TJ and I went for a walk the night after Christmas. My parents' neighborhood outside of Buffalo is nice enough but our walk was more intended for the stretching of legs than for the seeing of sights. Visiting home is always a little odd for me because the sole connection I have with East Amherst, New York is the people I grew up with there. I feel zero loyalty to the place itself--it's not particularly pretty, not particularly interesting--but it includes my parents, my grandmother, and, at least at one time, it included a lot of my friends from high school. But since most of those friends have, like me, moved on, visiting is always a little melancholy. I love seeing my folks, but aside from them, I have less and less compelling reasons to come back with each year that passes. Contrast this with how I feel about New York City, a place I lived for all of six months, but to which I feel a deep, in-the-blood, sacrificial love which I would feel even if I knew absolutely no one there. Heck, I feel this way about Chicago, Toronto and Napoli, two cities in which I have, through my whole life spent, barely a few days in apiece and in which I know virtually no one. There are places that have the power to compel my love all on their own. And then there are places that only even exist for me because people I love live there.

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While TJ and I were out walking down streets of nice, unremarkable suburban houses, I asked rhetorically, "How can real estate even work?"

I mean, the idea is that you buy a house at time point A, and over a period of years, it increases in value so that at time point B, you sell it for significantly more than you bought it for. Ideally, you then get a new house using only part of the proceeds and pocket the rest. This, then is where all that language about, "Your most important investment" comes from.

But, um, doesn't that system thereby require increasing house prices forever? Just increasing in value enough to keep up with inflation won't cut it: Your house has to be worth a lot more when time comes to sell. And then, of course, a house that is worth more is only really worth more once you convince someone to buy it from you and the money changes hands.

Given that wages increase much slower than house values and that there is not a perfect spectrum of houses (it seems to me there are a few really crappy cheap houses, a LOT of really expensive nice houses, and fuck-all in-between), won't houses eventually be priced out of range of more and more people? I know supposedly more people than ever before own houses these days, but only because of those "creative" (read "stupid") mortgages where you pay nothing the first year, almost nothing the second, and sell your first three children into slavery in the third.

And why do houses increase in value, anyway? I mean, houses are to live in. They don't become a better and better place to live in as they age. Quite the opposite. And I'm sorry but the great tracts of suburban America are not composed of architectural objets d'art that are gaining in value for cultural reasons.

Basically it seems like people expect prices to go up because, well, because they expect prices to go up. We've all agreed that, dammit, the Emperor's clothes are the most beautiful we've ever seen, and so we're all going to pay more and more for houses forever.

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Permalink Wonderful things seen in Chicago, 'ere we left by train on Monday night:

1.) A Metra station entrance made up to look like one of the stations of the Paris Metropolitain:



2.) While awaiting a Red-Line El, an El train done up in ridiculously over-the-top Christmas lights--and with the whole middle car removed and replaced with a flatbed with a tableaux of multiple Santas and waving elves (hee hee: El workers+Santa's assistant costumes= "El-ves.") The thing blew by the platform so fast I only had time to furiously dig around in my coat pocket for the camera and snapped this picture as it was almost out of sight:



3.) In Boystown, an old folks' home with a street-level, glassed-in dining room so the old people could comfortably people-watch the punks and gay couples walk by.

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We went to see Bube yesterday. She has pretty much no memory or speech left, although she positively lit up when she saw me. I'd like to think she knows who I am. But it might be that anyone who walks towards her smiling and meeting her eyes gets this treatment.

As I said, she can't really talk anymore. Occaisionally, one word will slip out while we're talking around her like, "Really?" or "Okay." While we were waiting for a nurses' aide to bring over her lunch tray, I remembered I used to give her back rubs for 50 cents as a kid. I gave her one while she was sitting there and she made appreciative noises. Then I fed her, which, despite her good appetite, wasn't easy. Her hands shake now and as I leaned on the arm of her chair, she took hold of my right forearm, causing me to shake too.

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Time to do my bit to piss off Bill O'Reilly and destroy Christmas:

"Why I Don't Like A Miracle on 34th Street"

Susan and her mother live in Manhattan(!). But Susan's wish is for a house for her family Somewhere Else. Now Susan is supposedly 6 years old in the story, and one can almost imagine her 10 years later as a teenager positively climbing the walls with craziness at being stuck in suburbia. "What the fuck was I thinking???" she'd scream to herself, "I hate Grover Prairie! As soon as I'm 18, I am OUTTA here! I'm going back to Manhattan and never coming back!"

More seriously, the implication is clear that city people live emotionally poorer lives than suburban dwellers, coupled with the uber-American idiom that true happiness can only come with real property ownership. Yes, I know that Miracle on 34th Street is hardly the only place this meme appears. There is a whole raft of books and movies in which the character's redemption is achieved by leaving the city and going "back home" to the country, small town or suburbs (the three places are viewed as interchangeable). The assertion being that no one is actually "from" the city and that it is impossible for anyone to actually be "at home" in a city except, y'know, those people (blacks/browns/yellows/the poor/the rich/artists/criminals/gays/liberals). This idea has a very long pedigree, probably going as far back as Lot's flight from Sodom.

Anyway, that's just part one of Miracle on 34th Street's badness. I'll skip over the unsubtle anti-feminism of it--that Susan's mother, a single working woman--is only spiritually fulfilled when she finds a Nice Man to take her off to the suburbs. Instead, let me just confront the theodicy of the story. Actually, that might not be the right word. "Theodicy" means "God's justice" and is a field of thought that tries (and fails) to answer questions like, "Why do small children get leukemia?" God does not make a direct appearance in Miracle, but Santa supposedly does. So we're talking about "Santodicy" here: Santa's Justice.

So anyway, Susan wishes for a house for her family and gets it. It's not clear at the end whether Santa really was the true agent of delivery or whether it was a happy coincidence that her wish was granted, but Susan says--at least in the new version of the film--that "If he's really Santa Claus, he can get it for me."

Really. Let me now ask the thunderously obvious question: If Santa can bring you a house, why doesn't he bring, say, a clean biopsy to the kid with liver cancer? Or a home for the kid whose family doesn't even have the perfectly nice Manhattan apartment you have, Susan? Religious folk--and/or believers in Santa--are inclined to get angry at questions like this, or at the very least, they act dismissive, pretending there is something logically wrong with the question. Or they try to parry with, "God works in mysterious ways."

Me, I'd say that's a better observation than explanation. And anyway, we aren't talking about God here, we're talking about Santa.

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Permalink A one-day belated "Happy Birthday" to my wife.

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I'm a convert to a new religion. Jainism? Judaism? Voodoo? No: I'm a faithful believer in the new iteration of Battlestar Galactica. I'd heard about this and let it slide by me until yesterday. Bulgingly full of Indonesian food from TJ's birthday dinner, we were poking around at Bongo Video and I decided to rent disk one. I assumed it'd be just a cliche-y rehash of the old 1978 series. Chrome robots in spaceships versus other humans in other spaceships.

