March 2009 Archives

Long ago, I had a single issue of a Donald Duck (or was it Scrooge McDuck?) comic book. I'm not sure why; I wasn't into comics as a kid, and definitely not into cute Disney characters. Maybe Grandma Roth bought it for me, or maybe Dad bought us some comic books for a road trip, because he'd always read comic books on long drives as a kid.

Anyway, I don't remember the comic very well, but I remember one panel very clearly. The story involved a race to climb the Matterhorn, and at one point, the protagonist--Donald or Scrooge--gains some time by pulling himself over the lip of a ledge instead of taking the longer path winding up the mountainside. He is able to do so thanks to a handy clump of weeds, which he grasps with the cheerful announcement, "A sprig of gorse!" As he gets his grip, the comic panel helpfully punctuates the act with the word GLOM! as one might depict Batman belting the Joker with a POW!

Now count this out. That panel held five words: four in a speech balloon, and one floating free as corrupt onomatopoeia. Of those five words, two (a, of) are unimportant particles, and three are well outside an eight-year-old's vocabulary. I was a bright kid, and a voracious reader, so I had a relatively large vocabulary, and I was only pretty sure what "sprig" meant. While I could guess their meaning from the context of the panel, I definitely had never heard the words "gorse" and "glom" before. In fact, I've only seen the word "gorse" used one other time in my entire life, in a geological study of mineral deposits in continental uplift layers--so it hardly belongs to anyone's working vocabulary.

Just to make sure, I looked all three words up, and use them, although I don't use gorse very often. Now I wish I still had that comic, just to check how many other vocabulary stretchers it contained, and to measure how far it "talked down" to its juvenile readers--probably not at all, given words like gorse, but it's possible the comic used simple language to carry five-dollar words in a sneaky ploy to slip some education into its entertainment. I'd also like to compare it to other comics of the era, to see just how unusual that was.

Spring break is over; back to the school grind. That's cool. The break did exactly what it was supposed to: left me refreshed and ready to study again. I played a lot of computer games last week that I'd been unable to spare the time for, which is more serious than it sounds, because computer games are my version of meditation: laying an efficient road network, or methodically pinning down and reducing an enemy, lets me organize my thoughts along with organizing a strategy. Our Boston trip injected enough novelty to make me ready to return to the grind.

The rest of my environment, however, chose not to cooperate last night. I foolishly stayed up a little late--not very late--to wrap up a scenario. The bed was hard, then hot, then cold, then hot again. Eileene stayed up late, so the light I'd left on for her ascent to the bedroom was a nuisance. And the radiators decided this was a good time for a round of the Bangalang Chorus. Needless to say, I didn't get enough sleep.

So I woke emotionally refreshed and ready to tackle the world, but physically and mentally unable to match that go-get-'em attitude. Just couldn't get my act together, resulting in, among other peeves, leaving in a rush, taking the car keys to be sure to arrive at class on time, finding our car blocked by Ella's, walking to school anyway, and hiking back at lunch to return the keys, only to find Eileene didn't actually need them. A brief flake-out that cost me nearly two hours' study--which I could use, since two of my classes now seem to be playing "catch-up" for the time "lost" to vacation.

The lesson here is to make the most of a good vacation by preparing to go back to work on the last night. That includes an early bedtime. Being once more ready to work doesn't do much good if you're still incapable.

Man, children's museums can be fun. Not if they aren't well kept, if half the exhibits are out of order or missing pieces. And sometimes the kids themselves can be a problem, if the parents just let them run wild, dashing up to slam every button and running off again. But a good kids' museum--Exploratorium, really--can be a delight. Not quite so instructive for adults as an adult museum, but much more fun.

We visited the Boston Children's Museum today and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. Blowing bubbles, playing with magnets, climbing on a mountain-climbing trainer wall, tapping a bit on a marimba. The neatest exhibit was a pair of large screens, one with marbles, one with butterflies. They could detect people in front of them, and would react to their presence. You could slap marbles around the first screen, which was fun, but the second screen cleverly paid off only if you showed some patience: if you stayed still for fifteen or twenty seconds, one or more butterflies would come to rest on your shadow. Surprising and delightful the first time you see it happen. I only regret that I couldn't climb inside this column of wavy boards anchored to a central steel pillar. As a kid, I loved to climb.

As a surprise bonus, it only cost us a dollar apiece. The adult admission was $12, which we expected to pay, but it turns out that adults unaccompanied by kids can enter for a $1 fee if they leave a picture ID.

(Also, I got a dozen six-sided dice in the recycling store for 20¢ apiece--a bargain compared to the standard 95¢ or so you pay in a hobby shop--and I just happen to need some six-siders for my players who don't own more dice, in a wider variety, than they could ever use. "Not true gamers!" I hear you cry? Oh, too true. But I digress.)

