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Still Here!: Brief WWE/Chick Musings

2011-11-02T10:18:00.004-05:00

Yeah, this post purely exists because October 8th was almost a month ago. I hope to get back to "full" posts soon, but, for now, I'll mention one thing that has bothered me since I read it a couple hours ago.

The WWE is in a poor state of affairs right now and it's entirely of their own doing. The details and such I'll go into in a future post, but let me give you a quick insight.

The booking of WWE is now heavily slanted towards Twitter, specifically to "trend" as many times as possible within a single 2 hr program. That concept, and the long-term ramifications of such, are bad enough. But I just read that Vince McMahon and his underlings were pissed that they failed to get any trending on Monday's episode of RAW.

Nevermind the crap quality of the product, which was actually GREAT just last June/July ("Summer of Punk"), but then was overbooked into an unfocused mess that it currently sits in. Nevermind that Monday Night RAW's attendance was so bad even TNA had them beat the last time they were in town. Nevermind PPV buys are dangerously low. Nevermind that, with all this, Vince McMahon borrowed over $250 million against the company, a move never before done not even when he nearly went "out of business" back in 1997, to fund the upcoming WWE Network channel.

It's a scary time for a wrestling fan. Or, should I say, a wrestling fan who actually gives a damn about the business-side of the industry, the current state of the industry as a whole, and its long-term viability.

On the plus side, yeah things are still going with this chick. ..err...lady! Going very well. We managed 4 consecutive dates last Thursday thru Sunday. In fact, we've got a 3 day camping trip planned for her B-Day 2 weekends from now. I've never been camping and the prospects of getting eaten by a bear don't sound very sexy, but, hey, the things we do, right?

[Up]Date Night

2011-10-08T15:57:00.006-05:00

For those interested in my love/date life, things are still happening. Date #2 happened last Friday. It was bowling at Don Carters. She was on the bowling team at Runnels, but hadn't bowled since (6 years). Though rusty, she still handily gave me the ass-whip. I won the contest for slowest and fastest thrown bowling ball though. Under 4 mph and over 16 mph.

The bowling lasted all of one hour, we then spent the next 9 hours talking. Talking! For 9 straight hours! Tommy don't even understand. We left when the fog started to roll in and rave bowling was about to bust out (strobe gives her headaches).

Leaving, we arranged another date for The 13th Gate the next night and food afterwards, but she had to call it off later. That left my Saturday night open for Real Steel and post-LSU game Taco Bell with Tommy.

Back to the girl, date #3 has just been arranged for Saturday. Officially, it's only the 3rd date, but, damn, does it seem like we're been doing this for longer than that. Must be the marathon date sessions. Assuming this goes well, I've got a great idea for a future date (date #4?) that should earn me major "Shine Gets". Details on that later.

So how's it going? Pretty good. Considering my usual [bad] luck, I'm kinda shocked at how easy its been going. I like her. I feel comfortable around her, or as much as one can feel comfortable on a date. I "click" more with her than any girl before. I'm pretty sure she digs me as well.

Oh and every movie I've happen to bring up so far she had seen. All the superhero movies (she's looking forward to the Avengers, but not Batman 3 so much, she loved Captain America). Conan. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (she didn't like it). The Rocketeer! Various Disney movies. Even The Hills Have Eyes. And The Wicker Man!

Next time we meet up, I'm gonna have to pop the big question: You some kind of nerd?!

Hell, she's seen Ghost Rider.......and she wants to see Ghost Rider II!!!! I own the collected edition of the Batman vs Predator comic, but even I got my limits!

P.S. The first Batman vs Predator comic was actually really good. DC/WB need to jump on that jeep and ride.

Date Night....With The Stir-Man!

2011-10-03T15:29:00.005-05:00

Who has two thumbs and had a date Saturday night? This Guy!

Just when I'm about to write off OKC as being a waste of what little time I already gave it, I gave it one last check and stumble upon someone with an interest in Game of Thrones. Read the book a long time ago, watched the HBO show, re-read the book, and then continued through the series to book 4 or 5.

So, what the hell, I send a Game of Thrones-related email. "Response Get!" We exchange a few more mails and I take the real first step, asking if she wanted to go out. She agrees, calling it a "date" herself. "Date Get!"

So we went out last night. Met up at Perkins Rowe for 6 and when to Kona Grill. We didn't leave Kona Grill till almost 11! She didn't finish her chicken salad. I didn't finish my turkey burger (which is a shame). We spent the entire time talking. Cuba (she's half cuban), our jobs, white people wearing Che shirts, photography, health, Disney, movies, family, etc. It seems kinda crazy to sit in a restaurant for that long, but Kona Grill never offered the check, nor hinted at needing us to leave, and neither her nor I made a play for the door.

We just kept talking. By the time we exited, Lion King 3D wasn't a possibility anymore. B&N was closing. So I walked her to her car. Gave her a hug, cause I gets mine! (also, I'm not a first date-kisser, sorry, ladies), and asked if I could give her a call. She responded in the positive.

Driving home, not 10 minutes later, I get a text. I figure it's from Tommy, who was at an asian wedding in New Orleans. Nope. It's her. She thanked me for dinner and said she had a great time. This caught me off guard as I'm not use to women openly being informative with their interest, much less right after the first date. I replied that I had a great time too and look forward to doing it again. She txt'd me back with a "Me too".

It was probably the best first-date I've ever been on and I was surprised by just how simple the affair was. Sitting at a table for 5 hours talking. She's cute, has a passion for her interests/job, educated, plus more! I waked into the date with zero expectations beyond a potentially interesting night and walked away......liking her.

I'll give her a call tomorrow in my break between classes and setup a second date for later in the week. She use to bowl, so I was thinking of that. I had other ideas of zoo, the 13th Gate, biking (she mountain bikes), but I think I'll save those for future dates should we move past the 2nd one. Outside of bowling, any ideas?

Fright Fest 2011: Writing Hurdle

2011-09-29T21:53:00.004-05:00

Up till now, it's been smooth sailing. The writing is done for The Fog, Christine, and The Thing. The Fog has already been formatted, for Facebook's pleasure, and only awaits Saturday to be published. Last week, I watched Prince of Darkness. This is the first of two Carpenter movies I'm gonna cover, yet have never seen before. My hurdle started earlier today when I restarted the movie and took fingers to keyboard to type out a draft.

The format of my writeups are recap the movie as I watch it. Following that is the review section. Nothing crazy deep. Just what I like, don't like, improvements, etc. The first three writeups came in around 5 pages. The Prince of Darkness note is currently at 5 pages and I've only covered the first 40 minutes of the movie! Being a new movie to me, I suppose I find myself commenting more on some of the little things.

Anyway, I stopped myself at the 40 minute mark because I didn't like what I was writing by that point. I'll have to re-read it later, but it felt as if I was antagonizing the movie. Having watched the movie, I certainly think it deserves a little tough love, but that's for the review section. For the movie viewer summary part, I just want the reader to follow along with me as I experience this movie. Good. Bad. Crazy. Goofy. Whatever. No thoughts beyond seeing what's around the next corner and having a little fun while doing it.

For Prince of Darkness, once developments started to get revealed, I began to butt heads with the movie. Or at least, again, it felt that way. Evil being legitimized with science is the main focus of the movie. In fact, it's the main motivation for all the characters in the movie aside from not getting dead. So when the movie starts to push some hokey ideas, it's hard, as a reasonable-educated adult, to not call out the shit. Worse is when the movie begins to contradict itself with its own revealed facts. Numbers stated earlier don't match match number or statements presented later. And no character acknowledges the change. The various changing facts can make the movie hard to follow. Hell, even now, I'm not sure I understand fully what's going on.

Thinking back, I don't believe I'll have to scrap the whole note. Just some of the parts close to where I stopped when the "evil grounded in science" starts to get explained. The challenge is keeping the fun tone of the note going when the movie dips into "kinda dumb" territory.

I'll let this movie rest a bit. Got a date Saturday, so I'll try again Sunday before heading off to watch the Hell in a Cell PPV at BWW with Tommy.

A Long-Delayed Reaction to 2001: A Space Odyssey

2011-09-18T22:04:00.000-05:00

Stirling,

Because you're such a big movie buff, I always assume that if I see a classic movie, you've seen it before as well. I'm particularly hoping that that's the case with respect to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Katy and I watched this afternoon for the first time. I'm hoping you can give me some guidance as to what I should be thinking about this film. I came to the movie shockingly unspoilt—other than knowing that there would be monkeys, monoliths, and a computer saying, "I'm sorry, Dave—I'm afraid I can't do that," I had no preconceptions. Here's what I got out of it.

The movie is divided into four essentially self-contained episodes. First, we see prehistoric apes discovering a monolith, which does something—it's not clear what—after which they discover tools, weapons, and warfare. Second, we see a sequence in which we learn that modern, space-faring humans have discovered a similar monolith on the moon, which does something—it's not clear what. Third is the most pop-culturally familiar sequence, in which an astronaut named Dave, in the midst of a mission to Jupiter, faces off against a homicidal artificial intelligence, HAL9000, his ship's onboard computer. Fourth and finally comes a sequence, by turns psychedelic and then just avant-garde, in which Dave reaches Jupiter, discovers another monolith in its orbit, hallucinates (?) for a while, and then finds himself in what appears to be Versailles, except with fluorescent lights for floors, for—I'm guessing here—basically eternity, after which, another monolith does something—it's not clear what—involving Dave being reincarnated as a galactic fetus.

The plot is sort of hazy to me, as you can probably tell. Luckily, I get the feeling that the plot isn't really at the center of the film. The points of connection, in terms of plot, between any of the four episodes are pretty limited. There's no plot point in common between the ape-episode and any of the later ones, unless you count the bare fact that monoliths figure heavily in all of them. The moon- and Jupiter-episodes are connected, we learn fairly late, by the fact that Dave's mission to Jupiter was motivated by the discovery of the moon-monolith. And the only plot connection between the psychedelic episode and the rest of the film is that Dave is present. To put it simply, these aren't chapters in a book—they're short stories in an anthology. Rather than being plot-driven, the important connections between episodes are thematic—themes of humanity, intelligence, and technology are present throughout, as are those pesky monoliths.

But even as I get this, I have to admit that I don't have a clue what's being said about humanity and intelligence and technology and monoliths. Worse yet, I'm not even sure I've identified the relevant questions that I'm intended to take away. In the end, the plot is so loose, and the symbology so underspecified, that I feel I'm just flailing around in the dark. Still, I have to pose the following questions:

Are the monoliths alien artifacts, as most of the characters seem to suppose? Or are they naturally occurring objects, somehow (spiritually? metaphysically?) connected to the origin of the universe (and its rebirth)?
What are the monoliths doing? What exactly happens to the apes who come into contact with the monolith, that wouldn't have happened to them otherwise? (I mean, is it completely clear that tool-use and warfare are direct effects of the monolith? Are the tool-using apes even the same apes who encountered the monolith, or are they their distant descendants?) What happens to the folks on the moon as they gather around the monolith for a photograph? We're never told. What is happening to Dave when he encounters the monolith in Jupiter's orbit? (This question could be answered either literally or figuratively—it just needs to be answered). What is happening to Dave when he encounters the monolith on his deathdbed? (Ditto).
Is HAL malfunctioning? I find it somewhat more terrifying to imagine that he's in perfect working order.
If HAL is malfunctioning, what is the cause of his malfunction? "Human error," HAL's own diagnosis, seems too trite an answer for this film. All of the other episodes, besides the one in which HAL appears, deal with matters of cosmic significance. To me, there's something absurd about allowing the HAL-episode—the film's indisputable (right?) centerpice—to be contingent upon a programming error by some unknown codemonkey back on earth. Could the malfunction be monolith-related? I ask this in part because the HAL-episode is the only episode in which no monolith appears. That is, the monoliths are conspicuous by their absence from the HAL-episode. But, from a plot standpoint, how would it be possible for a monolith to cause the malfunction?
Is HAL a conscious being? Does he have real emotions? Even though the movie explicitly poses these questions, they're never answered, nor, upon reflection, do they seem particularly important thematically. Is the whole issue a total red herring?
How literally is the final episode supposed to be taken? Completely literal? Are some parts of it just Dave's hallucinations, and if so, which parts? Or, by the final scene, are we being presented with something that is not the literal experience of any conscious being? For me, I suspected that by the end, we'd traveled even farther beyond the confines of plot than we were before, such that I was no longer even being told a story. Instead, it seemed to me that the movie was just saying things with images. But I don't know what it was saying.

That final sequence, in luminescent, green Versailles, was at the very least a striking bit of film-making. There's something terrifying about it. I remember, beside me on the couch, Katy saying at one point, "Oh, God, he's turning around. He's gonna see Dave. Wait. Where's Dave? Oh no, that's Dave, isn't it?" The mindfuckery of it is off the charts.

And the long minutes without dialogue. For ten, twenty, thirty minutes at a time, you'll hear nothing but apes caterwauling, or classical music as space vessels spin, or an astronaut's deep breathing as he's out for a spacewalk, or unintelligible human voices rising to a crescendo, in what seems for a long time to be hell, and still, at the end of the film, might be. There's emotional intensity to go around.

And then there's just the technological aspects. The fact that Stanley Kubrick, in the late 1960's, built a bunch of giant hamster-wheels so that he could give the audience a realistic look at how weightlessness and artificial gravity would look. Impressive stuff.

But here's what really got me in the end. To me, it seems that if this movie had been made ten years ago, we wouldn't be talking about it today—it would have been forgotten by now. It wouldn't be a sci-fi classic, remembered fondly by the former adolescents of the 60's and 70's—instead it would have been ghetto-ised as an art house film, so that most people would never have seen it or even heard of it. You'd never be able to assume it as a part of the pop cultural vernacular. What strikes me as most hopeful is that there was ever a time when a large number of Americans would have wanted to be as intellectually and aesthetically challenged by a film as they must have wanted to be in 1968, to have made 2001 such a cultural touchstone.

Roughies: Fright Fest 2011

2011-09-13T14:13:00.003-05:00

October is fast approaching and, with that, another annual month of horror movies to watch and "note" about. Last year was all the Exorcist movies (including the alternate cut of the prequel). I did something the October before that, but I can't remember.

Though I got through all the Exorcist movies watched and wrote (only lapped 3 days into November, I believe), I learned some lessons from the experience. That writing about movies you like can be hard in the sense of fairness (The Exorcist). That bad movies, really bad movies, can nearly kill your desire to continue forth on your proposed journey (Exorcist II: The Heretic). That, if you can take a leap of faith, you may discover a lost treasure and revive your passion (Exorcist III). That watching and writing about, in essence, the same movie twice, though immensely interesting, can be......a bit of a drag.

The biggest issue, though, was time. I had 5 Exorcist movies. October has 4 weeks. I had to watch the movie. Then write about it, which could take hours for a single note (The Exorcist II note took forever). Some editing. Pics. Rinse and repeat 4 more times.

The Horror-movie-a-thon is back, but I decided to go about it differently. First, I'm starting early and not flying by the seat of my pants. I've already settled on a set of movies, which was harder than I imagined due to several options I drew up. The first movie is done as far as getting most of the content down on paper/MS Word. I watched the movie. Then I rewatched it while simultaneously typing my write-up. Aside from a few pauses here and there to finish typing my thoughts/commentary on any given scene, I finished when the movie finished. The conclude with thoughts on the movie as a whole.

So far, it seems more efficient. Watching the movie, a second time, as I type helps me remember more of the movie's ongoings. This provides a longer note / more commentary (the first movie's draft is a single sentence shy of 5 pages!), but it should be good. Or, I should say, I hope it's good.

I plan to watch/write up another movie or two before heading back and finalizing the first movie's review.

Stay Tuned.

Gaming Music: Metallica, AC/DC, & Van Halen

2011-09-07T10:13:00.013-05:00

Before now, music games only scratched the surface of rock. Free Bird? War Pigs? Monkey Wrench?! That's stuff for some high school talent show. Now's the time to go balls-deep into rock! With band-centric music games! Welcome to 2008!

I popped in Guitar Hero: Metallica first. Logos. Logos. Logos. Usual menu options: Quick play, Practise, Options. I go for Career. Shit gets real off the bat with Metallica entering their venue and *dramatic pause* YOU ARE METALLICA! And you open it up with "For Whom The Bell Tolls". Assuming you don't suck, you then get to encore "The Unforgiven".

You/Metallica, Rock! Inspiring a boy (also you) in the crowd to start up a band. This brings you to your character. You can choose among Guitar Hero's standard roster of cartoon rockers. I usually go with Izzy Sparks for his David Lee Roth-ness. But! Now there's a Create-A-Rocker option. Ok. Let's check that out.

Boy, are there a lot of options. Past the opening Male/Female selection. You can pick your music style. Punk. Rock. Heavy Metal. Goth. Classic (seemingly late 60's, early 70's rock). Etc. I go with classic. From there, you can edit body size, shape, and color. Clothes (shirts, pants, shoes, hats, etc.). Tats. Band name. Band logo. Edit instruments (guitar, bass, drums, mic). Plus more! Again, there's a lot of options. I spend waay more time on it than I expected. Maybe even wanted, due to the numerous loading screen and the game chugging to loading the various scrolling items.

Once I rebrand my Guitar Hero mainstay band, Sexual Misconduct, into a Metallica cover band and create The Stir-Man, complete with bald head, country beard, hoodie and track pants, it was time to hit the road (in our Mystery, Inc. Van labeled " 'Tallica, Jr.") to a Metallica live event and audition for the "opening act" slot. We win the slot and an opposing glam, 80's, hair-metal band look pissed. I guessing they're the bad guys here.

At this first venue, there are no Metallica songs to cover. So, first, I chose Alice in Chains' "No Excuses". Second, I go for Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone". Not sure why, but playing the song felt "special". Kinda like I wasn't playing it but experiencing it. Fitting since I'm led to believe that the song holds a special place in James' heart.

I back out and check out the extras. Under videos, there's a lot of backstage/concert stuff. In the gallery, there's pictures of old posters, tickets, patches. I'm talking old. One is a flyer for a concert with Metallica, Twisted Sister, and a third band that has slipped my mind. This stuff is really cool for any fan of Metallica. I just wish you could zoom in on the flyers/tickets/etc. so you can actually read some of the smaller print or just get a better overall look at them.

Oh, there's also an option to listen to various songs while info tidbits pop up. I did this for Tuesday's Gone. Some interesting stuff. Background on Lyn Skyn. Their influence on Metallica. Well worth reading. But then it ends by stating that Lyn Skyn's Free Bird ended Guitar Hero II. Kinda out of nowhere. And not near as important/interesting as the rest.

I decided to check out AC/DC Live! next. I've never played Rock Band before, so I was looking forward to seeing how the original Guitar Hero devs "improved" on their GH formula. Usual menu options. I notice a "Calibration" option. Never having done a calibration, I check it out. You strum to visual and audio cues to help set a proper lag between video, music, and strum-ness.

Back in the menu, I skip career (not wanting to spend so much time with create-a-band/character, if that's what happens) and go straight to "Quick Play". I head directly to "Hell's Bells" like a parent dragging their kid to the Indiana Jones ride at a Disneyland opening. And...

And.....

And....I fail. Hard. I don't know what the fuck just happened. I couldn't hit shit. I even saw the notes coming. And I still couldn't hit them. I give "Jailbreak" a try. Though I fare better, and finish the song, it was still pretty bad. Did I fuck myself over with the calibration? Is it that the notes are thin rectangles, and not GH's round circles, giving less room for error/timing?