But no. This is Battlestar Galactica as you--and certainly I--had never seen it before. Incredibly smart, mysterious, finely tuned Battlestar Galactica. It's as if Lost and Firefly got together and had a baby. There are still chrome robots in spaceships, but they're actually not the really dangerous ones: Those robots look exactly like humans. Some of them don't even know they are robots. And the robots have special technology that disables the most advanced human ships, so the heroes have to rely on retro-tech ships, non-networked computers, phones with cords and, GASP, paper printouts.

And it's incredibly character-driven. Starbuck is a pottymouth woman, Gaius is a conscience-free ladies' man responsible for billions of deaths, Adama is an old man (played by Edward James Olmos, sans uber-Latino mustache), the president of humanity is, in fact, just the field-promoted secretary of education. And the blue-collar flight mechanic is in love with a Cylon woman.

And all I've done is see the first episode. Already my head in entangled in dozen thorny mysteries and memes:

1.) At the end, Adama recieves a paper message saying "THERE ARE ONLY TWELVE CYLON MODELS". We've seen 4 human-replicant versions and 2 "chrome" models. Questions: Who gave Adama the message? Do the 2 chrome versions count toward the total of 12? How many Cylon infiltrators are in the fleet? Assuming no duplicates, there are at least 1 and as many as 8, now that 4 have been revealed.

2.) Gaius keeps seeing visions of Number Six (presumably Model Number Six). Is he crazy or did she do what she said she did and implant a chip in him while he was asleep? Is Gaius a Cylon? Is Number Six capable of controlling Gaius or is she only able to appear in his brain and annoy him?

3.) President Roslin is dying of cancer. Who will replace her when she dies?

4.) Adama says Earth doesn't exist, but that he plans to tell the crew otherwise in order to give them something to live for. Obviously, Earth does exist. Will they find it even though they have no idea where it is? What'll happen then? Where the the hell "in time" are we? (I.e. if Galactica finds Earth, will it be 2006 A.D. or 600,000 B.C.?)

5.) What about that one officer and those civillians left behind on Caprica? Are they still alive? Will they find a ship and catch up later?

6.) Gaius claims to have a way of detecting live Cylon replicants. Does he or doesn't he?

7.) Did any other ships survive the Cylon attack?

8.) What's the purpose of the device they remove from the ship's bridge? Are there any more? Why did Number Six draw Gaius' attention to it if it is something her own people went to so much trouble to secretly install?

9.) Most Importantly: Why do the Cylons believe in God? Why do the Cylons believe they are God's instrument of our eradication? In a very War on Terrorism vein, the characters find themselves asking, "Why do they hate us?" (Indications are, it'll be a complex answer.)

And on and on and on. If anyone out there has seen more of this series, don't tell me any more: I want to find out on my own. Once we get back after Christmas, I'm going to methodically watch the whole series.

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And on that note, I bid everyone Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, and a Happy New Year. We're off tomorrow via overnight train to my folks' house. It's the only way to travel.

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Permalink From the pages of Make magazine comes the one-page "Distributist Technologies" by Tom Owad:

"Today, freedom and technology no longer stand in juxtaposition. A CNC lathe or milling machine can be built for $500. Raw materials can be prepared in homemade foundries. Solar power and wind turbines make it possible to live comfortably off the grid."

"Open source software is ubiquitous and hardware is following the same path . . . Goods can be exchanged between craftsmen without the need for distribution networks and middlemen. Advancements in personal fabrication at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms hold the greatest promise. Their aim is to produce a personal fabricator that can manufacture anything from a doll to a precise replica of itself. The current MIT Fab Lab...can be assembled for $20,000. For the price of new car, it's already possible to establish an effective personal fabrication laboratory."

I wholly appreciate the appeal of this thinking--that where democratization of media production went first, democratization of material production will soon come after--but I'm not totally on board. The Fab lab developed by MIT isn't exactly what is needed to democratize manufacturing: As I understand it, it's an automill, meaning it can only shape machine parts and solid objects, and then only out of plastic, low-grade ceramic or other "soft" materials. The gold standard, so to speak, would be something that could auto-mill metals. And then, of course, a human being is usually needed to assemble anything produced into a complete good with moving parts. That is, don't expect to input "handgun" into your fabricator: You'd need to separately (and time-consumingly) input "barrel", "slide assembly" and so on into it, then put the moving parts together. (Although here too, others have gone ahead to provide a guide). Too, any auto-mill, in order to be truly "distributist" would need to be totally open-source and owner-serviceable: That is, if it broke, you could open it and fix it yourself, using spare parts you'd earlier made for it yourself or which your friend had made for you using his auto-mill.

The personal fabricator is an exciting prospect (and Vernor Vinge wrote a trilogy of really cool stories about a future in which everyone owns their own means of production). But for now, a lot of the things human beings most need and want are not within the reach of personal fabrication. The Napster/filesharing revolution was only possible because the "materials" involved--computer files--did not obey the traditional laws of physics: An MP3 file (sans digital rights management crippleware) can be endlessly duplicated and circulated without reducing the "substance" of the "original." This broke the hold of media companies, who, ever since the invention of writing, had profited from the idea that culture comes in self-contained, limited-edition packages (books, musical records, CDs, videotapes, photographic prints).

As exciting as it is to think about a similar shattering of the oligarchy of, say, oil companies, such a prospect is a little further off in the future than conceived-of right now. Personal assembly and customization is currently widespread and growing: Huge numbers of people can now create their own PCs, battling robots, recumbent bicycles, or even biofuel cars. But out and out fabrication--that is, producing finished goods from raw or stock materials--is still out of reach. Carbon fuels, silicon, steel, thermoplastics: These things can't be file-shared. They still require large, centralized extraction, processing, and distribution systems.

Still, as I say this, my wife's spinning wheel sits in the next room, along with several hundred yards of her handspun yarn. If we had 1-5 acres of good clover, we could raise a few sheep, shear them ourselves and have complete control of a textile production process. Too, if I had a beehive, a 5-gallon pail, and a small shed to contain the fumes, I could make my own booze.

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Permalink I have chosen to exercise the gloriously Orwellian power of the Internet to erase my own last entry.

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As I said earlier, I'm big into D&D Miniatures right now. I've been going to at least one, sometimes as many as three sessions a week at game stores around Madison. (Oh and while I got the Tiefling Blademaster I wanted, I've decided against the Centaur Hero). I also spend a fair amount of time ogling miniatures from the various series (there are now 10 series of 60 minis each; 600 minis to look at, and Wizards of the Coasts claims to have at least 2 more series in the works) online. Mostly here.

TJ gently ribs me about this. Mostly by coming up behind me and deliberately/accidentally misreading the names of the miniatures aloud. Like "Green Slaad" (a giant, humanoid frog; this guy) becomes "Green Salad" and so on. But I've started to pre-empt her by coming up with better fake names for the minis before she can say anything. Recently, I was looking at the Human Executioner and, hearing the pitter-patter of little Teresa-feet behind me, said aloud, "Look it's the Human Executive."

