Oh, he’s proven more willing to open diplomatic dialogues than his predecessor—not a difficult target to hit—but what else? Military involvement in Afghanistan is on the rise even as schedules are laid to withdraw from Iraq, no more prosperous or politically stable now than it was under the Bush occupation. Guantanamo is still open for business, and, while it is being slowly closed, the prisoners are not so much being set free or delivered to fair and open trials as being stuffed into another prison with a similar name. Indeed, the Justice department recently argued that it could not free certain prisoners because, while they were almost certainly mistreated and wrongfully arrested in the first place, all that wrongful treatment might have turned them INTO terrorists; by the Obama administration’s estimation, the mere act of being seized under false charges is itself a crime that admits neither trial nor release. Even those vaunted diplomatic pushes are often bought at the expense of quietly pushing human rights off the table. All of which got me to thinking.

The list of recipients consists entirely of four categories:

1. statesmen who initiate or broker peace agreements, such as Frank Kellogg and Nelson Mandela,
2. private citizens who champion a humanist cause, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Muhammad Yunus,
3. populist organizations, such as the Red Cross or Amnesty International, and
4. statesmen who are offered the prize less for their accomplishments, which are often bloody, than as encouragement to their people to continue to move toward civilized discourse, such as Yasser Arafat and Jose Ramos-Horta.

Obama seems to fall firmly in that fourth category; he certainly doesn’t belong to the other three. He has struck a diplomatic tone on behalf of the US that seems remarkable only after a decade of a go-it-alone arrogance and, often, a positive effort to antagonize other nations. He is pushing (though less aggressively by the week) for a health care program that has yet to materialize and would, at best, merely catch the US up to the kind of safety net and widespread coverage already available throughout the rest of the industrialized world. He stands as a symbol of the slowly vanishing scars of American racial politics. And, of course, he is not George Bush, for which the entire world is deeply thankful.

While I share the world’s general relief to have once again a thoughtful, decent man in the White House—the first since Carter—the actual award reminds me how far we’ve fallen. This year’s Peace Prize feels like one of those patronizing invitations to third-world despots to join, or rejoin, the ranks of civilized nations. And, God help us, it seems we actually need it.

Described as an epic Western with a sci-fi twist, the show will revolve around "a gunslinger caught between worlds" and will feature a nod to "Planet of the Apes," said Rosenbaum, who is executive producing with Wonderland's McG and Peter Johnson.

"What I'm really interested in is the revamping of the Western genre where you still have all of the iconic Western themes and iconic Western tropes but the idea is that it will feel incredibly contemporary and will introduce the Western to a whole new generation," Rosenbaum said.

Wait, wait, I’m getting a terrible sense of déjà vu…

Oh, right. Fox already had an epic western with a sci-fi twist, didn’t it? Firefly came from phenomenon Joss Whedon, who already gave Fox a big hit with Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. And it was terrific. (I say this as someone who never understood all the excitement over Buffy.

It was clever. It had compelling characters. It had snappy dialogue that puts all others to shame as only Whedon can. The “cowboys in space” theme which looks so corny on paper proved nevertheless both quirky and coherent—no mean achievement. The show had a core of truly, amazingly devoted fans and rapidly growing interest among more ordinary viewers, following Whedon’s pattern of developing show “legs” over time as his layered and complex stories unfold, and as he moves beyond the necessities of establishing the characters to his strength as an experimenter. It was a revamping of the western genre that had all of the iconic western themes and iconic western tropes but an idea that felt incredibly contemporary and introduced the western to a whole new generation.

But Fox blew it; one might say they deliberately sabotaged it. Producers insistent on immediate blockbuster meddled in the episode order, to the detriment of the show. They moved it about the airing week schedule. They shoved it into an undesirable time slot. And—surprise!—it failed, and producers lamented its “low ratings.” Not that I’m bitter.

So, while I have nothing against Rosenbaum or his as-yet-unnamed show, I can’t help but suspect it is already doomed to the Graveyard of Novel Television Projects. And, to my embarrassment, I might prefer it to end up there rather than upstage Firefly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.