September 2009 Archives

Last year, I expressed a desire that the all-too-plausible assassination of Obama be discussed as little as possible, excepting of course within security details like the Secret Service and police forces of the cities he visited, which must discuss the possibility in excruciating detail precisely in order to prevent it. In part, I feared the self-fulfilling prophecy—not so much that discussing assassination would put the idea in some nutjob’s head, as the idea was already likely there, but rather that by repetition the idea should come to seem a familiar and legitimate political expression in some would-be assassin’s mind. This fear was reinforced as I saw increasing numbers of voters explaining to the cameras that they didn’t want to vote for Obama for fear he would be assassinated: ass-backward thinking from start to finish, but thinking which came to seem rational to these people through repetition. Talking about assassinating the ni—ahem, that is, the first major African-American candidate wasn’t didn’t just endanger the hopeful candidate; it cost him votes, and the more discussion the idea received, the more votes he would lose. Outside professional security forces, I couldn’t see the discussion doing any good at all.

Well, no one put a bullet in Obama before the election, though several with suspect political sympathies were caught trying to sneak guns into his speech rallies. And Obama won both nomination and election despite the wishes of the racists and the reactionaries, and despite the fears of the liberals now conditioned to concede to their own fears before they even begin to concede to the right wingers. We’ve got a black president at last, and, mirabile dictu, the darkies still haven’t risen up and murdered in their beds all the good, clean, Christian white folk who feel the entire country belongs by rights to them alone, nor carried off their women for unspeakable purposes.

Yet talk of assassination continues. Mercifully, the left gave the subject up since the election, but the right continues to raise the subject, always with protestations that they don’t personally condone violence, oh no, but always with the tacit understanding that neither would they object to someone killing the president, at least not this particular one. We see it in schoolyards and in bathroom stalls and in sick subcultures like the Free Republic forum. We hear it from right-wing radio and Fox, along with reminders (and damned lies) that Obama isn’t legally president, or even an American citizen. We even hear it delicately raised by US Senators, to their eternal shame, not to mention those who offer no objection to and much sympathy for voters who voice assassination fantasies at public meetings. We see it most recently in the scandalous Facebook “assassination poll” quite properly yanked from the web and under investigation. And all implicitly egging one another on, like schoolboys daring one another to some petty crime. Or like pro-life web sites tracking doctors who perform abortions and scoring those who are killed.

Before the elections, I objected to talk of assassination because I saw no good in it, and some harm. Today, talk of a presidential assassination is no longer a tool for generating fear, nor the bogeyman of Obama sympathizers. Today, talk of a presidential assassination is a deliberate, knowing attempt to make it happen, by cajoling some as yet unidentified psycho teetering on the edge of madness into jumping. And so today, I prefer to see assassination discussed publicly, although I am happy to see it discussed strictly in the format of calling out such speech for what it is: hate speech, sedition, and incitement to murder. We’re past the election; talking about assassination isn’t going to change the result. But halting the conversation to pin every sleazebag who smirkingly suggests what a blow it would be to that anti-American liberal agenda should Obama die to his every last word, spotlighting every last just-shy-of-illegal suggestion and demanding the speaker justify himself and grovel for forgiveness—or, more likely, taint him as a murderer by proxy and traitor to his country—and never, ever let a single instance go unchallenged or allow it to slip from memory, but to throw winking speech of assassination back into the face of every last public figure to offer it, forever and always, until he is sick of it and no other political figure dare repeat it… That can only be to the good.

This is the kind of fight over American speech that cannot be won in the courts, for it isn’t strictly illegal. Nor can it be won by ceding the field to allow the bigots and authoritarians to write see fit, as decent Americans have all to often done since 1980. This is the kind of fight that has to be won by making a big stink, each and every time someone gets out of line. This is a fight to be won precisely with the enemy’s favorite weapons: guilt by association and guilt by suggestion. And, happily, the charges will be true.

