive tribe awed by Yernev's earlier visit but now plagued by a demon who has taken it in his head to monopolize their source of the magic/steampunk ore that fuels their end of the portal, which they take to be a holy artifact connecting them to the departed Yernev. I don't know what we'll see next; that's Jen's job. So far, everyone seems pretty enthusiastic about the campaign, which leaves me quite ambivalent.

Yes, it's great that everyone's having a good time, and that they are properly mystified and eager to see what's next. It's gratifying to know I can pretty much bullshit my way into a campaign--maybe even through a campaign--with minimal preparation, and get my players excited. I'm also pleased that good vibes might help me convert the group to Over the Edge, or at least the idea of a rules-light system, and especially to wean them off D&D and its imitators.

On the other hand...

I seem to be the only one who isn't enjoying myself. Maybe it's because I know I'm bullshitting my way through this, without a real goal in mind, and knowing hastily conceived motives and plot devices aren't working properly. Maybe it's because I'd simply prefer to play a more formal campaign with properly consistent theme and ground rules, and I'm not sure we gained anything with this one--the time spent conceiving the campaign, creating characters, and otherwise getting it up to speed should have been enough to have my Homecoming or Archipelago campaigns up and running. Maybe it's because I've been in the uncomfortable position of trying to manage my own character while taking care of the GM's job as well. It's an unavoidable hassle, because I'll need a character of my own when others GM, but definitely a hassle.

But I think those are all just contributing factors. I think what is getting under my skin is that the group is as enthusiastic as it is, and I know this just isn't my best work. I put more work into Prairie Mage and much more into City of the Dead; the former was a success only after the players had time to get used to the flow of things and the latter a complete failure. So while it's gratifying to know I can get by pulling something out of my ass, it's awfully frustrating to know that I can't seem to do better than such a half-baked work. There's a lesson to be had here, but I'm not yet sure what it is.

Eileene was in a seething huff after our day together at Comicon. She was angry at fans wasting everyone's time with stupid questions for the celebrity panels. Some of the sins she witnessed at her Torchwood event included:

1. Asking the same question someone else had already asked, and had answered. (Answer: "no.")
2. Asking questions about plans for Doctor Who, about which actors in the Torchwood spinoff know little or nothing.
3. Standing up to say how much they really like the show, and how much they admire one or more of the actors or writers, and that it's really made a difference in their life, and sort of forgetting that there was supposed to be a question somewhere in this fangirl gushing because it's a question-and-answer session?
4. Generally asking questions about which information is already easily available--on the show's website, say--and which any "real" fan of the show already knows.

Granted, as bad behavior goes, this is hardly on the same scale as, say, genocide, or arresting and torturing people without a warrant, but it definitely warrants a pet peeve. The question-and-answer period is often brief, and almost never does everyone get to ask all the questions they have for the celebrities. Wasting the audience's time with stupid questions means that good questions--questions that a lot of people want to know the answer to, or that shed new light on the show, or that can't be answered simply by turning to a FAQ--go unasked, and therefore unanswered.

Well, Eileene didn't get to ask what the next project in the works is because she'd been pre-empted by dumb questions, and she didn't let go of the bitterness for the rest of the evening. I want to make fun of her for it, but the glass house keeps getting in the way. Because the next day, perusing ask-the-team forums devoted to the upcoming Champions Online MMO, I had to roll my eyes at dumb questions there. Here's two questions, one insightful and one vapid. See whether you can tell which is which.

Q1: The open-ended character design that is such a strength of the pen-and-paper Champions could be a real problem for play balance in an MMO. How are you going to balance the appeal of mix-and-match powers against the need to avoid unstoppable power combinations?

Q2: I watched a demo video in which someone had a matched pair of flaming swords. Will a pair of flaming swords be a character option in the actual game?

See the difference? See how much more informative an answer to the first question would be? See how obvious it is that overworked game developers wouldn't spend their nonexistent free time coding a graphic effect only for the purpose of teasing players and hurting their game experience by denying them something they know should be available, and how irrelevant the second question is to the remaining 99.99% of players who don't want a pair of flaming swords?

Folk wisdom has it that there is no such thing as a stupid question. I disagree. While I agree with the broader sentiment that you should not choose to remain ignorant for fear of appearing foolish, stupid questions nonetheless exist. If you already know the answer, or know that the person you're asking can't or won't answer, the question is stupid. In the CO forum, asking a stupid question isn't much of a problem, because the staff can answer as many questions as they like--although it still takes some of their valuable time away from actually working on the game, and all the chaff makes it harder to find the questions you want. In a very limited venue, like a fanboy conference, stupid questions positively interfere with real exchange of information. Don't ask stupid questions.

