Just For The Record

The more I hear from him, the better I like him.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the picture I already posted, because it bears repeating.

Saturday Night's All Right For Blogging

This is an experiment. Every day I have a pile of ideas to write about. My backlog of notes stretch back for years. Almost every day I intend to write, but don't. So today I'm going to start up this text file, add arbitrary bits to it throughout the day as the urge strikes, and post it late tonight. It may be a lot, or very little indeed. We'll see how it goes.

---

I've been filesharing since long before filesharing was a thing. It started with copying programs on cassette for my Commodore Vic 20. Then the Commodore 64, with its 1541 disc drive and a program called Fast Hack 'Em (itself copied, of course). Weird side note: I once got a new bank card with the randomly assigned PIN of 1541. I didn't change it, because it was so easy to remember. Every time I used that card, I just had to visualize putting it into a Commodore disc drive.

A little later, when my friends and I started getting seriously into music, we habitually took turns buying albums (cassettes at this point). Only one of us would buy any given album, then the others would run off copies.

Around 1986, we had just started getting into Genesis. We only knew the singles from Invisible Touch that got radio play and an hour's worth of videos that were on a two-part MuchMusic Spotlight, which I still have it on a VHS tape somewhere. I remember (future-)Pastor Derek and I deliberating over who would buy which of their albums. I picked Abacab first because it included Keep It Dark. I don't remember which one he got - I think it was Duke or A Trick Of The Tail. Either way, he got the better of that arrangement.

I also remember that no one wanted to buy Trespass. We had never heard of any of the songs on it, and there were only six tracks, so it had to be really short and therefore a ripoff, right?

We would learn.

Given this well-established propensity to piracy, I was all over Napster when it came along. I still have the issue of Maximum PC that included the client software on a bundled CD-ROM. Over the years, I went through many other alternatives. Usenet, BearShare, Kazaa, DC++, Shareaza, WinMX, and many others whose names I have forgotten have come and gone.

Nowadays, of course, torrents are the way to go. I used uTorrent when on Windows, and have settled on KTorrent here in Linuxland.

I've always practiced hit-and-run strategies for any files that a copyright holder might object to having passed around. That is to say, any commercially available material. My default settings in KTorrent are to stop seeding as soon as my download completes. Impolite, perhaps, but it's kept me out of court thus far.

When I have something that I can safely leave seeding, though, I happily do so. Free open source software, concert recordings (usually safe to share, although not always), and anything with explicit permission to distribute stays seeded. I leave my torrent software running most of the time, and I've managed to rack up some good share ratios. Here's what I'm currently seeding, with ratios as of this writing:

Ubuntu Studio 13.04                41.32
World English Audio Bible       36.01
AVLinux 6.01b                           17.35
AVLinux 6.0                                17.23
Ubuntu Studio 12.10                10.42
LibreOffice 3.6.4 installer        1.83
Deep Purple 2012 concert        0.54
LibreOffice 3.6.4 Help files      0.41
Paul McCartney 2013 concert   0.28

(Sorry the numbers don't line up all pretty. I could insert a table or play with the spacing, but that sounds like more work than not doing either of those.)

I'm especially impressed that the newer version of AVLinux moved ahead of the old version so quickly. I've been seeding version 6.0 for over 59 days (actual seeding time only), but 6.0b for only 13 days. I'll probably stop seeding the old versions of AVLinux and Ubuntu Studio pretty soon, if only to free up some hard drive space, since all the demand is obviously for the newer versions. I'm also pleased with the demand for the audio Bible, although of course I'd like it to be way out in first place.

---

Volumes have been written about Kermit Gosnell, with much wringing of hands from the pro-abortion side, alternatively claiming that he did nothing wrong or that he is an aberration, a stain on the fine profession of abortionist.

The simple truth about Gosnell is that he's nothing unusual. The babies he killed wound up no more dead than those killed by any smiling ghoul in a clean gown, working in a well-lit facility to terminate the pregnancies of women who don't even look pregnant yet.

The stage of gestation is not the issue, the killing is. The actions of every abortionist are as vile as those of Gosnell, and deserve the same condemnation.

---

My bit about my new saw includes one joke that pleases me far more than it should. I know it's poor form to laugh at your own jokes, but if I don't, who will?

Anyway, there's one joke in there that seems like an easy, stupid pun but which actually works on a whole other level. Which is still a stupid pun, but one that generally gets missed. I've gotten eye rolls from people around me when I pointed it out, which makes it no less entertaining to me.

---

I'm glad Dexter is wrapping up. I've had a complicated relationship with this show. I like the premise, and I like Michael C. Hall's acting, so I figured it was worth a shot. About a year ago I borrowed the first two seasons from a friend, and... obtained... the rest of the seasons (remember my first big topic today?).

Season 1 was awful. Around the time that Dexter found the doll parts in his freezer, I turned to my wife and said, "The killer's going to turn out to be somebody from his past that he doesn't know about. If it's his long-lost brother, I'm out."

A few episodes later, the killer was revealed as Dexter's long-lost brother, and I was out.

Oh, yeah: spoiler warning.

If only there were some way to go back up and insert that warning earlier. Ah, well, perhaps someday such technology will be within reach of the common man.

Anyway, I gave up. My wife persevered. She assured me that it got better after season 1, and I really enjoy Jimmy Smits's acting (he's why I started watching my all-time favourite show, NYPD Blue), so I decided to give it another chance, at least until Smits did his bit.

The writing still varied widely, but was good enough to keep me in. Barely. I loved the John Lithgow and Colin Hanks / Edward James Olmos seasons (the Hanks / Olmos twist is the only one in the entire series that I didn't see coming). However, I despise the "long lost relative" trope, and they've gone to that well twice.

I've long gotten the impression that Dexter has a senior writer or two with a lot of clout but no fresh ideas. They churn out the hackwork, and generally drag the show down to the lowest common denominator. However, the writing staff also includes at least one or two people with good ideas but little influence. They manage to slip some quality material past the guards here and there, but mostly get quashed. If those fresher voices had been louder,  the show could have been great.

They're three episodes into the final season, and I'm glad it's ending. I want to ride the show out to the end at this point, but I wish they were only doing six episodes. Everyone involved seems to be phoning it in this year.

This season seems like a Greatest Hits compilation, only in Dexter's case they're revisiting the worst aspects of the series. Deb being whiny, ineffectual, and so annoying that I spend every episode hoping someone - anyone - will kill her? Check. A serial killer expert shows up and makes Dexter nervous? Check. New character has extensive but never-before-hinted-at ties to Dexter's past? Check. Painfully bad dialogue, especially in Hall's narration? Check. Misuse of technical terminology by characters who are supposed to be experts and therefore know better (there's a difference between "psychopath" and "sociopath", and every time Vogel opens her mouth she proves she doesn't know it)? Check, Check, a thousand times Check.

Even the technical aspects of the show are getting lazy. Watch any scene with dialogue between two characters. Every time the camera angle switches, say from a front-angle two-shot to a shot over a character's shoulder, the actors' head positions jerk around wildly. They go from looking straight at one another to one looking down to either or both staring off into the distance with each new shot. Nobody involved could be bothered with little details like continuity between shots.

I can't imagine Bryan Cranston tolerating Breaking Bad sliding off a cliff this badly.

All dramatic writing is about getting from Point A to Point B. With Dexter, I often hate Point B (long lost relatives ahoy!), but how they get there can be interesting. On The Walking Dead, Point A and Point B are consistently good, but how they get there can be lazy. Case in point - everyone disagreeing with Dale about whether to kill a prisoner, even though several of the characters would clearly have sided with him. However, they needed to alienate Dale from everyone to make his death later in the episode all the more tear-jerking ("I never got to tell him... sniff..."). The characters get moved around like pieces on a chess board, characterization to this point be hanged.

Oh, yeah: spoiler warning.

The Walking Dead has gotten better on this score. I think the writers may have even realized their mistake. Glenn gave an out-of-nowhere speech in a later episode about how Dale had been right and he shouldn't have abandoned him like that. Well, yeah, Glenn, and you wouldn't have if your writers had been more conscientious.

For the ultimate in good writing, though, nothing beats Breaking Bad. Point A and Point B are both terrific, and how they get there is always compelling and unpredictable. I'm not glad that Breaking Bad is ending, but I am looking forward very much to seeing how they do it.