Two weeks ago, I asked a question in class. Many obstacles to a good education, or to improving education, are widely institutionalized, and both teachers and educational reformers complain bitterly about their institutionalization. Two common institutionalized problems, however lie with the teachers themselves: that students are often ill-prepared in earlier courses for the current course (and teachers of the earlier courses in turn blame those farther upstream), and that a basic educational conservatism, often buttressed by the limitations of a limited budget and community apathy, quickly beat down bright-eyed teachers fresh out of college and, with them, their new ideas. Poor morale is infectious, especially from teacher to student, and largely self-perpetuating once it sets in. How then, I asked, does one maintain his own energy while still bright-eyed and fresh out of college, so as to transform the vicious cycle of low morale into a virtuous cycle of self-reinforcing enthusiasm?

For my pains, I received not a direct answer, but a week’s delay, after which the prof, having looked up the (sort of) relevant student theses, gave me an additional assignment atop that given to the class generally: read those theses and lead a class discussion on their conclusions.

My immediate reaction was to complain (in the safety of my own head, and later at home) that assigning additional homework every time I ask a substantial question is an excellent way to make sure I don’t ask substantial questions. Deeply ironic under the circumstances! But I went ahead and did the reading, and led the class discussion regardless, and came away thinking that the prof may not have been such a tool after all. I’m back in class because I choose to be, and I ask questions both in and out of class because I truly want to know the answer, and not merely to prove I’m paying attention or keep the conversation going or otherwise earn brownie points. As it turned out, I didn’t get my answer, but had the theses been more directly aimed at my question, I would have learned much more than I would have from a simple answer. And I’m still prepared to ask questions when something’s bothering me. I can’t help myself; I’m a nerd. Perhaps the prof saw that and shrewdly matched his response to his student. That thought made me feel a lot better. For about a day.

Because my third thought on the subject of extra homework for questions in class was that, even if I am too stubborn and idealistic to be dissuaded from questions by mere homework, I’d lay very long odds indeed that a significant percentage of my classmates are not, and they are just as readily able to see a connection between curiosity and work load. I know for a fact that at least a few scheme to get out of homework—not, as some of my classmates, because they’re busy professionals barely able to keep up with concurrent graduate classes, but simply because they don’t like doing homework. For these students, who are also likely to end up teachers, the lesson is that curiosity is punished with work load, and they will take that lesson with them to their own teaching careers. Just the kind of perpetuation of a damning of enthusiasm for learning my original question was meant to combat.

Through a circuitous route, I ended up thinking about solo RPG adventures in the shower this morning. These adventures operate much like those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, where you read a paragraph or three of description and are asked to make a decision about what to do next, which tells you which page to turn to for the next block of the story.

Solo RPGs are more sophisticated than the original CYOAs in several ways. Written for an older audience, they must work harder to preserve the reader’s sense that he is master of his own destiny: solo RPGs frame your choices in relation to some kind of coherent, objective scenario, instead of merely stringing together wild swings of fortune; they often employ game statistics to help you make informed decisions about your chances of success with a given course of action; they often let you design your own set of statistics before playing, a sort of meta-decision in the story. As an attempt to automate the give-and-take of a true RPG and dispose of the need for a GM, solo RPGs, though better than CYOAs, are still largely a failure. Computer “RPGs,” though richer still in a selection of abilities and tactics as meta-story decisions, rarely employ an actual story structure any more sophisticated than the CYOA, and often lapse into a simpler one, even an unapologetically linear structure.

All three forms curtail your choices out of necessity, because the work involved in creating the adventure in the first place rises exponentially with the number of decisions the player is allowed to make in a given play from start to finish. On the small scale, a writer/designer/coder can employ tricks like feeding choices from earlier, divergent branches into the same conclusions in order to cut the work load, but exponential functions can’t be cropped short for long. And no attempt, however sophisticated, to automate a self-told adventure story can ever offer you the chance to be truly creative, since you can never be allowed to make a choice the designer didn’t think of, himself. As I mulled this continuum of sophistication in approximations of the true RPG, a metaphor popped into my head:

Solo RPGs are to real RPGs as paint-by-numbers is to actual painting.