Even at $12 apiece, it would have been worth it. Two hours of fun, every bit as stimulating as the latest blockbuster film and a box of overpriced popcorn. Look for children's museums in your area; if you live near a large city, there should be one. Science museums, too. (Chicago's is the grand-daddy, but small ones can be rewarding, too. It's more a matter of upkeep than size and scope.) You may be lucky enough to have both. Found one? Okay, take your significant other there, instead. If you're willing to get lost in the spirit of the thing, it'll be every bit as romantic as winning him/her a kewpie doll at the milk bottle stand in a cheesy chick flick.

We're heading to Boston tomorrow for an overnight trip. In part, it's to make good on my recent resolution to visit Mary Chung's again before it's too late--if it isn't already too late.

In another way, it already is, because another desired stop--King Fung Garden, familiarly known as "Brezhnev's," after the former owner, who resembled the Soviet premier--just closed last September, to much lamentation. The community restaurant review sites wailed and moaned and gnashed their teeth at the passing of the icon. Which only goes to show matters of taste are not subject to dispute.

I'm attached to Brezhnev's mostly out of nostalgia; it was a frequent stop for my hallmates and I when we hankered for Chinese food. Brezhnev's featured Shanxi cuisine, which can be hard to come by, and their scallion pie was excellent, but otherwise, the place was mediocre at best. It was a rat's hole. Built into a converted take-out pizza joint, it only had room for six tables or so. It failed health inspections frequently, but kept coming back after brief closings. The walls and Styrofoam ceiling were stained. Half the dishes didn't appear on the menu; they were only listed on cardboard sheets printed only in Chinese, and we learned which ones we liked through a combination of trial-and-error and oral tradition. The teapots dribbled. But it was cheap and plentiful and passably tasty, which is no small concern for college students. It was also authentic, which is why I first learned to like proper Chinese food there, the Chinese food of suburban Illinois leaving something to be desired. I would have liked to take Eileene there, both to share a piece of my history and because she'd like the beef lo mein for its shortage of beef.

But great food? No. The praises and lamentations left by its fans at its passing are a product of self-selection.

All of which is germane to another planned stop on our trip. We'll pass through New Haven and lunch at a burger joint called Louis' Lunch. It gets a lot of superlative "Best. Hamburgers. Evar!"-style comments, but I have my doubts, particularly when the website sneers at customers who want ketchup or mustard, and the restaurant refuses to serve any. (It's a burger joint, for crying out loud. If they wanted to get snotty about food, they're in the wrong line.) I'm prepared for a true burger taste treat, but I'm even more prepared for something mediocre exaggerated in importance in the minds of loyal regulars who have convinced everyone that, because the stand is unusual, it's the best in the world.

Postscript: We went. They were okay, but nothing special. Served on Wonder bread instead of a bun, using Cheez Whiz in place of actual cheese for the cheeseburger, onions that were way to strong. My burger was dry and could have used some ketchup, despite what the self-styled "true connoisseurs" think. The place survives on atmosphere rather than the burger itself.

I've had a Watchmen-themed satire of a Saturday morning cartoon on my browser for several days now. I can't make up my mind about it. At first, I couldn't even make up my mind whether it was a send-up, or if it was once a real Saturday morning cartoon.

This isn't so implausible as you might think. For one thing, the cheap quality is no bar. Cartoons of my childhood were really crappy. Really crappy. For another, the format is spot on: the squeaky-voiced mascot, the silly-crazy guy, the character who can transform himself into any shape (except his face, which is permanent and obvious), the hero-by-day rocker-by-night--all the standards. Nor is the distortion of the Watchmen characters implausible; I saw a lot worse in the late '70s, when cartoons had to be cranked out fast, because they were too lousy to hold the attention even of kids for very long, and producers would scruple at nothing that might sell another season's sugar-coated cereal. Recasting Rorschach's insanity as a silly disposition is standard operating procedure. If Hanna-Barbera could candy-coat werewolves, they could candy-coat psycho vigilantes. Plus "ripped from an old VHS" threw me off.

The likeness is quite good, especially if it's a one-man show. I was only able to decide it was meant as a joke after paying attention to details. Three Dr. Manhattan's in a bed, looking sheepish is okay, even the implied Comedian-Silk Specter incest; it's only creepy if you know the original, which seven-year-olds wouldn't, or wouldn't understand if they did. But the word "cancer" would never appear in one of the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood. Before the AIDS outbreak, cancer was too horrible to share with the kids.

My embarrassment at finding it so hard to join the joke aside, or rather in light of that embarrassment, I'd have to call the send-up a success. Pity I missed the humor by missing it the first time through and needing to have it explained to me (even though I did the explaining myself).