As is so often the case with us, we spent a fun half-hour after that expanding on this joke, thinking of all the magic items a Human Executive would carry in the D&D world. Here's a partial list, to date (new submissions welcome):

tie of power
suit of power
+1 briefcase
cellphone of one million irritating ringtones
lunch of three martinis
suspenders of pantholding
Treo of constant consultation
wristwatch of costliness
mirror of coke snorting
diploma of business administration mastery

And so on.

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I'm off to my parents' place for the holidays in just a week and a half now. Seeing them, seeing my sister, visiting old friends (a surprising number of whom, having lived in other parts of the country, are now boomeranging back to Buffalo on a long-term basis), eating food, going to Toronto, and getting presents are the main attractions. So too is traveling by train to get there: I love train travel.

I'm also looking forward to watching cable television, which I don't have but don't really think about until I'm suddenly able to watch it as much as I want. TV, in general, sucks. But TJ and I have agreed that if there were a way to cheaply subscribe to just four cable channels--the Food Network, Animal Planet, the Cartoon Network, and the Discovery Channel (the better to watch Mythbusters)--we'd totally do it. And I have feeling that the days of such price- and selection-customizable cable are perhaps not too long in the offing.

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Permalink

Turns out that the oldest written story in the world--at least, as interpreted by modern writer Kathy Henderson--has advice on how to achieve peace in Iraq:

"The next day King Enmerkar's army, with the seven princes in the lead, continued on its way, winding through the valleys like a snake in a grain pile . . . Now at last they came in sight of the city of Aratta, famous for its stone and metals, for its craftsmen and beautiful things, and there they pitched their camp at the city boundary , expecting to conquer it in a matter of days."

"But their tents were barely up when spears began to rain down on them from above and more stones than a year of raindrops pelted from the slings on the city walls."

"The bombardment went on for hours. Hours became days. Before they knew it, days became weeks, weeks became months, and the year turned full circle..."

"The soldiers of Uruk stared uneasily. Why weren't they winning? What had gone wrong?. . ."

"[Lugalbanda], the little prince, began to run. From the foot of the valley he ran, up into the high mountains . . . and before it was even midnight he came to Uruk and the temple where the goddess Inana sat on her cushion."

"Lugalbanda threw himself on the ground before the goddess . . . "I bring a message from the king," said the little prince . . . "King Enmerkar begs great Inana that even if you have no further use of him, you will at least bring him and his troops safely home. Then he will lay down his spear and you can break his shield and he will make an end to war forever.""

"The goddess replied with mysterious words in the way that goddesses do. "By the banks of the river where the water meadows lie," she said, "There is a pool of sacred water where a little fish eats the honey weed, and a larger fish eats acorns, and the largest fish of all frolics and plays. Among the tamarisk trees that grow at the edge of the pool, one stands alone. [King Enmerkar] must find the pool, cut down the lone tamarisk and make a bucket from its wood, catch the biggest fish, and offer it to the gods . . .""

""But one thing he must understand: It is not for him to destroy Aratta! Only if he brings its treasures and the artists and craftsmen who made them to safety, only if he restores the place and settles it again, only then will King Enmerkar have victory and my blessing again.""

". . . So [Enmerkar] made his offerings to the gods and when the fighting ebbed away and the gates of Aratta opened . . . King Enmerkar was wise. He did not destroy Aratta or reduce it to rubble. No, he restored the city from the damage of war and settled it again and made sure its treasures and the craftsmen who made them were safe . . ."

"And when they reached the temple of Inana [in Uruk], the king laid down his spear at the feet of the goddess, and she broke his shield to make an end to war forever."

You've wasted enough time already, Bush: Get looking for that tamarisk tree. Whatever gods you've been praying to are clearly not the ones who count.

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Permalink I haven't been away: I've just been leading a boring, unremarkable, un-blogworthy life for the past 12 days or so.

Well, we did have a nice Thanksgiving anyway. We stayed in Madison and met up with some people we knew at some of their friends' (thus, our friends' friends) house. A quiet and enjoyable holiday overall. TJ's vegetarian pot pie and my pumpkin pie and homemade whipped cream went like gangbusters. Some of the poor folk there were on WeightWatchers or something: They took slices of the other pumpkin pie there--a less rich one someone else made--and then dolloped my whipped cream on top, not realizing they were pretty much cancelling out whatever health benefits the pie was giving them.

As is our wont, we went to Chicago the day after. Traffic was surprisingly reasonable. We suspected that the effect of many people being off work on Friday far surpassed the effect of people pouring into the city to shop. We pulled right into Evanston and took the El into town (stopping first at Comics Revolution so I could both buy things and drool copiously). Then we traveled south and meandered through once-Czech, now-Mexican Pilsen and then into the once-Swedish, now-lesbian neighborhood of Andersonville. I'd been to these neighborhoods once before with other friends and now got to poke around them with TJ.

Since everything was so quiet in residential Chicago, we decided to chance going to the lake shore and were surprised to find no particularly long wait for the Art Institute. TJ was tickled by the exhibit on the Silk Road, especially a sequence of Japanese prints showing the different processes of sericulture. I was disappointed that there wasn't an aside on print #3 ("Gather the silkworms off the mulberry bushes") mentioning that, at this stage, the papermakers then come and cut down the young mulberry shoots to make paper, to begin another, equally ancient, multi-stage Japanese craft.

Then, after some stumbling to find the correct starting station, we rode the Metra back up to Evanston for a nice Thai dinner and home again.

The lesson is that, if you drive fast and get off in Evanston, you can get to and from Chicago in good time, even on the day the holiday shopping season starts.

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Permalink Sat down on the bed early this evening after dinner. Picked up a book. Turned three or four pages. Felt an almighty wave of sleep coming on. Had barely enough time to take off glasses and put down book before fell deeply asleep. Awoke an hour later feeling rested in body but profoundly disoriented in mind. Lost ability to write in active sentences.

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Volunteering to make phone calls for the Democratic Party these past few months may have been a watershed for me. I used to do a lot of volunteer work before I graduated from college. It was social work-style stuff rather than political work, but I remember now getting a lot out of it. I worked at Loaves and Fishes, setting up for and cleaning up after community meals at the Episcopal Church in Ithaca. Then I went to New York City at did my internship as a social worker and legal aide at The Door. Plus, I did a ton of mathematics tutoring for middle and high school kids while I was there. When I got back to Ithaca in the fall of 2001, I went to work answering letters and making up book parcels for Books Through Bars.

But since I graduated and got my first real job, I haven't really done anything like that. Part of it was the time constraints of being a professional rather than a student, but really I think it was just that I fell out of the habit of helping out my fellow man/woman/child/senior citizen and never got back into it.

Now that I think about it, the end of my volunteering was the beginning of a slightly more bitter outlook on the world than the one I had back in college. I felt less helpless then than I do now--or at least, than I did until I started my volunteer work for the Dems back in early October.