This applies equally to CYOAs, computer “RPGs” like the Final Fantasy series, and to online MMOs like World of Warcraft. Like painting, real RPG play is a creative art, in this case a narrative art closely akin to improvisational theater, and can go anywhere the player-artists can conceive, within the limits they set themselves in telling the story. Granted, most player-artists are amateurs, and most turn out a low grade of art. But it is art, nevertheless, just as most paintings are of interest only to the artist, and only a minute fraction are sufficiently skilled to hang in the Louvre. Like paint-by-numbers, solo RPGs allow you to go through the motions of creating this art, and, like paint-by-numbers, solo RPGs let you produce something bearing a superficial resemblance to actual art: a story about a warrior-hero slaying dragons or piloting starships or outwitting assassins rather than a splotchy Mona Lisa. But ultimately, solo RPGs only let you read the story someone else has written, following a fixed set of instructions. If you want to try something clever and original, you’re stuck. Oh, you can read the paragraphs out of order in a fit of rebellion, but thinking outside the box in this way just produces an incoherent jumble, just like painting outside the lines.

I’ve had the opportunity to watch the first season of the old Barney Miller show. I remembered it dimly from my childhood, and thought it might be fun to review. I didn’t remember—because I was barely aware of—the heavy, heavy race consciousness with which it was written.

Barney Miller was from the Norman Lear era, and it shows, sometimes painfully so. I can understand that simply employing a multi-ethnic cast was something unusual at the time, but the approach is awkward, and the result is really, really corny from the lofty heights of what is supposed to be post-racial America. It’s a squad composed of token minorities: a black guy, a Japanese guy, a Polish guy, a Puerto Rican guy, and a Jewish guy, led by a Jewish captain.

And yet, despite the show’s eager desire to portray everyone as “just folks,” it depends on stereotypes for its humor: it’s the Polack who’s the dumb one, the black guy who’s all fly and calls people “brother,” the Puerto Rican guy who’s always chasing the chicks, the Jewish guy who’s an old curmudgeon. The gay purse-snatcher is not just gay, nor even just queeny, but openly lecherous towards every male in earshot. The jokes are often wince-inducing, as when Sgt. Yemana blames his poor performance at the shooting range on his slanty eyes.

We as a culture have learned that one of the most effective ways—perhaps the most effective way of defusing racial epithets is to embrace them. “Black” was an insult, the preferred euphemism being “colored,” until Reverend Jackson and company began telling us “I’m black and I’m proud!” “Gay” was an insult, until gays began using the word themselves, as if to say, “Yeah, I’m gay. So?” But I don’t think Barney Miller was operating with that level of sophistication. At best it was groping toward that epiphany; at worst, it was simply perpetuating racial stereotypes even as it sought to dispel them. Notably, when the 12th precinct busts a prostitution ring, the prostitutes comprise the same racial mix, and match off with the detectives by race…and age.

Despite Obama’s election, we are not yet a post-racial culture. Race has been America’s great stumbling block since its founding, and there’s a long way to go yet before we’re color-blind, especially since we’ve reached a point where addressing inequality serves to reinforce a sense of division as much as help us break down inequality. Still, progress is being made. And for those who wish to focus on the positive, it is not necessary to go back to the great watersheds of Emancipation and the Civil Rights movement. Outlawing slavery was a big step, as was the elimination of “separate but equal” from our legal vocabulary. But the small steps count, too, the ones that drift quietly into the backs of our minds where they’re hardly ever noticed. The shockingly primitive quality of Barney Miller’s portrayal of race and other demographic divisions are a testament to that: if what was then aggressively egalitarian now seems horribly chauvinistic, our cultural measures of how sharp a distinction can be before becoming offensive must be narrowing, and if no one is even aware of that narrowing, so much the better.