There's a lot of talk about revoking the obscene bonuses paid to AIG employees who drove the company into the ground, and the world economy with it. To be sure, they hardly deserve a bonus; even from the narrow perspective of what they earned AIG at the multiple expense of everyone else, I understand their bonuses amount to 105% of what they brought into the company, apart from their normal salaries. That is what you call an "unsustainable business model."

Unfortunately, it seems AIG stupidly agreed to provide these bonuses regardless of actual work performance. As much as everyone--banking victims, ordinary voters, and (belatedly) our national government, wants to deny the bonuses to the employees, there's no legal grounds to do so. Talking AIG into paying more than they're worth isn't a crime, any more than what they did for the company. Immoral, yes; criminal, no. Accepting that money isn't criminal, either. Taxing that income at a special 100% rate is unconstitutional on two grounds: that it doesn't treat them equally under the law, and that it's an ex post facto law. Taxing all workers at financial institutions in which the government has an interest at the same rate is going to burn the undeserving, as well as being unconstitutional. As emotionally satisfying as it would be to seize these fuckers' assets, we must respect the rule of law. If American contract law is to mean anything, the bonuses must be paid.

If we want to hold someone accountable, hold the AIG executives who created the situation in the first place, the ones who agreed to pay these bonuses independent of actual performance because the money wasn't theirs, after all. 105% indeed.

I see a certain parallel here concerning Gitmo: if American jurisprudence is to mean anything, we need to set free those we've held there without legal counsel, without trial, without even charges, occasionally torturing them for information, or just for giggles. That's a shame, because some of those prisoners probably are as mean and nasty as we've been told. But they all have to go free, not just the innocent ones, because the irresponsible executives who failed in their due diligence, and just decided to play it quick and dirty.

If we're going to hold someone accountable, hold the US authorities who created the situation in the first place, the ones who decided to play fast and loose with US and international law because showcasing a fearsome enemy without worrying about the rule of law made it easier to push policies for personal and political gain. Enemy combatants, indeed.

And if we're going to hold them accountable, let's do so with proper trials. US courts or international courts, either one.

I remember picking up in a history of Byzantium that "privilege" derives from Latin, literally "private law." The very idea is anathema to US law, which holds that all are to be equal before it. Increasingly, we've seen privilege in America degenerate from mere wealth and influence into its literal meaning. Obama's election is a rare opportunity to reverse that trend. He very deliberately told the public that no one is above the law. It's becoming increasingly clear even to the reluctant that the highest authorities in our country were directly involved in conspiracy to kidnap, torture, and commit negligent homicide. If US law is to mean anything at all, we need to see investigations and prosecutions. If Obama's statement is to mean anything at all, he needs to provide them, however worrying or distasteful he finds the arrest of a former president, and however much it may damage his mantle of bipartisanship.

This is supposed to be a nation of laws, not men. That cuts both ways: no private exceptions for the "ins," and no individualized attacks on the "outs." Even if the "outs" really deserve it. Even if they were the "ins" just a year ago, and used that to profit at the expense of the nation. If the laws as they stand are insufficient to see justice done, by all means rewrite the laws--but only against future misdeeds. I think the laws as they stand should be plenty to do what needs doing today; we just need to start enforcing them again, after a long drought of regulative will.

I watched Demitri Martin's "if i" this evening via YouTube. It's not exactly stand-up comedy, not the one-liner style that he does in an idiom of wordplay learned from Carlin and Wright. This is more of a monologue with humorous elements--often one-liners from his earlier routines--mixed in. And, while it's funny and weird and insightful, I found it awfully uncomfortable.

Martin talks about some uncomfortable things: extreme nerdiness, dropping out of law school, an early marriage and a rapid divorce, trying to find a productive life rather than becoming an entertaining bum. The way he goes about it, and the emotional drives he describes leading him there, are pretty screwed up, which is part of his point. In this monologue, he sounds borderline autistic: obsessed with wordplay, compulsively learning neat little tricks instead of useful skills, compulsively codifying and measuring his life to better himself, instead of actually bettering himself, only aware of social norms through experience and conscious effort.

What creeped me out was how closely I identified with all he said. I haven't exactly done what he's done, but I've done similar, and for similar reasons. I preferred puzzles to people as a kid. I bailed on my graduate education. I get caught in self-examination to the exclusion of actually bettering myself. I have found it necessary to learn social norms through conscious study and years of maturity, rather than coming to them naturally, as people usually do. The monologue, especially the uncomfortable parts, hit very close to home.

Not exactly a laugh riot, then, especially not for me. Not even a comforting reassurance that others deal with being screwed up in the same fashion. (One of the hazards of a congenital lack of empathy is that others' problems don't reassure in this fashion. At best, somebody else's instructive example.) Listening to him confess to crazy behavior, even in an entertaining fashion, just made me feel crazy, too. Entertaining, too, in my own fashion, but still screwed up.