---

Helen Thomas, the terrorist-sympathizing former journalist, has passed away. The CNN Breaking News e-mail bulletin says, "Thomas retired in 2010 after she made controversial comments regarding Jewish people."

I guess you could say that. She accidentally let her anti-Semitism show in front of the camera, and "retired" a week later. If a public figure to the right of Mao had made those kinds of statements, they'd still be reviled and propped up as an example of the "racism of the right". But since Thomas was a credentialed (literally) leftist, it's a dog-bites-man story and the media lets one of their own "retire with dignity".

---

I've been listening to the new, complete audiobook version of World War Z by Max Brooks. It's pretty good, and the voice cast is top-notch. It probably works better as an audiobook than as a novel. One of my main criticisms is that the dialogue doesn't really offer different "voices" to each character, with little to distinguish them in terms of vocabulary or speaking style. Having different actors play each character ameliorates that problem, but doesn't solve it completely.

I will one day watch the movie, which by all accounts I've been able to take seriously appears to be a soulless Hollywoodized disaster, just out of geeky completionism. I certainly won't pay ten bucks to watch it in a big dark room with noisy texting strangers. I'll wait until the DVD rip hits the torrent sites is released and available at my local Blockbuster store.

What?

I think they missed a bet with the World War Z adaptation. It should never have been a movie. It should have been a TV series. The self-contained episodic nature of the book would have made for a great series. Each episode could have had the interviewer going to speak to another survivor, switching to their story told in flashback as they spoke. Of course, you could have the interviewer's support staff, UN personnel, etc., as recurring characters. It would essentially be an anthology series with a stable framework. Although anthology series are a tough sell to an audience these days, I think the zombie / survival horror fanbase would be large enough to get the show off the ground.

Alas, what could have been.

I haven't finished the audiobook yet. If Brooks ever reveals what happened in North Korea, don't tell me. Everybody hates spoilers, right?

What?

---

A woman in the U.S. found out that her unborn baby has down syndrome. Unwilling to raise the child (for the record, I have no problem whatsoever with her making this decision - giving a child up for adoption is always an option), she put the word out: if anyone would adopt the baby, they could have him or her. (I try to avoid referring to unborn children as "it", which concedes important linguistic ground to those who would deny the child's humanity.) If no prospective adoptive parents stepped up, she would have an abortion.

The plea went online, and over a thousand people volunteered.

I've frequently railed on the cognitive dissonance and refusal to accept facts that are inherent in the pro-abortion position. Can even this case make them finally pack in the ludicrous "who's going to raise all the unwanted babies" argument? Probably not, but I can hope and pray.

Parents are available for unwanted children. I have friends who waited years for adoption. We're a long, long way from running out of loving homes for any child who makes it through the gauntlet that the world offers those with doubts about having a baby.

There are no unwanted children. There are just a lot of people who project their own unwillingness to be a loving parent onto others.

I was almost in an adoption situation myself several years ago. My wife heard a woman say that she just found out she was pregnant, and wasn't happy about it. She wasn't seriously considering abortion, but was hesitant to raise the child herself and was musing about trying to find adoptive parents. My wife told me that she very nearly volunteered on the spot. She wasn't 100% sure I would agree, but knew that it was a pretty safe bet. She was right. I assured her that if she's ever in a situation like that again, she has carte blanche.

The pregnant woman wound up keeping the baby and raising her herself. They live in our neighbourhood, and that no-longer-baby goes to school with my son. Everything turned out OK, as it usually does.

There is no shortage of homes for "unwanted" children, at least in North American society.  I can't speak for the rest of the world, but last I heard international adoption was a thing that people do. Anyone who clings to the "all the unwanted children" argument is demonstrating that they're too ignorant (willingly or unwillingly) to take seriously in a discussion of life-and-death issues.

---

"You can't argue with results" is just a prettier way of saying "the ends justify the means."

"To each his own", depending on context, is usually just a prettier way of saying "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

---

I recently saw this listing on a classified ad site. I've touched up the grammar and punctuation, which were atrocious, partly because I couldn't stand them and partly to make tracing the post to its source (not the point) less likely:

$290.00 Crib Voucher for sale! You pick out the crib, and I'll buy it at the store for you (the voucher has my name on it). Reason for selling: I have no space for the crib at the moment. Selling it for $225 (brand new).

I can't come up with any theory for this that doesn't involve words to the effect of "The kid can sleep in a cardboard box. Mommy needs crack money!"

Can anybody else?

---

This has gone better than I had expected. I think I'll stop now.

---

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of some of my PC Gamer magazine collection, rotated to maximize the nerdiness.

Reading Log: A Farewell To Ebert

I had already intended to write this entry well before Roger Ebert passed away. When he died, I figured that was the perfect time to finally get it written up and posted as something of a tribute. Several weeks stretching into months later, here it is. Such is my sense of time.

This entry is a Reading Log because the shelf full of books I've purchased and read but not yet written about includes a copy of Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2004. I don't know where or when I got it. Probably a library book sale several years ago. I've been putting adhesive labels with my name and date of purchase inside every book I've bought for quite some time now, and it doesn't have one. I also don't remember when I read it. I know that shelf includes books that I read at least as far back as early 2009.

So, yeah, I'm pretty far behind on Reading Logs.

I bought this book for two reasons. I like movies, and more importantly, I like books that are divided into lots of independent sections, so that they can be picked up and flipped open to a random page, read for a minute or two, then put down again. I read at a lot of times when most people don't. While eating, while brushing my teeth, while drying off after a shower, etc. Novels don't lend themselves to such segmented attention. Magazines, encyclopedia-style reference books, and anything with the words "bathroom reader" in the title work much better.

I have a few of Roger Ebert's books. Besides the Movie Yearbook 2004, I have the 1985 and 1991 editions of his Movie Home Companion, and a copy of The Great Movies. I read the 2004 book the same as all the others. I started by looking up my favourite movies, then some of my least favourite, then just by random reading. Each one also got at least one complete read-through.

I took particular interest in The Great Movies, reading through it and considering whether I wanted to see each of them (assuming I hadn't already). I did the same a while back with IMDB's top 100 rated movies. Those lists led me to a few films I was very glad to have watched (e.g., Network, Seven Samurai, Taxi Driver) and a few that made me want the three hours of my life back (e.g., Apocalypse Now - if you place any value on your limited time in this life, don't waste a moment of it on the extended "redux" edition).

On that note, it's a cultural wonder that we live in a time when pretty much any movie ever released (and a few that weren't) is available to me virtually immediately. It's a far cry from the days when I'd read about some obscure horror film in Fangoria and have to either scour independent video rental stores for it (chains were always a waste of time), mail-order it at exorbitant cost, or resign myself to doing without.

If it sets you at ease, feel free to assume that by availability I'm referring to such modernities as Netflix, video-on-demand, and hundreds of cable channels that cater to every taste. The facts that my fibre-op connection can pull down 700 megs of data in no time flat (9.5 MB/second sustained!) and that I've modded my Wii to include a video player that can stream files across my wireless network may have nothing to do with it.

I always enjoyed watching or reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews. I started watching him and Gene Siskel on PBS many years ago. They were on late Sunday nights, sometime either before or after Monty Python. I started watching just for the chance to see movie clips and previews, a rare treat in those days when the Internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore's eye. Before long I hoped every episode that Gene and Roger would argue, and finally started paying attention to the reviews themselves.

I'm usually not interested in whether a reviewer actually likes whatever it is they're reviewing. The key is why they did or didn't like it. The body of the review is far more important  than their final verdict, be it expressed in stars, points on a scale, or thumbs. It's always possible that a reviewer may have a general dislike of a genre or style that the reader will enjoy.

A former co-worker and I used to discuss movies, using one another's opinions as a guideline whether to see a given film. If he liked it, that was reason for me to avoid it, and vice versa. We reached this conclusion when I told him although I had liked 28 Weeks Later overall, I hated the incredibly stupid scene when a low-flying helicopter's blade was used as a zombie-decapitating weapon. His response: "That part sounds awesome!" At that moment, we both knew we had no common ground.