I got some junk mail yesterday from “The Bradford Exchange” yesterday. It was obviously junk mail just from the look of it, from the fancy seal on the return address meant to suggest this a real classy outfit, yessir you betcha, to the urgent “IMPORTANT: Please inform us of any address changes” on the back flap. But the only indication of the can’t-be-missed offer inside was the imperative on the envelope to “Go belly to belly with the fiercest dragons.”

One generally hears dragons described as fearsome beasts to be vanquished, especially in the geek culture I inhabit, and rarely something one goes belly to belly with. Now, I’d heard of being face to face with a terrible foe, and I’d heard of going toe to toe with the enemy. I’d heard of nose-to-nose confrontations and even seen “hand-to-hand” used improperly as an adverb to describe how a fight unfolded. But to my experience “going belly to belly” describes a very different form of close contact, one that is, shall we say, more cooperative and less confrontational. So I just had to see what the envelope promised.

Turns out it was a series of dragon-themed belt buckles. That’s a fairly specialized niche in the junk mail marketing biz, the kind I could only get as the result of someone—I’m guessing Amazon, from whom I recently ordered a couple of used RPG supplements—passing my buying record around.

In my case, that unintentionally funny teaser line was an immediate success despite ending in failure: I opened the envelope, though having done so I was not even tempted to examine the merchandise, much less buy it. And that’s what almost all advertising techniques aspire to: a moment, even a flickering glance, at the product in the hopes of snagging another sucker. Of course, the effort is wasted if it doesn’t end in a sale, to someone, somewhere, but before making any kind of sale you have to get the buyer’s attention. On the other hand, another truism of advertising is to sell the fantasy and not the product, and the image called to mind by the envelope is rather off-putting. So I’m left speculating about whether that “belly to belly” line was deliberately chosen to sound stupid…and whether, in the end, it gets more sales through that instant of attention than it loses by tainting the product with an unflattering image, or whether the buckle salesmen might have been better off with a different clever (?) line.

My laptop is dying of old age.

People can die of any number of specific trauma: mortar fire, malaria, drowning in the bathtub, whatever. But barring some specific and untimely demise, people tend to die of everything at once. The death certificate may read “heart failure,” but an aged patient may well simultaneously be in immediate and perpetual danger of stroke, pneumonia, or renal failure as well, with advancing Alzheimer’s on the side, and if the heart hadn’t killed him, the colon tumor would have.

The vital organs tend to give out more-or-less together, because there’s little evolutionary advantage to growing, say, a liver that can outlast a spleen by a factor of ten. A person dead of pancreatic failure is still dead no matter how lively his liver is.

That’s what my laptop is dying of. I wrote lately about needing to take it to “the shop”—my techno-savvy father-in-law—after it stopped recognizing it had a CD drive and an internet connection. And, at the time, I questioned the need for a replacement. But today, barely a week after its repair, although the CD drive is still in operation, the internet connection is out again. And this time I don’t have any suspicions as to why, since I haven’t done anything to the operating files myself. The power connection is also wearing out, so it tends to jiggle loose when I change positions. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the internal battery were not so degraded as to provide about ninety seconds of power, causing the whole system to shut down without enough notice to save my data and terminate all programs. The screen is okay—mostly. Sometimes it’s dim or discolored on startup, and I have to wiggle the screen a bit on its hinges to get it to recognize all the color signals.

Like the organs of an aged organism, all the various parts of my laptop are dying at once, and for similar causes. There is little or no market advantage to building, say, a screen that can outlast its processor by a factor of ten. A laptop dead from a worn motherboard connection, broken from gentle, repeated stress on the bottom of the case, is still dead no matter how lively its screen is. Nor indeed is there much market advantage to constructing a computer that will outlast its likely replacement as the next generation of processing power arrives; people tend to buy new computers as advancing applications demand more processing power, even if the machine they have still operates exactly as intended.