I had planned to stop there, but my failure pushed me to pop in Guitar Hero: Van Halen. To see if I fared better back under the GH style. I go to "Quick Play" and chose "Ain't Talkin' Bout Love". My favorite Van Halen song. Very familiar with it. And I start off fucking it up! Why? Due to a difference I didn't even notice between Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Not the note shapes, but in how the notes scroll on-screen. In GH, the notes scroll in from back of the screen to front. In Rock Band, they go from top to bottom.

I didn't realize this going from GH: Metallica to RB: AC/DC, but, back in GH's world with Van Halen, it was fucking up my song. Now realized. I make whatever needed mental adjustments and BAM! I'm rocking out to Van Halen. Telling bitches, "I got what you need".

Next is the so damn cheesy yet so damn fun "Jump". Then "Runnin' with the Devil". Playing these songs, it makes me think of just why I like Van Halen. I think it might be because they're rocking out, yet seemingly light-hearted about doing it (as oppose to Metallica's more heavy-handed-ness). Almost a sort of parody of 70's/80's rock but with good songs backing it up. Kinda feel the same way about Foo Fighters for their era.

Of course, there are various songs from secondary bands. Queen. Foo Fighters. Even Billy Idol's White Wedding (which I look forward to playing). But then there's a speed bump. The Offspring's "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy"). Strumming through the songs and hearing that damn song kick in.....I let out a sigh. It doesn't fit. Kinda ruins the vib of the game.

Compared to that of Metallica's, the extras disappoint with no vids or gallery to be found. Just lyrics and a "Van Halen Soundboard". I'm missing the point of this soundboard. Press two differing colors in differing order and 3 second long guitar solo plays. I felt lost in this "extra".

From my quick experience with GH: VH, it certainly feels like less of a game directed by a band for their fans as GH: Metallica does. GH: VH feels decidedly "hands-off" in Van Halen-ness. But it's got Van Halen songs you can Guitar Hero to, which, I suppose, is all one would want from a game such as this, but, damn, if the game just feels lacking in the frills and whistles extras of the Metallica version.

How bout that last sentence, eh?

Get 'Dem Deals!: Toys'R'Us Moving Sale

2011-09-05T14:02:00.008-05:00

So Toys R Us is moving. Sources say to the Tinseltown area. Seems like a bad idea, but, hey, SALES! 60% OFF!*

*up to

I don't know how long the sale has been going on, but there wasn't much goods[tuff] to be had. I doubt there were many to begin with. But I did find some goodies.

Guitar Hero: Van Halen ($6)
Guitar Hero: Metallica ($2.40)
Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s ($5.99)
AC/DC Live!: Rock Band Track Pack ($4.73)

Though I moved on from the Guitar Hero craze of several years ago, I did pick it back up earlier this summer and picked (ha!) my way through Guitar Heros 1-3 (Freya is my best song). Nice find to pick up Metallica, Val Halan, and AC/DC on the cheap. Not sure how a music game comprised mainly of a single band, but, hey!, it's Metallica, Val Halan, and AC/DC. And it's cheap!

My only other concern is that AC/DC Live! is a Rock Band game. My guitar is Guitar Hero-based. I know there shouldn't be a problem. The game box tells me there shouldn't be a problem. I just remember Activision making a hissy fit about the issue. Whatever the case, I'll have a pretty sweet box cover.

While walking towards the register, I happened to notice a very small dump pile of DVDs. Hey, why not, right? Browse. Browse. CBS. Browse. Browse. Couple discoveries.

Batman/Superman: Apocalypse ($6.49)
Star Trek: Nemesis ($2.49)

All in all, a pretty good catch. Checking out, I got a little bothered by the lady ringing me up making it very clear that there would be no refunds. Over and over again. Back in the car, I quickly removed the security plastic/stickers for Star Trek: Nemesis. There was a DVD inside. Screwjob averted!

George Lucas Has Officially Gone Insane!: More Star Wars Changes for Blu-Ray

2011-09-02T07:52:00.024-05:00

So we've known that Lucas has been going downhill since the Special Edition releases of the original Star Wars movies back in 1997. A lot of unnecessary shit thrown into the background of many scenes to make them seem more "alive" when really it just makes it look "busy". A butt-load of awful CGI. Like SyFy channel worthy "Python vs Anaconda vs Dino-Gator" bad.

Remember Jabba in A New Hope? No? Try now.

Earlier in the year, Star Wars was revealed to be heading to Blu-Ray, original three as well as the newer ones. For Episodes 4-6, I'm pretty sure everyone expected the Special Editions. Lucas has a hard-on for his "improved" versions. You know what? Fine. But, considering the mass storage space of your standard Blu-Ray, it was also assumed the the original versions would be included as well.

You know what happens when one "assumes", right?

About a week ago, leaks of the Blu-Rays showed up online. With it came two disturbing revelations. First, the original versions are NOT on the Blu-Rays. It's Special Edition only. Ok. I don't like it, but OK. Chances are they'll release the original versions in a couple years or so for mo' money like they did with the DVDs. Though my biggest problem with this is that LucasFilm will claim up and down that the Special Editions are Lucas' view of the original films (surely!) and as such the original originals will never be released (bullshit!). Then once they've scared everyone into buying the Special Editions and sales have died down, they'll release the actual real original versions due to "fan demand".

The second revelation? Lucas is making even MORE CHANGES to Star Wars. The 90's Special Editions were what he always intended Star Wars to be. Then changes again with the Special Edition release onto DVD incorporating elements from Episode 1-3 (most infamously being young ghost Hayden Christensen joining ghost Yoda and old ghost Obi-Wan, replacing original old ghost Anakin). So now, for the third time, we have more improvements to Lucas' supposedly already improved vision of the movies.

The new changes are rolling out at a steady pace, but I'm going to just focus on the first four. The last one being a fucking game changer. Last straw. I'm talking "Someone needs to get Star Wars away from this guy! Now!"

1) Episode I - CGI Yoda replaces Puppet Yoda

This change doesn't affect me that much. Visually, it may even be for the better. The Episode I Yoda puppet was fucking horrible. I could understand reasons for why they couldn't use the original Yoda puppet from the Empire and Jedi. It probably doesn't exist anymore or in poor shape. What I don't get is why they just didn't make another one that looks just like the original. An argument could be made about aging and the time gap between Episode I and Empire (a gap that seems to fluctuate with every movie). But Yoda was like 900 years old, right? So what's 40-50 years? Comparison between puppet and CGI Yoda here.

Now, if Lucas gets the bold balls to replace puppet Yoda in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi....then.....by God......then......THEN!

2) A New Hope - New Obi-Wan Krayt Dragon Roar

This the the sound that Obi-Wan makes, that of a Krayt Dragon, I reckon, to scare off the Sand people from Luke. I honestly can't remember what the original sound was, though maybe I would if I heard it. But why change such an insignificant sound? Has this been riding up Lucas' crack for the past 30 years but he didn't have the technology to edited it out till now?

Since I watched the clip and heard the sound, I kept thinking that the new roar sounded familiar. Like I heard it in a song somewhere. Then it hit me! It's the opening "WOOOOO!" from Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough". Hot shit! I went straight to youtube to give the clip a listen again and ended up on a remix video of the epiphany I just had. So others have connected that dot as well.

As such, this might be my favorite change. The one that pulls these Star Wars improvements into an alternate reality or, more simply, an alternate outlook. One of humor as oppose to one of facepalm. I'm telling you now. If we're watching a Star Wars Blu-Ray, If we're watching A New Hope, If we watch this scene, I WILL be getting up, singing, and dancing "Don't Stop". I don't care who's there. Your mom. Father. Sister. Daughter. Granny Jo'. I will be grabbing crotch. Notably my own.

3) Return of the Jedi - CGI Ewok Eyes Enable Blinking Action!

Finally, THE major complaint about the Ewoks has been fixed! Now everyone will love them! *sarcasm* I've never once thought about the Ewoks inability to blink. If this change has done anything, it's made this "issue" all the more obvious. Now I won't be able to look at an original Ewok without noticing his non-blink-ing-ness. Or an improved Ewok with his blatant eye blinking!

Stop trying to be real, Ewok! You're a puppet! You have no soul! You're a damned Ewok!

Now the time has come. If you've yet to hear of this change then, please, prepare yourself. Sit down. Relax. Spend some time with your family. Learn of the joys of life and of love. Realize that there is more to life than Star Wars. I beg you. Cause if you fail to, then this is one giant leap to going over the edge.

Ready?

4) Return of the Jedi - Darth Vader Says "NOOOoooooo!" Twice!

The biggest joke of the prequel Star Wars is the end of Revenge of the Sith. Vader finally shows up. The moment we've all been waiting years for. And Vader goes, "NOOOooooo!" I can't think of another character that has been so completely ruined with one word. One exclamation!

I don't know what bubble Lucas lives in, but it must be of extra durable strength as I would have to assume (there's that word again!) he's not heard any "NOOOoooo!" jokes. Or the dude's just insane. He's taken the "NOOOooooo!" and added it TWICE! to the climax of Return of the Jedi, my personal favorite Star Wars movie.

It's a showdown between Light and Dark. Father and Son. The fate of the galaxy is in their hands. And they engage in an epic battle of greens, reds, and blacks. Of misguided ideals. And of rage-induced beat downs. Outside of Yoda scenes, it's my favorite scene of any Star Wars. Hell, it's THE scene of Star Wars. Then the Emperor begins to torture Luke with force lightening. Vader watches. Silent, yet obviously conflicted. John Williams music ringing in our ears. Then Vader acts. Not for himself. Or even the galaxy. But for his son. And then the Ewoks sing some "Yub Nub". The End.

The improved version? Blah Blah Blah. Epic Battle. Greens. THE. Blah. Emperor tortures Luke with force lightening. Vader watches. Conflicted. BUT NOT SILENT! He says loudly to himself, "Nooooooooo". The Emperor, too busy re-living that time he made Sam Jackson look like a bitch, fails to hear. Vader then makes his presence and feelings known by yelling "NOOOooooooo!" as he picks up the Emperor and throws him into that bottomless space station pit thingy.

It's takes a dramatic high point of the series and gives it the feel of a man-child raging that mommy took his video game. It's sad. It's cringe-inducing. It's "Damn, Lucas". It's How can you be this unaware of what you're doing?! This is bad. Real bad. How can you take something that's been a joke since Episode III, 6 years ago, and apply it to the major battle/turning point of the entire saga?!

And there are more changes. Hopefully nothing as major as this one but there are more.

And, with that, I'm done with Star Wars bitch ranting. It'll be fun to one day go back and look at all the changes, but I'm done complaining/bitching about Star Wars from this point forward. I'm gonna choose to have more fun with it, cause, at this point, it's all starting to feel like trolling the fanbase on the part of Lucas.

That's why, for the past 2 years, I've been riding dat Star Trek jeep, baby! Engage!

Round-Table: Spielberg

2011-08-19T09:54:00.020-05:00

Two ideas have been wandering around in my head for a while. One was Spielberg-based. Favorite movie. Worst movie. Progression. The other idea was a series of "roundtable" conversation dealing with various topics. The topic and info in the post. Conversation in the comments. That's the best implementation I've got of a roundtable in blog-form (will take better suggestions).

So why not smang them together?!

For our first Roundtable, Steven Spielberg. *applause* I was going to keep the topic directed at the question of "What is Spielberg's Worst Movie?", but let's open that up a bit. Our primary question will still remain the subject of his worst movie. Once we've tackled that, let's venture into relating questions. Favorite movie? Liked/disliked characters? Etc. Any thought, questions, statements related to the topic (Spielberg), throw 'em in there.

Info:

Rotten Tomatoes seems to be the movie rating standard, so you can find a list of Spielberg's work here. Be careful of his credit listings. There's no filter, so don't mistake Spielberg for the director of "The Legend of Zorro".

Imdb provides a more manageable list of director duties here minus the ratings.

Note: Spielberg is not the [official] director of 1982's Poltergeist and 1985's The Goonies, though often confused as such. Unofficially, Spielberg was heavily involved in both movies. For The Goonies, Spielberg worked very close with Richard Donner and the cast. His influence was there, but Donner was not usurped. Things were not so smooth for Poltergeist. Though Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Tobe Hooper is officially credited as director, many involved with the movie cite Spielberg as the real director. You can read that tidbit here.

RE: Rise of the Apes!

2011-08-10T10:59:00.002-05:00

Reading your thoughts, Ryan and Katy, I've been trying to figure out my expectant followup comment. Obviously from my FB message, I liked Rise of the Apes. A lot. I would even go so far as to call it my "Movie of the Year" thus far (previously was Rango). As a Planet of the Apes series fan, thanks to many replays on 90’s TBS, my favorite one was always "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes". If not known, Rise of the Apes is a remake/reimagining of the 1972 movie that had Roddy McDowall as Caesar. I say this because the few reviews I’ve read reference the original Heston movie and liken Rise as a reboot/prequel to it.

Conquest hasn't aged very well. There's some things in the movie that are damn hokey (training apes to get accustomed to serving tables in a disco club setting completely with strobe lights and funky music), but the under/over-tones can save it for a patient viewer. Racism. Slavery. Torture. When the revolution comes, it is swift and violent (gore, if any, is understated). Many humans are beaten to death with blunt weapons. Many apes guned down. It all ends with Caesar giving a hated-filled speech in front of his fellow apes and their sole prisoner, the head of "Ape Management". Caesar declares a new world. A better world. "And that day is upon you NOW!" With that, the apes beat their prisoner to death with the butt of their rifles. I should note here there's an issue with that ending, but that's for another time.

Overall, Rise of the Apes gave me close to what I wanted from a remake of Conquest. More time was devoted to Caesar. We saw his "fall" as he realized he was not a man but an ape. Worse that he had the knowledge of such. Finally, we get a movie that, first, proves that a special effects character can be a proper lead in a live-action movie (as oppose to Bay's Transformers movies not actually being Transformers movies) and, second, that much can be done by actions with little or no words and still be effective, if not much more.

For both of your disappointments in Rise, I don't wish to go down the point/counter-point road. Though I really enjoyed the movie, I don't see you both as completely wrong, nor I completely right.

The thing that stuck out to me about the mom chimp wasn't that the science dudes were unaware of the pregnancy. As far as I know, chimps don’t physically show much if at all. Though that would leave blood testing up in the air and I would assume that would show a pregnancy, if their tests displayed the proper indicators. What I noticed afterwards was that the mom defended her child.....by leaving him. But the mother, no matter how smart she may have gotten, was still a wild chimp in an unfamiliar/human environment. The overprotective rage could have blinded her and pushed her further away from her cage/baby with every human she encountered.

Likewise, I took no notice of the riot police order for safeties off. It was my understanding that, in an organized armed unit, it is the commanding officer who gives the order to go “live”, even more so in a fragile situation like the one on the Golden Gate Bridge with a mix of friendlies and targets. As the apes took the bridge, the people were spilt between those who remained in their cars (city side) and those already out and running from the apes in towards the redwoods. With humans on the battlefield and heading towards armed police, I would think it mandatory for the unit to have safeties on till people were cleared and the “go live” order given.

I found the film to be very violent. The actions of the apes toward each other and, later, humans were realistic to what I’ve seen of primates on Animal Planet and youtube. The attacks were unsettling on a primal level. That in mind, it was obvious that there was a lack in realism as far as the consequences of these ape attacks. Caesar attacked the pilot and bit his finger. Tommy and I assumed he bit the finger clean off, as chimps are prone to do. Nope, the guy later had his finger in a splint. In the case of the mauling/beatings (the pilot, the not-Draco ape worker), both were stopped fairly quickly. The lack of consequence could be explained away by Caesar holding both himself and the other apes back. Caesar seems to understand the importance of life and the severity of taking it away. As much as he hated Draco, his death was accidental. Caesar wanted to repay Draco for the fire hose attack, but wasn’t aware of the electrocution hazard that Draco’s cattle prod. Of course that changed with the death of Buck the Gorilla (damn humans!) causing Caesar to purposely allow the death of Money-Hungry Corp Head.

I do strongly agree that I was expecting, and would have liked to see, more violent results, be it straight up gore or implied. These are apes. Apes are fucking insane. They tear off dicks and wear them as [white] hats. Same for the police, minus the dick hats (hopefully). But I can see and understand the possible reasons why the powers-that-be distanced the movie from this (PETA, lady disfigured by chimp, likely adapted sequel storyline from Battle for the Planet of the Apes, PG-13 =mo’money, yo!).

Turns out Super 8 is my annual “Movie I’ve been interested in seeing for a while but forgot to actually go watch it”. I’m getting better as last year had too many winners.

As for the characters, writing, and such, my guess is that we are approaching the film from different directions. We all like bad movies, but I assume you both are probably much more selective of movies watched overall while I am a bit more open (I don’t do anal, sorry). My point that maybe I’m a bit more…uhh…..aware (though there’s a better word out there) of just how low movies can go in the writing/characters department. Best recent example: Transformers 3. Tommy still enjoyed it, but admits its problems. Also, Sucker Punch. Not even Tommy can say shit for that movie other than the chicks were hot (which is true). As you can see, Tommy is my measurement of how bad a movie is. I can’t trust my own feelings. That would be biased, right? Anyway, that’s my guess. That I see it as above standard fare while you guys see it as below and made worse due to the rule of cool. I would agree that all human characters are simple, but I wouldn’t personally call them terrible (except for the cliché drunk teenagers looking for fun in a damn ape sanctuary!). Each one served their purpose in the story. I thought the James Franco/John Lithgow dynamic quite reflective of my own relationship with my Alzheimer’s-afflicted granddad.

The GF’s singular line about some things not meant to be changed was a bit shallow, I’ll agree, but, eh, I’ve had worse. “Kiss me, Neo”.

Sorry you guys didn’t like it, especially since I “highly recommended” it. But, hey, seeing as how the movie has already almost made back its budget, we’re likely for a sequel! You guys ready for Rise of the Apes 2: Rise Harder?

Oh and Katy, you know your awareness of ape balls, or lack thereof, is gonna be a thing, right?

Movie Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-08T22:27:00.000-05:00

As you know, Stirling, I was excited about this movie. I thought that a summer blockbuster about biotechnology would be a lot of fun. Katy was skeptical. And it turns out that she was right to be. Here's why:

It was sooo unrealistic, even allowing for the silliness of the premise. So I'm supposed to believe that at a laboratory in which they test gene therapies on chimpanzees, a laboratory that ostensibly employs experts on chimp physiology, nobody noticed that one of the new arrivals was pregnant? Sorry, no. I'm supposed to believe that a phalanx of riot police, with their rifles at the ready, has to be reminded by their superior to take the safeties off? Nope. I'm supposed to believe that an animal trainer who is beaten for a considerable period of time by a several mature chimpanzees is going to be in any condition to explain what happened the next morning? Again, no. He'd have been lucky to have survived that attack at all; at a minimum, his injuries would have been traumatic. But that brings us to the next problem.

I wanted it to be sort of gory and scary, but the violence never rose beyond the level of the cartoonish. This was a movie that just couldn't deal maturely with the violence at its core. There were several instances in this movie in which the victim of chimp-violence ought to have been, by all rights, a bloody mess. (If a chimp starts wailing on you like that, you ought to thank your lucky stars if your most notable injury derives from a bite to your finger). At least in part, the movie's squeamishness about treating this violence seriously has to be related to its depiction of the apes as unambiguous white-hats. If you start showing what really happens when people get attacked by chimpanzees, the audience might lose its warm, fuzzy feelings for our heroes. Me though, I like an ambiguous hero. I come to the cinema in hopes of experiencing complicated emotions. I prefer to be confronted by the ramifications of the real excesses of the side I'm rooting for. Rise of the Planet of the Apes lacks the moral backbone to even confront its own premise.