So if I want to keep this more upbeat outlook on life going, I'll need to keep my volunteer involvement up. What to get involved in next? I'd happily go back to adult literacy or middle school mathematics tutoring. I found "educational" work more satisfying than social work-style volunteering; people--even kids--generally "want" education and view it as a positive good, whereas they only seek social assistance (i.e. food pantry help) out of direst necessity.

Any suggestions?

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Permalink I sort of didn't get a chance to finish my entry from yesterday about my reservations vis a vis Eragon--I had another job interview I had to rush off to.

Two more things I wanted to say, or rather to give as general suggestions to fantasy writers:

1.) No more elves.

Wookiees are cool. Klingons are cool. Vampires are cool. Dragons are definitely cool.

Elves are not particularly cool.

Elves--and here I'm referring to Tolkienian elves as skinny humanoids with pointy ears, long lifespans, and a love of archery and nature--partake just a little too heavily of emo to appeal to me. Like vampires, they have that sort of gender-blurring beauty, but, unlike vampires, elves come across as being about as sexual as a Ken doll. Or worse; rather than being asexual, they're anti-sexual. I wouldn't have batted an eye to have heard Hugo Weaving say, "Welcome to Rivendell; if you'll just clamp on your chastity belts, I'll show you to your rooms." I dunno, maybe I've just seen too many fat fanboys with deeply unfortunate hair dressed up as "elves" at gaming conventions.

Legolas was cool, but only because he was Orlando Bloom; not because he was an elf. And if I'd been Aragorn, I think I might have gone with Eowyn rather than Arwen. Yeah, Eowyn's mortal, but I just get the sense that life with her would be just a bit more relaxed than with Arwen. Aragorn would be a little more free to, say, burp loudly or recite ribald ballads without offending the sensibilities of the Mrs. If Arwen isn't the definition of a "high maintenance" woman, I don't know who is.

2.) Enough with medieval Europe.

Knights, peasants, castles, dark coniferous forests, mutton, mead: I'm pretty sick of it all. There are about 47 million different geographic settings, cultures, and strains of mythology in the human world, all of them potentially ripe for picking by would-be fantasy writers. I like the many new experiments with steampunk settings going on right now, but there is a ton more that could be done with settings and characters derived from, say, Native American mythology or ancient India or what have you. Think it over, eh?

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Permalink Eragon isn't very good. I have to admit I didn't read it cover to cover--in fact I didn't read it at all; I listened to a goodly chunk of it on my MP3 player--but what I read/heard left me pretty empty.

Eragon is a Tolkienesque fantasy novel (now proceeded by it's sequel, Eldest and soon to be made into a movie) by seventeen-year-old Christopher Paolini. I first heard about it in the Isthmus in a review that started something like, "Forget Harry Potter: Eragon is the new hot fantasy book in town!" and then proceeded to talk about about Mr. Paolini and his influences. Now that I think back on it, there wasn't much there about the book, which is telling: As I said, it's not very good.

The thing has the fingerprints of a seventeen-year-old all over it. Description of character appearances, settings, and above all, armaments, are rife while dialogue is sparse and flat. Important details about character backgrounds are either delivered through multi-page info-bombs* or else slipped in as obvious afterthoughts (just a notch short of, "Oh, by the way: Eragon was an orphan who often wondered who his father was.")

The setting is odd and anachronistic, too. Eragon is the seventy-eight millionth fantasy novel set in a medieval-Europe simulacrum. And yet, farmers are described as growing squash, purchasing sugar, and recieving meat from the butcher wrapped in paper. Too, Eragon's family is described as poor and as living hand-to-mouth, and yet they--and everyone else in their village--seem to own their own land, which violates the most centrally defining characteristic of medieval Europe: Land ownership by a tiny class of warrior-aristocrats. In the same vein, Eragon--a self-described peasant--goes hunting for deer in the woods. EH!!! Wrong: There was no "wilderness" in medieval Europe; if land was undeveloped, it was left so for the lord to hunt in. And there was literally hell to pay if a "peasant" poached game.

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*Info Bomb(v. or n.): Characteristic feature of science fiction and fantasy writing--especially low-quality sci-fi and fantasy--in which the author stops the action and writes expositorily at length to explain the workings of a particular piece of technology or the historical background of a scenario.

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Permalink The ass kicks back.



I can barely express what a revolution in thinking this is for me. I've spent my entire adult life under more or less unfettered Republican rule (I was 15 in 1994). On an existential level, I no longer feel like a captive locked in the back seat of a taxi cab driven by coke-snorting madmen. I volunteered this election to make phone calls for the Dems, I gave several small contributions to the national Dems, the Wisconsin state Dems and to now-victorious Governor Jim Doyle . . . and it worked. I mean, I know enough about the world to see there were other things going on this year besides me deciding to do volunteer work in a dingy office late on Monday nights. Still, I'm man enough to admit I had developed a raging political inferiority-and-hopelessness complex over the past decade, but now . . . all gone.

I'm going to be walking around today--and many days to come--with something like "The Hogwarts March" playing in my head. (Track 16 on the Amazon page; you can listen to a clip).

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Permalink Between the ages of, say, 11 and 19, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, as well as other roleplaying games. It was fun. In the initial earlier years, it was a welcome distraction from a thoroughly unsatisfactory junior high/middle school experience. Later, as I matured, it became a more existential playground on which to play out some of my philosophical and political frustrations with the world of adults.

The characters I played reflected that. There was Hallus Bry'Lyta--a melodramatic swordsman jointly modelled on Hercules (he was marked at birth by the goddess Eiliastraee) and Elric of Melnibone (he was the last of his people). But as I got older, I replaced Hallus with Tathach Bi'Hasparet; a more human, more fallible adventurer. He wasn't musclebound like Hallus--he was a skinny, underdeveloped fellow with a scraggly red beard (gosh, who could I have been thinking of?) who relied more on trickery and cleverness to get the better of his devilish orc foes. I worked out the customs and history of his whole tribe, whom I based in larged part the Picts. His people--the Kinnestaag (KIN-ess-stag)--had been fierce warriors, but otherwise generally peaceful folk, who had been pushed to the edge of their formerly spacious homeland by the cruel, autocratic, dominion of the God-Emperor Akalga Onas. I never really personalized Emperor Onas but I worked out the character of his empire in great detail. I wish I still had all this stuff written down, but from what I can remember, it partook heavily of all things and people I disliked most at ages 16 through 19: In Onas' empire, money, power, and physical prowess were all completely interchangeable. There were two levels of aristocracy: the military elite was composed of brawny, casually brutal veteran gladiators (jocks) and their vacuous, buxom courtesans (cheerleaders). Then there were Emperor Onas' civil viziers: Jowly, corpulent men in tight-collared robes who saw human lives as merely so many goods to be traded or sacrificed in pursuit of larger, loftier goals (conservatives).