As for Ebert himself, I enjoyed his writing. The man definitely knew and loved film, and spoke with a great deal of authority in that realm. As a philosopher and theologian he made a great movie reviewer, but we'll come back to that. His website, which has lived on in his absence, was and is an excellent resource. I just went there to get affirmation of my suspicion that the movie adaptation of World War Z is an artless, souless chunk of commercially safe garbage, and was not disappointed. My favourite part of the site was always Movie Answer Man, which Ebert stopped doing over a year before his death and which seems to have died with him.

I don't think I would have liked Roger Ebert much on a personal level, and I'm quite sure he wouldn't have liked me, which does not reflect poorly on him. I found him arrogant, both when speaking of film, where he was an authority, and everything else, where he was not. He regularly condemned philosophical or religious certainty with absolute certainty, never seeming to notice the irony of that all-too-common position.

He was a good writer, though, and no matter how much I disagreed with his positions, the expression was consistently thought-provoking and worth reading. He would even engage his critics in the comments sections, not with shouting but with discussion of ideas. That's rare, and his loss brings the Internet's average level of discourse down a notch or three.

He had other very admirable qualities. He clearly loved his wife, and faced the adversities toward the end of his life with amazing dignity, grace, and humour.

I've read a lot of Ebert's writing, and the one non-movie article that best encapsulates what I've said about him is one written toward the end of his life: "How I am a Roman Catholic", in which he explains at length that, contrary to his claim, he wasn't. The quotations that follow come from that article.

Ebert liked the ritual and traditions of the Catholic church, and did a good job of internalizing some of the social and moral lessons that the nuns taught him in childhood. Some of those social lessons are dubious. I don't see where the Bible (as opposed to the Catholic church - feel free to mentally add "Roman" in front of "Catholic" for the remainder of this article) endorses labour unions. In fact, Matthew 20:1-15 undermines the rhetoric I've endured from labour unions to which I've been forced to belong (union shops where if you want to work, you have to sign the card). I'm rooting for right-to-work legislation in Canada. In Orwellian fashion, Canadian unions argue that such a law would infringe on the right of workers to organize, when in fact it would only give them the right not to.

But I digress. Back to Ebert's article.

So Ebert liked some aspects of the Roman Catholic church. He had the courage to profess an essentially pro-life position on abortion ("My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born."), but through some cognitive dissonance refused to admit it and follow through ("I support freedom of choice."). At other times he resorted to the standard squishy if-you-don't-like-abortion-don't-have-one position. One could reply, using precisely the same logic, that if you don't like abortionists being shot, then don't shoot them.

A textbook cafeteria Catholic, though, he rejected the position of the Church when it became personally convenient or trendy, notably on matters of sexual ethics ("Is homosexuality a sin? ... My feeling is that love between consenting adults is admirable. The commandment about not coveting thy neighbor's wife had more to do with concepts of property in Old Testament times...").

However, his original premise of explaining his Catholic status goes out the window near the end: "I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God."

Um.

You simply don't get to call yourself a Catholic, or any other sort of Christian (of which Catholics are a subset), or any other sort of theist (of which Christians are a subset), if you cannot affirm a positive belief in God. Atheism or agnosticism place you outside these particular camps.

At this point, if this blog had more than five readers on a good day, I'd anticipate a reply in the comments accusing me of being "judgmental" (or maybe "judgemental"), probably quoting Matthew 7:1 out of context, thereby completely missing the point Jesus was making.

Observing that a person is not Catholic if they don't believe in God is no more judgmental than observing that a person is not a vegetarian if they have steak for supper twice a week. Enjoying the rituals and traditions doesn't make someone Catholic, any more than enjoying wearing white coats would make them a doctor. The word "Catholic" actually means something, and like any title, it comes with costs, responsibilities, and certain minimum requirements.

There are many reasons why I am not Catholic, most of which have to do with the elevation of human traditions to the level of doctrine. That said, even if I grew up in and still attended a Catholic church, I would understand that I do not get to apply the label to myself. I am not Catholic, and cannot be so unless I accept Catholic doctrine and teaching. The only reason to cling to an undeserved label or title is to cheapen and weaken said title, to damage its brand value.

Nancy Pelosi is a superb case in point, hiding behind the skirts of falsely claimed Catholicism while proclaiming abortion "sacred ground". And not just any abortion, although she likes 'em all, but late-term abortion, which makes even many pro-abortionists uncomfortable. The woman is either completely deluded, or deliberately slandering Catholicism.

But I digress. Back to Ebert.

He was a good writer and a fine film critic. I still read "his" website, but not nearly as often. Eventually I expect it'll become a website that I used to read.


Bonus fun fact: Blogger's spell checker sometimes flags the words "movie" and "movies" (but bafflingly, not always), which means there's a lot of red on my screen as I type this.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of something else my wife cooked and ate during her Year of Shrinking, during which she shed just shy of 100 pounds. I don't know why she photographed this, but there it was on the memory card.

Perfectly Ordinary Shirt Day

I'll put my hatred of bullying, and contempt for the bullies themselves, up against anyone's. I have a visceral reaction to any abuse of power or authority.

This holds true whether we're talking about bullies on the playground, or anywhere else in life. Members of Parliament who intimate that objecting to their proposal implies you're in league with child pornographers, thuggish cops whose first interaction with a distraught foreigner is to taser him to death, teachers who run screeching to the police to arrest a man because his four-year-old daughter draws a picture of a gun, or people who think it's OK to kill babies in the name of convenience, and hey, it's not like they can fight back - they're all cut from the same cloth as playground tyrants, and I want them all knocked off their high horses. Hard.

However, as much as I deplore bullying in all its forms, I won't conform for the sake of an empty gesture.

Tomorrow is Pink Shirt Day, intended to demonstrate opposition to bullying. There will probably be millions of people, including lots of them at my son's school and my workplace, wearing pink shirts under the delusion that a momentary meaningless gesture of solidarity will dispel the satisfaction that bullies get from exercising brute force. Their intentions are good, but on Thursday they'll be dressing normally and the Nelsons of the world will resume business as usual.

This display will do nothing to dissuade bullies, mainly because bullies aren't very smart. If they were, they'd be far more frightened of possible consequences of their behaviour, like the school shooting currently playing out in Ohio. Interestingly, earlier today I saw reports saying that the (alleged...) shooter was a favourite target for his school's bullies. Those seem to have now been scrubbed offline.

That's the sole upside of school shootings: the hope that somewhere a bully will furrow their unibrow and wonder whether that little spaz they torment might do the same to them if pushed too far, and back off. I'd rather they back off out of personal growth, but in the interim fear will do. And no, that tiny upside doesn't mitigate the tragic downside.

Anti-bullying has entered the fashionable mainstream. That's only because now it's politically useful to some people to call attention to some of the victims. Kids have always been picked on by other kids. Some can take it, some can't (which is not meant to denigrate those who can't, because they shouldn't have to). The awkward kids, shy kids, tall kids, short kids, fat kids, smart kids, homely kids, and yes, those kids who don't conform to the mainstream stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, as the case may be, have always gotten picked on. The worst thing a kid can be in the eyes of other kids is different. And everybody tisked and muttered about how that shouldn't be, but it went on more or less unabated for millenia.

But now it's intolerable and the greatest scourge of our society because of the fashionable (take that as a pun if you like) victims.

"It gets better" is a message for all kids, not just those in trendy subcultures.

As for me, I will not be wearing a pink shirt tomorrow, partly because I don't own one but more because I'm largely immune to peer pressure. This is closely related to my near-total lack of social skills and inability to understand normal human interaction.

This immunity has some downsides. Sometimes it's wise to go with the herd, because there be tigers in the other direction. On the other hand, not caring (or often, even realizing) what everyone else is doing lets you skip over a lot of nonsense in life. I rather like it when I look at the magazines in the supermarket checkout aisle and don't recognize any of the people on the covers.

I'm actually hoping that one of our office cheerleaders calls me out tomorrow for not wanting to play this latest reindeer game. If and when they do, I'm going to make a loud spectacle out of asking them why they're singling me out for negative attention just because I don't conform to their expectations. I'll grow increasingly (mock-) distraught as I proclaim how much they're hurting my feelings by picking on me for dressing differently from them.