A treat of Chinese food for lunch today. While it's easy to find heavily Americanized Hunan cuisine just about anywhere in the US, and more traditional Hunan and Cantonese cuisine is fairly easy to find in the orbit of NYC, even Szechuan cooking requires a bit of a search. We've relied heavily on Grand Sichuan International for years, and stopped at their Chinatown branch after doctors appointments this morning.

It was tasty, but also tinged with sadness. This lunch was something of a rain-check for missing dinner at the 50th Street branch after Comicon when we arrived only to find Grand Sichuan gone and replaced by another restaurant. I'm glad two branches are still open, although the St. Mark's restaurant isn't as good as the others, and 50th Street was easily the most convenient for us. But nothing lasts forever, especially in the volatile restaurant business. Even restaurants which survive the perilous two-year mark--beyond which novelty appeal fades and restaurants must stand on its own merits--to develop a viable base of loyal customers must fend off challenges from newer rivals and their novelty appeal. Changes in ownership, management, or cooking staff can completely alter a restaurant even if the menu remains unchanged. Eventually, all Grand Sichuan outlets will fold, or become unattractive, and we'll have to resume our search for good Szechuan cooking.

But I'm sadder still to think on Mary Chung's, a terrific Szechuan restaurant in Cambridge, MA. It was an institution of my college days, reasonably cheap and utterly delicious. While I have a strong sense of nostalgia for the place, my evaluation isn't rooted in nostalgia; reviews of Mary Chung's are consistently stellar, and my attachment is entirely different from my attachment to King Fung Garden (affectionately known as Brezhnev's), where the food was dead cheap and only mediocre, but also an institution of my college days.

Mary Chung's is most notable for two things: the best ravs I've ever had and the suan la chao show. Technically, ravs are "fried pork dumplings," also known as "potstickers" for the way they stick to the wok if you aren't careful, but in Boston they're known as "Peking ravioli," or "ravs" for short. I absolutely love them. Even a bad rav is pretty good, and Mary Chung's are the best: lots of crispy, with a relatively thin breading and a strong ginger-garlic-scallion taste. Suan la chao show--probably misspelled here, but that's close, and "show" rhymes with "plow"--is a different kind of pork dumpling, steamed in a wonton skin and served over a bed of bean sprouts and a spicy sauce. I have never, never seen it in any other restaurant, not even by another name, and I've asked. (Sometimes the good stuff isn't on the menu, for fear of scaring off finicky Yanks; it may be on Chinese-language-only menus tacked to the walls, or simply not printed anywhere.) I resolve the dilemma of which kind of dumpling to have by ordering both, along with a take-out carton of pork-fried rice, which in Boston has a drier, more fragrant, less greasy quality than what we get in NYC. Gustatory heaven, often followed by gourmet ice cream at Toscanini's down the street. Heaven with ice cream.

But college was twenty years ago. (Wow. Twenty.) I don't know how long Mary Chung's had been there before I went to school, but it had been several years, at least. Our hall archives had a picture of residents dining there that looked like it was from the 70's. It has almost certainly undergone changes in ownership, management, and/or staff since I was there last, possibly to the detriment of this jewel of Chinese cuisine. I know for a fact that it has moved at least once, because we've visited once since and nearly missed it in the confusion. About ten years ago, we went to Boston with my in-laws; I don't recall the reason, but I remember talking up Mary Chung's. We went, and everyone agreed it was spectacular. We nearly missed it, though, because it had moved across the street (Massachusetts Avenue) and a half a block down, and had a less visible sign out front. We spotted it only after giving up and looking around for alternatives.

Preparing for that visit, I first expected Mary Chung's wouldn't be there at all, but was happily surprised to find it listed in the phone book and internet guides. Then I admitted to myself it might not be all that I remembered, either due to changes or to the haze of nostalgia. But it was everything that I remembered: heaven with ice cream. That pleasant surprise ten years ago has given me an almost superstitious expectation that Mary Chung's will be around forever: it lasted a decade already beyond my school days, and for an unknown number of years before, and still tasted and felt exactly the same. Nonsensical though it may be, my gut tells me it will be there every ten years for another once-a-decade visit, no matter how many I make.

We really should make another one, before it's too late. If it isn't already.

Reading How to Read Literature Like a Professor before bed last night, I got to the part about the close symbolic association between flight and freedom, along with a flock of related themes--birds, wings, feathers, Icarus, detachment, ambition, achievement, and of course the ironic reversal of flight as a metaphor for freedom. It's the birds I continue to think about, however: birds and freedom.