Another contributing factor to the film's squeamishness must have been its PG-13 rating. I need to learn not to go see PG-13 films, no matter how interesting they look like they might be. Rarely, something like Super 8 comes along, but most of the time, you just get action movies that privilege visual effects over versimilitude and emotional resonance.

Also related to my complaint of cartoonishess, Katy notes that in the course of the film, although we see many chimpanzees from many angles, standing, sitting, running, whatever, we never see any ape genitals. This, if you've ever seen a chimpanzee, is a LARGE omission. See right. This isn't really a complaint. But once you notice what the movie is NOT showing you, you kind of have to laugh about it.

The characters, the writing, and (maybe) the acting were all terrible. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is inhabited by the dullest, flattest characters that I've seen in a movie in a long time. Let's play a game where we try to sum up all of the main human characters in one word each. This is like shooting fish in a barrel:

Will: self-absorbed
Will's girlfriend: pretty
Will's dad: old
Will's boss: bastard
Will's neighbor: jerk
Lab chimp expert: bearded
Chimp shelter owner: amoral
Chimp shelter handler no. 1: sadist
Chimp shelter handler no. 2: stutters

There. That's everything you need to know about the human characters in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and you didn't even have to spend $7.50 and waste two hours of your life. The writing is just as bad. I think that the acting was pretty lousy too, but it was hard to tell. I mean, what were they supposed to do with those lines? "Will, you have to learn that there are some things that aren't meant to be changed." Seriously, that's the line that's supposed to fire up the protagonist to to re-examine his life's work? It's the turning point of the film! The big moment when Will realizes something about himself upon finally, irrevocably losing his father. And that's the best the screenwriter could do? It's so derivative! It's like the mad scientist version of "You just don't get it, do you?" If you're writing a screenplay, and you see this line in it, write harder! Say something interesting—anything interesting—instead! Ugh, my head hurts. I have to go soon.

In light of all this, it's almost irritating how good a job the director and Andy Serkis do in bringing the character of Caesar to life in mostly wordless scenes. Caesar is a compelling character. If this was the best script they could come up with, they should have striven harder for wordlessness.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

2011-08-07T05:41:00.003-05:00

Man. Amazing, or annoying really, just how much a nightmare can set you back. Make you feel as if you haven't progressed at all these past 3 months. Feel like a child.

Then left wide awake at 4:30 am. Wanting to go back to sleep, but can't. Trying to empty your mind, but can't.

Can't we go back to the asskicking Transformers/Kyndal dream?!

You Know What's Bullshit? - Coming to An Exercise Class and Not Exercising

2011-08-04T23:13:00.008-05:00

There's a list of things about teaching/leading an exercise class that grabs my goat. Right up there at the very top is people coming to class and NOT exercising.

What the hell?! We're not kids forced to go to math class. We're adults. The class is optional. Everyone is there because, supposedly, everyone wants to be there.But then, every once in a while, I'll get someone who comes, pulls up a yoga mat, and does nothing. [Bull] squat!

Several months back, a woman of 30-something years came to class. She's friends with 2 of my regulars. While I conducted a special 1 hour 30 minute Yoga X class, she sat on her mat. Texting. Talking to her friends in class. Annoyed the shit out of me. So I directed my wit and tongue at her several times throughout the workout. It was a light tone. Humorous. People laughed. No feelings were hurt but my point was made. Why come then sit and do nothing?

This happened again today with one of my regulars, a cute, yet married, girl. She wasn't "in the mood" yet she came to class. While others lunged, did squats, and boxed the air, she sat on her mat. Other times she laid down. All times doing nothing. I again made light of the situation. At one point, I announced that we were going to lunge "that way" past [Name Withheld] then we'd turn around and lunge back past [Name Withheld] again. "This is a two [Name Withheld] exercise!" Creating a new unit of measurement, a [Name Withheld].

Worse, both women want to lose weight. But they don't put in the work to do so. At least one does come to class. The other seems to expend too much time and energy in trying to find ways to lose weight by doing as little as possible. Read: Irony.

P90X - How It's Done

2011-07-31T19:20:00.011-05:00

Is it really that bad? No, not really.

When hearing of P90X, it's usually about just how tough it is. Impossible. Many people start, No one finishes. Really, though, it's just a workout. But it can be tough. It certainly can be impossible, if you approach it at face value and don't listen to the instructions or yourself. I've personally experienced how boneheaded people can be with this workout. They didn't listen to the instructions. They didn't listen to me. And they didn't listen to their body. They finished the routine. It was only a 15 minute ab [ripper] workout. But they killed themselves, have yet to return (over a month back), and I'd bet they aren't working out anywhere else.

So I thought I'd share some "tips" for tackling P90X. Advice that should transform this mythical monster into something a bit more...manageable.

Do every routine, even the ones you hate. For me, the worst workouts are the ones I've never done before. I don't know what's coming. I'm willing to jump over the obstacles, but I need to know what they are. There's nothing harder than not knowing what's up next or when it'll end. So you take the "new" away from the workout. Do each one as it turns up in the rotation. Make each one old hat. "Yeah, it sucks, but I've done it like 8 times already. So what's another one." I hate plyo. Well, just dislike, really. But I do it. I get it over with. And then I see that fucker again next week.

Do what you can. I can't do every exercise in P90X. I can't do as many reps as they do in P90X. I do what I can. If the people on the tape are doing 30 reps of something (and they do) and you can only do 4, 8, or 10 or whatever. It's ok. They are pushing themselves. You're pushing yourself. It doesn't matter the number as long as that number is bringing you to the limit [for that set].

Be a 60 minute man. Most routines are an hour long. Tailor yourself to last the entire workout. You may can do 30 push ups. Once. Maybe even twice. But you've still got arms, back, legs, whatever. Dominating the first 10 minutes of a workout doesn't mean squat if you can't bring it the following 50 minutes. These are one hour workouts. You finish the hour workout. If that only means 4 reps here. 10 reps there. Doesn't matter. In the end, you'll have done more reps than the guy who goes balls to the wall and burns out after 10 minutes. Pace yourself. Probably the most important piece of advice and the biggest error most people make.

Food. Water is important during the workout. I take in water after every 6 exercises, when given a water break, and/or when needed. You're sweating. Losing water. Replace it. Usually you'll hear to take small sips. Not to gulp. If that works for you, fine. Me, personally, I gulp that noise down. 3 or 4 gulps even. I don't get sick and puke so I'm not worried about taking in too much water at once. Afterwards, eat something. Anything. Usually being away from home, I'll having some type of bar with me. Likely a Fiber One knock off. Your body is looking for energy after a hard workout. Give it some.

Simple to do at home. Equipment is minimal. A chair. A pull up bar that you stick in a doorway. Some hand weights. I have 30 & 25 lb dumbbells, 20 lb kettlebells, and 8 & 6 lb handled medicine balls. Can I lift more than then the heaviest weight I've got? Yeah. But these do more than the trick when you've got a lot of reps to get through.

Shit, I had more. But I seem to have forgotten.

P90X isn't impossible. I wouldn't even call it "hard". You can get through it. Take each exercise one at a time. Do the reps. Take a breath. Move on to the next. It's tough, but manageable.

RE: Running

2011-07-29T07:18:00.009-05:00

To improve running, I'd focus on the legs (obviously) and core.

For legs,

Calf strength is very important and the primary force propelling you forward when running. Calf raises are the go-to exercise. You can do them simply on the floor or from the edge of an elevated platform (like stairs) for added range of motion. Hold weight for increased difficulty. Note: I would not recommend holding weights while doing calf raises off the edge of something.

Tip toe exercises are another good way to focus on the calves. Tip toe/Sneaky lunges are great. You stand on your toes and deep lunge forward (back leg straight, front leg's knee over the ankle, & try to step forward as far as you can). Hold the tip toe lunge for a few seconds. Then bring your back leg forward back to starting position and repeat. Find yourself a fairly large area to do this. I workout in a large room and lunge from once side to the other. Ideally, you could do this on your walking path. Just set a distance for yourself. Doing the lunges while remaining on your toes the entire time may be hard at first, depending on your balance and leg strength, but gets easier with practise as most things tend to do. Another good one is Gap Jump or Monster Truck Tires. Just pretend there's large tires on the ground and you're jumping from and landing on your toes from the center of each imaginary tire.

Squats are good. Aside from the normal ones, there's Goblet Squats where you hold a weight in your hand while squatting. Deep/Floor Touch Squats (no vid?!) where the feet are pointed slightly outward and you squat down as low as you can and/or touch the floor with hands then squat back up. Two one-legged squat variations with [Super] Skater Squats and Dead lift Squat. Oh and then there's the Wall Squat. If you're feeling froggy, there's One Leg Wall Squat.

Lunges can be done with body weight or added weights. Besides tip toe, there's three way lunges.

Core, I would suggest Wide leg Situps (you can cross legs indian style to make harder) & Pulse Ups (don't rock the legs back and forth as much as the guy in the vid does, should mostly be an up&down movement).

I recommend watching these videos and grabbing various exercises from it. Ab Ripper X Part 1 and Part 2. Legs and Back. Plyometrics (sorry, this is the best vid I could find of it).

I'll post about P90X sometime this weekend.

Running

2011-07-28T21:01:00.000-05:00

Stirling,

I'm glad you brought up health. That's actually a pretty fortuitous topic for me right now, because I've just started a new workout regimen this past month. And actually, I've been wanting to write about it, but always had something else I'd rather focus on. Your question brings my workout to the front of my writing queue.

My weight was around 170, which could potentially be a pretty healthy weight for me if it was lean mass, but mostly it wasn't. So in mid-June I took up walking, with a view to intersperse some running as my heart, lungs, and legs got stronger. There's a five-mile bike/running path that runs from a park just across the highway in front of my apartment, along the river, all the way to downtown. I started out just walking the two miles north, and turning around and walking the two miles back, which takes me about an hour. It's about 100 degrees out there, and humid, so it isn't exactly a picnic. I've added a little more running over the ensuing weeks. Now I walk the first two miles, turn around and walk back a mile, then run three-quarters of a mile, and walk the last quarter-mile back as a cool-down. I do this every weekday, weather-permitting, but I've only been out one time this week; the skies have been threatening rain, though they haven't delivered.

I've dropped five pounds, which is nice. I find that I have to drink a lot more water during the days. But I also find that I'm less hungry after a long cardio workout than I was before.

A few observations about my workouts:

I never would have guessed just how much of an effect the sun and wind would have on my body while working out. My first two miles are northward—generally into the sun and with my back to the wind. When I was first starting out, I would be completely beat at the end of the first two miles (I've gotten better since then). But within a few minutes of turning around so that I face away from the sun and into the wind, I feel better in almost every way. My muscles loosen up. I sweat less. Before I added any running to my workout, I typically felt more exhausted at the end of two miles than I did at the end of four!
The psychological impact that running is having on my life is at least as important to me as the physical. I hadn't really expected that. But I find that being alone in the sweltering, unfriendly elements for an hour, getting sweaty, not talking to anybody, not thinking about much of anything, doing something for myself—something that matters, really, not at all to anyone else in the world but me—is hugely liberating. And at the end, when I've run the distance I told myself I would, there's not only the sense of accomplishment, which can be pretty easily described, but there's also the endorphine high, which feels good, but not in any way that I could put into words. It's become something I look forward to when I'm at work, specifically as a way to disconnect from work.
So far, running doesn't seem to have made my legs any stronger. This came as a surprise to me, though probably not to you, given your background, Stirling. In the beginning, I had some muscle aches in my calves, but those have gone away pretty much entirely. Since then, any discomfort has been knee- or ankle-related, in which case I take it easy for a few days and start back up when they feel solid again. But since my calves and thighs weren't aching, I figured they must be stronger than they used to be. So a few nights ago, when the weather was being uncooperative, I decided to test this out by doing some squats. And the squats were just as difficult as they've always been! Furthermore, in the morning, my thighs ached like a motherfucker! The remedy for this, of course, at least short-term, was more running, which loosened up those muscles again. My heart and lungs are almost certainly as strong and healthy as they've been in years, but it's clear that if I'm going to strengthen my legs, I'm going to have to focus on resistance training as well.

I'm certain that you could have told me all of this and more if I'd just seen fit to ask you. Anything else I ought to think about for the kinds of workout I'm engaging in?

I'm interested to hear about p90x, which is something I keep hearing about, but about which I know literally nothing. Looking forward to getting an explanation.

Welcome Back! How's Your Health?

2011-07-28T10:13:00.006-05:00

Risen from the dead like a zombie that creeps Dennis Hopper the fuck out! And we'll start things real easy-like with a simple question, How's your health? What are you doing? What do you feel you should be doing? Goals? Wants? Whatev!

Me, I've spent the last two years going up and down the weight scale. 2009/Tampa saw me drop to 180 lbs thanks to wrestling in a hot warehouse. Post-Tampa, I gained weight up to 215 lbs. That was a mixture of weight-lifting and eating whatever the hell I wanted. September 2010, I then transitioned to a mostly yoga regimen which saw me drop from 215 back down to 180. I think maybe I was eating a little better (not that I ever really ate "bad"). So hey! Yoga does work. The biggest benefit from yoga has been flexibility getting into the poses and strength in holding them. I can bend forward, keep straight legs, and palm the floor. Being a guy, pretty damn impressive. Feels really great. I can move around and quickly switch between positions with ease. I use to hate stretching, but I have come to terms with it. Even enjoy it a little bit now that I can see the results.

This is what I love about having a job that deals with exercise. The thought of working out 3 or 4 hours a day is much easier and manageable when it's your job and you get paid to do it. I lead them through a workout but it's mine as well. I am my best student.

Currently, I do find myself working out 4 hours on any given day as I've thrown P90X routines into my schedule. On afternoons, I have an hour gap between my two classes. Usually, I devoted that time to power naps on a really crappy-looking yet oh-so-comfortable sofa in a room across the hall. Thanks to events with Kyndal, I found myself needing to do something. To keep my mind busy. What happened was sad and I was tired of feeling sad about it. Tired of thinking about it. So I "obtained" P90X dvds and did them between classes. I usually have a guy (50's, great shape, weight lifter, ex-HS wrestler/football player, ex-cop now engineer) from my later class join me as well.

Each routine is an hour or less. Includes warm up, main exercises, and cool down. Workouts include Chest & Back, Shoulder & Arms, Legs & Back, Kenpo (punck, kick, HA!), Plyo (jumping), Yoga, Cardio, Stretch, Chest-Shoulders-Triceps, and Back & Biceps.

I'll try to save my thoughts on P90X for another post, but, honestly, it's not that bad. If you keep certain rules in mind and use your head while working through them. And it does work. There are results. Not the extreme 3 month results that advertisements would suggest. Though I'm not sticking to the P90X nutrition plan, but following my own rules. Proper portion sizes. Lean meats (turkey, grilled chicken). Try to avoid beef and fried crap. Increase protein intake.

With the P90X & yoga mix, I'm stronger. Leaner. Up to 190 lbs. More flexible. Doing more push ups, pull ups, curls, presses, lunges, etc. So what are you guys doing? Give me the details. Tell me how it's going. How you feel. Goals.

To Bing or Not To Bing?

2009-06-19T17:50:00.001-05:00

Microsoft recently launched what it apparently hopes will be a Google-slaying new search engine called Bing. The guys in marketing were apparently quite deliberate in choosing a name for their new search engine that could be conscripted into service as a verb, a la "googling." You can see this in an open letter to users, in which the Bing Team enthuses, "We sincerely hope that the next time you need to make an important decision, you'll Bing and decide."

I spot three problems with this potential verb. First, written in its presumed participial and past tense forms ("binging" and "binged," respectively) "to bing" is indistinguishable from "to binge." That's not the sort of ambiguity that I'd generally like to invite.

Secondly, the nearest English verb prototypes for "to bing" are probably "to bring," "to fling," "to ring," and "to sing," all of which are irregular verbs. You don't form the past tense of any of these verbs by adding -ed. No, you turn them into "brought," "flung," "rang," and "sang." Try those endings out on "to bing": "bought," "bung," "bang." And now see how you like substituting those into the sentence, "Last month, I googled Sonia Sotomayor maybe fifteen different times."

(Imagining "bung" entering the vocabulary as a past tense verb puts an inexplicably resilient smile on my face, I have to admit.)

Lastly, the participial form "binging," is just an unpleasant mouthful to spit out. It rhymes with itself in a cloying, ugly, nasalized guttural way. Those double -ng's are just too much damn work. We put up with them in "bringing," etc., because those are part of our native vocabulary, but no marketing manager is going to get me to use as demonstrably foul-sounding a word as "binging" just because it was the best he could come up with.

The Bing people were right to note that the verb form "to google" gives Google a word of mouth marketing advantage. The word makes for a pleasant mouthfeel. But on the Internet, these verbs spring up all the time, even when they aren't quite so easy and obvious, as long as the service is actually good for something; "to facebook," "to imdb," and even "to wikipedia," are all verbs I've encountered in real life. So I'm partially annoyed that Microsoft ever decided to make the verbiness of its search engine's name central to its ad campaign. Build a better product, and your users will take care of the linguistic bits for you. But what sends me over the edge is that, having decided that it coveted Google's verbiness, Microsoft couldn't come up with a name any less problematic than "Bing" in terms of precision, morphology, and phonology.

The Sotomayor Nomination

2009-05-28T14:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I came across this in an opinion piece by Ilya Shapiro posted on cnn.com, criticizing President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court:

[I]n over 10 years on the Second Circuit, she has not issued any important decisions or made a name for herself as a legal scholar or particularly respected jurist. In picking a case to highlight during his introduction of the nominee, President Obama had to go back to her days as a trial judge and a technical ruling that ended the 1994-95 baseball strike.

Moreover, Sotomayor has a mixed reputation among lawyers who have practiced before her, some questioning her abilities as a judicial craftsman, others her erratic temperament, according to a piece by Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic, which itself has come in for criticism.

Such anecdotal criticism is to be taken with a grain of salt -- while Justice Antonin Scalia's bench-side manner is more vinegar than honey, even his detractors recognize his brilliance -- but it does need to be investigated. So, too, do certain statements she made in presentations at Berkeley and Duke, respectively, the former arguing that a Latina necessarily sees the law differently than a white man, the latter suggesting that, at least to some degree, judges make rather than interpret law.

Am I correct in reading this to mean that Shapiro's primary beef with Sotomayor is her lack of "brilliance"? I mean, he shrugs off criticisms of her demeanor (apparently on the grounds that any failing of Antonin Scalia's must not be a failing at all), but huffs and puffs that she is no "legal scholar," "respected jurist," or "judicial craftsman." Seriously, how important is brilliance?

Here's a lesson from the real world and the practice of law: past a certain point, additional intelligence provides only short-term advantages. Being smart means you'll pick up the concepts more quickly than others. It means you might be able to come up with cleverer or more intricate arguments, more quickly. But over the long haul, those benefits never trump experience in the trenches. Yes, the Supreme Court is a very important post, and an impressive intellect is an asset; but an astounding intellect is unnecessary.

Secondly, there seems to be something hypocritical (or at least dissembling) about Shapiro's admonition that Sotomayor "has not issued any important decisions or made a name for herself as a legal scholar or particularly respected jurist." To me, this reads as follows: "Judge Sotomayor has failed to leave a satisfactory smoking gun evidencing her liberal activism, which makes my job difficult, since I'm supposed to call her a liberal judicial activist. Therefore, I will paint her failure to stake out such liberal positions as evidence of her intellectual lethargy." In other words, had Sotomayor staked out any clever, novel, or interesting legal positions, Shapiro would be criticizing her for having taken those positions, instead of criticizing her, as he does here, for not having taken them.