Then I'll abruptly shut off the histrionics and thank them, because I feed on irony. Their lack of self-awareness is like manna to me, the sweet nectar of paradise. I may lapse into a Montgomery Burns impression for this stage of the bit.

"But Z-Dog," you may interject at this point, "if you do this to some poor unsuspecting sap, won't that make you, kind of, well... a bully?"

To which I reply, "Don't call me Z-Dog. You sound like an idiot." Also, "Yes."

The best answer to bullying, unfortunately, is a bigger bully. We live in a fallen world, wherein every last member of the dominant species is corrupted by sin. The best of us isn't very good. The best we can ever hope for is that the bully at the top of the food chain is benevolent. This is why I'm quite content with America being the dominant world power for the last few decades. Yes, she occasionally throws her weight around, but virtually always with good intentions and often to good ends.

In summation, I hate bullying (but not the bullies themselves, a crucial distinction) of any sort as much as anyone, but I'm not interested in meaningless gestures that consist largely of leveraging peer pressure to force conformity, itself a concept dear to every bully's heart. I'll stick with knocking the feet out from under bullies at every opportunity, and encouraging others to do the same.

And I don't wait until the victims are a politically correct group.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of round Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger dolls that look like they could be wadded into balls for easy storage. I call them Poohkemon.

10 Short Thoughts Not About Glenn Gould

I just read the Maclean's year-end "Newsmakers 2011" issue. It contains a series of articles about the supposedly most newsworthy people and events of the year. With this issue, we hit a new journalistic low.

It's a given that a few people on these annual "most intriguing", "most interesting", etc., lists will be women who are there solely because of who they slept with. However, this issue features Pippa Middleton - who is on the list not even because of who she slept with, but because of who her sister slept with.

At least her sister finally got a promotion this year, after eight years of casual / temporary status as the Royal Penis-Warmer. Pippa's most newsworthy activity appears to have been showing up at the wedding.

To be clear, this is not meant as personal criticism of Miss Middleton. She may be a very intelligent and capable person. She may be very accomplished in the field of whatever it is that she does. However, none of that makes her particularly newsworthy.

No, this is meant to mock the media, and by extension its audience - that's us, folks - for being overly concerned with her. She isn't the problem, the people giving her undue attention are the problem. There's no discernible reason for anyone to be talking about her in "news" articles or magazine profiles.

Or in blog posts, for that matter.


Whoops.

---

Although I accept that there is truly nothing new under the sun, I sometimes strive for some semblance of originality. A while back I scrapped a drafted article / joke because I had expected "penis-warmer" to be a something of a rare term, but Google told me otherwise. I was surprised, especially by how many of the results were product listings on eBay (with optional what cozy?!?).

That said, I have high hopes for the revised term used above, "Royal Penis-Warmer". As I write this, there are no Google hits for that phrase.

Soon there will be one.

---

The Walking Dead (the comic, not the TV show) has been disappointing me of late. I'm getting a little tired of the last page cliffhanger/shocker that completely fizzles and is completely forgotten about within the first three pages of the next issue. Kirkman's going to that well just a bit too often.

---

An occasional commenter here, TB, has a blog of his own now. If you think I'm cantankerous sometimes, you should buckle up, go over there, and take a look.

---

I'm still not writing much here lately, I know. I've been posting comments some other places, though, like the Forge forums, Comics I Don't Understand, and Slashdot. I can often be found in one of those places when I'm not doing much here.

I've also been known to show up in comment threads in places like Jim Shooter's blog, Roger Ebert's blog, Crime Justice & America, and Ken Levine's blog.

That last one is probably my favourite, because Ken Levine actually responded to one of my comments in a later post (the one I linked). In this culture, getting my (fake Internet) name mentioned by a guy who knows some famous people is better than money!

---

The Supercommittee failed to reach a budget deal. By most accounts, the Democrats on the committee refused to consider any proposal that included any spending cuts, and the Republicans refused to consider any tax increases. No shocker, really. But it gave us a great chance to play Mediawatch! Here's how to play:

Think about the blurbs you heard in the media about this. The headlines, the soundbites, the text crawls at the bottom of the screen, the snarky remarks from "unbiased journalists" and late-night comedians. Notice how many of them blame the stalemate entirely on the Republicans "refusing to compromise" and completely ignore the equal but opposite intransigence from the Democrat side.

Oh, sure, some of the long articles mentioned the Democrats' equal role in one of the "continued on page 26" paragraphs - we're just talking about the short versions that are all most people will perceive.

But remember, only Fox News is biased. Well, and Sun News if you're in Canada.

Here's the scary part of playing Mediawatch. Consider any newsworthy topic of which you have some deeper knowledge. Now consider how ridiculously distorted you find the media's reporting on the matter.

Now consider that most people don't have deeper knowledge of most topics, and all they know is what the media feeds them.

Now consider that that includes you. The media usually talks about subjects where you don't have any particular insight. It's statistically inevitable, just because of the sheer volume of information on the world. It's humanly impossible to know very much about very much.

And when out of one of your comfort zones - which is most of the time - you only know what they tell you, and then usually only what was in the headline, sound bite, or crawl across the bottom of the screen.

---

Notes for historical purposes:

We got six trick-or-treaters this year, and most of those were kids whose parents specifically drove them here because they know us.

We have no snow to speak of yet. We've had flurries, and a few times enough to cover the ground (barely), but it's all melted away again so far.

My son's current obsessions are Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Roblox.

---

I don't like bad arguments being used in support of positions with which I agree. To that end, I wish people who oppose capital punishment - as do I - would stop saying that it has no more deterrent value than life imprisonment.

The problem with arguing about the deterrent value of capital punishment is that there's a ridiculous time lapse between a criminal being sentenced to execution and that execution being carried out. The lapse is so long that a death sentence is effectively the same thing as a life sentence.

Oba Chandler was executed recently for a crime that was committed in 1989, and of which he was convicted in 1994. 17 years after conviction, 22 years after the crime. With gaps like that, of course there's no extra deterrent value involved. Criminals know full well that execution is not a credible or imminent threat. It's too remote to be taken into consideration.

I'd be interested in seeing statistics on how many criminals die of natural causes - e.g., old age - while on death row. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than are actually executed.

---

In all but completely informal conversation, and sometimes even then, I'm a stickler for terminology. This is because correct use of terminology demonstrates comprehension of the subject. Incorrect use of terminology demonstrates the lack of same.

---

My wife and I started watching Breaking Bad a few weeks ago, from the first episode. It's great. We have only one episode left to watch - the fourth season finale, which is the last episode to date. We'll probably watch it tonight, then commence complaining until season five begins.

I like it because it's neither formulaic nor predictable. It took me many episodes to accept that I could almost never accurately predict what would happen next. Most TV shows and movies, including my nevertheless beloved Walking Dead (the TV show, not the comic), are predictable enough that at any point I can tell you more or less how any given scene will develop and/or resolve.

Not so Breaking Bad. It's a constant stream of nothing but curve balls. The writing is so good that I'm amazed that Vince Gilligan, the series creator, worked on the X-Files. I was not a fan of the latter show, to the point where I only made it all the way through one episode (the one Stephen King wrote). I thought the X-Files was trash, frankly, nothing more than rehashes of Scooby-Doo episodes, and it was painfully obvious that the writers had no idea how to resolve any of the longer story threads. I remained aware of the X-Files because my wife liked it (she has the entire series on DVD, and still re-watches them all from time to time), and because I worked in a comic shop in the late 90s.

The acting is also first-rate. When I first started watching Breaking Bad, I thought of Bryan Cranston as Hal, the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle. Hal is long, long gone now. There's not a trace of him in Cranston's performance by this point. It would be odd to go back and watch Malcolm reruns now, because I'll probably think of Cranston as Walter and wonder when somebody is finally going to drive that little punk Reese out into the desert and give him the bullet he deserves.

Giancarlo Esposito deserves every bit of praise he's gotten, too. He can express more with the slightest facial twitch than most Oscar winners manage in their entire career.