Humans have envied the birds' freedom for a long, long time. The earliest specific case I can think of comes from classical Greek poetry, though I would be surprised if earlier examples couldn't be found. (I know the myths of earlier cultures include flying and escapes by flight, but I'm not sure where birds specifically come in.) An awful lot of ink has been spilled since then wishing we could just be like the birds.

I dunno. Birds don't seem to have it so great, either. Even setting aside the likelihood that they have neither the intelligence nor the sympathy for land-bound species to appreciate just how fun flying is, in the way humans would if magically granted the power of unassisted flight, it seems to me that flight becomes a burden when you need it for survival, as opposed to simply enjoying it in your spare time.

Consider the fuel costs. Many species must consume their own weight in food several times over every day--and the more flying they do, the higher the fuel input required. Because flying isn't exactly effortless; it requires plenty of muscle power, despite a bird's very light weight.

That light weight is a fuel problem, too; birds generally, and small birds, especially, the ones who find it easiest to stay aloft, have a huge surface area-to-mass ratio. Being warm-blooded, birds lose a lot of heat to that ratio, heat that has to be replaced by eating. Birds in the wild hardly have time for anything else. When I see one perched on a telephone wire in wintertime, its feathers puffed up in a desperate attempt at insulation, I often find myself thinking that I prefer central heating to the ability to fly up to an exposed perch.

Birds that winter in the tropics don't have to worry about that, of course, but they do have to deal with an annual commute of hundreds or even thousands of miles, entirely powered by muscle. Flight seems less appealing if it's part of a package deal where you'd have to fly all day, every day, for half the year. A mandatory annual hike from New York City to Chicago and back doesn't sound like a carefree life, and I doubt migrating birds would feel any differently about their circuit if they were equipped to think about it.

Birds that inhabit the tropics year-round are free of cold and migratory imperatives, but they're still subject to that fuel demand, and surrounded by far more competition--and far more predator--than are more temperate birds. For them, the freedom of flight is the just their competitive hustle in the Darwinian struggle, and those who don't hustle are crocodile food.

Despite the way we humans might thrill at flight, I can't imagine birds enjoy a carefree existence. Not after seeing those tiny, frail bundles you find curled up by the curb, or under a tree. For the power of flight, birds must endure a fragility--in construction and constitution--we cannot imagine. I've seen an avian post-mortem on a science show declare a bird's skeleton simply snapped in high winds. Where those who long for flight wish to go.

So...freedom, yes, of a kind. But peril as well. And, worse, a loss of freedom of a different kind. Chickens may not work hard, all day, every day, but they don't do much flying, either. The birds we envy, the birds of the wild, have it a lot rougher. Even without the ability to take wing, humans have freedoms unique in the animal kingdom. Not that I have much choice, but I think I'll stick to those.

TPM Muckraker has a spot-on bit of muckraking concerning a certain sleazy bank tactic. When Paul Kelleher's mother died, he informed her creditors of this fact. Judging by the ensuing conversation, her Bank of America representative attempted to mislead Kelleher into believing he was obligated to pay her outstanding debts, morally if not legally. The approach didn't even recognize a possibility that Kelleher would not take on her debts, which indeed he has no legal obligation to do. Simply took it as granted that he would, and the only question was how: "That's too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?"

I find the claim entirely believable, for two reasons. First, the article quotes a pretty damning testimony from a (unnamed) former employee in Bank of America's debt collection unit. Second, I got exactly the same treatment from my brother's mortgage holder when he died--the same Countrywide whose scandalous financial shenanigans and likely bribes to two US Senators and others have been eclipsed by the wider financial scandal. When I called to inform them of Dan's death, explaining that my parents and I were digging through his records at the time, the immediate question was, "And which of you will be taking on his financial obligations?" No recognition whatsoever that the proper answer was "None of us." I had to supply that answer myself. After talking Dan into a toxic loan, a mortgage that left him deeply in negative equity in his house, they simply tried to buffalo us into covering their bad loan, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Fortunately, neither Kelleher nor I was foolish enough to fall for that tactic, but I would be astounded to learn unethical creditors don't snare a lot of victims that way--people who aren't very sophisticated about money, or the law, or are simply too distraught to think clearly at the moment.

In discussing this article, two online acquaintances reported similar experiences, so neither the attempt on Kelleher nor on me was an isolated incident. Be warned: if a family member dies, their estate is responsible for outstanding debts. You are not. The creditor made a bad loan; the creditor is responsible for the loss. You are not.