So my laptop and I are both victims of planned obsolescence. I suppose I should just be grateful that my own, biological systems aren’t already shutting down after we decided not to have any children.

Comedy, as Steve Martin reminds us, is not pretty. That maxim applies especially to the “Spicy Pony Head” routine I heard tonight on NPR. But it’s still pretty funny.

I had the “Voice of the Nation” show playing in the background last night as I puttered around on my laptop, only paying distant attention to the radio. So the “news broadcast” caught me off guard; one minute, it was ordinary-sounding news anchor, the next, I was sitting up thinking, “Wait, what did he just say?” I didn’t even know what he said; I was paying just enough attention for some low-priority processor in my brain to ping me with an alert that somebody wasn’t making sense, somewhere. I missed the next couple of jokes just shifting mental gears and catching on that this was a farcical newscast, by which time it was almost over. But happily the host continued interviewing comedy team Kasper Hauser throughout the show, touting their books and playing sound clips, so I got to hear “Spicy Pony Head” in its entirety. Also some other material, which proved hit-or-miss, as did their podcasts. But I gotta say: their “This American Life” spoofs are spot-on; like the newscasts, a casual listener might not even realize immediately that comedy is being committed. Anyone who enjoys “This American Life” must listen.

Eileene called this Wired article on a $150 space camera to my attention. It’s stuff like this that warms my heart and suffuses my college memories with a warm glow: ambitious, playful feats of engineering like this one may not be every-day occurrences, but they’re common enough at MIT to feel normal. The article clearly celebrates that spirit of mad science and doing nifty things simply because we can, and does not seek to exaggerate the project into anything more than a crude snapshot of near space.

Which makes the headline all the more cringeworthy. Taking space photos on a $150 budget is worth celebrating in itself; it need not be made out as “beat[ing] NASA,” which indeed it is not; NASA’s pictures have to be good enough to examine details of distant galaxies’ structure, or to distinguish planets on distant stars. Yet even as I write, some political hack has surely missed the point of the article, and is surely seeking to turn the headline into a rallying cry for dismantling NASA, and any other government programs it can tar with the “government always fails” brush. That the headline is taken out of context, or that it is downright false, offers no comfort; the faith of the free market genie is immune to mere factual truth, and any claim, no matter how ridiculous or deceptive or flatly wrong, can get lucky and grow mass media legs—witness rumors of “death panels” in the current health care debate.

Sadly, this kind of bad politics doesn’t need any help; it can grow out of nothing but disinformation and an absence of scruples. But why offer it free ammunition?

As part of a class assignment, I read a book today on landmark educators, with an emphasis on the educational systems in which they operated and how they sought to reform those systems. The passage on Quintillian was extraordinary.

What he had to say was not shocking; quite the contrary, the opinions quoted in the twelve or thirteen pages the book allotted to him were often ordinary, common sense statements that could only be considered insightful to the degree they differed from the theories and techniques of his time—techniques which admittedly may have been distorted somewhat by the revenue model employed by educators in the decadent days of Imperial Rome. But look at some of the points he argued:

• Children should begin schooling before the traditional 7 years of age. Allowances must be made for young students: they must not be subjected to the same long hours or stern discipline, but they are quite capable of learning useful lessons at age 4 or 5.
• Learning should be made as enjoyable as possible, rather than treated as a chore. While a basic core curriculum could not be dispensed with, students were whenever possible to study particular topics of personal interest.
• Conversely, punishments should be no more severe than necessary. Although Quintillian did not eschew the lash, he preferred the carrot to the stick, and urged instructors to reward deserving students with praise rather than to beat or belittle less able students, and to let all compete with one another in the expectation that competition and approbation will make learning fun.
• Lessons should have real value and meaning, rather than aim at a “gentleman’s education”—in particular, rhetoric should address plausible legal cases rather than the fanciful cases fashionable in education at the time. Such fanciful exercises created clever sophists, not a respectable citizenry.
• Small class sizes are, in themselves, desirable, as they allow an instructor to spend more attention on each student.
• Nevertheless, a small class is not necessarily a good choice; better a good teacher with a large class than a poor teacher with a small one. (In Rome, teachers were free agents, attracting students through their reputations. Unlike today, when class sizes are deliberately evened out by an educational bureaucracy, large class sizes were often a sign of a good education.) Still, one should be wary of very large classes; even the best of teachers can be overloaded to the point where their talents are neutralized.

The central message of Quintillus—that students should be encouraged and accommodated as much as possible, within the limits set by a need to master a necessary curriculum—is echoed over and over by reformers through the ages. And yet he never goes so far as to embrace the downright silly notions that percolate among today’s reformers, the kind of thinking that comes from embracing a central thesis to the exclusion of common sense. It’s as though, through direct experience and native talent, he cuts straight to educational theories that have been centuries in the rediscovery, and decades in the proof, and which even now are often attacked by teachers (or, worse, right-wing politicians) as unsound.

There may be more to Quintillian than the passages quoted; he may even have had deeply wrongheaded ideas. But what is present in my assignment suggests that Quintillian is all the educational theory a body ever need know; all the rest that a teacher must learn is specific techniques—a vast collection of specific techniques, to be sure, and not always obvious to the novice instructor, but nevertheless adding little or nothing to a general theory of education. I need to get my hands on a larger volume to determine more.

Well, this photo is a bit of spooky.

McCarthyism was one of the darkest blots on American history. Measured by the sheer brutality directed at is victims, or by the number affected, it cannot compare to our two greatest failures, slavery of Africans and genocide of the indigenous peoples. But measured instead as an abstract principle, by how sharply it contradicts our national values, McCarthyism lies pretty well at the nadir, alongside the Sedition Acts, the Know-Nothings, and the Japanese internment. Like the Stalinist state McCarthyism purported to be fighting, it criminalized not only the act of expressing dissent, but merely having a dissenting opinion. And like the Gestapo tactics America had just fought to destroy in Europe, it criminalized the very state of being different from the idealized citizen, seeking to progress from the truly disaffected to mere outsiders to the guy next door, making each progressively more normal group fear to stand up for the previous one for fear of suffering the same fate. Like the Gestapo and the KGB, it sought to turn American citizens into spies against one another. Like the Gestapo and the KGB, it condemned by association: those who defended McCarthy’s victims, or who were friends of McCarthy’s victims, or merely resembled McCarthy’s victims too closely, were also tarred as criminals de facto.

That the return of McCarthyism as an American institution could be considered even remotely desirable is a sign of the times: the polarized political atmosphere we operate in, the politics of fear, the long ascendancy of the far right. Obama seeks to improve health care. Personally, I fear he sins more in his willingness to abandon even his modest proposals than in flinging the country into a Soviet-style economy, but no health care proposal, no matter how poorly conceived, could damage the country so badly as another bout of McCarthyism, especially on the heels of the terrorist hysteria of the Bush presidency. We already have laws in place allowing the president to capture, hold without charges, trial, or legal counsel, and ultimately torture American citizens purely on his own authority. Coupling that to a new round of McCarthyism—which could do no more than ostracize and jail its victims—would rapidly turn the country into a police state. With that in mind, McCarthyism can only seem appealing in a purely Manichean world view: a free market is good, therefore a lifestyle driven by unfettered market forces is perfect; socialized medicine is not an unfettered market force and therefore purely evil, and any measure, no matter how terrible, taken to thwart that pure evil can only be to the good.