---

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of what it takes to get me to throw out a t-shirt. The last time I wore this shirt was to a Maplenoise show in September. It was in this condition by then. Partway through the concert, my wife suggested that I put my jacket back on. The shirt is solid black with orange and red letters - all of the light colour is a pillow I stuck in it to display the extent of its decrepitude. It's a Rez shirt, from the early 90s or so. The writing is (was) a Biblical reference ("For our God is a consuming fire, Hebrews 12:29"), written in the shape of a flame.

It's Funny Because I Didn't Know Her

Turns out that maybe Amy Winehouse should have gone to rehab after all.

I'm proud to be the 13,264,179th person in the world to do that line. It's a really cheap, easy joke, the kind I never feel really good about. It's the sort of obvious joke that I can imagine Jay Leno doing in his monologue, and it kind of depresses me when I write one of those. However, if Leno were to come out and do this particular joke this week, it would go a long way toward letting me respect his work again.

In that spirit, I'm hoping that I'm the first person to do a Winehouse joke other than the painfully obvious one. Let's give it a shot:


Right now, the Grim Reaper is berating one of his assistants. "You got the work orders mixed up! Winehouse wasn't until next week - you were supposed be at Charlie Sheen's place! This is almost as bad as that time you wrote down the wrong address and went to Phil Hartman's house instead of Andy Dick's!"


There. I feel better now.


Enough rambling. Here's another picture of my new dog back when she weighed less than sixty pounds, lo so many months ago.

Reading Log: Outliers

I have several rather large stacks - well, more like an amorphous pile at this point - of books that I've finished reading but haven't written about. I had intended this blog to act as a reading log, among other things. Not writing about books that I finish doesn't contribute much to that goal.

As an insignificant token gesture toward rectifying that, here's a book that I borrowed, and which I'd like to return: Outliers: The True Story of Success by Malcom Gladwell.

This one is borrowed from the local library. I've already kept it past its due date, and renewed it, and am fast approaching its new due date. I had read it well before the first due date rolled around, but held onto it in faint hopes of writing this entry.

There's a library very close to my workplace. So close, in fact, that I can spend my lunch breaks there, and most days I do. I have a set prioritization sequence. Each day I read the newspapers (including any from past days that I haven't read yet), then any new periodicals of any interest to me whatsoever, then scan the new arrivals shelves for anything that looks interesting, then finally work my way down a shelf, in Dewey Decimal System order, at least skimming each book. I keep notes on that last method, so I can remember the shelf and book where I last left off; most days, I don't make it past the new arrivals, so I rarely resort to this method.

I'm usually content to read a new book for a few minutes to get the idea, maybe returning to it another day if it's still there. Outliers has been the only book so far for which my ten-minute skim wasn't enough. I signed it out so that I could finish it at my leisure (which took two or three days).

This books starts strong, with a chapter on a phenomenon that fascinated me: the tendency for elite athletes to have been born in the early months of the year. The author provides a few lists of professional sports team rosters, and it's immediately obvious that the players are far likelier to have been born between January and March than at any other time. Then he explains why.

It's one of those things that's so obvious, you wonder why we hadn't seen it all along: at first, in any group activity, children are grouped by age, and there has to be a cutoff. Whether we're talking about junior sports teams, school, or almost anything else, all the kids born before an arbitrary date go into group A, and all the ones born on that date or later go into group B or wait until next year. It quickly becomes apparent that some of the kids in each group are more talented than others. Those more talented kids get more attention, more opportunities, better coaching, more practice time, whatever. It's only normal to encourage and nurture talent. The less proficient kids fall by the wayside. They may get relegated to the backup team, put into a less challenging curriculum, held back for remedial work, etc.

However the truth is that those "more talented" kids may not be prodigies at all. They may just be older.

These groupings by birthdate usually happen at an early age. Five or six years old, at the latest. When grouping those children into age cohorts, you end up with some children in the group being as much as one day short of a full year older than the others. At age five or six, a gap of (effectively) a full year makes a huge difference. The child who is five years, 11 months, and 28 days old will be bigger, stronger, faster, more co-ordinated, more agile, and more intelligent than the child who is five years and 2 days old. They will be "better", by almost any measure, by a significant margin.

That younger child will wind up on the losing end of almost any comparison. Before long, they will be shunted off into the second (loser) division. The "prodigy", whose true main advantage was that they had several extra months of development under their figurative and literal belt, will receive better training, more resources, more opportunities, and ultimately a better outcome.

This is not to say that birthdate is the only predictor of success, that children born at the "right" time never have true natural ability, or that children born at the "wrong" time can't sometimes overcome that through true natural ability or sheer determination. However, it's clearly an important factor.

The only hockey player whose name I could immediately think of when I first read this was Wayne Gretzky. He was born on January 26.

I found this age issue mind-blowing, and I wonder how it could be overcome or, to put it more crassly, perhaps even exploited. The first thing that comes to mind is that a rival children's sports league could be started, with the age cutoff exactly six months off from that used by the current, established league. If you could get this to take hold (and you'd have to follow it up through all the age groups for such a league), I think that within a few years we would discover almost twice as many "prodigies" in the sport. The ones born in January or soon thereafter, and the ones born in July or soon thereafter. How many potential Wayne Gretzkys have gone unnoticed simply because they were a few months less developed?

That's in sports, though, about which I give not the slightest whit. It's just an area where this phenomenon is easily observed. Gladwell - among other sources we'll discuss shortly - assures the reader that statisticians have done proper studies on the matter that demonstrate a clear, strong correlation between high athletic achievement and a birthdate near the entry point cutoff.

I'd be far more interested in overcoming this in the academic world. Many a child has been pigeonholed early on by the bureaucrats in charge of the school system, and proceeded to live down to the expectations placed (or not) upon them. Just one more way in which the public "educational" system fails miserably.

I'm something of a numbers and statistics geek, so when I read about this in Gladwell's book, having never heard of it before, I thought it must be a very obscure phenomenon. Then, shortly thereafter, I read about it on Cracked.com .

I think it's safe to assume that if a research area is being discussed on Cracked (which is sometimes a surprisingly good source of information), it's not exactly a secret anymore. I was just late to the party.

The rest of Gladwell's book is still somewhat interesting, but didn't grip me like that first revelation. He debunks the myth of effortless expertise, by using such examples of Bill Gates and the Beatles. Gates was certainly brilliant, but to suggest that he was an inexperienced natural who mastered computers by sheer intuition is off the mark. He had several opportunities fall into his lap by various means that allowed him to rack up thousands of hours of programming experience at an early age. Where most of us squander our time, young Gates passionately threw himself into a hobby that turned out to have a very practical application later in his life.

As for the Beatles, they honed their craft with months of nights on Hamburg nightclub stages, playing for eight to ten hours a night, seven nights a week, for demanding audiences. They didn't get as good as they became without paying years of dues. By the time they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, they had spent more hours onstage than most veteran performers will amass in their entire career.

The books bogs somewhat in the middle, as Gladwell spends far too many pages explaining why Jews became so prominent in the legal profession (no, really, he does). The book is well worth reading overall, but I could understand a reader setting it aside after the chapters on birthdates and "overnight success stories".

Another fascinating section comes when he compares two brilliant physicists, Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was somewhat deranged, even trying at one point to poison an associate for no comprehensible reason, but was put in charge of the Manhattan Project. Langan falls victim to a series of seemingly minor misfortunes, and winds up a footnote. The main differences between them lie in their social skills - Oppenheimer is a master manipulator, although we, as always, pretty this up by calling him "charming", "personable", or "persuasive". As such, his flaws, though at least comparable to those of Langan, are overlooked whereas Langan is allowed to drift into obscurity.

Much of life is a popularity contest.

I also appreciated the theme that raw intelligence ultimately counts for little. There seems to be a point where IQ is simply "high enough", and being any more intelligent past that threshold is insignificant. There is also a large degree to which, as in the case of Oppenheimer and Langan, raw intelligence matters less than "social skills", a euphemism for likability and capability to manipulate.

I appreciated this because I'm a guy whose IQ consistently tests in the top 1/2 of 1% of the population. It's been formally tested a few times over the years, and I've taken a few other informal but supposedly valid tests as well, and every time I've scored in that range. In real life, that counts for the exact midpoint of jack and squat.