I hate to admit to such direct partaking of cliches, but my Dungeons and Dragons playing petered off in direct proportion to the improvement of my skin tone and social skills. I was having much more fun playing Girls and Cars. I guess more substantially, I started reading things other than swords-and-sorcery stories and discovered things like poetry and arty movies. I mean, I was never popular in high school, but in my last two years, I sort of "hit bottom" popularity-wise, but then found there were other people on the bottom with me, and that it could be a lot of fun to hang out with them; date them; go to school dances in platonic gangs and arrogate a section of the floor for ourselves, or just skip the dance altogether and go see a Europe-y movie at an art cinema somewhere in deepest, darkest downtown Buffalo.

But in the really tall towers of my brain, I don't know if I've never totally stopped being a gamer. Recently I've sworn off computer and video games completely; they promise an experience like the old D&D days, but they never really live up to it. Dungeons and Dragons--partaking as it does of the vastly older human cultural medium of open-source storytelling--can temper the imagination to a far finer edge than digitalia currently can.

Odds are on that I won't take up the mantle of Hallus or Tathach again: D&D is enormously consumptive of that resource adults have in such scarcity, time. Pubescent or teenage me could spend 8-12 hours playing a single game session; adult me probably cannot. But I HAVE had a tremendous fun in the past few weeks with the quick-playing fun of D&D Miniatures Battles. In a trifling 2-3 hours, I can play 2, 3, maybe 4 whole games of this in a sort of distillation of the most exciting moments of the average D&D game. Plus, the uber-collectibility of the figures is supremely addictive.

Anyone out there got a Tiefling Blademaster or Centaur Hero for trade?







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Permalink Well, my vow not to make angry posts isn't going much better than my promise not to eat cow cheese. But I'm not giving up. After today, I renew my vow not to make angry posts, with a special intention not to make angry posts about religion.

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Islam is a religion of peace? Bullshit:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 29 — The members of the national dance troupe of Iraq are performers without an audience. They rehearse daily, but hardly ever put on a show.

Yet each turn of the hip and dip at the waist in their choreographed pieces has become weighted with a dangerous new reality, even as they wait for the chaos around them to subside so they can perform again. In today’s Iraq, with conservative religious parties and radical militias exerting growing influence over every aspect of life, even dancing is an act of bravery.

“Society is overwhelmed by these religious ideologies,” said Tariq Ibrahim, a male dancer in the Baghdad troupe, the Iraqi National Folklore Group. “Now a woman on the street without a head scarf attracts attention. What about a woman onstage dancing?”

Together they are a band of 10 women and 15 men from varied religious backgrounds. Once they toured the world together. Today they are simply trying to survive, hoping one day to thrive again as a troupe. But the religiosity sweeping Iraq does not bode well for their future.

Female participation in folk dancing is considered haram, or forbidden, in Islam. Ayatollah al-Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, has issued strict guidelines against dancing in various situations. The country’s Shiite-led government, the dancers said, is naturally trying to marginalize them.

“Religion in its essence does not match with art,” said Fouad Thanoon, the group’s director and lead choreographer. “So when religion and government come together, that will affect art very much.”

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Permalink I have an idea for a multi-million-dollar business. I just need some financial backing.

It'd be a chain of small storefronts in major U.S. cities, concentrated in densely travelled downtown areas. Each location would offer two services: There would be three or four change machines that for, say, 5 cents on the dollar, would make change for you (i.e. you'd slip in a $1 bill and get back 95 cents in coins).

Then, there would be a subway-type turnstyle in the back which would govern entrance to a set of clean bathrooms. You'd slip in, say, 50 cents or a dollar, and be given entry.

That'd be it. Here, under one modest roof would be the two services city dwellers need but which other businesses have never been willing to provide on any but the most grudging, tortuous basis. Ever try to get change for a dollar for parking or something from a Starbucks clerk? Without making a purchase? The barista might do it for you, but only after giving you the most supremely pained, suffering-martyr look. Like, "Yeah, I'll give you change. While I'm at it, I might as well just get out my cordless power drill and bore directly into my left molar. It's all the same to me, y'know?"

And if you're looking for a clean, publically available restroom, you are Shit Outta Luck in most places. They're rarely available anywhere in, say, New York, and lots of places that do have them require you to make a purchase first (if memory serves, the St. Mark's Place Starbucks actually has to buzz you in to the bathroom, thus requiring you to make a purchase first). And it's pretty much axiomatic that, even if you're willing and able to make a purchase for the privelege of using their bathrooms, the line will suddenly lengthen by ten people and grind to a complete halt as some grandma in front counts out 478 pennies to pay for her purchase. And then she'll throw a shit-fit 'cause they won't accept the one Canadian penny that she's got.

In a similar vein, the single most irritating human encounter I have ever had was with a Canadian waiter at a restaurant in Stratford, Ontario. My family was waiting in front to be seated and I really needed to take a piss. So, I just walked into the back to the men's room. I got into the stall, unzipped and then was drawn up short by a voice from directly behind my left ear: "Excuse me, sir. Are you a customer here?"

A waiter had followed me through the entire restaurant to the back, into the men's room and then into the stall and decided he was doing a good thing by giving me what-for.

It's hard to talk and pee at the same time, I found: I decided it would be easier to get forgiveness than permission. The waiter did not accept my excuse that my folks and I were just waiting to be seated--apparently, unseated clientele do not have piss-priveleges--and I honestly thought he might escalate things by reaching around to forcibly zip me up. But no; having gotten his final answer in the form of the sound of gently descending water, he simply stood there, getting angrier and angrier.

My folks are mystified about why I now flatly refuse to come along on trips to Stratford, Ontario. Personally, I consider that waiter's actions unforgiveable, and, out of pure bile, I've decided to take it out on the entire town for the rest of my life.

But where was I? Oh yeah; my business idea. Yeah: People just need to go to be bathroom sometimes and it is crazy that no one has yet seen their way toward exploiting that need for financial gain. Too, they sometimes need change for a dollar and would likely pay for the privelege of not being given needless 'tude when they ask for it.

So, my friends, I need financial backing to start up a pilot franchise. Any volunteers? Oh and I'll need some advice: Should I call it "Change'n'Piss" or "Skip to My Loo"?

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Permalink "...There's no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn't know whether God had died, or whether there had never been a God at all. Either way I felt free and I didn't know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened. And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth, before I even swallowed it. A taste--a memory--a landslide . . ."

"In one way it was hard to leave the Church . . . but in another way it was easy, because it made sense. For the first time ever I felt I was doing something with all my nature and not only a part of it."

--Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass, pp. 398-399

Madison Public Library allows you to put a hold on books online. For popular items, this usually means being given a place in a queue and then emailed when your turn is up and the item is waiting for you at the library branch of your choice.