We watched the much-anticipated Watchmen film last weekend. Much anticipated by others, at least; I had my doubts. I loved the original comic book--it would be hard not to love such a masterpiece--and the trailer didn't really look right. Too dark, taking its palette from Batman territory. Too much chest-thumping music. Voice-over by fanboy darling Rorschach gloating about how he'll let society drown in its own poison, rather than something that captured the spirit of Watchmen itself.

My fears were not realized, however, and the movie did a pretty darned good job of representing the original comic on the silver screen, very faithful, very literal, comparable to the earlier film adaptation of Sin City. The look was terrific, if, alas, a bit too dark. The costuming was terrific; apart from a tall, skinny pretty-boy to play Ozymandius, so was the casting. Purists, inevitably, will complain because some elements were changed. Some scenes--the parallel castaway comic book-in-a-comic book story, for example--were cut by necessity; even a long movie can't include everything in a substantial print format. Some good lines were dropped, or inexplicably tweaked. Fanboys are squawking at the alteration and simplification of the big reveal. Griping very long or very loud about such changes is out of line, however; the movie compromised as little as possible while threading its way between limitations of budget and viewing time. They did it right.

Paradoxically, the fact that the movie was done right feeds into my real reservation about a film adaptation: Why do it at all?

The Watchman comic stands at the pinnacle of its art, like Beethoven's 9th, or the Principia Mathematica. (A few other works stand at the same pinnacles; they're fairly broad pinnacles.) Remaking it in another format virtually guarantees an inferior version, if only because there's nowhere to go from a pinnacle but down. One thing that makes the comic great is the dense, intricate lacing of story elements together, crossing and touching on one another, or operating in symbolic parallel, in surprising and revealing ways. There is room for "sidebar" text, like an excerpt from a history on costumed adventurers, or an interview with Veidt, that can't be squeezed onto the screen. Without time and space to lavish on all this multiplicity, the interconnections vanish, and a lot of powerful moments, often no more than a glimpse of something in a panel's background--a glance between characters, a bit of graffiti, hints of Ozymandius's superiority over "ordinary" costumed heroes--vanish with them.

Again, if an adaptation must be inferior, why make one at all?

At their best, adaptations serve one of two distinct functions. First, they can be an entertaining intellectual exercise, when someone takes a classic and remakes it in a new setting, taking head-on a challenge of translating as much as possible from the original into the new format. Shakespeare is a favorite for this: how much of Macbeth can survive a translation into a conflict between modern Michelin chefs? How closely can my stand-ins for the weird sisters mimic the original dialogue (Trialogue?) without sounding ridiculous? What can I substitute for Birnham wood? Points are scored for closer imitation, and for working those imitations into more difficult, less similar settings. For the audience, the entertainment is intellectual exercise, too: how many elements can you recognize being translated, and how many do you miss? Rarely do you get high art this way, but you can have a lot of fun.

The second valid purpose of adaptations is to improve a flawed gem. Sometimes, you'll get a bad piece of art with one or more saving graces: moments of brilliant dialogue, brilliantly conceived characters, a really, really great idea for a Byzantine murder to confuse the cops before the detective makes it all clear. Or maybe you'll get good art marred by bad execution: a too-small budget, filming disruptions, an important role given to the producer's actress-wannabe girlfriend. Remaking a promising failure can pay off handsomely, turning artistic failure into success. But this approach is for failures. Starting with a masterpiece, and especially starting with a historical landmark of art, successful because it's already as close to perfection as we can get in an imperfect world, doesn't offer anything but the likelihood of spoiling someone's vision.

From the "scary right-wingers on parade" files, Glenn Beck is hosting a show on Friday titled "We Surround Them." Judging by the title, and the preview commentary calling for Americans to form "cells" to resist US government, and the promises to "pull back the curtain" on "a few people pressing the buttons," the show will be yet another serving of politics by paranoia. I'm sure the armed "cells" will have no resemblance at all to the terrorist cells the same nuts have urged us to fear to the point of dismantling our civil liberties.

To see whether you belong in the tribe, Beck proposes a list of "nine simple principles;" if you agree with at least seven of them, then he has a message for you. (If not, then stay out! This is a seekrit meeting for real Americans only!) See whether you agree with at least seven of these:

1. America is good.
2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

I find myself reading these nine principles somewhat differently. See if you agree with at least seven of these:

1. America can do no wrong. Any atrocity committed in America's name is excused. America does not torture; if it does torture, then the torture is excusable, although whatever inhumanities it may commit, even to the point of killing a prisoner under interrogation, are, by definition, not torture.
2. My imaginary friend is more important than anything, including my own family. The little voice he uses to speak to me in my head is the final authority.
3. (Actually, I have no problem with this. I'm not sure Beck is entirely honest in offering it, however; see below. Maybe this is just a bit of ironic humor to lighten a serious topic.)
4. Child abuse is A-Okay!
5. That is, if you break the law, you pay the penalty. If Beck believed he should pay for breaking the law, he wouldn't propose number 7, below. Nor do I hear him calling for criminal investigation of, say, Dick Cheney. Laws are for people Beck doesn't agree with.
6. That is, I have a right to those things. If your rights to these things aren't met, tough titties.
7. I don't have to pay for government services.
8. (Actually, I have no problem with this, either. The difference is that I believe it all the time. I note that Beck has changed his mind since we were gearing up for Little Georgie's Big Iraqi Adventur, when he felt that disagreeing with authority was tantamount to treason. If he really wants to be a more honest person than he was yesterday, he might start here.)
9. That is, the government works for me, not for us. If it did, government could force me to be charitable. I am not subject to the laws of the land, but I may use government to attack people I don't like, because it answers to me.

Not so appealing any more, is it?

We're all familiar by now with the warning beep emitted by many heavy road vehicles when they back up. It's a simple, functional beep, pitched and set to a volume that's easy to catch, and because it's used consistently on a variety of vehicles--dump trucks, construction trucks, delivery vans, what have you--we've had plenty of exposure to be thoroughly conditioned to equate that distinctive beep with someone backing up. It works great.

Presumably, someone figures it can be made better, however, because I recently heard an asphalt truck use a different sound to caution that it's backing up: a four-beep cycle in two tones, two beeps at the usual pitch followed by two beeps at a pitch one half-step down the scale. The lower notes might have been slightly softer, or they might only have seemed softer because they were lower in pitch; I'm not sure--BEEP BEEP, beep beep, BEEP BEEP, beep beep, etc. I don't know what advantages the new version may have over the previous one-tone beep that would outweigh the need to recondition everyone to recognize a different warning. I suspect the variation in tone is easier to hear, like a blinking light is easier to see than one that is constantly on, or two highly contrasting colors can be easier to see than a single vivid one. Maybe it isn't superior; maybe the truck only made a different noise because it was from a different country where a different back-up warning noise is employed, in the way that US ambulance sirens sound different from British ambulance sirens.

There's another problem beyond the unfamiliarity of a new sound, however. The older, more common one-note warning sounded like a warning. The new warning beeps sound too much like music, specifically the opening chords to "New York, New York." For the first eight beeps--about four seconds, a long time in a potential car crash situation--I wasn't aware of a warning at all; conditioning of a very different sort made me expect more beeps to enter playing the melody. (Deet deebee dee dee...) Only when the melody didn't come in, but simply cycled back to the first four notes, did I realize I was listening to an alarm of some kind.

An alarm that isn't instantly recognizable as an alarm is a technical failure, no matter how much more effective it might be at getting heard. Far more important that it be noticed.

Our off-the-cuff campaign with rotating GMs continues. Yesterday afternoon, Ella, my sister-in-law, took her turn behind the figurative screen. She was understandably nervous; it was her first run as GM. Ever.

And she did just fine. For a virgin GM, she did TERRIFIC, doubly so when you consider she's only had about a year's experience as a player--our last campaign was her first. (Strictly speaking, she's also touched RPGs a few times elsewhere--a four-hour LARP or two, a convention game, some online "roleplaying"--but still not much, however you count it.) The pacing was brisk, the five NPCs well-conceived and entertaining, the basic challenge facing the PCs sufficient without being discouraging. Apart from a few too many moments when she broke the flow to ask me how the rules worked--entirely forgivable under the circumstances--I'd have been happy to have produced the session myself.

Oh, she had some help, yes. She had my advice in a general way, along with borrowing several articles of advice for new GMs. She had Eileene, not entirely expert herself, to advise her on what is likely to work when she wanted to get down to specifics I couldn't be allowed to know about ahead of time. The players behaved themselves, dutifully trying to guess where things were going and playing along. Still, it was an amazingly good show out of the gate, and now I'm very, very curious as to why. I have two basic working theories.

First, Ella's had good examples to follow, and--more importantly, few or no bad examples. Most of us got into the RPG hobby as teenagers, and most of us started with D&D. Like any first efforts at a new art form, D&D got a lot wrong: an implicit hostility between GM and players, needlessly complex and often poorly-written rules, an assumption that PCs are motivated by greed and personal aggrandizement, a casual attitude toward death...many conceptual flaws which still infect RPGs and players alike. A lot of us started GMing without any examples at all to follow; whoever first bought the books learned how to do it by reading, and taught others, mixing their art with adolescent power fantasies in and out of character. That common background tended to produce common results, and for GMs who kept with the hobby long enough, one can find an almost uniform arc of learning good GMing techniques from ass-kicking to team-building to narrative, and an almost uniform shedding of natural but bad ideas, like letting a powerful NPC overshadow the PCs. Ella's never played D&D, nor any of its more munchkinesque progeny. And she's only been exposed to adult players, familiar with the pitfalls of bad GMing and willing to "lose," at least temporarily, if it results in a more interesting story, or even in the interest of fairness. So maybe she did so well because good GMing is no less natural than bad GMing for newbies, but happens more frequently only because of artifacts of RPG history.