I have a nice, nondistinguished, middle-class existence, which suits me fine. However, it's certainly not what anyone, including myself, would have predicted for me back when my elementary school tried to move me up several grades (Mom vetoed it), but settled for letting me take individual advanced classes (grade 5 English when I was in grade 1, high-school English and math in grade 3), or when universities began calling my house when I was still in junior high school. As it turned out, my academic career was solid but nothing special, and my professional life has been similar. My social skills are closer to those of Langan than Oppenheimer, so it could have been much worse, and I have absolutely no complaints about my lot in life. Still, one of my favourite TV shows was Malcolm in the Middle, because of its recurring theme: being intelligent doesn't make you smart.

Back to the book. The question I'm left with is what we can do with this information. By the end of the book we know that grouping children by age conveys a huge advantage on the oldest members of the group. We know that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of experience in anything to become an expert, and there are no shortcuts. We know that sometimes the skills acquired to adapt to adverse circumstances pay off handsomely later, when the circumstances change (the point of the section about Jewish lawyers).

So, do we stop grouping children by age? Do we devote more time to productive or educational activities, which sounds more than a bit obvious, no matter how unlikely? Do we focus more on developing our interpersonal skills? Do we contact our friendly neighbourhood psychics to ask what things will be like in twenty years, so we can start angling into position now?

The only practical action I can see is to try to provide opportunities to others. Part of Gladwell's thesis is that his titular "outliers" may not be so special in and of themselves. They may have been in the right place at the right time or willing to do what needed to be done to advance. However, many of them reached in their positions of prominence due in no small part to the largesse of others. No one really makes it alone. Bill Gates was given time in computer labs in an era when that was a rarity. A club owner decided to give the Beatles, a moderately talented garage band like hundreds of others, a shot as his house band. A blind eye was turned toward Oppenheimer's antisocial tendencies.

Help one another. Give a break to somebody who could use one.

I guess that's as good a moral to the story as any.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my new dog, back when she really was my new dog, in every sense of the word. She's a little over a year old now, and her head alone is now much larger than those boots on the left.

Wednesday's Title: Avoid Me

I'm still living in Chaosland. Not a place I enjoy.

The title is a Newsboys reference, by the way. I frequently refer to Breathe as "my daily devotional song". It's one I need far too often.

Ever have one of those days where your contempt for humanity festers and grows to such an overwhelming degree that you can't stand to deal with other human beings for another moment, and you start planning ways to completely isolate yourself from society? I have days like that eight, sometimes nine times a week.


Oh, all right, maybe it's not that bad most of the time. But sometimes it is. I had one of those days on Wednesday, the culmination of the last couple of weeks. I've spent too much of my time lately in limbo, waiting for other people to do something or at least tell me something. As an Olympic-level curmudgeon with an advanced degree in misanthropy, I don't relish dealing with other people at the best of times. I go into overload very quickly when I'm stuck depending completely on those other people - which I strenuously try to avoid - and they leave me dangling in the wind, which happens almost every time.

I don't often agree with the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, but "Hell is other people"... yeah, I'm all over that one.

Most of the problems have been professional. Stuff at work, and stuff with the prospective new job I recently mentioned. Those wheels are still turning, although they were mired in some pretty deep mud for a while this week. Others are personal. Remember that contractor who was coming to look at my house? I was very pleasantly surprised when he actually showed up.

Once.

That single visit ended with a promise to come back in a few days with a ladder to look more closely at the roof. It's been over a month. He hasn't been back, and he doesn't return my calls. I've left him voicemails, and left messages with a nice lady who answers his phone. Good thing I didn't give him any money yet, although I'd happily hand over a stack of twenties and fifties if he'd show up and do his job.

I've given up on him. I sent out a team of cryptozoologists to see if they could confirm another sighting, and although they tell me there may be a plesiosaurus in the drainage ditch out back, they couldn't find a trace of this guy.

So, I started calling other contractors. Each number was answered by a very pleasant and enthusiastic lady who took down my information and promised that somebody who knows something would call me back ASAP. Nobody has called back.

I'm planning a full entry one of these days on the history of trying to get people to come fix my house in exchange for money. I've been taking notes over the years. This is not that entry, and I'll stop now before it turns into it.

Anyway, yesterday and today have been much better. It's even been relatively safe for people to speak to me. However, I have to get on a plane this weekend. Let's see what dealing with the airlines does for my view of humanity.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the second shelf down, left side, on Bookshelf # 1. Another slushpile. This one is a complete mixed bag of books both read and unread, among other debris. Highlights include C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, doctrinal volumes from religions other than my own (The Book of Mormon, The Catechism of the Catholic Church), and a Late Night with David Letterman mug full of writing implements. The colourful cellophane-wrapped package in the upper right is a bundle of apologetics tracts from Catholic Answers. I may blog my way through them one of these days if I feel like alienating a whole lot of people. Suffice it for now to say that I've read their arguments and given them careful (and prayerful) consideration, and the reasons why I've chosen Protestantism remain.

Omar Khadr And Michael Jackson

I had intended to call this post "Michael Jackson And Omar Khadr", but I decided that just for once, Omar deserved to get top billing.


I've received four CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alerts (so far) about Michael Jackson's death. Unless he got back up shortly thereafter, screamed "BRAAAAAINS!" and took a bite out of Tito, that's probably three-ish too many.

What, too soon?


Poor Farrah Fawcett. She died first (garnering only a single CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alert for doing so), and promptly got overshadowed. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis dying on the same day as John F. Kennedy, meaning few people noticed. And so we add one final item to the list of "Eerie Coincidences Between The Lives Of Farrah Fawcett and C.S. Lewis".


On to Omar Khadr. This was going to be the entire entry until celebrities started dying. Khadr's case lets some people demonstrate that they think Canada should be dictating American policy (emphasis added):

...the argument raised by the federal government's lawyer in telling the courts to butt out of its handling of the Omar Khadr case is chilling...Federal Court Judge James O'Reilly had issued a blunt order "to return to Canada as soon as practicable" the young Canadian languishing in American custody... Justice O'Reilly's finding in April that the government's refusal to demand Mr. Khadr's repatriation was against fundamental justice...

In case you don't get the point, those quotations are from an editorial called, "Lawyer Exposes The Fragility Of Civil Rights". While the editorial makes some interesting points, most of it boils down to a theme that Canada should be able to demand (note that exact word used above) that the United States release accused murderers of their citizens, as long as the accused have a Canadian birth certificate. Sadly, lots and lots of people (in lots and lots of countries) don't seem to understand that this is at its core an issue of national sovereignty.

Omar Khadr is in American custody, facing charges under American jurisdiction for offenses against Americans. I would have liked his case to have been resolved in a more timely manner, but that's a separate issue.

Here's the bottom line on this whole debate: Canada has no business interfering with how the U.S. deals with Mr. Khadr. Imagine for a moment that an American were to come into Canada and commit serious crimes. Suppose that this hypothetical American criminal were then arrested and charged in Canada. If American lawyers were to call us up, demanding that we turn him loose and send him home, we'd see this as a ridiculous attempt at bullying. We'd say that he's our problem now, and that the U.S. can have him back if and when we're done with him.

In short, we'd tell the American lawyers to pound sand, go hug a rope, and / or sit on a pencil and twirl. And rightly so.

The same principle holds true in reverse. As long as Omar Khadr is in American custody, facing charges under American jurisdiction, then the diplomatic thing for Canada to do is butt out. We have absolutely no right to attempt to dictate to America. To even attempt to sway the proceedings by "just asking" (a suggestion contained in the linked editorial) would be an insult.

I acknowledge some exceptions. Rogue states and dictatorships sometimes lock up foreign nationals without valid cause, and in those situations I think it's perfectly appropriate for their home countries to call for their release and repatriation. However, I haven't heard any credible suggestions that Khadr was an innocent kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. By all accounts he was a non-uniformed enemy combatant on a foreign battlefield, which makes him a terrorist by definition, and quite possibly a war criminal. He could have been shot down like a dog on the spot, which in retrospect would have been simpler. Apparently I'm more grateful than he is that they chose to bring him in instead.