At any given time, I usually have six or seven things in my queue. Until recently, I was part of the huge queue for copies of both Richard Dawkins' and Sam Harris' new atheist books. But just recently, I took them off my list. No, I haven't suddenly Found Religion. Far from it. I have no doubt I'd agree with and possibly even enjoy their books, but it just sort of occurred to me that I didn't really want or need to read them. It fits in with a more general aversion I have to reading most "social issues" books unless they're really offbeat and unique.

But more importantly, I've decided I'm a Pullman Atheist rather than a Dawkins/Harris Atheist. The difference (other than the fact that Pullman's books are fiction and Dawkins' and Harris' are nonfiction) is that Dawkins' and Harris' premise their (un)beliefs on an appeal to logic--i.e. such-and-such logical proof strongly suggests the nonexistence of God, etc. By contrast, Pullman's unbelief--and mine--is basically intuitive atheism: Neither of us feels like God exists. Its a totally personal, totally metaphysical proposition. In one way, I suppose its a weaker, less considered kind of atheism--we don't even claim to have logical proof for our unbelief. In another way, though, it's stronger: I'm not particularly open to arguing with other people about the validity of my atheism 'cause, y'know, it's based on how I feel. It'd be like arguing about the validity of my preference for mint-flavored things. They'd say, "Ew, mint is gross!" and I'd answer, "But I love mint!" and then we'd be at an eternal, non-sequiteurian impasse. Frankly it's almost religious: I don't have to prove anything, 'cause I have faith . . . in the fact that there's no deity to have faith in.

Oh and just to head off a response I anticipate coming a mile away: That feeling I have? Of God's total nonpresence? It isn't a feeling of bitterness, despair, or emptiness. Instead it's exactly what Mary Malone says in the quote from The Amber Spyglass above. It's a good feeling; a feeling of wholeness and wholesomeness.

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Permalink Best wishes to Shira and Ari today on their Party of Fun and Love. You call it a wedding, but the State of New York does not. Yet.

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I feel like writing about head-shaving today.

Every two to three months, I shave my head. Not down to the skin, mind you, but just a once-over with a repurposed beard trimmer down to 1/8" fuzz. I've gotten better and better at doing the "head navel" I have at the crown of my skull; TJ's invaluable services as touch-up agent are still required but less so than they once were.

I do this for a variety of reasons. The biggest is because my hair looks like shit, almost no matter what I do. It manages to be both dry and frizzy and greasy and lank. If combed or brushed, it takes on foppish waves and I look like a gentleman dandy, circa 1918. If I leave it alone, it expands massively on the back and sides, and I quickly start to look like Einstein, or Chief Aramaki from Ghost in the Shell. In the summer, it dessicates and wool-ifies, and I soon look and feel like I've wrapped a cheap synthetic carpet swatch around my head. In winter, it plasters itself to my head in a greasy, dandruffy helmet under my hat. In the Nirvana-crazed days of late middle school, I briefly tried to grow it long like Cobain or Eddie Vedder. It was awful. It was like hell or death. Honestly the best I can hope for, hair-wise, is to towel it forward over my scalp when it's wet.

So ever since early college, I've been a head- shaver. Because when my head is shaved, I feel clean, unburdened, put-together, and even a little virtuous. I get in the shower, I rub my scalp with bar soap and I rinse it off. End of story. I can wear any hat I like and roll my head around on the pillow when I'm in bed without worrying.

Like most strongly felt personal preferences, my shaved head has expanded into a philosophy of life. I harbor the secret suspicion that most people would be happier shaving their heads and I wish more people would do it. We'd certainly save a lot of money, time and worry. It would be one less thing to judge people's appearance on. And there would be a minor holocaust among the world's lice, fleas, and ticks.

I've also become more attuned to the varied cultural meanings of head-shaving. It seems to me to tend toward extremes. People with shaved heads are either totally reviled, completely pitied, or absolutely revered. Here's the breakdown:

Reviled
Skinheads (as well as their polar opposite, the Sharps)
Mussolini
Jesse Ventura
Demi Moore in G.I. Jane
Segourney Weaver in Aliens II
Certain lesbians

Pitied
Concentration camp prisoners
Women with cancer (men with cancer, not so much)
Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta (which is a shame: if there were ever a woman who could make shaven-head-ness hot, it would have been her in that movie)

Revered
Buddhist monks and nuns
Certain orders of Catholic monks
Soldiers, especially U.S. Marines
Orthodox Jewish women, once they get married

No real surprises in those lists, are there? Shaving the scalp is associated with holiness and virtue--hair is regarded as a source of vanity and so putting off hair is regarded as an act of renunciation of worldly things (although nowadays, shaving just about every part of the body OTHER than the head is de rigeur for fashion). There are also connotations of self-discipline and sacrifice, hence the deal with newly recruited soldiers. But head-shaving is also associated with punishment and with the erasure of one's identity, gender, and sexuality. Involuntary head shaving or total hair loss--of Holocaust victims or of chemo patients--is considered pitiable.

That bit about gender erasure is especially notable. Head-shaving among men usually doesn't affect their impression of masculinity too much. But there is a certain stereotype of shaven-headed guys as being brutish and bullying--a trend kicked off by Mussolini and carried on today by Goldberg.

Among women, head-shaving is almost totally thought of as an act of shaming or surrender--or of a woman deliberately becoming more masculine and hence, less desirable. A shaven-headed woman can more easily pass as a man (although if head-shaving were more common, then the opposite would also be true). If I wanted to be really weird, crude and symbolist about this, I could point out that a shaven-headed person looks that much more like a giant, circumcised penis.

But I for one think shaven-headed people--men or women--look great and I stick to my guns saying we'd all be happier this way.

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Permalink The Duo. Scylla and Charybdis. The Klingon Junior Officer.

Call it what you will: I look damn good.



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Permalink No, I don't know why our sites were briefly replaced by a Lycos placeholder page saying "johnnysstew.com Is Coming Soon!" But it seems to be fixed now.

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Continuing my British fantasy kick, I've been reading Clive Barker's second "Abarat" book, which is both written and illustrated--beautifully--by him. The title is Days of Magic, Nights of War which is about as cool a title as I've ever heard. I wonder if Mr. Barker would mind if I one day borrowed it for the title of my autobiography?

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There's a real life bench in the Botanic Gardens in Oxford, England that features prominently at the very end of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials triology, of which I have written much and lovingly on this page. If you've read the books, you know why it's an important bench. If not, I'll again encourage you to read the books on your own to find out.

The bench has become a sort of pilgrimage site for lovers of the books. Apparently a lot of people leave flowers or notes. Things like, "L. [heart] W." and what not.

TJ thought that was a silly idea: People leaving tokens for fictional characters. I suggested it was no sillier than people cramming handwritten prayers on scraps of paper into the cracks in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. TJ dismissed that idea, saying that even people who loved the Dark Materials books know they are fictional, whereas there is at least the possibility that the Bible is true.

I suppose she's right, even though this morning I thought of a far better analogy: Bloomsday: All those people re-tracing the footsteps of the entirely fictional Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin.