Thirdly, Shapiro criticizes Sotomayor for commenting that judges make rather than interpret the law. If you read Shapiro's bio, you will see that he is a lawyer with an impressive-sounding resumé. This is surprising, because he is apparently quite a dim bulb himself. I attended a state law school, where I was taught by outspoken liberals and outspoken conservatives. Not one of them, regardless of their political persuasion, would have denied that in certain circumstances, a judge has the responsibility to make the law. "Interpreting, not making, the law," is something the public likes to hear about its judges, but it has never been the whole story.

Imagine this scenario: a criminal defendant has been tried in state court and found guilty of first degree murder. The jury deliberates, and votes 11-1 to impose the death penalty. A state statute provides that an 11-1 vote is all that is necessary to impose the death penalty. The defendant objects, saying that the state statute violates the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which ought to be interpreted to require unanimity in order to impose the death penalty. All the Due Process clause says is "No State shall... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." So which is it? Does the Due Process clause require unanimity or is 11-1 good enough? Either answer is plausible, but you can't support either one just from reading the Due Process clause. Say yes or say no, but your decision is not extrapolated from the meaning of the phrase "due process"; your decision gives meaning to the phrase "due process."

The take-away point is this: when the drafters of the Constitution or the legislation punt, the judiciary has to pick up the ball.

Lastly (for now), Shapiro criticizes Sotomayor for remarking that a Latina and a white man necessarily view the law differently. I actually can join Shapiro in being a little riled by this comment. Obviously she's playing to crude racial stereotypes here. Behind it is something like the ethnic imaginings typified in Jennifer Lopez romantic comedies: Latinas are all sassy hotel maids, and white men are all running for the U.S. Senate. You might as well say that black men and Sicilians necessarily have different views on the law—but then how do you explain Justices Thomas and Scalia? These are oversimplifications that should make us all blush, and frankly they're offensive.

On the other hand, by adding a little nuance, I don't think Sotomayor is very far from the truth. I think it's true to say that there are a lot of factors that influence one's view of the law (upbringing, religion, socioeconomic status, etc.), and many of those factors, statistically speaking, break along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. Because I am charitably-inclined, I'll spot her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that Sotomayor's comment was just ill-advised shorthand for the more nuanced version I've put forth.

Lip-Syncing and Musical Authenticity

2009-05-06T22:01:00.004-05:00

It's not the sort of thing I talk about with you guys, but for the last three seasons, I have watched American Idol. This week was "Rock Week," but we can talk about "Whole Lotta Love" another time. What I'll talk about now is Paula Abdul's turn on the stage during tonight's elimiation show, performing a song called, "I'm Only Here for the Music." If you can YouTube it—well—I still couldn't really recommend it, but what you will see is a fairly intense dance number coupled with barely half-hearted lip-syncing. It's bad enough to make you wonder why she bothered moving her lips at all, when it was clear that the dancing, not the singing, was the focal point of the show. I got to wondering just that.

Why do artists lip-sync? Let's break lip-syncing down into it's two, even simpler components. Lip-syncing consists of: (1) not singing, but (2) appearing to sing.

There are perfectly good reasons why an artist might choose not to sing at his "live" performances. He might be sick. He might not actually be a very good singer. The choreography that the show demands might overtax his respiration, precluding vocalization. If you were a fan of a certain kind of music, and of the stage show that most often accompanies it, this last justification would be particularly forceful. Think about Britney Spears and her "Circus Tour" stage show.

But what purpose is served by appearing to sing? To the pop music concertgoer, is your enjoyment of the dance numbers augmented by the fact that the artist's lips are moving? To the afficionado of musical authenticity, would your opinion of Milli Vanilli be diminished if, instead of dancing and pretending to sing, they had just danced?

After Abdul's performance, No Doubt performed "Just a Girl," and Gwen Stefani was awkwardly as frenetic as she was in 1996: leaping, writhing like a tsunami was running up her spine, maybe almost actually throwing elbows at the audience as she made her way back up on stage after jumping down among them. Her painfully live vocals were not at all spot-on, but I can't help but feel like a part of her energy was inspired by the impossible-to-the-point-of absurdity "vocal" performance that Abdul had just given. It was a fuck-you. She was saying, "Here's what it really sounds like when you dance while singing."

This is why I love Mike Leach...

2009-05-05T10:10:00.002-05:00

Aside from how much he whines, he might be more entertaining than Spurrier.

From Mike Huguenin at Rivals.com (story):

Third, Leach was incredulous that Texas A&M quarterback Stephen McGee – who was a reserve for much of his senior season – was drafted in the fourth round by Dallas (and Tech quarterback Graham Harrell – who led the nation in passing – wasn't drafted at all): "The Dallas Cowboys like him more than his coaches at A&M did."

Fourth, after Texas A&M coach Mike Sherman talked on back-to-back days about Leach's comments on McGee, Leach let fly again, with tongue firmly planted in his cheek: "I've always known A&M had great players. The fact that they have the luxury to put a third- or fourth-round draft pick on the bench, to me, identifies what a truly great team they are. It's an honor for us at Texas Tech to have the opportunity to play them. There are numerous players on our team that will never get a look or play a down in the NFL, so you can imagine how exciting it is for me and them to go play a team the magnitude of Texas A&M and look over there on the bench and see third- and fourth-round draft picks."

FCW: First Practise [Tag] Match

2009-04-30T09:55:00.007-05:00

So, last Monday we had our first tag matches. For me, it was my first practise match. 10 minute limit. Steve would watch our matches and give critiques post-match.

I was working with three guys I never worked or trained with before. They were always in another ring. My partner was fine, but our opponents gave me a bit of worry. One of them was the moonsault guy and the other was the guy who may, in some ways, be the worst of the bunch. I've no doubt that he tries his best, he's just uncoordinated. Confusing his left with right. Positioning mistakes. Going waay too fast and not thinking fast enough to keep up with himself. We'll call this guy "J" to make this story easy.

Pre-match, I wanted to just take it as it happens, but J was plenty nervous. So I came up with a beginning. Being the heel, I would play around a little bit. Once we lock up, J, being bigger than me, would power me around. Push me down. Back me into the corner, etc. When we locked up again, I would out chain wrestle him down and work on his leg as agreed upon. I also pointed out that we need to pace ourselves and slow it down.

So the match starts, I play around a bit. We lock up and J puts me into a headlock. Completely bypassing the opening setup of our characters. He then starts calling moves, something he said for me to do, and none of these moves involve me taking him down and working on the leg.

So I follow and the the opportunity arose, I put him in a top wrist lock and told him to work it (to make sure he didn't reverse it 2 seconds later). I took him to his knees and held the lock. I told him to keep it slow, work the hold. He looked confused as to why he shouldn't reverse. I then told him to slowly power up (making him look good). Once he he regained his footing, I took him down and worked the leg. Elbow drops to the knee. Leg grapevines. I then dragged him to my corner for the tag. My partner came in and worked him over.

At some point, my partner hurts his knee (for real) and limping jumps over to tag me back in. By the time I reenter the match, J's knee has magically healed (Hogan-style) and he's on a blind, God-knows-what rampage. It was horrible. I tried to lead him into moves but he was lost.

In one spot: he called for me to give him a fireman's carry, a move where I drop to my knees and flip him over my shoulders. I drop down and, instead of flipping over my shoulders, he falls with all his dead weight on my shoulders, neck and head, nearly driving my face into the mat.

In another spot, he takes me down and tries to apply the figure 4 leg lock, but gives up half way and expects me to sell it. I shoot a "What the...?!" look at the supposed leg lock, then to Steve, then back to the leg lock. A classmate called it a "Figure 4 Lay There". I grab his unlocked leg, flip him over, and transition from a leg lock to a headlock which got laughs and cheers.

In the final memorable spot: He shoots me into the ropes and I tell him to bend over. Bouncing off the ropes I flip over him and school boy him into a pin. Kick out. I call drop toe hold, where you drop down and trip up your opponents legs with your own. I drop down. Trip the legs. And J falls RIGHT ON TOP OF ME.

I sold the "splash" but J didn't know what to do. 10 minutes ran out and the match was stopped without a finish.

Steve directly critiqued everyone in the match but me. As of now, I'm taking that as a positive. I did try some different things. Saved some spots. And suffered for others. Now I just need to have hopefully better matches with better opponents.

Note this to facebook as well.

The Stir-Man's Mega-Update

2009-04-27T10:31:00.007-05:00

So, I've been locked out of facebook since....whenever was the last time I posted on facebook. The computers keep crashing here at the apt complex and they decided to install a internet protection program (K9) which blocks facebook. Maybe even worse, I got an okcupid email (as told to me thru lsu.edu) but I can't open it. All I know is that she thinks I look nice.

So, if any one of you could, please upload this entry to facebook and attach the usual names as my past posts. I think the only friend we don't have in common is Tommy Garza. Add'em and slap 'em on there. You can leave out the okcupid part.

FCW

So, our class has finished learning all the moves from the wrestling move/hold worksheet. Now we are either reviewing, cutting promos, and/or starting to have practise matches. Last Monday was our first practise match session. 6-minutes in length. Steve's only direction was show what you've learned. I didn't have a chance at a match along with a few other (ran out of time), but I saw some interesting stuff.

One guy tried to do a flipping springboard moonsault off the ropes onto another guy. The moonsaulter ended up landing on the guy on the back of his head/neck (he didn't completely flip over). It looked sick, but it seemed everyone was ok. The next class I found out the guy who got landed on broke off a part of his rib. The moonsaulter wasn't in class that day. I don't know what the hell that guy thought he was doing. It was the first practise match of a beginner's wrestling class. Some guesses are that the guy was/is a closet backyard wrestler. Completely stupid that the guy would take a chance like that, fuck it up, and hurt the other guy. As for the hurt guy, don't know if he'll be able to finish the class or not.

Protect your opponent. It's a law that's posted around the arena. That guy just wanted to look good, failed at it, and hurt someone. If I get paired up with this guy and he tries that shit, I'm moving. He lands on the back of his head in the ring and breaks his neck, I'll feel kinda bad but I'm not getting hurt cause of some guy with a reckless attitude.

The "main event" was between 2 guys who wanted to tear the house down, but tried waaay too hard and failed. They didn't communicate. Constantly got lost. One of these guys was Austin "The Mayor" from Canada. His practise match was alot like his training. Too intense. Too fast. Though he seems nice, he wants to be the best and prove it to everyone. But with all his intensity and selling, he forgets to communicate and even how to properly do moves. I'm a bit worried to work with this guy as well.

A couple Mondays ago, I was in class and, upon landing from a leapfrog, I must have rolled my ankle. Right afterwards, I knew it was hurt, but I thought it must have been only a slight sprain as it didn't hurt much. I redid the spot and continued. Once I stopped training and the adrenaline wore off, my ankle started hurting big time. I could barely put any weight on it and the walk back to the car was a long one. This was probably the worst pain I've ever been in. Now, for the most part, it's healed. Though I do still have some slight pain in certain positions. Back in action, I now wear an ankle support.

Three Thursdays ago, I made my FCW TV [taping] debut in a non-wrestling, acting role. I was a member of a protester mob against Steve and for a wrestler called Abraham Saddam Washington, who's working a heel/bad guy Barack Obama character. Washington was having a debate with Steve. Washington would answer his questions, but, when Steve tried to answer his, our protest group busted in the FCW arena and chanted "Washington!" throughout Steve's 30 seconds of response time. Rinse. Repeat. At the end, Steve confronted Washington face-to-face and Washington dropped acting as if he'd been shot. Our group pulled Washington out of the ring and towards the backstage area while chanting something.

A funny side story on this: 4 members of our group got to hold signs. During the end part where Washington is being pulled to the back by his secret service and us the protesters, I stole the sign from another protester (the blonde from class) and kinda charged the ring, pointing at Steve, yelling, "GET HIM BACK!", etc. I then made my way backstage holding the sign above my head, reversed so it could still be read.

Another side story: Afterwards, I looked at the sign I stole and saw that it said "Veto Keirn!". I crack a little smile as I realized that, with the little show that I put on, I did it with an incorrect protest sign. I'm pretty sure it should be "Impeach Keirn!". It would seem that I was up in arms about some bill Steve wanted to pass, I suppose the "Keirn Bill", and I wanted it vetoed.

The episode will air this coming Sunday at 6/5 central on Bright House Sports. If I can find someplace showing it online, I'll let you know.

The TV taping lasted from 7:30 till 10:30. They taped 3 episodes. I was there from 4:30 till as they wanted us there early to practise our roles. While waiting, I watched their heavyweight champion tape a promo. Took 2 tries. The first lasted 57 sec and the second was 1min 2 sec. The goal is to get as close to 1min.

Backstage were all the FCW wrestlers and several WWE/ECW wrestlers who still do the FCW show. Nattie Neidhart (Jim Neidhart's daughter). Alica Fox and DJ Gabriel. Harry Smith (son of the British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith), Tyson Kid (adopted Hart family member), Katie Lea, etc.

Afterward the taping ended, I was backstage shaking hands and watching some video of the taping (the wrestlers were watching their matches to review themselves). Harry Smith was showing some holds to another wrestler and asked me if I could help out, meaning have to holds put on me so the other guy could see the positioning. I said ok. He asked me if I was a wrestler. I just responded that I was in Steve's class. The holds were pretty tight and nothing that hurt much. I shook Smith's hand afterwards and went back to watching the video. A few minutes later, Smith came up to me and asked my name. I told him and he thanked me for helping out.

From reading wrestler books, I knew that letting another guy put holds on you is an iffy situation. The guy can push the limit, hurting you to make you "humble". While in a hold, I saw a guy walk by and shake his head, giving me that look that I was stupid to put myself in this position. Maybe I was, but Smith was a nice guy and didn't hurt me, even asking if I was ok. I'd like to think that by voluntarily asking for my name, that I got a little respect for myself from Smith.

Don't know how long I'll be out of facebook. Most likely a while as the liberry has it filtered as well. I know this is not what this site is for, but I'll try to keep updated through here (unless that's a problem). Whoever post this to facebook, maybe forward either the comments and/or the readers here so I can read them/respond. Also if everyone can keep me updated about everyone else as no facebook pretty much leaves me out the loop.

Too Many Friends

2009-03-17T21:10:00.003-05:00

Stosh,

We were talking a little while ago about the extent to which going away to college does or doesn't provide an opportunity to reinvent oneself. I came across an article today in the New York Times Magazine proposing that social networking sites might actually make this more difficult, since it's harder for, say, a Facebook user to make a clean break with his high school buddies.

I quote liberally from a passage that resonated strongly with me:

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

As Sean rightly pointed out, the pressure of one's past can be shut out from the present just by unplugging from one's old friends. I think the reason why in practice nobody ever does this is because, unlike friends who fade away in the real world just because you fail to contact them, Facebook friends hang around until you take the affirmative step of un-friending them. Nobody wants to have to take a step to affirmatively sever a social tie, except in extraordinary circumstances.

So is the mythos of college as a place for self-reinvention totally contingent upon the inconvenience of keeping up with one's old friends? And do social networking sites disrupt that inconvenience to such an extent that self-reinvention becomes too onerous to consider?

Bride of Pseudoscience

2009-03-13T18:35:00.005-05:00

It's in my nature neither to pay attention to, nor to write about stories as sordid and rubbernecky as this Rihanna-Chris Brown domestic violence story. But upon encountering this gem of a study, I couldn't help but bring it to your attention for your collective ridicule.

The Boston Public Health Commission surveyed 200 Boston youths between ages 12 and 19, "using the Chris Brown-Rihanna case to gauge their attitudes toward teen dating violence." All of the study participants had heard about the incident. Here are some of the results:

71% said arguing was a normal part of a relationship
44% said fighting was a normal part of a relationship
51% said Chris Brown was responsible for the incident
46% said Rihanna was responsible for the incident
52% said both individuals were to blame for the incident, despite knowing at the time that Rihanna had been beaten badly enough to require hospital treatment
35% said the media were treating Rihanna unfairly
52% said the media were treating Chris Brown unfairly

A few of these numbers are troubling. For example, how is it possible for 51% to think Brown is responsible, and for 46% to think Rihanna is responsible, but somehow, for 52% to think both are to blame? Mathematically and logically, it's impossible for more people to affirm the proposition "A & B" than the proposition "A." Does this turn on a subtle connotative difference between "responsibility" and "blame"? Or did the interviewers just ask one too many questions?

Secondly, how is the extent of a person's injuries relevant to determine their responsibility for them? I am right in reading that implication into the fifth statistic, aren't I? I didn't have to go to law school to figure out that the two issues are independent, but I did gor to law school, and we had this pointed out to us a lot of times in Torts. Just commonsensically though, if you step off the curb in front of an oncoming car, your injuries are your responsibility whether the vehicle runs over your foot and breaks your toe, or whether it sends you flying twenty yards and lands you in a full body cast. Liability and damages are independent issues.

Thirdly, and more in line with the presumed intent of the study, who are these 98 idiotic Boston teenagers wandering the streets thinking that a person isn't really to blame if he beats another person so badly that they wind up in the hospital? Are you kidding me? Newsflash, in case any of you happen to be reading: you actually are in control of whether or not you curl your hand into a fist, and hurl it with a high velocity into another person's cheekbone. Strange but true.

As irate as I am about this last statistic, you'd think somebody in the media would be talking about it as well. Wrong. See here and here. What's the most cited statistic culled from the study? I thought you'd never ask:

Of those questioned, ages 12 to 19, 71 percent said that arguing was a normal part of a relationship; 44 percent said fighting was a routine occurrence.

This is the news that has us fretting thusly?:

The results of the survey, conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission across the city and equally among boys and girls, are startling for local health workers who see a generation of youths who seem to have grown accustomed, even insensitive, to domestic violence."

I think you'd have to be pretty jaded if you weren't startled by it," said Casey Corcoran, director of the health commission's new Start Strong program.

I'm appalled. I'm appalled by the implication of these supposedly responsible adults that it is not "normal" to "argue" when you're in a relationship. Conflating disagreement with domestic abuse? Somebody should be ashamed. Woe to the teenager who buys into this crock of shit.

"Fight"? I just can't get too excited about 44% of youth thinking it's normal to "fight" with your significant other, in light of how broad the meaning of "fight" can be. It runs the gamut from simple disagreement, to heated argument, to knock-down-drag-out, to hurling a vase at the wall, to giving your better half two black eyes, and beyond. This continuum spans both acceptable and unacceptable behavior, so it's not very surprising that some kids think fighting is normal. If 44% had said that "physical violence" was normal in a relationship, I could see myself joining the chorus. But that's not what happened here. This study is plainly the unholy spawn of pseudoscience and tabloid publishing, so why are there people taking it seriously?

Sexting, Suicide, and So-called Sluts, but mostly just Sympathy

2009-03-06T19:46:00.004-06:00

Three weeks ago or so, I posted a critique of Dahlia Lithwick's Slate opinion piece about teen "sexting." Today, MSNBC reports that a high school girl has committed suicide following her decision to send a nude photograph of herself to her boyfriend. Apparently, after Jessie Logan sent the picture, her boyfriend forwarded it to others, and it eventually made the rounds to literally hundreds of students. Jessie was harassed at school for months, and eventually hung herself in her closet.