Granted, the kid in the shirt almost certainly has little or no notion of the nature of McCarthyism, neither as an idealized abstraction nor as a historical fact. He’s just wearing the shirt his parents gave him to wear. But really, that’s part of the problem: a significant portion of the populace aggressively working to forget its past.

Let us pray we are not condemned to repeat it.

We revisited the Hayden planetarium yesterday, as a birthday gift to Stan, who enjoys astrophysics. Part of the visit was the planetarium proper—in the strictest technical sense, the planetarium is the projector that displays the stars, usually on a viewing dome, while the surrounding displays are part of an astronomical museum. Even the dome is not, strictly speaking, part of the planetarium, though you rarely see one without the other.

That may change. Traditionally, a planetarium uses a dome as a screen so as to mimic the night sky; a sphere on the planetarium shines lights to represent the stars and rotates at the center of the sphere of which the dome comprises a part. (In sophisticated planetaria, the sphere may be slightly offset, the more accurately to depict seasonal changes.) It’s the simplest way to deal with the spherical geometry of the night sky viewed from earth, especially as the older planetaria are more clockwork than electronics.

But yesterday’s program hardly depicted the night sky at all. Mostly, we watched from a perspective swooping between stars and galaxies. Only twice was an earthly view on the dome, and even these were both merely endpoints of a continuous distortion of the sky as the point of perspective plunged through the galaxy. I’m not familiar enough with the full three-dimensional placement of stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy to know whether those distortions were accurately portrayed, rather than arbitrarily scattered points of light—I presume they were—but the geometry involved was decidedly not spherical. Especially, displaying the solar system from a point near the ecliptic plane on a spherical dome makes what should be the nearly two-dimensional space the planets occupy look like a spoon, or a badly-warped hubcap. Thinking back, none of the shows I’ve seen in astronomical museums for twenty or thirty years have involved actually looking at the night sky as it appears from earth; it’s all high-energy plasma clouds and galactic collisions and space warped into eleven dimensions for the sake of string theory. There’s no spherical geometry left.

As a kid, I was extraordinarily privileged to operate a modest planetarium, a relic of a marketing campaign for Elgin watches donated to my home town, which formed the core of an after-school program. As a result, I’m emotionally attached to the traditional spherical ceilings of a planetarium. I’ll mourn their passing. But the astronomy of today is so far beyond the Newtonian physics and mere stargazing that we learned in the Junior Astronomical Society that there’s no need for a spherical ceiling, apart from tradition. And there’s good reason not to use a spherical ceiling for a screen, including distortions like the ecliptic plane described above, and the discomfort of craning your neck to look at it. The show we saw yesterday, and the shows we’ve seen for the past couple decades, could be better shown on a standard iMax screen. The sooner, the better.

Obama’s speech on health care reform was meant to be a game-changer. Despite his spectacular popularity following the election and despite the enormous initial popular support for reform, Obama’s initiative has been stymied in Congress by the blue dogs and broken in the popular imagination by skillful disinformation campaigns. Much the same thing happened to Clinton’s attempts at health care reform—my god!—sixteen years ago.

Obama and his supporters were keenly aware of both the tactics employed to stop Clinton and of the ramifications of his failure, and hoped to avoid repeating his failure by approaching with a willingness to look after everyone, and to compromise however much might be necessary to see something done.

It didn’t work. Obama’s approach foundered on the same staunch opposition Clinton’s did, not because of the tactics employed, but because of the nature of the opposition. Nor, judging by the responses I’ve heard since, did the speech meant to revitalize the push for health care work. Every politician I’ve heard since hasn’t commented on the content of the speech at all, but rather on what they would have preferred the contents to be: Republicans who continue to complain of “national health care,” blue dogs who continue to worry about the program’s cost, Democrats who continue to insist that no change other than a public option is worthwhile, citizens who continue to ask the talking heads why they should have to change their health care after pointed, repeated insistence that no one will be required to change their existing coverage.