Just to deal with the objection that any wayward Daily Kos readers will surely raise at this point: just because you didn't like George W. Bush doesn't make him a fascist. Despite your fantasies, America did not change into a dictatorship between 2000 and 2008, on a slippery slope to dissidents being rounded into prison camps. The leftist delusion to the contrary is disproven by one simple observation. If America were really a draconian dictatorship, then Al Franken, Janeane Garafalo, and everyone whose picture appears on Zombietime would have disappeared in the night long ago. Instead, each of those folks are perfectly free to complain to their heart's content, without fear of jackbooted thugs showing up at the door. That's one of the greatest things about America: you can live in it without having to like it. (Same goes for Canada, incidentally.)

Here's a summation for Canadian terrorist sympathizers: how the U.S. of A. chooses to deal with Omar Khadr is really none of your business. He's their problem now. Go ahead and write all the protest songs about him that you want, but don't expect the grownups to take you seriously.


Hey, is Michael Jackson still dead? I haven't gotten a CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alert about it in like twenty minutes. How am I supposed to know?

Before this dies down (hey, see what I just did there? And it was an accident!), Jackson is going to be reported dead more often than Generalissimo Francisco Franco.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of an unfinished frog pinata. This started out as one of those projects with the kids (or kid, in my case) that sounded good on a dreary weekend afternoon, but for which all involved lost their enthusiasm partway. This thing hung in our kitchen like this (ostensibly "for the paint to dry") for months. The story didn't end there, though. Stay tuned!

And It Gets Worse

Chapter the Second, in which we continue to follow the curious case of Mr. Gilles Blackburn. Go read my last entry first, if you haven't already. After that, go read my first entry last. It's not relevant in the slightest, but I'm in a Lewis Carroll kind of mood today and enjoy the wordplay. By this time tomorrow I'll regret the previous two sentences. That one too, in all probability.


If I'm reading this editorial correctly, Mr. Blackburn stamped out some SOS signs in the snow, then kept wandering. On at least a couple of occasions, someone went to one of his signs, but Mr. Blackburn and his wife were by then nowhere around. I also enjoyed the offhanded mention that since there was snow on the ground, all Mr. Blackburn and his wife had to do when they first realized they were lost was turn around and follow their own tracks back to the trail they had left.

I'm no wilderness survivalist. I've needed to be rescued from the middle of city parks. In my defense, I was only afraid to climb back down from the statue because those park ducks looked fierce. The razor-sharp bills, the fleet webbed feet... I'm starting to get flashbacks. I'd best move along before I wind up back in therapy.

Anyway, the point is, even I know that the first rule when lost in the woods is stay put. Unless you absolutely need to move for some reason (like encircling park ducks drawing ever closer), find a comfy spot and wait for search-and-rescue. That's doubly true if you've somehow been able to signal your position with a flare, emergency whistle, fire, or SOS sign stamped in the snow. Of course, this may not hold true anymore if Mr. Blackburn achieves his dream of forcing search-and-rescue crews to cease operations. If there's no help coming, you might as well pick a direction and start walking. Personally, I'll be nervous venturing into my back yard without a trail of bread crumbs leading back to the shed.

As I mentioned yesterday, I can't quite demonize Mr. Blackburn. I hold out hope that he's still a victim here, being manipulated by sharks and weasels who see his tragedy as a way to make a quick buck. Who, you may wonder, could possibly be so low? And lo, we have an answer:

The lawyer for a Quebec man who barely survived being lost for nine days in the B.C. backcountry and watched his wife die in the ordeal says she's surprised by the level of animosity being thrust toward her client.

[snip, snip, snip your cares away]

Nancy Wilhelm-Morden, Blackburn's lawyer, says the public appears to have lost sight of who the victim is in this case.

"I think it's important that people be reminded who's being sued here and why," Wilhelm-Morden said.

That's right, Nancy Wilhelm-Morden, henceforth to be known as Weasel Number One. I love that she's "surprised" that people aren't falling for this nonsense. Since she presumably graduated law school, probably with flecks of ambulance bumpers already lodged between her teeth, I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she isn't actually stupid. However, it goes beyond disingenuous to suggest that this lawsuit is about improving services or contributing to public safety. This lawsuit is all about a payday for Mr. Blackburn, and more importantly for Weasel Number One. Those ads during Jerry Springer, encouraging idiots to file lawsuits when their idiocy backfires, don't come cheap.

I can almost understand Mr. Blackburn's lawsuit against the RCMP. I think he should lose it, but there may be an iota of merit to it. The RCMP has an explicit duty of care for Canadians, even when those Canadians are endangered by their own recklessness. However, suing the hotel is very close to the definition of chutzpah, and suing the search-and-rescue group is simply over the top.

I'd like to see the hotel countersue. Mr. Blackburn's actions caused them a lot of trouble, expense, and negative publicity. He should be billed for all expenses that they can reasonably attribute to him. Actually, my ideal scenario would be that they sue him, win, and are awarded a judgement of one dollar. I don't want him punished financially; I just want him to stop blaming others for his own foolishness. If he snaps out of this tomorrow, drops all the suits and publicly denounces Weasel Number One's opportunism, then all is forgiven.

In that spirit, I'd also like to nominate Weasel Number One as this week's Worst Person In The World, a completely meaningless award that I've invented for this blog, and -

What's that, Internet? Someone else already does a "Worst Person In The World" bit?

Huh. I didn't know that. Whoever it is must be pretty insignificant. I've certainly never noticed them saying anything noteworthy. Still, I don't want to rip off anybody else's fake, arbitrary awards. So, never mind, then.


Enough rambling. Here's the other end of Bookshelf # 1, with 12.5% fewer paint handprints! (Some of them are in behind the CD rack. Of course, you couldn't see all of them on the other end either. There was a monkey in the way, which happens a lot in my house.)

Trivial Pursuits

Today’s entry is all about a variety of games. Mostly Magic, but not all.

I recently decided that I was spending way too much time playing single-player games, so I decided to cut back. Other than a minor relapse involving Bejeweled 2, I’ve been doing pretty well. I’ve just had a lot on my plate, and wanted to reclaim some time. I’m down to watching only two television shows (The Simpsons and The Office) for similar reasons. I intend to talk about that a bit more some other time.

I haven’t given up, forsaken, sworn off, or otherwise expressed any intention to permanently quit playing single player games. I fully expect that I will resume at some point. For instance, when Diablo 3 comes out. I intend to buy two copies and do most of my playing on Battle.Net with my wife, but I’m sure I’ll squeeze in the odd solo session as well.

There are two upcoming video games that interest me. First up, there's finally a new Magic: The Gathering game, Duels Of The Planeswalkers, being released on June 17. This looks terrific. It has almost everything I want in a Magic game: computer AI to play against (I don't enjoy playing games online against strangers), customizable decks, and a low price point. I've logged far more hours than I care to think playing the old Microprose Magic PC game, and it's still installed in my older PC, because it meets those requirements.

Now the downside. First of all, this game doesn't have nearly enough cards in it. The promotional material says it includes "around 280" cards, many of which can only be unlocked through reaching goals in the single-player game (that part is fine). However, 280 cards is what Magic players call "a nice start". Apparently the cards only go back as far as Invasion block, which to an old-school player like me might as well have been yesterday. Add a zero to the end of that card count and dig further back into the game's history, and you'll have my full attention.

Far more important, though, is the platform. This game has only been announced for the XBox 360. My family doesn't own a console, and if we ever get one (maybe this Christmas, maybe not) it'll be a Wii. A PC version of Duels has been discussed, but apparently those plans are on hold for the time being. In that case, so is any chance of my purchasing this game. If they put it out for PC at a reasonable price point ($20 or under for a retail box, or $10 for a download), I'll give it a shot despite the low number of cards. 280 cards would let me build enough decks to hold my interest for a little while, at least - probably around $20 worth of "while". If they add a zero to the card count, they can double that price and I'll still buy it.

In other Magic news, Wizards have announced some fairly significant rules tweaks. I'm indifferent to some of them (terminology changes, mulligan and token ownership rules), and mildly-to-moderately opposed to others (no mana burn, immediate combat damage, ordering blockers). There are none of them that I can look at and say, "Hey, yeah, that's a good idea!"

I sympathize with their goals of making the game more accessible to new players. I understand that doing so may be essential to the game's long-term survival. The folks at Wizards aren't stupid, either. With very few exceptions (reserved list and power-level-testing-for-Urza's-Saga, I'm looking in your direction...) their tough decisions have been the right ones.