The second possibility is that she's a natural, possessed of a gift unexploited until yesterday.

Naturally, it could be some of both. Probably is. Maybe she even got a little lucky that the PCs didn't blunder in the wrong direction, as PCs are wont to do. But only a little, if so. Part of good GMing is minimizing those chances without letting players see the rails they're on. I have no doubt Ella frequently felt mere moments from narrative catastrophe, unaware that good GMs are usually mere moments from narrative catastrophe, constantly juggling things and improvising without letting the players know how much fudging is going on. If so, her distress was no more apparent than for seasoned GMs.

Although the second theory promises more for me personally, with the hope of awesome campaigns to come from Ella, I rather hope the first theory is the correct one; it suggests that RPGs will only get better in the future, as players enter the hobby without passing first through the munchkin gate. It would help RPGs to survive beyond a single generation.

I suppose I can't let the week go by without at least some comment on the kerfuffle surrounding Rush Limbaugh. The loudmouth found himself gratifyingly center stage in national news as well as of his own little cult of personality after Rahm Emmanuel dropped a few suggestions that Rush speaks for the Republican party.

The Republican leadership didn't like that. As right-winger David Frum drily observes, "If you're a talk radio host and you have five million who listen and there are 50 million who hate you, you make a nice living. If you're a Republican party, you're marginalized." At a time when right wing agenda, and the knee-jerk reactionaries who bray them entirely free of reference to objective reality, are deeply unpopular, allowing Rush to become the brand of the Republican party is unthinkable.

At the same time, it is, for them, terrifyingly probable. Indeed, it already is the Republican reality, and has been since 1968, when it embraced Nixon over Goldwater; only now it is also justly becoming the Republican image. We've just weathered eight years in which the president, de facto leader of the party, practiced the same kind of unthinking devotion to regressive economics, military adventurism, and disregard for civil rights that characterizes the extreme right, and he in turn was simply the culmination of a generation of Republican leadership pursuing just that. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes; you just might get it.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory by harnessing the ignorant and hateful and authoritarian. The religious right, emerging from relative political obscurity, got a lot of media attention at the time, but his coalition also aimed at picking up southern racists looking for a home since LBJ dumped them in the '60s and Nixon's law-and-order crowd--a proto-fascist movement in the making. Seeing a winning strategy, the Republican leadership latched onto this demographic and nurtured it with cuts to education, deregulation and consolidation of the news media, religion-driven government, communist scares, terrorist scares, negro welfare mother scares, negro rapist scares, sexual affairs, and whatever lies were handy. It worked really well, too. Once won over, the ignorant and hateful and authoritarian proved eager to lock their own minds tight against reason for the Republicans, and practice whatever Orwellian double-think was necessary to keep it that way. And if you can turn 25% of the population blindly loyal, you've got a nearly-insurmountable margin of victory among the remaining 75% who are open to argument.

It took the disaster of George the lesser to turn enough of that 75% against Republicans to overcome that margin: starting a war against a third-world country on false pretenses, losing a war against a third-world country, torture, record deficits, constitutional violations, and just generally poisoning everything it touched. Even that would not have been enough had not the economy dramatically imploded shortly before the 2008 elections, and had not the Democrats found themselves something akin to a messiah, a charming young centrist whose smile concealed fangs we're only now beginning to recognize were sharpened on Chicago politics.

The Emmanuel comment was another flash of those fangs, a brilliant if somewhat overstated branding of Republicans with a toxic label, exquisitely timed to the leadership crisis already underway in the Republican defeats of 2008. With the Bush administration discredited, a lot of senior Republican Senators quitting in mock disgust and with a keen desire to cash in before the backlash gets them, too, the general public angry at the revelation they've been swindled for a generation, and the promise that a lot of records sealed by presidential order are about to be opened on the same authority, no established figure seems able to speak for Republicans. The pyramid scheme of tax cuts for the wealthy on everyone's debt is unraveling, and there's nobody left.

Except the extreme right, of course. And they're more than happy to offer to speak for Republicans--as oblivious to the damage they now do the party as they are to the damage they've done the country. And megalomaniacal Rush can't help eagerly agreeing that, yes, he does speak for the party. Perhaps he does, at that.

An old Texan adage holds that "You have to dance with the one that brung you." In political discussions, it means an elected official is beholden to the power groups that put him into office. For today's Republicans, always happy to repay political favors with cash, and vice versa, the adage has taken on an ironic second meaning: they have to dance with the crazy 27% because no one else is willing to dance with them any longer. They're afraid to cross Rush, and lose support among their remaining base.