I know TJ intended no disrespect by what she said. But to me, given the transparently fake things that very large groups of people care passionately about--organized religion, organized sports, currency markets--I just don't accept blithe dismissals of science fiction and fantasy as nothing but silly diversions.

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Permalink No joy in Mudville as regards that clerk job I wanted. What keeps me going after this, my something-teenth rejection letter, is A.) that I have a job to work at right now, however low on the totem pole I may be--I can't imagine how much harder this might be on me mentally if I didn't have any job at all. And B.) that there seem to be so many library jobs to apply for. Seriously: I'd have thought the problem would be not being able to find jobs in libraries to apply for. But there's no shortage of those: Ever since we got back from our trip to Erin's graduation, I've sent out better than twenty application letters. And I'm at least getting responses and interviews. I'm just not at the top of the pool for any of these things.

And if it goes on for more than another six months or so, it won't matter because we'll be moving and I'll be able to try my luck in another city.

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With my more-plentiful-than-perhaps-I'd-prefer free time, I've been playing Heretic Kingdoms. It's a fairly cheesy game but fun due to a series of unique gimmicks. First off, your character can, at any time, shift into the "Dreamworld"--an alternative plane in which landmarks remain the same but living creatures and people disappear and are replaced by spirits. Various things are accessible only in the Dreamworld (i.e. you can cross a river by using a bridge that doesn't exist in the 'real' world). And its a good way to avoid too-tough enemies in the real world. Second, you get to make choices regarding your overall goal: Whether to destroy or obtain the 'Godslayer' sword. More precisely, you need to decide: Are you going to kill God or save God? Heavy stuff.

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LATE ADDITION/EDITION:

As a dues-paying member of the American Library Association, I am priveleged to recieve, once per month, the latest issue of American Libraries magazine, which is both the trade rag for America's libraries of all kinds and also the primary newsletter for the profession of librarianship.

Each issue has a one-page column called Censorship Watch, usually devoted to three or four new or continuing stories of book-banning. Now librarians are not like doctors: We don't have to swear to an oath of professional conduct in other to be a member of the profession. Nevertheless, the vast, huge, crushing majority of librarians would cite the 1953 Freedom to Read statement as their guide to their professional responsibilities as regards intellectual freedom. I certainly do. I feel that the last three sentences are the real kicker:

"We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours."

In that vein, this month's Censorship Watch brings us the story of the failed attempt to ban the 48-page children's picture book (it is always a children's book) Voyage of the Bassett by James C. Christensen from the Davis County Library in Utah. The complaint is that there are some topless mermaids in some pictures:

"The question to me is not whether the book has a good story line but does it sexually stimulate young boys?" pornography-addiction therapist Rod Jeppsen said at the board meeting . . . "What we normally don't consider pornography, a child may get sexually aroused by."

Ugh. Sigh. Alright, here are just four of the 67,498 things wrong with Mr. Jeppsen and his argument:

1.) "The question to me is not whether the book has a good story line but does it sexually stimulate young boys?"

Yes, that would be the question to you, wouldn't it Mr. Jeppsen. Trouble is that if all that matters is a work's potential prurience, then we're going to be throwing out a lot of really important works. Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, The Illiad and The Odyssey, Whitman, Dr. Zhivago, biographies of Thomas Jefferson, biology textbooks, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. The Bible is potentially prurient (Song of Solomon, Book of Judges, et al). Care to champion the dumping of that book too, Mr. Jeppsen?

2.)"...does it sexually stimulate young boys"

This is a weird statement. Does Mr. Jeppsen not care about the sexual stimulation of young girls or does he just think that young girls just don't get sexually stimulated?

And then there's the question of whether boys or girls of an age to enjoy a 48-page picture book are psychologically or physically capable of getting 'sexually stimulated'. Assuming, somehow, that they are, there is then the question of whysoever it might matter.

3.) "What we normally don't consider pornography, a child may get sexually aroused by."

In a different age, Mr. Jeppsen would fit right in among the members of the Inquisition or the judges at Salem. The idea that there are things that are sinful which are impossible for people to even recognize as sinful is absolutely vintage inquisition-thought. "You don't know you're sinful: You don't have the judgement to identify sin when you see it and if you say you do, well, that's just one more sign of your sinfulness. But we do, and what you're doing is it."

And again, Mr. Jeppsen's entire manner is premised on the notion that sexual arousal in children happens all the time and that it is bad. Those are both huge social, scientific, and philosophical questions. But a local library board is not the proper venue for their discussion.

4.)"...pornography-addiction therapist Rod Jeppsen..."

Now here's a job title unique to our day and age. I don't debate that there is such a thing as porn addiction, nor that there might conceivably be a person whose vocation was to therapize individuals with said malady (although I do wonder who exactly trains and credentials these people and how many there are who are able to make a living doing just porn-addiction therapy and nothing else).

And yet I doubt that Mr. Jeppsen actually is a real therapist. As I understand it, therapy for addictive behavior of any kind--alcohol, gambling, pedophilia, etc.--is based first and foremost on compassion for the individual and encouragement of him or her to admit his or her inability to control their behavior. This was the genius of Bill W. and his colleagues when they started AA. They recognized that the traditional view of alcoholism--and, in the larger sense, any addicitive substance or behavior--based as it was on shame and moral repudiation of the addict, was no good. Organizations like the WCTU that focused on alcohol itself were never going to be of real help to people addicted to alcohol.

So one wonders how good a therapist Mr. Jeppsen can really be, given that he has so much time and energy to condemn vaguely, potentially, possibly licentious children's books, and not, y'know actually helping individual porn addicts.

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Permalink I may be honing in on a better class of library job than I currently hold now. Last Friday I had a great interview for a circulation clerk job at one of the branch public libraries in Madison. And I've apparently been applying for these things long enough that my old score for the Assistant Librarian exam has expired and I get to re-take the test tomorrow. That's good, because I'd like to try for a better score than I have now.

But to counterpose the greater prestige and pay of a clerk or assistant job, I would have to give up one of the perks of being a mere shelf monkey. Namely, I'd no longer be able to spend entire working shifts plugged into my MP3 player. As it stands now, I can pass my working hours pleasantly listening to DJ Logic, Nelly Furtado, and capoeira angola. I also have been known to use my player's FM radio function to listen to NPR News (at least when I'm working on one of the above-ground floors of the library where I can get reception).

But since my all-time favorite leisure activity is to read things, I've found an even better use for my MP3 player and have being listening to ripped tracks from audio books on CD. I've listened to 2 entire Harry Potter books, the complete Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black (and read by Mark Hamill!) and, most recently, I've been re-"reading" the "His Dark Materials" series (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman. The books on CD are narrated by him, but the voices of the characters are portrayed--awesomely--by a huge vocal cast of British stage actors.

I love Philip Pullman's Dark Materials books. If you haven't read them, go and do so, then come back here. I'll wait . . .

...Done? Good. Anyway, you may have heard that the books, having already been a smash-hit as a stage adaptation in Britain, are now being made into feature films for which I'm waiting with a mixture of excitement and squeamish dread.