However, my problem with some of these changes is that although they simplify the game, they do so by dumbing it down, removing strategic options that served as opportunities to demonstrate play skill. The elimination of mana burn and the fast effects window during combat damage makes the game easier for new (or less-skilled) players to learn, but the corollary is that more skilled players are effectively penalized. Magic is a game of both chance and skill. Lessening the impact of skill by removing strategic options increases the impact of chance. There comes a point where you might as well just flip a coin at the beginning to determine who wins, and skip all that fussing about with cards. Magic isn't there yet, but this is a toe on the slope.


Sidebar: this utter lack of player input is my problem with many games aimed at children. I can't stand Candyland or any of its myriad clones, or Snakes and Ladders, or any other game where there's absolutely no time where a player can make any decision that affects the game's outcome. I view these games as a necessary evil, a first step toward getting children used to game concepts. Once the kids are used to the boards, dice, tokens, and cards, though, put the mindless games away and move on to anything else that involves at least a little bit of thought. Trouble is a good next step. If you're lucky, your kids will move on quickly. My son, who is in kindergarten, enjoys Battleship, Monopoly, Pass The Pigs, Uno, Disaster, and Heroscape. I'm thinking it's almost time to introduce him to Risk. (I didn't link to them, but pages dedicated to each of those games can be found on Boardgamegeek.) End Sidebar.


The worst of the changes doesn't even make the game simpler. If anything, it has the opposite effect. Under the new rules attacking players "order" blocking creatures when more than one blocker jumps in front of an attacker. The attacking creature's damage is then doled out in order. If there's enough to kill "blocker one", then the rest goes to "blocker two", and so on. Blocker two doesn't take damage unless and until blocker one is dead.

That's apparently supposed to be simpler and more intuitive than "the attacking player chooses how damage gets divided up between blockers." I'm not seeing it. I'm also not seeing how blocking with banding creatures or Furnace of Rath will work. If the Furnace is in play, can I assign half the damage required to kill blocker one, then move on to blocker two, or do I need to assign full lethal damage to each one and let the Furnace overkill them? I hope the Wizards rules team have thought things like this through. Experience tells me they probably have. (They've announced that they'll explain banding under the new system "at a later date", which implies to me that no, they hadn't thought it through.)

I'm well aware that I could simply ignore these rules changes. My Magic playing takes place at my kitchen table, not in sanctioned tournaments. If I didn't specifically tell my wife about these rules changes, she would have no idea they existed. However, that's not the way I like to do it. I like playing by the actual, official rules. I like that if I do happen to go into a game shop and get into a pickup match, we'll all be playing the same game. I've been known to correct people who say that they always play by some house rule that directly contradicts the actual rules - being allowed to play all lands in your opening hand on your first turn is a popular one - by telling them that they aren't playing Magic: The Gathering, but a game of their own that happens to use Magic cards and borrow some of its rules. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but you should understand that you're playing a different game than the rest of the world.

So, my house will be sucking it up and playing by the new rules, effective with our next game (hopefully this weekend). There's no point in putting it off. I'll miss having some of those options, and tune a few decks to account for them (some cards, like Magus of the Vineyard or Power Surge, have been made far worse or completely useless by these changes), but the game goes on.


On to another new video game: The Beatles: Rock Band. As frequently noted on here, I came perilously close to idolizing the Beatles for much of my life. I'm over that adulation, but still a fan. There was a time when I would have scrimped and saved and sold my blood to get my hands on this game. Nowadays, I just think the trailers look cool.

However, as noted earlier, I don't have a console. I like playing games on a machine I can also use to store my MP3 collection, write blog posts, etc. Consoles have enough advantages (primarily simplicity of use) that I may get a Wii someday, but I haven't hit that trigger point yet, and The Beatles: Rock Band isn't going to do it.

There are two major reasons I won't be buying this game anytime in the foreseeable future. The first is the price. A console aficionado friend warned me that it would be expensive. I thought that meant maybe a hundred bucks. Instead, it seems like it's more like $250 to get the game with all the necessary controller hardware. Add in the fact that I'd need to buy the console to run it, and we're talking over $500. Nope, go fish. Simply and absolutely not going to happen.

Second - here comes the heresy to many gamers - I watched the gameplay trailer, and although the graphics and animation are great, I'm just not sure the game looks like any fun to play. I've never tried any of the Rock Band / Guitar Hero games. I've never taken a good look at their controllers, or touched one. However, I just don't think I'd enjoy the gameplay experience. It may stem from the fact that I actually play guitar (albeit far from well). Rather than tapping buttons on a vaguely guitar-shaped bit of plastic, I think I'd get much more satisfaction from sitting down with my guitar and some sheet music and actually learning to play the songs.

Who knows? Maybe if I tried one of these "pretend you can play an instrument" games, I'd be instantly hooked. Maybe I better not try one. I don't want to get sucked in and wind up eager to pay $500 for the experience of pressing coloured buttons in time to Beatles songs.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the top of one of my bookshelves, Hostage Bunny's captors apparently having gone incommunicado for the time being. This particular shelf holds a bunch of old toys.

Quick Notes

It seems like everything I've written on here of late has been epic-length, which contributed to the dearth of entries for April. Time to shake that pattern. Some of these will be jokes, some will be a bit more serious, some will be pure self-indulgent diary entries. Onward.

---

My wife and I are playing a lot of Magic again lately. Our current deck count stands at 20 decks built and ready to shuffle and play. Several of them are untuned beyond all the mana bases having been checked to make sure all the cards are playable, but they're all ready to go in a pinch. And that's after I tore two decks apart over the last week ("Odyssey & Grab Bag Green" and "Odyssey & Grab Bag Black"). Since my wife almost always plays the same deck (Thallids), I rotate frequently between all the others.

She's dividing her spare time between that and reading the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Since she won't be writing any Reading Log entries, that's probably the last you'll hear of them around here.

---

I was looking through a German cookbook, and I noticed that every recipe starts the same way. "Step 1: round up all the kosher foods you can find and stuff them in the oven."

---

My son is a creature of habit, to put it mildly. I call him obsessive-compulsive, although the more accurate technical term is "rigid". Here's a list of his current fixations.

Breakfast - a waffle. He went through a phase of eating nothing but (toaster) French toast for breakfast for months, and before that it was oatmeal. The waffle must be plain. Don't dare offer him a chocolate chip waffle, and blueberry is right out.

Lunch - A cheese sandwich, non-grilled. He insisted on a grilled cheese sandwich for a long time before that, and a Fluffernutter (peanut butter and viscous marshmallow goop sandwich) for weeks on end before that.

TV - Teletoon Retro is now the only channel that matters. I agree with him wholeheartedly. He's arrived at some insights about Looney Tunes that probably deserve their own entry.

Current play fixations - 3-D jigsaw puzzles, Transformers, and online Flash games. As I write this, he's a few feet away playing something called "Twang".

---

My walk to work takes me along a set of railroad tracks that run parallel to the road. Recently I noticed some odd litter along those tracks. Hundreds of unopened bright yellow artificial sweetener packages were scattered all over the ground, for about fifty feet. Then, in the middle of that, a single, opened, presumably empty Viagra box.

What sort of party went on down there?

---

Actually overheard at work: "I have to try that new exercise equipment at the gym. I don't know what it is or how it works, but Madonna uses it."

Those two sentences encapsulate much of what is wrong with our society.

That lady is in for a surprise when she arrives at the gym to find that this "exercise equipment" is a pair of Dominican baseball players.

---

When I was very young, my family moved and were assigned a new phone number that used to belong to a dentist who had long since retired or moved away or died or something. We would occasionally get calls from people who didn't know this, and my parents (I was too young to answer the phone) would politely explain that this number was no longer the long-closed dentist's office.

Most callers understood that, but there was one guy who was persistent. He kept calling, over and over, trying to book an appointment. My parents would explain that this number now belonged to a young family in a tiny second-floor apartment, but this guy just wouldn't get it.

Finally one day when he called, Dad said, "You're in luck! We just had a cancellation. If you can be here in fifteen minutes, we'll get you right in!" The guy was thrilled, and said he'd be right over.

He never called again.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Hostage Bunny being menaced by a guard Hey Bulldog.