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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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