While I applaud a spirit of compromise in government, Obama made a gross error in seeking progress through compromise and appeasement in the current political environment. Compromise must work both ways, and Obama’s opponents on health care are fundamentally unwilling to compromise and fundamentally unappeasable. There are the corporations, whose profits are threatened by whichever policies might be proposed. There is the crazy 27%, who will oppose any program, no matter how effective, inexpensive, or praiseworthy, for no other reason than that it comes from the other side. And, most of all, there are the Republicans in Congress who calculate that any successful reform, acting to the credit of the Democrats who passed it, will cost the Republicans elections, possibly an entire generation of elections, as Social Security won a generation of loyal Democratic voters.

Our monthly gaming group enjoys Race for the Galaxy, a space exploration game that grew out of an attempt to adapt the much-beloved Puerto Rico from board game to card game. In fact, San Juan won the distinction of being the official card game adaptation, while RftG when back to the drawing board. The time was well spent however; while San Juan has much to recommend it as a casual game, the relative complexity of RftG gives it longer legs: more strategies to explore, a greater sense (accurate or illusory) of controlling one’s destiny rather than being a puppet to fortune, and considerably more room for variations and expansions.

I mention expansions because, while researching strategic ideas for the game, I discovered that two expansions already exist—and I’d heard of neither of them. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am; there’s been plenty of time since the original publication to turn out expansions, and the original set included cards features that have no game effect, only an explanation that such cards are meant to have game effects in later expansions. But we bought our copy a couple years after it first hit the shelves, so it’s still a new game for us, and we don’t yet need new cards to spice things up.

Still, I suppose we ought to grab them while they’re still on the shelves. Most expansions and adaptations have a fairly brief shelf life, and, already behind the curve, we can’t afford to dawdle in catching up.

The date being 9-9-9, it’s a good day for marketers to release the movie 9. Unfortunately for them, their release is wholly overshadowed by the release of the Beatles expansion to the Rock Band game for the Xbox on the very same day. People like the Beatles more than they like Timur Bekmambatov.
Essentially a combination of karaoke with Dance Dance Revolution for the fingers (or, earlier still, the ancient electronic game Simon) Rock Band allows you to perform top 40 hits at home. Singers attempt to hit the notes; instrumentalists try to push the right colored buttons on their guitar-shaped or drum-shaped controllers in time with the music. Rather than playing the wrong notes when you screw up, the game simply fades out until you hit the right button again, and the final sound is a recognizable facsimile of the original. The simulated audience will cheer wildly for all but the most pathetic performances.
Like karaoke, the game is more fun than jaded or cynical gen-Xers might wish to admit. I’m not much good at it. This is partially because I’m clumsy with my hands, but I suffer as well from failing to recognize most of the songs I’m called upon to play. Familiarity definitely helps, both to match the rhythm and to anticipate changes in the rhythm. So the Beatles expansion is definitely a welcome handicap for me. Add the new feature of allowing up to three voices to sing harmony, and I’m actually mildly enthusiastic about it.
What I’d forgotten until today was how many popular Beatles songs come from their pre-Revolver days, back when they were singing bubble-gum pop like Help! and She Loves You I know these, too, of course, but I only listen to post-Revolver songs by choice, and in my eagerness to test myself against the close harmonies of Because and the licks of I Want You (She’s So Heavy), the yeah-yeah-yeah period had just entirely slipped my mind until the news clips discussed the new game expansion with Ed Sullivan and screaming teenage girls in the background. Oh, yeah.
That’s not going to be as fun. Though their early songs are considerably simpler, I don’t think I can just automatically sing along in harmony without distracting myself from the demanding task of pushing colored buttons in sequence. I’ll have to think, however briefly, about what comes next in the vocals while I’m trying to watch what comes next for the colored buttons, and I’m just going to come apart at the seams, and look foolish for doing so, the bane of all karaoke. ‘Cause who doesn’t know I Want To Hold Your Hand?