In a departure from my usual habit of reading myself to sleep with RPG material, I'm currently working on Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor. It works well as bedtime material, divided into bite-sized chapters of three to seven pages, so there's little need to keep reading past the point of being ready to sleep, and written in a playful tone that prevents taking the material too seriously, concentrating so hard that the effort keeps me awake.

Or maybe I don't have to concentrate very hard because I already know what the book has to say. It's largely a catalog of symbolic literary devices, like the knight's quest and the Christ figure and seasonal themes, with repeated reminders that (1) authors enjoy deliberately using such devices for emphasis or irony, and (2) the similarity between the classic use of the device and the use at hand doesn't have to be identity. If you've taken any courses in English lit, or even enjoyed a substantial English program in high school--and I have--there isn't anything very novel in the book, just something of a brush-up discussion in the vein of "Remember how Mrs. Daniels kept talking about how The Wasteland was rooted in religion? Well, this is the general technique critics used to identify important elements of the poem and string them together to reach that conclusion."

Perhaps more important than having taken a bit of English lit, I am, by Foster's measure, something of a natural at this. English professors, he says, are blessed and cursed with a habit of teasing stories, and quite possibly many other things, apart, analyzing them for patterns and feeling like they've scored a victory when they find one. They can't stop. (Nor does it help that many writers deliberately play to such interests for motives of their own, rewriting Shakespeare in a corporate boardroom or taking biblical allusions for titles.) It's a combination of analytical mind and competitive urge to see how many secrets they can uncover, how many literary clues they can identify.

Well, I have both the analytical mind and a compulsion to keep score. About the only thing keeping me from treating every book, every film, every narrative as such a challenge is my none-too-highbrow reading habits. I've read tons of classic sci fi, very little of classic literature proper. A lack of experience with "high art" has left my literary vocabulary stunted, so I miss things. Even when they set off little alarm bells suggesting "this means something," I don't always know what that could be--and unfamiliar devices rarely trip such alarms anyway; in the hands of a skilled author, they double innocuously as ordinary events in their own context. I most often read stories that work hard at putting the meaning right up front to be seen, not hidden behind a code of symbols: sci fi, in particular, thrives on playing "what if" with ramifications of natural law, or of alterations to what we understand to be natural law. That game of "what if" tends to break down if the natural laws under consideration are treated as mere metaphors, or if the trappings of science fiction (space ships, aliens, genetic engineering, black holes) are forced into the background while humans and aliens stomp about the foreground reenacting timeless archetypes. I tend not to read literature like a professor because I don't generally like literature that a professor would want to read.

But when I do, when I pick up a book with an understanding that it's high literature, and probably full of literary devices, I keep my eyes open and play the game. Same for art flicks. For a certain cast of mind, it's impossible not to play.

I've been looking forward to the movie Monsters versus Aliens since we saw the trailer before Bolt. For those who don't know the premise: an alien lands in America ("...Which is the only country aliens ever seem to land in.") and announces its intent to take over the earth. A desperate US president agrees to assemble a team of B-movie monsters to stop it. A misfit team bonding comedy.

I laughed my head off at the trailer. Eileene says I was the only one in the theater audible above the speakers; if I were inclined to worry about such things, I'd be embarrassed. It wasn't just the antics of Bob, the send-up of the Blob obviously slated as the team screwball; it was the sequence of reference gags outside the monster movie genre: Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, Mission Impossible, probably more. The trailer was very well timed, building up in a rapid-fire crescendo.

I'm particularly interested because it seems like the Dreamworks team finally "gets it" when it comes to animation. Starting with its mega-hit Shrek, and continuing through several films thereafter, Dreamworks films felt like those unimaginative paint-by-numbers films constructed by producers according to some kind of success formula: big-name actors, cute sidekick, topical humor, and an apparent effort to replicate the look of Pixar instead of finding their own graphic idiom. I still bear a grudge over Shrek winning the Oscar for best animated film.

But times change. Pixar has produced a couple of duds since then, like the smarmy Cars and the formulaic Ratatouille. So, while it's still capable of genius like The Incredibles, there's no guarantee Pixar won't dip into unimaginative territory. Meanwhile, Dreamworks has been learning. It finally weaned itself off simply hiring the latest big star, and now properly picks real voice actors to allow the animated characters to be themselves, rather than being mere animated versions of Mike Myers, Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano. Dreamworks lingers over secondary characters. It doesn't employ animation gimmicks just to show it can. Although I admit it still seems prepared to milk properties for as many sequel rehashes as the market will bear. We were watching Bolt in the first place because it showed a lot of promise...which it did half-way. Original and funny for the first half, settling into a formulaic feel-good ending with fewer and ever-more-predictable jokes and plot twists. So, while Dreamworks has made considerable progress, it's still got a way to go to win my heart.