I feel bad about this, I really do, but isn't it totally predictable? This is what teenagers are like. The idea that this "private picture" would have remained private is hopelessly naive. Boys who possess nude pictures of girls show them to their friends. This I know from experience, except that in my case, it was just a seventh grade friend of mine sneaking a Playboy into the back of the electronics lab. Teenagers love a victim, and they particularly love to call slut when it stands a chance of doing real damage.

Maybe there was a time when a girl could get away with this without major fallout. Like in the age of Polaroids. She could have snapped a photo and slipped it in her boyfriend's locker. Still, it might have been passed around among his friends, but no way it would have been seen by hundreds. It might have passed by word of mouth, but it would have just been plankton floating in the deep blue sea of the high school gossip, and most importantly, it would have been hearsay. She would have been teased, but she'd be able to plausibly deny having done it, and it would all blow over.

Digital media makes this sort of thing that much more dangerous because it's so easily copied and transmitted to others (and without sacrificing one's own copy). Furthermore, the ease of duplication makes the meme practically immortal for anyone who wants to get his hands on it.

What distressed me most was this passage:

The school resource officer at Sycamore [High School] said he tried to do something about Jessie’s case. He said he confronted the kids who were harassing Jessie and even took Jessie's case to the prosecutor to see if he could press charges. But he said that because Jessie was 18, there were no laws to protect her. He said he'd like to work with the Logans to have the laws changed.

She was eighteen. She was so close to college, the part of your life where you really can, if you want to, reject everything that was ever said about your high school self, and start over fresh. You can reject the prudish but titillated clique that would torture you for something like this. You can lay down roots where they've never heard of you before. And you can conduct your naive, not-even-debauched forays into sexuality with relative impunity. Put it this way: I knew sluts in college, but I didn't know anybody with "a reputation." Even if a girl was objectively easy, she wasn't a victim of that fact; she owned it, and this was true to such a degree that (since, for me anyway, the centre hasn't held) it often registered more as a strength than as a weakness. Not in every case, but often enough to warrant my saying so.

Unrelated, but I wanted to welcome a new contributor, S. Not sure if you're going for anonymity or style on the name front. If it's the former, I need you to say so, because I don't want to accidentally "out" you by using your name, which I will most assuredly do eventually in the absence of specific instructions otherwise.

Also, good luck to Stirling at FCW.

Four reasons to wonder whether race plays a role in head coach hiring decisions

2009-03-04T07:18:00.003-06:00

Sean,

Just throwing out a few reasons why I think it's plausible that racism plays a significant role in keeping black head coaches out of head coaching positions in FBS college football.

1. You're right that the kind of probabilistic reasoning that I was engaged in will never prove that a particular decision not to hire a black man is racially motivated. The fact that African Americans are represented in lower numbers among the ranks of FBS head coaches than they are among the population at large doesn't prove anything. But it does lead us to ask for reasons why such a disparity might exist. It could be that white guys generally possess qualities that would make them better college head coaches, just as nobody seems to bat an eyelash if you draw a conclusion that young black men must generally have qualities that make them better football players than young white men, since they are overrepresented on the football field. But I don't think that my concern has been answered just because other possibilities are plausible. Speculation is all we have at this point, but I'd prefer to answer the question with data, if it were available.

2. You write that you can't think of a single instance in which a head coach hiring decision stuck out to you as being racially motivated. I think it would be surprising if one had. Your observation is salient for what it is, but it doesn't preclude use of race as a "tiebreaker." That is, assuming that a black candidate and a white candidate are relatively equal in terms of merit, a hiring committee still might systematically choose the white candidate. As long as the true basis of the decision is hidden, no one could reasonably accuse that particular hiring committee of racism. But if the same methodology is applied at a number of schools, the numbers would begin to look suspiciously like the ones we in fact encounter.

3. Racism could be outsourced to smaller schools or less pressworthy positions. Everybody knows that hiring a new head coach at a major conference school attracts lots of press scrutiny. This is less true at mid-major schools or in the FCS, and also of coordinator positions, position coaches, and the rest, on down the line. If race is used as a factor at those levels, it is less likely to be detected since people are less likely to crunch those numbers. But the results would still be felt at the head coach level because policies like these would yield fewer qualified black candidates at the coordinator level, or as head coaches at mid-majors.

4. You write that it's inconceivable to believe that anything matters to a hiring committee more than W's. Actually, I think you mention something that could matter more to them: $$$. You write as though there's a one-to-one correspondence between wins and profits, and certainly that correlation is very strong. But money comes from other places; in particular, from booster fund raising. If the hiring committee fears that the boosters will not take well to a black head coach (which would not be an unreasonable concern here in the South), then they might pass over a more qualified black coach on that basis alone, unless the expected profits from his greater number of wins would outstrip the losses the school would suffer from decreased booster support.

More on racism in college football.

2009-03-03T13:34:00.000-06:00

Much has been made of the relatively small numbers of black head coaches in NCAA 1A football. While I remain skeptical of how much racism is a factor, I certainly concede that it's a possibility, and despite my skepticism, I generally don't make much of this discussion. The big difference between this case and the Auburn case is that even though fingers were pointed in both, nobody was targeted specifically, and since there's no target, it's hard to make a case one way or the other.

As evidenced by the last three Super Bowls, there are clearly good black head coaches (although it might be a stretch to assuming good NFL coaches are roughly equivalent to college coaches). Like the Auburn case though, I started looking for other instances in which possibly more qualified black coaches were overlooked. Several web searches later, I hadn't come up with anything substantial.

About 25% of Americans are black, so you'd expect around 30 black coaches based solely on that. Furthermore, only six coaches in division 1A haven't had college playing experience, and easily more than 25% of college football players are black. It wasn't always this high, but in 2001, over 55% of college football players were black. Honestly though, it's a little strange to be talking about racial breakdowns at all in my opinion. If it were that simple, we could also say that black players actually benefit from racism. Saying that blacks are more fit to become football players isn't entirely different than saying whites are more fit to become coaches.

Being an SEC fan, I rarely pay attention to up and coming coaches. Most SEC schools don't have the patience to take chances on unproven coaches, although it happens on occasion. Looking just over the major conferences, no recent coaching hires have stuck out to me, at least from a racial perspective. Most schools take a conservative approach and hire the most successful head coach they could land from Div 1A. Occasionally, a top coordinator gets a head coaching shot. For the most part though, new coaching blood comes from the non-BCS conference schools, and I don't really know where those coaches are coming from.

One thing that I have noticed though is that there haven't been many decent black coaches in the mid-major schools lately. I can list several of the most successful mid-major programs of the past few years, and none of them have had black coaches. On top of that, perhaps the two black coaches with the most impressive resumes were fired last season. I think I'd still rather have Tyrone Willingham or Sylvester Croom than Turner Gill.

Perhaps I'm naive, but it still seems strange to me that head coaches could be chosen by any other criteria than the number of games they would be expected to win. I know there are academic considerations, but race has nothing to do with that. If I'm an athletic director, the one thing I'm asking is, "How many wins can you get for my program?" With most football programs more than paying for themselves, more wins equals more money and more prestige for the university. If there's a coach that can get one more win every couple of seasons, or even every fourth season, than the next best guy, I don't care what his race is. As far as I'm concerned, if he's black, you even get good press coverage as a bonus.

Racism in College Football

2009-02-26T11:29:00.002-06:00

Much has been made of Auburn's decision to rehire former defensive coordinator Gene Chizik over Buffalo head coach Turner Gill. At first glance, this deal seemed a little dubious, considering Chizik's recent record as the head coach at Iowa State, but I neglected to make a first impression. After further researching Chizik, and remembering that he was the very successful defensive coordinator for Auburn's undefeated run in 2004, and he immediately followed that success by leading the defense of the 2005 national champion Texas team.

His career as a head coach has been rocky in the emerging Big 12 north, but it wasn't hard for me to justify hiring a defensive mastermind with SEC coaching experience over any MAC coach. Certainly, there have been some coaching gems to come out of non-BCS conferences, with Urban Meyer being the most notable. Still, Meyer was much more accomplished when he was offered the head coaching position at Florida than Turner Gill is now, leading Utah to an undefeated season in a stronger conference and a BCS bowl victory. On the other hand, there have also been some successful head coaches plucked from the defensive coordinator position at major conference schools (such as Oklahoma's Bob Stoops).

My conclusion: no grounds for racism charges.

I didn't stop thinking about it there though, especially when I recently stumbled across some Auburn students discussing the issue on a web site I frequent. Not being huge football fans, they didn't have strong opinions one way or the other about whether racism affected the hire, but they weren't happy with the reputation their school has received from the incident. Just looking at the argument before, I hadn't considered the apparently lasting effects that this issue would have on the reputations of the school and its students. I know that in the long run, this too won't last, but for the time being, the media has falsely perpetuated the racist southern stereotype at Auburn.

I don't think I've quite proved my point yet though. Going back to Turner Gill, I don't think he's a bad coach. I think it's entirely possible he's a better coach than Chizik. I'll be the first to admit that Chizik's head coaching career hasn't been the greatest success, but let's look at Buffalo. Gill gets a lot of respect for leading the Bulls to a MAC championship, but most people forget that Buffalo was hardly the best team in the MAC. In terms of overall regular season conference records, Buffalo was tied for fourth. They led their division, but four teams had regular season conference records as good or better than Buffalo's, and being in the much tougher division, those teams went through tougher conference schedules. The MAC western division went 14-4 against Buffalo's eastern division. Even Buffalo was 0-2 against western division opponents in the regular season before upsetting Ball State in the championship game.

Buffalo clearly didn't get any top 25 votes, but how well did they do in the computers? They finished at #60 in the Colley Rankings, fourth in their conference. In Massey, they finished at #76 (#68 MoV), third in the MAC. I'll definitely admit that Gill has improved Buffalo's program over the three years he's been there, but is a #60 finish in the Colley Rankings enough reason to think he could succeed in the SEC in the recently upgraded western division? Chizik on the other hand, while not the head coach, played a significant role in coaching two consecutive top 2 teams.

The correct choice remains to be seen. As it stands now though, I would rather stand with Chizik. He's done a great job so far pulling in an impressive recruiting class, always a difficult task for new head coaches. He also gets points for stealing offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn from Tulsa. Malzahn, a former high school coach, has achieved great offensive success in his stints at Arkansas and Tulsa. I just hope this racist reputation Auburn has acquired is soon to pass.

Letter to the Editor: Wired Magazine

2009-02-23T18:15:00.004-06:00

It's not every day that I get to correct a major publication on some of the finer points of probability, so when the chance comes up, I take it. The full article is here, and the erroneous passage is contained in the fourth paragraph from the bottom of this page. I wrote:

"A Formula for Disaster" is a relatively informative article on one of the causes of the current financial mess, but it bears pointing out that one of Mr. Salmon's illustrations of the concept of mathematical correlation is misleading. In particular, Salmon writes, "And if Britney wins the class spelling bee, the chance of Alice winning it is zero, which means the correlation is negative: -1." It's true that this correlation is always negative, but the numerical value of the correlation is dependent upon the number of students in the class with Alice and Britney. In fact, the correlation of A and B will only be equal to -1 in the degenerate case where Alice and Britney are the only two students in the class. In general, assuming that every student in the class has an equal probability of winning the spelling bee (and that these probabilities can be accurately modeled as Bernoulli random variables), the correlation between A and B will be equal to 1/(1-n), where n is the total number of students in the class.

Wired is one publication where writing in geekspeak might actually increase your chances of getting your letter published, so I went all out. Sean, would you mind checking my math?

Racist? Really?

2009-02-19T20:19:00.006-06:00

Is this cartoon offensive?

I'm participating in a long-term survey conducted by politicshome.com, pursuant to which I receive one or two emails per week prompting me to answer a short series of opinion questions about the news of the day. This morning, the email contained the following sentence: "Today, we approach the delicate subject of race." I clicked the link, and was greeted with the above cartoon, along with some explanatory text:

The New York Post ran this cartoon in their newspaper yesterday, and it has sparked a controversy. The image is of a chimpanzee having been shot by police. The text reads: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." Do you think this is offensive?

The media has been all atwitter with the story of the woman in Connecticut who was almost mauled to death by her friend's trippin' pet chimpanzee. After the attack, the owner called 911, and the police were dispatched, at which point they shot and killed the ape. The victim was so badly mutilated that the police thought she was a man when they came upon her body. The last I read, she was in critical but stable condition.

This is what ran through my head when I saw the cartoon. I drew the conclusion that the cartoonist had in mind to intimate that the stimulus was such a poor bill that even a chimpanzee (on downers) could have drafted it. Which is pretty much what you would expect a New York Post cartoonist to say. So was it offensive? I thought that it was somewhat tasteless to take advantage of this lady's plight to make a relatively crass point about a totally unrelated political event, and particularly to do so in such a patently unfunny way. But tasteless isn't offensive. I clicked "No."

Still, I continued to think about it. After all, the email from PoliticsHome had primed me for a question about race. I am an intelligent and educated man, and I am by no means ignorant of the fact that the history of rhetoric regarding race in our nation includes not just a few instances of black men being lumped in with lower primates by people with political and eugenic axes to grind. So I sat a while and tried to spin a sensical interpretation of the cartoon that would play on that outdated and obviously offensive symbolism.

I couldn't come up with anything that made sense to me. For the cartoon to operate in that way, you would have to read it as blaming black people for drafting a shoddy bill, which doesn't fly, since Congress drafted the bill, and most members of Congress are white. Anyway, I finally decided, if there was an offensive racial interpretation to the cartoon, it was too subtle for me to detect, so I left my answer as it was.

It was only later in the morning when I came across editorials by Roland S. Martin and Keith Josef Adkins explaining what was purportedly offensive about the cartoon. Martin writes:

If you haven't seen the editorial in question, it shouldn't take you long to figure out that the subtle message was clear: comparing President Obama to a chimpanzee.

WHOA! Wait a minute! Seriously? I stared at the cartoon for five minutes, actively trying to suss out what was supposed to be racist about it, and I never, NEVER would have made this supposedly obvious connection. It makes no sense at all. President Obama didn't draft the stimulus bill; Congress did.

And now listen to Martin's explanation for why this connection is so obvious:

First, mixing the two stories [the chimp attack and the stimulus] is ridiculous. Yes, the chimpanzee incident and the passage of the stimulus bill have a lot of folks talking, but to put them in the same element just doesn't make sense.

Second, the cartoonist didn't hang a sign around the neck of the chimp, so he left it up to the reader to determine exactly who the cops were referring to.

As to the first argument, about what percentage of the political cartoons that you read make a hell of a lot of sense? My hunch is that this number hovers between 20% and 30%. As to the second, I think it makes my point just as effectively as it makes Martin's own: if it is "left up to the reader to determine exactly who the cops are referring to," doesn't that imply that the reader chooses whether to interpret the cartoon in a way that he or she finds offensive?

Adkins, on the other hand, didn't go out on a limb to say that the cartoon chimp represented Obama in particular, but did write, "I'm sorry, there's no way to interpret a cartoon like this except as racist filth." I just disagree. The cartoon clearly CAN be interpreted as racist filth, but only if the interpreter is predisposed to read racial animus into found cultural objects. I think it can be interpreted as just tactless and unfunny.

Look, I'm not accusing these two columnists, or the many people who agree with them, of manufacturing umbrage in response to the cartoon. I have no reason really to believe that they are being anything but sincere in taking offense to it. I suspect that this is just one area where different upbringings coax out wildly different interpretations of the same cultural object, and not a great deal can be done about that. So I recognize that it's possible to have caused legitimate offense without having intended to do so, and that maybe in such a case, an apology is warranted. But these cases of cross-racial misunderstanding are so common that it's time for both sides to start adjusting their expectations. As a white guy, I just don't have a radar for this stuff. If I offend somebody, it's not insensitivity or malice; it's just that I'm operating on a different set of symbols from the one that would help me avoid putting my foot in my mouth about these things. It's the same way that I can walk past a pile of dishes in the sink for days on end, as Katy steadily boils over in anger: to me, those dishes are not saying "Wash us!"

To finish up, I think it bears saying explicitly that white people generally don't assume that depictions of apes in editorial cartoons are representative of African Americans in general, or of President Obama in particular. Quite the contrary in fact. When I imagine a simian as a symbol for the chief executive, a president of a different vintage comes to mind. Anyone remember the Smirking Chimp?

Federal Funds are Nothing New in Louisiana

2009-02-19T07:07:00.004-06:00

Just quickly, I'm noticing that a lot of my more conservative Facebook friends are expressing their pleasure at the fact that Governor Jindal has indicated his willingness to forego the federal stimulus funds allocated to Louisiana in the new bailout package. Granted, Jindal has predicated his position on an abundance of caution, wishing to evaluate the "strings" that may be attached to the funds. But my friends seem to be approving Jindal's move on the more general basis that they oppose Louisiana's acceptance of federal money in principal. (Check out the comments to this blog post from the Huffington Post, for instance).

All I want to say is that as a matter of course, the budgets of every state, including Louisiana, include significant injections of federal funds. Famously, Louisiana long resisted increasing the drinking age to 21, until the U.S. threatened to withhold federal money for highway construction and maintenance unless the drinking age was raised. Louisiana quickly fell in line after that.

Anyway, if you oppose states accepting federal money in principal, you can't start and end your criticism with the stimulus package. There are veins here that run deeper than that.

Indulge my Curiosity

2009-02-17T21:34:00.003-06:00

The Catholic Church has been making a fair bit of news the past few weeks. On February 9, the New York Times reported that the Church is renewing the availability of limited and plenary indulgences for the first time since the Second Vatican Council. I won't try to give an exhaustive definition of "indulgences," but they apparently can shorten a believer's stay in purgatory, and played an important role in European history, as the impetus for Martin Luther's exodus from the church. Earlier, Newsweek reported that the Pope was making conciliatory motions towards a group of rogue bishops who formed the Lefebvrist schismatic sect in protest of the reforms introduced after Vatican II.

In isolation, these stories might interest me, but together I wonder do they constitute a trend under Pope Benedict XVI of backtracking on the Vatican II reforms.

Most famously, Vatican II got rid of the Latin mass. As a non-Catholic (and so from the outside looking in), it always seemed to me that this must have been a signifcant loss. Looking back at my own religious upbringing, I feel like I sort of missed out on the sort of ritualism and the incantatory effect that something like the Latin mass must have elicited. Right or wrong, I've always somewhat suspected that I would feel more religious if the clergy didn't expect me to be able to affirm that what they were saying made any sense.

I won't go any further down that particular rabbithole though for three reasons: (1) I'm not Catholic, so if I continue I'm bound to start sounding insipid and insulting, (2) ritualism comes with its own set of liabilities, just as an absence of ritualism does, and (3) it turns out that the end of the Latin mass was only the most visible, and by no means the most important, result of Vatican II.

The Newsweek article (which I cannot recommend highly enough) reports that Vatican II was the first time that the Church had recognized that "the human person has a right to religious freedom," and that it was this doctrine that incited Archbishop Lefebvre to split from the Church. To me this fact is shocking.

Sean, I wonder are the changes accompanying the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI being talked about locally, and how people feel about them. Are people even aware of the renewed availability of indulgences? NYT was reporting that it varied by diocese whether the priests were publicizing them or not. If people are aware of them, how do they feel about them? And how do people feel about conciliatory gestures towards the Lefebvrists? On the one hand, yeah, maybe schisms ought to be healed as a matter of course, but on the other, is the recognition of religious freedom negotiable?