Newly minted RNC chair Michael Steele retracted his objection to Rush within twenty-four hours of Rush calling him out. If the RNC is afraid to cross Rush, and he isn't afraid to dictate to them, then he really is becoming the voice of the Republican party. And Rush is proving happy to turn the same no-compromise destruction on Republicans that they've used him to unleash on Democrats for decades. The very wealthy used a right-wing demagogue to undermine populism to their advantage. How could it go wrong? It worked so well in the Weimar Republic.

It seems my "Archipelago" campaign, which I'd given up for dead years ago, has returned from the grave. After a bit of hemming and hawing and trying to foist the decision onto one another, my fellow players decided they'd rather try that than a more tightly-focused, combat-oriented "Homecoming" campaign of stormtroopers from the Star Wars universe returning home to set things right in the wake of the Rebellion's takeover, and find a measure of redemption.

That's cool. This choice is a little less convenient, demanding more time on my part, but it also promises to be more rewarding--if I can pull it off. I created the setting a long time ago, when I was still enamored of the Everway system, to be used with its unique technique for modeling things on the four classic elements and a tarot-like deck. I had more free time, then, and the setting is unusually rich and detailed for one of my works. A lot of the work put into creating an elemental theme will fade into the background, alas; we tried the Everway system since then, in a disastrous campaign modeled after Grim Fandango, and it didn't work for everyone--I liked it, but several players were confused and frustrated. So it's back to Over the Edge, which I'm getting the group comfortable with now in our between-campaigns campaign.

The real obstacle isn't the system, though; it's the root conception. When I came up with "Archipelago," I was also still enamored of conspiracy gaming, hooked by Over the Edge and the GURPS Illuminati worldbook. I was younger then, and more enthusiastic, and had somewhat more free time, too; since then, I've become conscious of some of the dreadful pitfalls of conspiracy gaming, the biggest of which lies in the middle of my group's preferred path.

Conspiracy adventures, like murder mysteries, depend too much on the protagonist(s) making the right leaps of intuition to translate well from books (where the author controls both mystery and protagonist) to RPGs. Preserving the mystery means leaving the players, and hence the protagonists they control, in the dark, which pretty well guarantees they'll be confused and frustrated a lot. The situation is even worse for conspiracy than for murder mysteries in an RPG for two reasons. First, every datum is a potential trap, disinformation, or other red herring makes leading the players with hints nearly impossible. The broader the hint, the more likely the PCs will twist it into "They can't be that clumsy; this clue is only what They want us to think!" Second the stakes are far higher. The conspiracy is supposed to be vastly powerful, and damn near omniscient, both willing to kill to achieve their goals and able to do so without consequences. One misstep in a Ludlum novel is supposed to end in catastrophe for the hero, usually a permanent, fatal catastrophe.

That combination is a recipe for turtling, a phenomenon wherein players dig in and refuse to expose themselves for any reason. If enemies lurk at every turn, and an all-knowing conspiracy understands what they're up to and litters their path with so many false clues that players can't hope to sift out the real ones, going out and doing anything is a low reward-to-risk proposition. So the PCs stay home and never talk to anyone and never trust what little they do know to take action. That's death for a campaign, and it's my players' first reaction to anything. Second reaction at the outside.

I've commented before on my scheme to train them to be proactive, and on the mixed results it garnered: it worked really well for a while, as long as their fears of exposure blatantly continued to fall on an oblivious general public, but when the PCs finally encountered an actual enemy, they went right back to turtling. I don't know how to stop that, especially since in this campaign, where the Sinister Plan is fixed from the beginning, and guesses as to what's going on are definitively right or wrong, I can't use the ingenious subterfuge of constructing the Sinister Plan from the speculations of the players themselves, simultaneously creating an illusion that they're cleverly solving the mystery and rewarding activity--almost any activity--with success.

Like so many groups, my players like the idea of a conspiracy campaign more than the reality of one. At least, they aren't willing to live up to its conventions. When the hero of a conspiracy novel gets into a jam, he tries something desperate, because if he doesn't do something, the conspiracy will complete its Sinister Plan. Action. When my players, and RPG players generally, get into a jam, they retreat to dig uselessly through old clues and create excuses why any given plan won't work. And, as I observe above, the harder I prod them to act, the more likely they'll resist, arguing the clue is a false one.

chutzpah (khutz'-pƏ) n.: gall, brazen effrontery, arrogant presumption; from Yiddish--"the quality of a man who murders his parents and pleads for leniency before the court because he is an orphan"

Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, formerly CEO of the AIG--yes, the same AIG now at the center of the world banking crisis--until booted from that post amid public charges of fraudulent business practice, securities fraud, common law fraud, and other violations of insurance and securities laws, is now suing AIG over the size of his golden parachute. Greenberg argues that the value of stock options offered as part of his salary were not as valuable as they should have been, because at the time of his departure--that is, under his own direction--the company had artificially inflated its stock price.