If you've read the books and liked them, you'll understand the excitement, but possibly not the dread. The dread comes in like this: The storyline of the Dark Materials series is not exactly friendly to organized religion and, in particular, Christianity. I'll get down to brass tacks: Not only the church but God himself ("the Authority" as he's called) is cast as the villain. There's been some talk about this aspect of the story being toned down in the film adaptation--a prospect I don't care for since I can't see how the story would even work without that element in place. (Although Pullman himself seems upbeat about the idea).

But dread is only partially that they're going to castrate the story in the film adaptation. More materially, I'm afraid that people just aren't going to get it. There's so much about the story that really needs to be read to be understood and which requires the sort of sustained concentration, imagination, and attention span that major-release movie audiences often lack (or which movie studios assume their audiences lack). Then there's the fact that these movies are being pitched as titular children's stories (i.e. the heroes are children and talking animals). People are going to go and see them are, for example, not understand that when people in the story say they have "daemons" that they mean "embodied animal soul" rather than "devilish monster." And then there's the conclusion, in which the universe is saved when two 12-year-olds have sex. I can't imagine standard-issue red state folk taking too kindly to that.

As I said to TJ, I suddenly understand why Mel Gibson initially wanted to screen The Passion only for invited audiences of commited Catholics. I almost wish that, when The Golden Compass comes out, each potential audience-goer will have to present proof of being a non-reactionary at the box office.

P.S. Mrs. Coulter is going to be played by Nicole Kidman. If the goal was to have someone who could convincingly play an evil blonde vamp/theocrat, I'd have suggested Ann Coulter, but Ms. Kidman is a pretty good choice, too.

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Permalink I read most of issue 4 of Make magazine ("Technology on your time"). It is to electronics and mechanics what ReadyMade is to household decor. My favorite bit was easily the plans for the single-axle, dog-drawn cart ("You haven't lived. Not really. Not until you've experienced tandem dog-cart racing.").

The longest non-schematic piece was an interview with Dean Kamen inventor of the iBOT personal mobility system (a wheelchair that allows a disabled person to be elevated to the same height as a standing person) and, of course, the Segway.

Questioned about the underlying rationale for the Segway when either walking or biking seem better alternatives, he gives this response:

"Most people that we know won't walk one or two miles to get somewhere--they just won't . . .The average speed within the city limits between any two points [in] the largest 20 cities of the world is less than 9 miles per hour [by car]. Then why does everybody use his or her car to get around? Because walking is less than 2 miles per hour!

So what if you could give people in cities an alternative to walking for distances greater than 100 yards and less than a few miles? . . . [What] if they could get on a Segway and cruise from start to finish at 8 miles per hour? . . . In highly dense urbanized areas where buses and cars do not work well--they have only been used to fill the gap for lack of a good alternative--the Segway shines. If a better solution comes along in the next 20 years to address the rapidly worsening inner city transportation problem, then the Segway may become obsolute. But so far, I have not seen a better solution."

"A bicycle cannot mix effectively in a congested pedestrian environment. It cannot move at walking speeds with humans . . By contrast, a Segmway is designed to use the same infrastructure that pedestrians use [and] occupy the same footprint as a pedestrian . . ."

Okay: I can identify three different total errors and unwarranted generalizations Mr. Kamen's statement. Here they are:

1.) "Most people that we know won't walk one or two miles to get somewhere--they just won't . . ."

I often walk the 2.47 miles between my home and my workplace. I do so because I can--because I'm a relatively fit human being and I enjoy walking--and because the infrastructure is in place to make it practical: Sideways, crosswalks, walk lights with buttons, etc. Too, there are things worth looking at at a walking pace between where I live and where I work: Trees, modest houses, small stores, other walkers, outdoor artwork.

So don't go saying "nobody" will walk to get somewhere.

2.) "In highly dense urbanized areas where buses and cars do not work well--they have only been used to fill the gap for lack of a good alternative--the Segway shines. If a better solution comes along in the next 20 years to address the rapidly worsening inner city transportation problem, then the Segway may become obsolute. But so far, I have not seen a better solution."

We've had a better solution now for well over a century: Rail. It can go underground in tunnels, in cut-and-cover trenches, in open trenches beneath bridges, on elevated lines, or on monorails. But regardless of how it's arranged, it is a proven solution. It's hugely efficient in its ability to move people and to save energy and space.

My suspicion is that Mr. Kamen has thought of but rejected the idea of trains for public transport because he thinks they're "too expensive." What a tiresome little turd of an argument. Highways are expensive. Roads are expensive. Cars are expensive. But expenditures of money on roads and highways are never called "expensive"--they're called "investments" and "infrastructure." Whereas comparable proposed expenditures--or even lesser expenditures--on rail systems are always called "subsidies" or "Communism."

3.) "A bicycle cannot mix effectively in a congested pedestrian environment. It cannot move at walking speeds with humans . . By contrast, a Segmway is designed to use the same infrastructure that pedestrians use [and] occupy the same footprint as a pedestrian . . ."

First of all, if we're talking about a "congested" pedestrian environment, then that would mean that your first statement--about "no one" wanting to walk anywhere--doesn't really hold water, does it Mr. Kamen?

As regards the bicycles mixing or not mixing with pedestrians, I don't see how the Segway is an improvement. A gently pedalled bicycle moves, say, 8 miles an hour. So does a Segway. So, um, where's the improvement? Pedestrians here in Madison are already occaisionally terrorized by old folks (or, more commonly, fat folks) in those godawful Rascal scooters. I've seen those people get very angry when 2-3 mph pedestrians get in their way on the sidewalk.

And that brings me to my final point: They're called sidewalks. Similarly, sidewalks are called pedestrian (literally "foot-goer") infrastructure for a reason. Sidewalks are for people walking. They're also places for people to stop, talk to each other, look into store windows, pick up after their dogs, rubberneck, or whatever. They are not wasted space languishing for lack of some genius to come up with some alternative use for them as mini-highways for 8 mph vehicles.

My reaction, if I were to encounter a Segway whirring down the sidewalk, would be first to say to myself, "Look, here comes a mincing idiot." And then I would start to actually get mad and consciously belligerent: "No, shithead, I will not step aside so you can zip by on your feeb-mobile. Fuck you: Get off my sidewalk."

I'd identify Mr. Kamen's vision of the Segways as a sort of trump card to current problems as a "desperation alternative": An unwillingness to embrace obvious, common sense solutions manifesting in the suggstion of alternatives so outlandish and makeshift as to invite derision and laughter when they are brought to public attention.

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Permalink One of the running gags from Megatokyo is people taking off all or some of their clothes so as to reduce the risk of damaging their computer equipment with static electricity. As with most sitcoms, physical comedy of this sort tends to be visited upon the male characters. But I guess Fred Gallagher decided today that we'd been good and deserved a reward . . .



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Permalink New blog segment. Frontispiece from Inverloch.

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