Bearing this in mind has made me cautious about Monsters versus Aliens after the first shock of hilarity. I've re-watched the trailer five or six times since then, and I note two things. First, all the good lines seem to be Bob's. Second, there's every possibility I've already seen all the best stuff. The trailer might be composed of the best ninety seconds of the movie, with the rest being filler between the jokes I've now memorized.

Keep your fingers crossed.

I've already described many of my experiences with the bathroom sink. We had a leak. I proudly fixed it, albeit with several false starts. After a week, it began to emit a satanic rumbling (cavitation) when we turned the hot water on without the cold for more than a few seconds. I couldn't fix that. After several months, it began to leak again, worse than ever. I couldn't fix that either. I felt compelled to turn off the cold water at the feeder hose, which redoubled the cavitation problem, and ticked Eileene off. Since then, we've lived with the leak; setting the faucet handle at certain off-center positions helped, but didn't stop the leak entirely.

Then, slowly, the leak tapered off of its own accord. Last week, it stopped entirely, for reasons I am unable to fathom, or even take more than a wild guess at. The faucet "fixed itself."

This whole sequence highlights why I'm such a poor handyman. I can understand the principles behind tools and mechanical systems just fine; freshman physics was an easy A, and I can't remember a time when I didn't know the principles of an internal combustion engine. Alas, actual, physical tools and mechanical systems never behave so tidily as they do in problem sets, or in full-color diagrams for young engineers. You can't ignore friction in reality, nor are bars perfectly rigid. Tubes twist. Tape measures sag. Air bubbles get trapped in fluids. Wood shrinks as it dries, or expands and splits in moisture. Pressure is never quite uniform. Tiny flakes of oxidized metal wedge themselves beneath the gasket of the cold water faucet.

So, nine times out of ten, I understand how something is supposed to work, but, unable to anticipate and compensate for slight inaccuracies sufficiently to make it work properly, which has provided endless frustration in my life. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. Sadly, in practice, there is.

This weekend we attended the ordination of our friend Greg, who after several years' study and a complicated interview process is now a full-fledged Unitarian minister.

The service was comfortably similar to the services I attended at Saint Paul's United Church of Christ (Elgin) when I was a kid, almost disappointingly so. The hymns were old, familiar Christian hymns, although the lyrics had been carefully altered to remove the words "Christ," "Jesus," and "God," along with various synonyms like "the Father" or "Lord." Everyone stood up and sat down and spoke at the same times and in the same order as I was used to. Indeed, the whole service had more in common with the UCC services I grew up with than it did the Unitarian services my parents now attend--my parents' church takes pains to cut itself almost entirely loose from its Christian founding, preferring to take sermons and hymns from everywhere but Christianity. It's the religious form of multiculturalism that works so hard to make sure everyone is included--the more remote and obscure, the better--that it neglects the dominant culture to which the actual people present belong.

I don't suppose I should be surprised--nor was I, really. UU and UCC have a lot in common, historically and socially if not in their actual doctrine. Both are fairly liberalish, with markedly liberal congregations. Both are decentralized, placing most doctrinal and ceremonial authority in the local congregations. Both were founded about 150-200 years ago with a mandate to seek common ground with other religions: UCC is a composite compromise of six protestant sects, and UU, as I noted above, tries to pitch its tent so as to include everyone. Still, I was disappointed to see so little in the way of novelty. The only difference from St. Paul's services was a dance with rainbow-colored scarves. I suspect other UCC churches might include dancing, but my particular church was painfully conservative in behavior if not doctrine; like the Lutherans from Lake Wobegon, that congregation had an almost neurotic fear of calling attention to itself. There, the ideal was to keep your head down and do like everyone else does.

Eileene, by contrast, grew up in the far stricter INC, a Philippine sect with an almost cult-like attention to recruitment, attendance, and doctrinal purity. She had a hard time just relaxing and going with the flow, in good Middle-American-Protestant fashion. She was scandalized when I stood with the congregation and read the responsive litany aloud with them, and she even seemed reluctant to sing the thoroughly inoffensive hymns, properly joining in only with the fourth and last. Where she comes from, services are supposed to exclude anyone who isn't already a devoted member, like a Catholic church offering the mass only to good Catholics, just like Jesus would want. And even though she, like I, has left church behind, she has a hard time wrapping her head around the idea that some churches welcome everyone, including strangers--not for full, hard-sell conversion, but simply to have them present. Or, in the case of the St. Paul's, a desire not to make waves. Strangers mouthing a litany with which they don't quite agree isn't so scandalous as the oddballs sitting when everyone stands.