Puzzling Over Some Wacky Ideas about Teenagers, Sex, Technology, and the Law

2009-02-16T18:37:00.000-06:00

For as long as I have been a reader of Slate, which probably goes back to around 2001, I have been a fan of Dahlia Lithwick's writing for the online magazine. Even before I'd settled on attending law school after graduation from college, I'd long enjoyed her Supreme Court Dispatches series, which summarized the facts of many of the more notorious cases on the Court's docket, the legal issues attending thereto, and often included transcriptions of the more raucous parts of the oral arguments. Good, good fun, to watch the Court, and especially to do so in the company of such an astute and professional Court-watcher as Lithwick.

Lately though, Lithwick's columns are falling short. A lot of her recent articles on Slate have been cross-published in Newsweek, and those articles have proven particularly lackluster. This weekend, she weighed in on what has become a trend in adolescent circles, namely "sexting," which apparently means taking nude photographs of oneself and electronically transmitting them to other teens. In a number of cases cited in the article, senders and recipients of the sext messages have been charged with crimes related to child pornography. Lithwick forcefully argues that such charges are inappropriate.

We'll assume for the sake of argument that the photographs in question actually qualify as prohibited child pornography in the prosecuting jurisdictions. It turns out though that this assumption may not be warranted in all cases. For instance, in Louisiana, the crime of pornography involving juveniles is governed by La. R.S. 14:81.1. Under that statute, a depiction of "sexual conduct" is required in order to cross the threshold of criminality, and "sexual conduct" is defined as "actual or simulated sexual intercourse, deviate sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality, masturbation, sadomasochistic abuse, or lewd exhibition of the genitals." From this language, it's not clear that a simple nude photograph would be covered; cases would presumably turn on how "lewd" a particular exhibition of the genitals might be.

Anyway, like I said, let's assume that the jurisdictions in question have broader anti-porn laws, or that the photos forming the basis for prosecution are particularly "lewd." Why then should they not be prosecuted? Lithwick can speak for herself:

One quick clue that the criminal justice system is probably not the best venue for addressing the sexting crisis? A survey of the charges brought in the cases reflects that—depending on the jurisdiction—prosecutors have charged the senders of smutty photos, the recipients of smutty photos, those who save the smutty photos, and the hapless forwarders of smutty photos with the same crime: child pornography. Who is the victim here and who is the perpetrator? Everybody and nobody.

Lithwick seems to be suggesting that, in these limited circumstances, child porn is a victimless crime. Of course, you could point to the analogous case of a drug deal: both the seller and the buyer can be charged with a crime. It's equally difficult in that case to identify a "victim," but nobody seriously thinks that a clearly identifiable "victim" is a prerequisite to a certain act being declared criminal. In the case of both illegal drugs and child pornography, the justification for criminalization is the same: when certain revenue streams cause aggregate damage to the physical, mental, or sexual health of the public, those revenue streams ought to be shut down.

Lithwick quotes a police captain in a Pennsylvania case, who argues that the prosecutions are justified, saying, "Once it's on a cell phone, that cell phone can be put on the Internet where everyone in the world can get access to that juvenile picture." She then trivializes his argument, writing:

The argument that we must prosecute kids as the producers and purveyors of kiddie porn because they are too dumb to understand that their seemingly innocent acts can hurt them goes beyond paternalism. Child pornography laws intended to protect children should not be used to prosecute and then label children as sex offenders.

Parenthetically, I'll admit that Lithwick is right on when she says that registration as a sex offender would be an inappropriate punishment for teenage sexting. Those registries are supposed to identify criminal sexual deviants, and whether it's good behavior or bad, nobody ought to maintain that the urges that lead to teen-to-teen sexting are anything other than mainstream.

But again, Lithwick's rush to identify the victim throws her off the scent of what's really going on here. This is not an exercise in paternalism meant to protect the interests of emptyheaded would-be teen sexters. Child porn statutes are meant to shut down commercial activity in contraband, and it is reasonable in that light to enact laws that would curtail production of contraband, including small-scale production.

And besides, the prosecuted teens will ordinarily be benefited by the same procedural safeguard afforded to minors generally in the legal system: prosecution before a specialized juvenile court, with relaxed formalities. Imagine yourself as the juvenile judge before whom a sexting case is brought. You have wide latitude in terms of punishment. Do you really want to put a teen sexter in juvy, much less in prison? No! Your role is the same as it is in the vast majority of other juvenile prosecutions: to ensure the offenders understand the gravity of the situation, the reasons why their conduct is prohibited, and to scare them a little bit. Then you assign them a few hours of community service. In other words, teenagers are already benefited by regulations meant to ensure that their punishment reflects their relative level of informal culpability.

But here's where Lithwick completely loses me, and it's a matter of sort of general penology, rather than something specific to sexting:

Many other experts insist the sexting trend hurts teen girls more than boys, fretting that they feel "pressured" to take and send naked photos. Yet the girls in the Pennsylvania case were charged with "manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography" while the boys were merely charged with possession. This disparity seems increasingly common. If we are worried about the poor girls pressured into exposing themselves, why are we treating them more harshly than the boys?

Allow me to retort with an example from physics. Suppose 10 pounds of force is being applied to an object, but you want the object to stay put. What should you do? Apply 10 pounds of force in the opposite direction. But if 100 pounds of force is being applied, 10 pounds won't be enough; instead you should apply 100 pounds. In other words, if you want to curtail girls sending naked pictures of themselves to boys, and they feel intense peer pressure to do so, a seemingly plausible course of action would be to push back harder, by increasing the applicable punishment to such an extent that it balances or overcomes peer pressure.

Now obviously I make no claims to expertise in child psychology, and can't vouch for whether the push-pushback illustration accurately models a workable incentive structure for teenage girls thinking about sex. But it passes the smell test anyway. Even if it's wrong, it's at least on the side of common sense, so that I think anyone who would take the contra bears the burden of showing why such an incentive structure won't work. Certainly it's not as mystifying as Lithwick seems so hellbent on implying.

But then again, maybe Dahlia's right. I mean, gang initiates feel intense peer pressure to commit murder. So maybe we shouldn't be so hard on them.

Retiring the Joker, a Test Case in Uncoverability

2009-02-12T18:19:00.007-06:00

I just wanted to post a quick link that has some relevance to the concept of uncoverability that I was writing about last week.

Apparently, a group of folks (purporting to be fans of Heath Ledger and The Dark Knight) are petitioning Warner Bros. to have the Joker retired from further film adaptations. Quoting from the CNN writeup:

Barbella said he thinks any new performance just won't be able to top Ledger's.

"He upgraded the character in a thrilling way," he said. "Although a lot of actors would love the chance to play the Joker, as Batman fans and now Heath Ledger fans, we think no one could ever perform it as well as he did."

Now obviously I'd be shocked if this particular campaign led to anything as official as a retirement of the Joker. But its proponents raise what appears to be a legitimate point: once this brand-renewal cycle for the Batman movie franchise runs its course, and some new upstart director gets it in his head to revive it again, would it be that shocking for him to voluntarily eschew the Joker character, given the outsize influence that Ledger had on the role? Imagine casting the Joker. Imagine directing the Joker. Imagine portraying the Joker for God's sake. Wouldn't you feel that what you were doing was somehow superfluous, and that somehow, the character was already locked down?

This has as much or more to do with the iconography that has grown up around Ledger and the Joker as a result of Ledger's death as it does with the unique quality of Ledger's performance, but I don't think that changes the truth of anything I've said here. Posthumously, Ledger's have become some very big shoes to fill, and, at least from where I stand now, it wouldn't surprise me if it takes a long time for another actor to try them on.

Kucinich to Citi: "We Own You."

2009-02-09T18:21:00.001-06:00

This morning I would have made my conservative father proud. While getting dressed, I quite literally yelled at Dennis Kucinich, who was appearing on CNN, "What are you, some kind of fucking idiot?" Kucinich was bemoaning the fact that Citi, after accepting bailout funds from the federal government, was applying a portion of those funds ($400 M) to become the name sponsor of the New York Mets' new baseball stadium.

Perhaps speaking as a sports fan, Mr. Kucinich's ire could be somewhat justified. I will be the first to admit that, say, the moniker "Minute Maid Park" lacks the magnetic hubris of the late, great "Astrodome." But do I want the federal government messing around with this stuff? No!

"We own you"? Really, Mr. Kucinich? Is that really what you meant to say there? Maybe people would be less put-off by you if only you were a bit less heavyhanded in your approval of actual, state socialism. I'm not the kind of person to make such a charge lightly; in fact, I don't think I've ever called any American politician a socialist, and where I come from, that's saying something.

Maybe it's worth belaboring the obvious on this point: Fortune 500 companies are not in the business of tossing hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing contracts without the prospect of a sizeable return. A part of any major corporate budget is marketing, and to go around clutching one's pearls because the titans of corporate greed failed to suspend their advertising budgets upon receipt of public funds just shows how ignorant (or vindictive) Kucinich and his ilk really are. Advertising is an easy target for these guys, because there's a popular perception that advertising is frivolous business, when really, I think that the perception of frivolity has more to do with the frivolous nature of the public that the ad business must appeal to, than with anything frivolous in the nature of the ad business itself.

Simply put, the money is not being "wasted" just because it's being spent on marketing. Did anybody accuse Apple of wasting money on advertising in the past several years? There are times when the better investment for the future of a business is advertising rather than maintaining jobs. To my knowledge, Citi has not been nationalized as a provider of unemployment benefits, at least not yet.

I don't want to be heard as saying that the mere fact that a large corporation spends its money in a particular way is evidence in itself that the expenditure is a good idea. After all, banks sank billions of dollars into subprime mortgages, and investment banks spent several billion more on the resulting mortgage-backed securities, and those have proven to be disastrous investments. But I think those cases are distinguishable. The mortgage catastrophe has an element of the sorites paradox: a large number of practically identical transactions, no single one of which would have sunk the ship, but whose aggregate effect was to do just that. Nevertheless, in order to be taken in by the logic that because one bad mortgage doesn't kill you, you ought to risk your entire business on bad mortgages required the banks to cultivate systemic ignorance in their employees and management as to one of the most basic functions of any lending institution: managing risk.

By contrast, Citi's purchase of naming rights is a one-off transaction. Sure, it could spell a net loss for Citi, but that's an inappropriate way to evaluate the wisdom of such a unique transaction on the front end. Citi has to evaluate the expected value of the transaction based on what it knows right now; not upon what it will know after twenty years, when the naming agreement terminates. And with a relatively limited number of similar transactions to draw upon, past performance isn't likely to be particularly helpful in this case. I see no good reason to stifle private investment just because a particular transaction happens to be relatively easy to mock.

I am no raving capitalist, but it seems disingenuous to me for the Congress to fail to regulate what the bailout funds could be spent on, and then fly off the handle, threatening hearings and bad press, when the funds were used to pay for perfectly predictable (if not necessarily palatable) expenditures like executive bonuses and advertising. The proper way to channel the funds as Congress intended would have been to attach the strings to the funds on the front end—take it or leave it—not to stage unwarranted attacks ex post. If Congress wanted to put quotas on the number of loans made by Citi and the rest, or on the number of jobs that corporate America should create, then it should have said so in the first place, and conditioned the bailout funds accordingly, since it has the authority to do so. But I seem to recall that Congress' forays into the home loan business had something to do with getting us into this situation in the first place.

My Chemical Romance Covers Dylan: I Have an Opinion About That, and It's Not (Exactly) What You Think

2009-02-04T18:26:00.012-06:00

I think it was Monday evening when Katy came home and told me that My Chemical Romance was contributing a cover of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" to the soundtrack of the upcoming film, Watchmen. Before even hearing the song, I was nonplussed, and remained so afterwards. They tossed some verses, sped it up, applied their traveling circus style of buzzsaw guitar, lifted a riff straight out of Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me," and got it down to 3 minutes. And they missed the boat entirely.

I should probably start by saying that although not my cup of tea, the problem is not that My Chemical Romance is contributing the cover. Katy owns two of their albums, I've listened to them, and I don't hate them as much as I'd expected that I would. At their best, they sort of succeed as a dark-ish party band; in some places they actually sound like a successor to Twisted Sister, not great praise necessarily, but not all bad either. My biggest complaint with them is that it seems to me that their lyrics could benefit from another several drafts before hitting the CD press.

My problem is also not the problem that a Dylan purist might have. That is, I think that most Dylan songs can and should be covered. In fact, off the top of my head I can name several covers of his songs that kick his album versions in the teeth and don't quit.

Anyway, those paragraphs were tangents. My problem is not with My Chemical Romance, and my problem is not that the Dylanography is inherently untouchable. My problem is with the choice of song itself; I propose that "Desolation Row" belongs in a class of songs which I will denote "Uncoverable."

In fairness, it was practically inevitable that any attempt to film Watchmen would involve a cover of "Desolation Row," since the graphic novel actually quotes the song. In that connection, I can't help but be reminded of the making-of previews for Watchmen, in which the director says, more or less, "A lot of people think of Watchmen as the unfilmable graphic novel." It just strikes me as interesting that in order to film the unfilmable graphic novel, you have to cover the uncoverable song. Poetic, kinda.

I've heard the concept of uncoverability floating around before. On Last.fm, I remember someone complaining about Johnny Cash's cover of U2's "One," saying effectively that the song was so personal to Bono that any attempt to cover it becomes automatically crass. That's not precisely what I have in mind. I think that a song is uncoverable when the original recorded performance is so radically idiosyncratic that it forces the potential cover artist into a catch-22: either he copies the idiosyncrasy, in which case it swallows up his own contribution to the project, making the cover redundant, or he ditches the idiosyncrasy, in which case everyone wonders what was the point of performing a song whose most interesting aspect has been extracted.

The best relatively contemporary example that I'm coming up with is Bush's "Glycerine." Uncoverable I say. Why? Because the arrangement is completely anomalous, and yet it works so well that a casual listener could hear the song a hundred times and never notice what it is that makes the music so haunting: no percussion. Only vocals, fuzzed-out electric guitar, and a string section. If you were inclined to cover "Glycerine," what would you do? Jettison the attributes that make it sui generis, by incorporating drums? Or play it straight, omit the percussion, and allow the song itself and its history to overpower your performance of it? (The tragic choice might be avoided through schtick, say, by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, but I have in mind serious covers, and not parodies).

So what is the radical idiosyncrasy of "Desolation Row"? I suggest you download it from iTunes and see for yourself, but failing that, read on:

First, at 11 minutes, 20 seconds, it is a radically long song, even for Dylan. The first 9 minutes or so are comprised of a sequence of verses featuring characters from and allusions to various works of art, literature, fairy tale, mythology, scripture, and history. Cameos are made by Romeo and Juliet, Cain and Abel, Cinderella, Casanova, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the Phantom of the Opera, among others. Neither the melody nor the arrangement changes appreciably during this section, though changes in diction and emphasis will help to keep you interested. Each verse is essentially self-contained and unrelated to the others.

The other thing worth pointing out is that, while there are emotionally touching standouts (like the Ophelia verse), between one-quarter and one-third of the verses are absolute garbage from the perspective of being well-written or interesting or insightful. In particular I'm thinking of the verses beginning "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood..." and "At midnight, all the agents..." (Interestingly, that latter verse is the one quoted in Watchmen). It's perplexing then, at first, that those verses are there at all, since the song is already too long, and nobody would miss them if they'd been omitted, since they bear no real relation to the other parts.

Then, after all these verses, there is a harmonica interlude, and after it, a final verse, wherein we learn that the foregoing verses were all contained in a letter received by the speaker. The final verse is the speaker's response, and he's having none of it; in fact, he's bored, effectively mocking the audience for any enjoyment it might have derived in the previous ten minutes:

All these people that you mentioned,
Yes I know them—they're quite lame.
I had to rearrange their faces,
And give them all another name.
Right now I can't read too good.
Don't send me no more letters, no,
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row.

And that's when it hits you that the radical idiosyncrasies at work in this song are the peculiar chutzpah that it must take for an artist to pull this sort of time-wasting, tear-jerking prank on his audience, and the charisma it takes to make them feel satisfied even after the rug has been pulled neatly out from under them. Dylan knows that he can string you along until the end, maybe move you to the brink of tears, or convince you to sing along, just by employing that timeless, nasal/gravel/gargle he calls a voice (maybe the closest we modern English speakers can come to hearing Beowulf sung), sprinkling some good lines and verses in among the bad ones, and mostly by appealing to the audience's ego: "I've heard of Ophelia!" It's Menippean satire meets the Shaggy Dog Story. It's the take that makes you love getting took.

And that's why it can't be covered. Now that "Desolation Row" is a classic, chutzpah and charisma are no longer required in order to get away with it. But it's the chutzpah and charisma that made it a classic in the first place. The reasons that undergird your desire to cover it are the very reasons why you'll never be able to bring anything to it that is new or interesting or relevant or really very good at all. You shouldn't bother trying.

Congressional Representation for D.C.: Why the Constitution isn't Really such a Big Problem

2009-01-28T20:32:00.005-06:00

The District of Columbia presently has no representation in the Congress of the United States. Why not? Because of the Constitution. Art. I, Sec. 2 of our founding document provides:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States...

Since D.C. is not a state, its people are not constitutionally authorized to elect a member to the House of Representatives. (Art. 1, Sec. 3 makes the same rule applicable to the Senate). If you wonder why this is such an affront, think about every income tax increase, declaration of war, imposition of the draft, etc., in the history of the United States, and recall that the residents of D.C. had no voice in the authorizing legislation, but found themselves just as subject to it as did the citizens of any state. It's practically imperialistic.

There is now a bill in the works to allocate one seat in the House of Representatives to D.C. (No plans for the Senate yet, apparently). The problem is that the bill is almost certainly unconstitutional. Like I pointed out above, the Constitution says if you're not a state, you can't be represented in the House. Not even an act of Congress can change that. It will take a constitutional amendment to properly get D.C. into Congress, just like it took the Twenty-Third Amendment to allow its residents to vote for President.

(There is an interesting Supreme Court Case, Tidewater, holding that Congress could constitutionally treat D.C. as a state for purposes of diversity jurisdiction, even though the text of the Constitution says that diversity jurisdiction only applies to cases and controversies "between Citizens of different States." Tidewater is probably distinguishable though, because the question involved there was not nearly as politically fraught as this one is. A court has inherent authority to determine the limits of its jurisdiction, which is all that the Supreme Court did in Tidewater; courts will tread much more lightly on the turf of the legislative branch.)

Anyway, I was reading today an argument from someone fretting the unconstitutionality issue, but urging the passage of the legislation anyway. His argument was that although the measure would be overturned in court, the legal turmoil would publicize the plight of D.C. residents, laying the groundwork for a later constitutional amendment. I have a better idea. Pass the unconstitutional law and don't sweat it; it will not be overturned anytime soon.

Just because a law is unconstitutional doesn't mean that Joe Schmoe can file a petition in U.S. District Court to have it declared unconstitutional. You have to overcome an initial showing that you have "standing." In general, that means that you have to show that the unconstitutional law is causing you a particularized harm, and that an order from the court will be effective to cease that harm. Now I ask you, who has standing to argue in court that the D.C. representation act ought to be declared unconstitutional? I've come up with two scenarios, both somewhat implausible.