As ironic as this is, it's entirely in character for both Greenberg and the financial community generally. This is the corporate culture we have created with monetization, supply-side economics, deregulation, and a refusal to enforce such regulations as exist. This is the corporate culture now asking for hundreds of billions in taxpayer money, to be spent at its leisure, without accountability or oversight. I think we can dispense with any pretense that the banks asking for a bailout are operating in good faith.

Snarky political humor is making the rounds: in the wake of renaming their butter pecan flavor "Yes, Pecan" in celebration of Barack Obama, ice cream moguls Ben & Jerry are rumored to have held a contest to name a new flavor in honor of the departing George Bush. Sadly, the contest proved spurious, but spurious or not, there's some really good suggestions, from "Wire Tapioca" to "ImPeach Cobbler" to "I broke the law and am responsible for the deaths of thousands...with nuts."

The open-ended nature of the list is already inviting mutations and addenda, so I doubt there's a proper canonical list anywhere, but here's one source of suggestions.

I prefer to takes the contest directions as is: "For George W. Bush, Ben & Jerry created "__________."

That's it. Bush's ice cream is "__________." We could put his much-publicized slack-jawed monkey face photo on the lid. The name is accurate, too: the pint container would contain nothing but a slip of paper explaining that the private sector will soon provide some actual ice cream now that it is properly monetized. The shelf price would read $3.99, but when you got to the register, you'd find it would actually cost $12.84, less a tax refund of 3¢, unless you're wealthy enough to qualify for the premium price of $1.29, with a refund of $42.50. Proceeds from the sale would benefit the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the nation. Anyone who complains would be subject to DoJ investigation, because if we let people criticize the president's legacy, the terrorists win.

To really capture the spirit of the Bush administration, we'd also have to hire some thugs for $380M to machine gun the cows, but that would be taking things a bit too far.

I don't have much time for proper computer games these days. As I told Stan when he asked me what I'm playing, "Whatever I have time for." Farewell to the elaborate and immersive management sims I prefer; these days I'm playing either: (1) much shorter games, or (2) games that can be safely divided into bite-sized chunks, say a half hour's play on my lunch break or before bed.

Matching one of those requirements, while still producing a game satisfying to a Civ-head, is no mean task. Short games rarely give much of a sense of closure and accomplishment. Longer game--the better ones, at least--have learned to copy Civ's winning "one more turn" formula, layering ongoing projects so that one compelling goal arises before the current one is quite finished off, and it's hard to pick a temporary stopping point. Thankfully, it's about time for one of my occasional affairs with the free webgame lists. The relative shallow achievement of winning a single microgame is outweighed by the achievement of mastering a new system.

I already described the RTS-lite Star Baron, which works well as a short game, taking five to fifteen minutes at a go. I'm also enjoying Blocks With Letters On and Auditorium, which are readily divided into bite-sized chunks.

Blocks is a series of crudely drawn but cleverly constructed puzzles asking you to maneuver lettered squares into a goal area, spelling a word. The techniques you must use to circumvent a variety of obstacles--deadfalls and sticky patches which trap blocks, surfaces which drain special pink blocks of their gravity-defying color, trigger spaces that open and close portals, teleportation spaces, bumps that rotate letters into (un)acceptable orientations--are many and varied, and often you'll get to the end of the puzzle to realize you messed up one...little...step back when you dropped the W into a shaft before the L and have to start over. The puzzles also do a good job of injecting lateral thinking into what could be a pure sequencing puzzle. One puzzle, for example, concealed a W as an inverted M; players who tried to spell the final (different) word with an M in place of a W would set themselves an impossible task. Very satisfying to logical, left-brain thinking.

Auditorium lies at the opposite end of the puzzle design spectrum: like Flow, it's a trite mechanic polished to a compelling shine. A spray of particles emerges from an arbitrary point; you must arrange a very few accelerators to direct that spray over a few target squares. What really sells the game is the way that each square, when struck by a particle, lights slightly and raises the volume on one haunting musical theme microscopically. A steady stream of particles lights up a square and brings the musical theme to maximum volume, and as you progress through a screen, bending the flow of particles to touch all the squares at once, the squares light and add instrumental voices to a satisfying harmonic blend. Where Blocks is all hard-edged logic, Auditorium rewards patient adjustment with esthetics both visual and auditory, a right-brained feast.

Freeware offerings like this can't hold my attention forever. Although there's so many that sampling them can take a good, long time, outpacing the designers is pretty much a given. That's why I tend to explore freeware games in binges: play them until I've tried everything that looks either creative or produced with a great deal of craftsmanship, then ignore them for months while a new crop comes in. Then it's back to the meat-and-potatoes management of Civ and SimCity and Caesar. I hope available free time will allow me satisfaction with such games by then.