Imagine that after the D.C. Representative is seated, he votes to enact a new federal criminal statute. The measure passes the House by one vote, is passed by the Senate, and signed by the President. Later on, a criminal defendant is indicted under the new measure. The defendant brings a motion to quash the indictment, arguing that he didn't violate the law because there was no law; the bill was never properly passed by the House of Representatives. It was only considered to have passed because of the improperly seated Representative from D.C., whose vote should not have been counted. Now, the issue really is whether the law authorizing a seat in the House for D.C. is constitutional, and the criminal defendant can clearly meet the burden of standing. The situation is implausible because it relies on the bill passing by one vote; otherwise it makes no difference how the Representative from D.C. voted.
The Constitution gives the members of each house the authority judge the "Qualifications of its own Members" (Art. 1 Sec. 5). They can and do sometimes refuse to seat members, as you may recall from part of the Rod Blagojevich scandal. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that the House could refuse to seat a Representative from D.C. on the grounds that his election would have been unconstitutional. If they do so, his recourse is to sue in federal court to have his election declared valid, at which point, the court will have to decide the issue of whether the statute authorizing his election was constitutional. The reason this scenario is implausible is that, assuming the D.C. Represenatation statute passed the House in the first place, it's doubtful that the House members would then turn around and refuse to seat the elected representative. It would take a big shift in the makeup of the House for that turnaround to occur; by the time it does, the congressman from D.C. may already be pretty well entrenched, and the political fallout from the challenge might outweigh the political gain.

Pass this statute because it's the right thing to do for the residents of D.C., and because it stands to actually do some good long before anybody racks up the standing to have it declared unconstitutional.

WrestleMania 25: Chris Jericho vs Randy "The Ram" Robinson

2009-01-26T13:17:00.003-06:00

So The Wrestler still has not appeared on Baton Rougean shores as promised, missing its Jan 23rd opening date, but the hype just got taken to a whole 'nother level.

As I have gathered while trying to remain spoil-free, the movie revolves around an aged, down-and-out wrestler, Randy "The Ram" Robinson, who finds himself with no family, friends, or career. Robinson goes on a journey to reconnect with his daughter and get a shot at "the big one".

I've no idea what happens at the end of The Wrestler, but it appears Mickey Rourke/Randy "The Ram" will get his final hurrah not at the end of the film, but on "the grandest stage of them all", WrestleMania, against current super heel Chris Jericho on April 5th.

This just might be the biggest thing to hit wrestling since Hulk Hogan vs The Rock at WrestleMania X8. First, we have a wrestling related movie that serves some justice to the industry, unlike David Arquette's Ready to Rumble. Then it's actually recognized as being a pretty good movie, not only by wrestling fans, but critics, too. And now we have Mickey Rourke bringing his character off the silver screen with Randy "The Ram" Robinson getting the opportunity to perform at WrestleMania in Houston.

For the movie, Rourke was trained by WWE Hall of Famer Afa "The Wild Samoan", so Rourke is suppose to have had serious wrestling training, unlike Jack Black's Nacho Libre. According to Afa, Rourke deeply impressed him and can be considered "one of the boys".

But can he successfully bring Randy "The Ram" to WrestleMania?

Non-wrestlers' wrestling matches tend to be fairly safe and non-eventful beyond the name value. Though Rourke and the WWE can go this route, it would be a poor choice. Likely the promotional main event of WrestleMania, all eyes will be on this match, fan and non-fan alike. As such, WWE needs to book this match to properly hide whatever faults Rourke may have due to his lack of experience while giving the audience a big main event match in content that matches the forthcoming media blitz. In terms of The Wrestler and the character of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, it's important that Rourke and the WWE step up to give a proper closing chapter to "The Ram". Much like Rocky Balboa, Robinson manages to find himself in the main event at a major promotion. It's not a matter of winning or losing. It's about going the distance and ending your career with satisfaction. Robinson has this chance.

So the stage is set for potentially one of the greatest WrestleMania matches/moments of all time. It's in the hands of Vince McMahon, Rourke, Jericho, and Rourke's insurance company. Let's hope everything works out.

Thank the Jesus that Nicolas Cage dropped out of the movie.

Hate Food, Lose Weight

2009-01-21T17:32:00.001-06:00

Katy and I started the South Beach Diet on January 12. I've been making an effort to work out at least every other day since then. So far, over a week and a half, I've lost 4.5 pounds. So that's progress.

But I have this inkling, this sort of tickle that arises from the junction of my meager education in physics, biology, and nutrition, and it tells me that I'm being hoodwinked by this diet. My intuition, aided by whatever foundations I have in science, tells me that the weight loss/weight gain inequality is actually much simpler than all this. I'm internally convinced that the rule of weight loss is that you lose weight when, over an extended period of time, your daily caloric output (metabolism plus exercise) exceeds your daily caloric intake, and it makes no difference where the calories come from.

Stirling, is this right? I mean, I know the diet is working, because I've been steadily losing weight. But I'm beginning to wonder if the particular way that this diet moderates my caloric intake is by making sure that there is nothing in my apartment that I would actually enjoy eating. I haven't had a Coke, or a potato chip, or a cookie, or a cracker in a week and a half. When I go to Subway for lunch at work, I have to get a salad instead of a six-inch sub because the bread has too many carbs. The only things I own are vegetables. And if I have to eat one more spoonful of ricotta cheese mixed with Sweet n' Low, I'm going to go completely apeshit. It is amazing how much variety your life seems to lose when you no longer have free reign over what you eat.

There are some upsides. For instance, I'm learning to cook things. I poached a salmon last night, and even though it didn't come out particularly tasty, it was still an accomplishment. And I can make a killer ham and mushroom omelet now. Breakfast has actually become my favorite meal of the day because the diet doesn't modify a typical breakfast menu very much—except that I would like to be able to have a slice of toast with my omelet, or a Pop Tart if I'm in a hurry.

Admittedly, I'm only in "Phase I" of the diet, which is the most draconian of the three phases. Starting next week, I'll be able to eat whole grain breads at lunchtime, and oatmeal for breakfast. But I don't think I'm supposed to have potatos again for the rest of my life. Seriously, Stirling, does carb-counting make sense, or does this diet only work because it makes me loathe the foods I eat?

Artists Offer Mindblowing APYs on Colossal Certificates of Deposit

2009-01-16T18:41:00.005-06:00

Marcel Salathé and Anthony White are a pair of artists undertaking a somewhat perplexing experiment involving art and economics. They take a canvas, paint words on it promising to pay a certain sum of money to the person who returns it to them, provided that person returns it during the month denoted on the painting. It looks like this.

You can think of it sort of like a certificate of deposit, except that it's on a square yard of canvas, and, if the maturity date expires, it won't roll over into a new CD; instead, you can't redeem it at all after that date.

My expectation would be that the novelty of a giant certificate of deposit that you can hang on the wall of your urban loft-style apartment with exposed ductwork would make these paintings sell at higher prices than CDs of the same face value that you purchase from your bank. Effectively, the artists ought to be able to offer a lower annual percentage yield (APY) than a bank does, because of the purported aesthetic value of the painting. In practice, this expectation has not always been borne out.

The series so far consists of six paintings, four of which have been sold. The maturity dates of two of the four sold paintings have passed (Bond Nos. 1 and 3). Bond No. 1 is pictured here to my left. Bond No. 1 promised $1,063 if it was returned during February 2008. The piece was sold at auction for $1,286. The painting was not returned, and so the artists netted $1,286. That's a good result for them. Not only did they sell a promise to pay $1,063 for more than $1,063, but the promise lapsed without being enforced. Not bad.

To my right now you'll see Bond No. 3, which promised $1,392 if returned during October 2008. Bond No. 3 was sold at auction on April 29, 2008 for $960, and was returned to the artists in October 2008. The artists then paid the returning party $1,392, and auctioned the painting again on eBay, where it sold this time for $242.50. All told, the artists netted a loss of $189.50 on Bond No. 3.

It seems to me that Bond No. 3 was worth well more than $960 when it was purchased, and that the reason it sold for so little must have had to do with the thin market (i.e., the fact that not many people knew about the auction). If you bought a CD for $960 that promised a return of $1,392 in five months, its interest rate would be 89%. That comes to a 144% APY. For comparison, if you buy a six-month CD from Chase today, it will buy you a measly 0.25% APY. Bond No. 3 was a steal at $960.

After Bond No. 3, the artists apparently learned their lesson, and stopped auctioning the paintings. Instead, they placed a fixed price on them. Bond No. 6, pictured at the top, lists for $2,699, and promises $3,658 if returned in November 2011. The comparable CD would have an interest rate of about 10.4%, for roughly an 11% APY, nowhere near as crazy high as Bond No. 3, but still a much, much better rate of return than would be available from a bank right now. In fact, an 11% APY is higher than you'd ordinarily expect in a decent year from stocks (and Lord knows we may be waiting a long time for another one of those); on a guaranteed investment 11% APY is mind-blowing. I say buy it if you have the cash on hand.

But doesn't this seem strange? Like I said above, the aesthetic value of the art ought to mean that the artists should be able to offer lower yields than banks. Instead they offer higher ones. It's almost like the aesthetic/novelty factor actually makes the painting worth less than a traditional CD. Are Salathé and White making a paradoxical or ironic statement about art values? Or are they just not performing the calculations that would tell them that they are grossly undervaluing their work?

Marvelous Word Clouds

2009-01-15T17:55:00.007-06:00

Just wanted to post a link to http://www.wordle.net/, which uses a Java applet to generate marvelous word clouds, either made from text you enter on the site, or text it imports from a blog you direct it to. To the right, you'll see the word cloud it generated when it crawled our site. In other news, we are huge nerds.

I also tried it with some of my old papers from college. Here's the cloud Wordle generated for my paper, "Beauty is Truth: Modern and Medieval Notions of Historicity in The Lord of the Rings."

I haven't beaten FFXII, and let me tell you why...

2009-01-14T18:28:00.001-06:00

Stirling,

I haven't beaten Final Fantasy XII. I've progressed as far as the City of Archades, and my game is saved in there somewhere.

That game puts me at odds with myself. On the one hand, the game is beautiful. The setting of FFX may be prettier in itself, but XII's attention to detail (and controllable camera) take it to another level. Also, the storyline is much, much deeper than that of any RPG I've ever played. It's full of intrigue, diplomacy, espionage, and statecraft, and all of its mysteries are only slowly revealed. Trying to keep track of the competing motivations of each of the characters reminds me of reading Balzac or Dostoevsky. And unlike in FFX, the voice acting adds to the appeal of the game.

But it has its own set of problems. Like FFX, it suffers from Yellow Brick Road-syndrome: the mini-map makes it so easy to determine where you need to go that you never really end up exploring. You just follow the Yellow Brick Road from the beginning of the game to the end.

Also, the characters are not very distinct from one another in terms of their abilities. There's nothing stopping you from making Basch a wizard, or Fran a tank. Just acquire the relevant licenses from the license board. Somewhat related to that concern is this: I can't remember a single instance in the entire game where I had to change out my party members. At first, you might think it's nice to only have to deal with the characters you like. But every time you go to the menu, you'll be reminded, like I am, that you're wandering the world of Ivalice with three characters above level 40, and three characters around level 12. This is aggravating, and a better-designed game would give you some sort of incentive to try different party combinations. But since each character is so customizable, there's no incentive to change party members to access new abilities. And since party makeup has no effect on in-game dialogue or cut-scenes, there's no incentive to change out party members to try to learn a different side of the story. Despite the fact that I've never used Balthier in battle, he keeps showing up alongside me, making quips and casting foreshadows.

You complained about the bosses and the random battles being too hard after a certain point. I agree with you about the bosses, but I actually never found the random battles to be too difficult. The only exception I've found is in the Jungles where the Viera live, there's a monster called a Hellhound that's obscenely tough for the stage in the game where you face it. Other than that, I didn't have too much trouble with random encounters. Bosses and Marks are another story. Marks especially so, but that may only be because I'm impatient and try to defeat them as soon as they show up on the bulletin board.

But I think what I may dislike the most about FFXII are the gambits. Because FFXII isn't turn-based, gambits are a necessary evil; although you can give specific instructions to your characters, to do so is so cumbersome that most of the time, you'd prefer to give them some AI governing what they do when you're silent. I always have equipped Attack Enemy with Lowest HP, and it gets you through random battles nicely. You can also equip Cure Ally when HP < X%. That's another one you'll appreciate if you've ever played RPGs before. But to give you an idea of how fickle gambits can be, I'm well over 40 hours into the game, and I still can't tell my characters, "If you're ally is poisoned, use an Antidote on him," with gambits.

The genius of turn-based RPGs is that slowing the action down allows one player to realistically simulate a strategy that might reasonably be adopted by three or four playable characters. It's not necessarily a non-starter to try to implement a realtime game experience if you supplement it with character AI (Baldur's Gate did a good job on this front); but if you do, the AI needs to be robust. FFXII's gambits fail miserably. You cannot implement a winning strategy against any substantial boss in FFXII using gambits alone. You always have to burst in with specific instructions, in which case the action freezes while you navigate the command menus, and you're left wondering what was gained by switching from turn-based in the first place.

The last thing I don't like about gambits is that they distance the player from the action. It used to be that you would deck your characters out in weapons, armor, etc., and then head out to smite some evil. Once you were in battle you were essentially at the mercy of your equipment if it was suboptimal, but you could limit the fallout by making wise commands. Gambits take your battle commands and make them more like weapons and armor and relics in that respect, since you're sort of stuck with the ones you have equipped. Admittedly you can disable gambits or override them with specific commands, but those are just small exceptions; most of your time in FFXII is spent watching your characters instead of playing them.

For all its faults, and I know I've been really hard on it, it really is a game that's worth playing, and maybe even worth loving. Somebody with less traditional tastes than I have might even be able to prefer it over the rest of the series.

Oh, and we haven't signed up for HD satellite service yet, because the HD-DVR receiver costs more than we want to spend right now.

FFXII Made Me Do It

2009-01-14T12:53:00.003-06:00

Ryan,

So the dude loved FFIX and Chrono Cross, eh? Good. I enjoyed Cross a lot. One of the smartest gaming-related decisions I made was ordering a copy from amazon a few years back. As we discussed before, Cross certainly does have a slow, near pointless start. Once you cross (ha!) the slump hump, things do get better and the game settles into the very good-to-great category. Or at least, I think it does. From what I've read, most people either hate CC or love it. They're diehards one way or the other. Though some of the diehard love may be embellished by the diehard hate that the game unfairly receives.

As far as criticisms, FFIX seems to be in the same boat as CC, interestingly enough. There's either blind hate or blind love. It's been called the worst FF as well as the best. I bought my copy. We'll see.

No, you're not a part of the fanboys I referred to. FF7, as the first mega successful "mainstream" RPG, brought many fans to the playstation brand and to Final Fantasy/RPGs. There's an unholy sect of FF7 fanboys whose RPG resume' began, and in some cases ended, with FF7. These are the fanboys who will have no part of any earlier FF and bitch about every subsequent post-FF7 Final Fantasy because it's not FF7. These are the fanboys who want an FF7 remake simply because they want to play a "real" FF again. I want an FF7 remake because the original's early 3D visuals are a facepalming eyesore.

Have you finished FFXII? I was hyped for that game. A major FF in the FF Tactics universe?! Sign me up. Loved the art style and the characters were cool. No one got on my nerves. The story, from what I played, had me intrigued and seemed like it was going places. The battle system killed me. I don't have to love an RPG's battle system to enjoy or just simply play the game. And I didn't mind FFXII's, until you got to the point where "random" enemy encounters were unnecessarily difficult and damaging to your party and the boss battles were encounters seemingly based purely on luck. Against my will, that battle system drove me to, if not hate the game, then put it back on the shelf unfinished (which is almost the same thing). Every once in a while, I'll pop the game back into the PS3 only to once again place it back on the shelf an hour or so later. I got the limited edition, though, so at least the box is nice to look at.

Nice TV, btw. Watch The Dark Knight on that bad boy? Or RAW in HD?

Review of the Good Installments in the Final Fantasy Franchise

2009-01-13T17:42:00.004-06:00

Stirling,

I never played a lot of FFIX, but a friend of mine had it in high school and he liked it. This was the same friend who introduced me to Chrono Cross. He loved both games, but I never played far enough in either one to really see the appeal. I'm not saying they're not good games, but my attention span expired before I got to the good stuff apparently.

Maybe to stray from your topic a little bit, but Katy and I last week purchased our first HDTV, and so (as soon as she would let me) I pulled out all my old RPGs to see what they looked like on the bigger screen. Maybe I'm only being nostalgic, but in my opinion, the newer FFs don't have nearly the heart or the replay value of the older ones.

No single-player game of its era, for any system, by any publisher, or in any genre, is as replayable as Final Fantasy I. There are 126 distinct party combinations, and I'd be misleading you if I said that I don't want to someday beat that game with each and every one of them. Sure, the plot lies somewhere on the continuum between simplistic and non-existent, the magic system is outdated, and your party members will occasionally attack monsters that are already dead. I don't care. Yeah, yeah, the status and equipment menus are poorly integrated, being poisoned alters your party order, and sometimes you'll get killed by a roving band of Sorcerors before you can peel off a single round of attacks. I don't care. It still sets the standard for how attention-hogging an RPG should be. When I'm bored, I'm still more likely to pick FF1 up than any other RPG I own. I will admit that I'm probably lucky that FF1 was my first RPG experience, since its clunkiness would have been more readily apparent if I'd played others first.

I'll skip down to FFVI, although I could certainly sing the praises of IV and pass mild judgment on V. Final Fantasy VI is the best RPG ever. I said it. Ever. There is more in there to see, to do, to find, and to equip than there ever has been in any other RPG. There are 14 playable characters, and only a handful of them are throwaways. Each one is distinct in terms of personality and equipment. And the level of certitude that the game achieves in terms of the effects of elemental magic and weapons is superior to that of any game before or since. And maybe what I love about this game the most is that getting the best weapons, armor, and items in FFVI does not necessarily require you to go to GameFAQs or buy a strategy guide (except for the Paladin Shield); FFVI rewards patience and cleverness, without requiring you to be an insider.

Final Fantasy VII. I don't think I fall into the camp of fanboys that you loath, Stirling, but this game is another one that's pretty much spot-on. It's the first time that the English translations from Japanese started to sound relatively fluid and natural. (With some exceptions!) It's throughgoing storyline is superior to that of any FF before or since, with the possible exception of XII. And I do prefer materia over magicite. But in every other respect, I prefer VI over VII. Most of the characters in FFVII are totally peripheral. That includes Barrett, Red XIII, and Vincent, but I'm referring especially to Yuffie, Cait Sith, and Cid. The Cloud-centricity of the plot makes these characters' side quests feel that much more tacked-on. Also, I sort of feel like there's less to find in FFVII, and even after you find it, it's not as interesting as the stuff you found in FFVI. Once they decided to make weapons customizable by equipping materia to them, they limited how much interest the weapons themselves could hold. Weapons became reduced to battle power, hit rate, materia slots, materia growth rate, and ability bonuses. But that meant that you'd no longer find weapons with elemental effects, or that cast spells randomly upon striking, or that consumed MP to cause a critical hit. If you wanted such a weapon, you had to create it by equipping materia. Which is fine for what it is, but the more ground the game designers cede to in-game customization, the less the game draws on the old swords and sorcery motifs that made RPGs appeal to me in the first place.

But it's really only in FFs X and XII (among the ones I've played) that the in-game customization reaches such an epic scale that it becomes an actual turnoff. Come to think of it, in-game customization is probably at least a part of what makes FFV a few tiers below the best of the series as well. Since this is getting pretty long already, I'll save my rants on those games for another time.

Waiting for Squeenix

2009-01-11T10:57:00.011-06:00

When one thinks of video games, surely one thinks of a particular company. That would be Nintendo. If you were to continue on, you'd probably list Capcom, Konami, Sega, Data East, Sunsoft, Rare, Grasshopper, Activison, Acclaim, and the list goes on....

....oh! and you might think of another company. First Square, then Squaresoft, and finally Square-Enix.

Unless you bought a Nintendo 64 or a Gamecube, you'd be hard pressed to NOT find a multitude of Square games.

The NES was given Final Fantasy I, II, & III among other Square products.

The SNES got Final Fantasy IV, V, & VI, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, etc.

The PSX got an assload of Square with Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, & Tactics, Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Bushido Blade 1 & 2, Parasite Eve 1 & 2, Brave Fencer Musashi, plus various Final Fantasy/Chrono Trigger remakes/re-releases, Japanese wrestling games, and other products.

The PS2 continued the assloading with Final Fantasy X & XII, Dragon Quest 8, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, Grandia 3, Radiata Stories, Musashi: Samurai Legend, Drakengard 1 & 2, and the list goes on.

But something happened. Once considered progressive and infallible, Square merged with Enix in 2003 to become an assumed megapower.....but that hasn't really happened.

Once content to not revisit past franchise installments, Squuenix has continually re-released old games on new formats often with little enhancements. See the many Final Fantasy re-releases on the PS1, Gameboy Advance, and DS.

Considering the lasting popularity of Final Fantasy 7, fanboys happily rioted when Squeenix announced the "Compilation of Final Fantasy 7", games that would revisit and explore the Final Fantasy 7 universe and characters. Fanboys rioted again when these games sucked. There were two cellphone games (ugh!), a 3rd person shooter starring Vincent, a CGI film Advent Children (that forgot to render a plot along with its flashy visuals), and an animated OVA. A prequel FF7 game was released for the PSP following Zack Fair recently, and it's considered to be the sole good product to come of this compilation, but it's also considered too little too late. Nearly four years ago, Squeenix showed off a PS3 tech demo of Final Fantasy 7. The hype flood began until Squeenix killed it off announcing that the tech demo was JUST a tech demo and that FF7 was not being remade. Since a remake of FF7 is the only thing anyone has ever been asking for, kinda lame one must settle for shooters and cellphone games that "expand" the FF7 universe.

And now I find myself waiting..........waiting for Squeenix who seems yet to have caught up with the next (now current) generation of hardware with exciting, must have, Square-quality games.

There's Final Fantasy XIII & Final Fantasy Versus XIII which we've seen videos of for the past couple years. These are set for release God knows when, maybe next year.

If you're a WiiBoy, you only have Final Fantasy Crystal Chonicles: My Life as a King, a downloadable Wiiware title, and Dragon Quest: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, a point click/action RPG lite type thing. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers looks interesting with its steampunk style and the main character being a renowned superhero, but Squeeinx has promoted little of the title. Thought to have been quietly canned, Squeenix confirmed it was still in development, then went right back to showing nothing.

Outside of FF13, the Wii will be home to Squeenix's biggest game if this gen, the recently announced Dragon Quest X. Toasty!

If you're an HD boy, you don't have much to play with on the PS3 or 360. The Last Remnant and Infinite Undiscovery were RPGs meant to satisfy Western gamers, but has shown to have satisfied few.

Star Ocean, the two Final Fantasy XII games, Kingdom Hearts III, and whatever else in the HD-pipeline could and hopefully does change this.

As of now, your home for quality Squeenix is the Nintendo DS. There's the 3D remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV, re-release of Chrono Trigger that can be seen as an "ultimate edition" of sorts, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (a sequel to FF12), The World Ends With You, etc.

I've yet to dive into the FF3 & 4 remakes, but their receptions were positive. With portable gaming possible becoming the most convenient form of gaming for me, I may jump in pretty soon.

On the other hand, I have played the re-released Chrono Trigger and The World Ends With You.

Chrono Trigger didn't get the 3D upgrade, which sucks, but the 2D sprites appear sharper than before. There are many options for this game, providing the best of the SNES & PSX Triggers with the added comfort of the DS's dual screens. There's no enforced touching, which is a plus. Two new dungeons along with a new final boss have been added. These additions provide new backstory to further flesh out the events transpiring between Trigger and Chrono Cross. Though not 3D, it's the best Chrono Trigger release and worth having.

The biggest [positive] Squeenix surprise is a new IP, The World Ends With You (aka "It's A Wonderful World" in Japan). With an interesting artstyle and premise as while as excellent execution, it's the Squeenix game I didn't know I wanted.

Add to that, the DS is also getting Dragon Quest IX this year.

But that's handheld. Where's our console Squeeinx?! Since 2006 we've been promised much. Near three years later, they're delivered little. Hell, hardly any! We're still seeing non-in-game videos of the Final Fantasy XIIIs. Still nothing on Kingdom Hearts III. The Chrono announcement proved not to be a third game nor a 3D remake. Dragon Quest IX was "lost"to the DS. Dragon Quest X has been announced for Wii, but that's still a couple years off at best.

One might as well venture outside and have a social life, maybe even tan, as we wait for Squeenix.

Lastly, anyone have any opinions on Final Fantasy IX? I keep reading that its the best of the PS1 FFs, but also the most overlooked (along with Chrono Cross) as it was released just before the PS2. It's going for $15 new on amazon and I'm probably going to buy it at some point.

Quantitative Analysts of the World Unite!

2009-01-07T22:30:00.004-06:00

Just wanted to post a quick link to an article by Bill James, a statistician, advocating that quantitative analysts effectively go on strike by refusing to allow the BCS to incorporate their computer rankings in its algorithm. Among other things, he points out that the BCS limits the computer rankings' inputs to such an absurd degree that it's impossible for them to make unique and meaningful contributions.

More interesting is James' assertion that participation in the BCS actually hurts the reputation of the field of quantitative analysis, since rightly or wrongly, when the BCS malfunctions, the knee-jerk reaction from practically everybody is to blame the computers. He says statisticians should refuse to continue playing whipping boy for the BCS. The BCS can hang itself with its own rope.

Aesthetic Experiences for Artists

2009-01-07T18:34:00.000-06:00

Sean,

I think you put your finger on something interesting where you suggest that it's easier to admire a work of art when one's own fingerprints are not the only ones on it. I think you're right that Vinnie might have an easier time admiring Less Than Jake's output as a result of its collaborative nature. But more on that in a second.

Likewise, I accept your correction regarding the chronological perspectives (short versus long term) from which Vinnie and Joey, respectively, were speaking. As I was wrapping up my last post in this thread, I think I had come to the conclusion that, really, that distinction was less important than the one between Joey speaking as an artist and Vinnie speaking as a promoter, but I never got around to saying so.

But let me go back to what you said about it being easier to appreciate other people's work than one's own. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's even possible to have an aesthetic experience of one's own work. I mean, I can talk about liking or not liking "Beer Goggles" using the same language that Joey Cape can. But if I say that I don't like it, do I mean the same thing that he means when he says that he doesn't like it? I don't think so.

It seems to me that as a listener, when determining whether I like a song, I determine how much awe it puts me in. (Of course, I'm using that word to cover more ground than it ordinarily would). But as a writer of music, if I ask myself whether I like a song I've written, I determine how much pride it induces in me. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me that there is a qualitative difference between pride and awe; that is, a difference other than whether the emotion is self- or other-directed.

To put it in particulars, to the extent that I admire a poem that I've written, I don't think that my emotions are so much different from those of a contractor who admires the building he's just erected, or of a mechanic who admires his handiwork in repairing a broken engine. With respect to my own work, I can't get past the pre-aesthetic level: the level of craftsmanship. My emotions when reading my own work bear no resemblance to my emotions when I read Tennyson's "Ulysses" or Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium"; those works elicit a tingle in me that my own do not, and I don't think it's only because they are much, much better than mine.

Concerning the differences between Joey Cape and Vinnie

2009-01-06T21:19:00.003-06:00

Ryan, you made an excellent point about comparing Joey and Vinnie, but I don't know that it's quite apples to oranges in the way you suggested. Going back to Joey's interview, after mentioning the time and work spent writing songs, then the recording phase, and then on to producing, Joey finishes by saying, "By the time a record comes out, I usually, really honestly never want to hear it again." Considering Vinnie already had a cut of the album, I don't think they're quite so far apart in terms of perspective.

I think the reason it might be wrong to compare them has more to do with their respective roles. Vinnie writes lyrics and plays percussion, but most of the composition duties fall to Chris and Roger, and I'm not really certain how involved Vinnie is with the recording and production. On the other hand, Joey Cape does all the writing, most of the composing, and is very involved in all phases. I didn't take into account that Joey was responsible for a much higher percentage of his music. While I still don't care for how much Vinnie loved the new album, I don't think it's nearly as tasteless when we consider that he could legitimately be enjoying the work of his bandmates rather than his own contributions.

I also agree that there must have been some stage in the process where Joey Cape appreciated his work, and I think I would have pressed him a bit further on that issue if I were conducting the interview. Just as not being satisfied helps you grow, there still must be some degree to which you appreciate your work, because how else can you distinguish between bad, good and better? I think I would have asked him to look back at all his experiences through all stages of writing songs, and if he could, pick the one song that gave him the most momentary satisfaction with his efforts as an artist. Or more simply, which song was he most proud of at any given moment?

Against Playoffs

2009-01-06T17:47:00.005-06:00

The college football postseason winds down Thursday night when the Oklahoma Sooners and the Florida Gators finally meet in Miami. For a lot of people, the BCS national champion is going to be crowned illegitimately, because the system used to select the champion does not involve a playoff. The debate over a playoff in college football has raged for a long time, but as far as I'm aware, advocates of the system presently in place have always played defense in these debates. They say that the present system preserves the importance of the regular season; that it preserves the unique pageantry of the bowl season; they say that college football already has a playoff, and it's called the regular season.

What they don't say is that a playoff is a less efficient and less accurate method of determining the national champion than the present system is. Maybe they should.

The idea of crowning a champion is that we want to recognize the "best" team. Underlying this definitional matter is the assumption that each year, there is one, unique, "best" team. The hard part is identifying the best team. All systems will identify the wrong team as the best occasionally; the goal should be to maximize the percentage of seasons when the correct team is identified.

A playoff has its good points in this analysis. By giving more than two teams a chance to play for the title, a playoff increases the probability that the best team will make it into the mix. But there's a countervailing concern. The more teams allowed into the playoff, the more rounds it will require; the more rounds it requires, the more likely it is that the best team will lose.

That's right, because sometimes deciding it on the field means the better team loses. According to Coleman's rankings, which minimize the number of losses by a higher ranked team to a lower ranked team, the better team lost to the worse team no less than 9.22% of the time during the 2008 regular season. It's likely though that these so-called ranking violations occur more often than strictly mathematically necessary. Massey's consensus rankings—which are more in line with popular opinion than Coleman's are—place the percentage at 18.4%.

Note also that those numbers are across all games; where the opponents are more evenly matched, as they would be in a playoff scenario, the numbers would be significantly higher. So let's say that among the top 32 teams, the weaker beats the stronger with a probability of 32%. In each round, as the competition gets stiffer, the probability that the weaker beats the stronger increases by 4%, so that in the final round, the weaker team has a 48% chance of beating the stronger team. Obviously these assumptions are simplified (especially since they ignore the effects of seeding), but they seem reasonable enough.

So now let's estimate the probability that the best team will be included among those invited to the playoffs. Here, I'll fly a little more by the seat of my pants and say that the probability that the best team is among the top 2 is 50%; the probability that it's among the top 4 is 75%; the probability that it's among the top 8 is 87.5%; and so on.

So to calculate the probability that the best team is crowned champion, we multiply the probability that it has been invited by the probability that it wins all of its games once it's there. Let's see:

2 team playoff (current system):
P = 0.5 x 0.52 = 26%

4 team playoff:
P = 0.75 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 21.84%

8 team playoff:
P = 0.875 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 15.29%

16 team playoff:
P = 0.9375 * 0.64 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 10.48%

32 team playoff
P = 0.96875 * 0.68 * 0.64 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 7.37%

Based on my numbers, which clearly are open to debate and criticism, the current system gets it right more often than any of the extended playoff scenarios, crowning the correct champion a whopping 26% of the time. (One of the interesting things revealed by this exercise is just how pathetic even the best system is in the face of a problem this intractable).

A rejoinder from the pro-playoff camp at this point might be that the point of a playoff is not to crown the "best" team, but rather to crown the team that has accomplished something great, the team that is the last one standing atop a pile of defeated contenders. A playoff is a well-honed instrument for ensuring that this is the result: at the conclusion, one entrant is undefeated, and the rest have one loss. No arguments.

But that structure is wholly artificial. We all know that it's a mathematical impossibility to answer the question "Who's the best?" by answering the question "Who beat whom?" The regular season is full of contradictions and vicious circles that have to be wrestled into submission, not casually cast aside. A playoff is a machine that is not engineered to crown the best team; it is a machine engineered to put an end to arguments, without regard for whether the champion it produces is the best team or not.

What I will say for it, though, is that it would make for quite a spectacle.

The Vinnie Paradox

2009-01-05T17:54:00.013-06:00

Sean,

Speaking from my own experience writing music, poetry, and prose, I can say that if I work at it for a sufficient amount of time, I can come up with something that I love. On the other hand, virtually without fail, if I come back to that same work a year or two later, its flaws are obvious to me, and I'm embarrassed to have ever loved it, and I hate it a little for not being as good as I remember.

I think something like that could account in part for the difference between Joey Cape's opinion of his work, and Vinnie's of his own. Joey Cape was clearly taking a long-haul perspective, whereas Vinnie was talking about an album that was still fresh and new to him. The two are apples and oranges.

At the same time though, I won't fault you for feeling that Vinnie's extollation of the new album was a turnoff. Vinnie is in a tough spot, because he has always taken such an enthusiastic approach to promoting LTJ and all the bands on Fueled by Ramen. Back when the albums were unmitigated triumphs (like Losing Streak and Hello Rockview), his enthusiasm felt warranted. But as the quality of the music has steadily declined, Vinnie's rhetoric hasn't changed a bit, and as a result, he's started to sound shrill and hucksterish. When he says the new album is great, I have a hard time thinking anything except, "That's what you said last time."

The problem for Vinnie has got to be that he's taken it upon himself to be the band's biggest promoter, and that fact clouds his view of what he's accomplished (or failed to accomplish) as an artist. I don't think we'll ever hear him say that in retrospect Anthem and In With the Out Crowd disappoint him artistically, because he spilled so much ink telling us how great they were during their promotional phases. He may be so far gone at this point that he could never even imagine the albums being anything less than superlative, the dual roles of artist and promoter having become so intertwined. And even if he can bring himself to think it, he certainly can't say it, because it would look like he had been lying to the fans in the first instance. Still, I think that if we could retroactively split those two roles, and somehow talk to just Vinnie the artist (not Vinnie the promoter), he'd sound a lot more like Joey Cape does in the interview you quoted.

I'll add that I think there's something really embarrassing and gauche and tasteless about writing to one's fans that you've been driving around Gainesville listening to your new album and LOVING IT. It's always been sort of an awkward question—do bands listen to their own albums recreationally?—and the affirmative response is just so ridiculously and needlessly narcissistic that I really feel like a person ought to be too embarrassed to admit it even if it's true. To me, it would be like saying, "I love how I sound on voicemail."

But really that's all about comportment; it's not about how the artist feels, but rather what he says about how he feels. So I'll respond directly to the question you posed: should an artist love what he makes?

I do think that, at least in the short run, an artist ought to love the things he creates. In the long run, it's important to see where you could have done better, and inevitably that probably means falling out of love with your old work. But it's the pleasure of putting the pieces together and making them work, even when they don't perfectly instantiate your vision, that keeps you coming back to the drawing board. Of course you have to work and improve, but nobody works to improve skills whose exercise doesn't bring pleasure in the interim. Again, I don't think this view puts me at odds with what Joey Cape was saying; I just think that in responding to the question he was asked, he had the long view firmly in mind.

Joey Cape vs. Vinnie Fiorello: The Potential Flaw of Appreciating One’s Own Creative Endeavors

2009-01-04T22:34:00.005-06:00

A few years ago, I was reading about Less Than Jake’s upcoming album on their website. Songwriter/percussionist Vinnie Fiorello had posted an update detailing how excited he was about the album. He said he had a copy of it and constantly listened to it in his car, driving around Gainesville, drumming on his steering wheel. In short, he thought the album rocked. He LOVED it (he might have actually used ‘love’ in all caps to describe it). While I didn’t really delve into it at the time, it definitely struck me as odd, and more than anything, I counterintuitively became more worried about the quality of the album. If I like a band’s music, and they say their new stuff is great, why should I be worried?

I got the album when it came out, and I didn’t really like it at all. It generally lacked all of the elements that I liked about their music. Rather than the quirky songs with fanatical bass lines and creative vocal harmony, I found the new album to be little more than fairly unoriginal rock music. That was the last album I bought from them, and that fact has much less to do with how much I liked that album than what Vinnie said about it. I think most everyone with a critical ear would admit that even their favorite artist/band has songs they don’t care for, and enough of those songs can make an album, but a bad album isn’t enough by itself to shake my faith that a band can still put out good songs. Vinnie’s glowing endorsement was a sign to me that the band was clearly going in a direction that I opposed.

All talk of directions aside, my question is this: Is it a flaw for a musician to like their music? Before I’d even heard the new LTJ album, Vinnie’s affinity for it raised red flags in my mind. Perhaps I had subconsciously surmised the direction the band was taking from the progression of their previous records, but I don’t think that’s what triggered in my head. Rather, I suspect that on some level, I simply could not identify with being a satisfied creator. My experience with writing songs is far too limited to draw on, but if I can take anything from my other efforts (writing, for instance), it’s that I’m never satisfied with anything, sometimes to a paralyzing extent. I can’t help but be aware that everything I’ve done could be better, potentially much better, and that makes it very difficult to even say something is good enough, much less great or exceptional.

Then there’s this excellent interview with my favorite artist, Joey Cape, in which he discusses exactly this in response to being asked to pick his favorite song that he’s written:

[I don’t like my songs. I think it might be an actual flaw when people that write music tell you they love the music they write. I don't really understand that. Most songwriters that I meet are always trying to perfect their art or trying to be better at what they do, so they're just basically not all that satisfied with anything they do, and I think that's what makes most artists at least capable or good at what they do.]

If I was leaning towards that opinion before, hearing it from someone I respect more as an artist than anyone has only strengthened that stance. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible for a good artist to appreciate his work, but I figure it’s likely that any artist that does has reached his peak, and that peak is probably far lower than I’d like it to be.

Tongue in Ear?

2009-01-04T01:43:00.001-06:00

This past New Year’s Eve was a two-year anniversary for me, so I was working on a post about the [somewhat weird and not that hot] romantic/sexual practice of placing one’s tongue in someone’s ear, and how it’s still largely considered sexy whereas similar acts such as tonguing eyeballs have failed to achieve such good publicity. Having experienced the act, I did not find it to be sexy in the least. I’m not going to say there was nothing sexy about it, because there’s certainly something sexy about a girl liking you that much in that way, but I fail to understand how anybody is so interested in what is essentially a wet willie without the middle man.

Then I had my first phone conversation with a friend I met on OkCupid. I mentioned I was working on a post for this group blog and she asked what I was writing, and upon hearing my topic, related to me that she orgasms just from guys whispering in her ear.

WITHDRAWN…

Book Review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

2009-01-03T01:30:00.002-06:00

I just finished reading Andrew Keen's 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur. The thesis of the book is that Web 2.0 technologies (think blogging, wikis, social networking, and file sharing) are undermining the cultural and economic institutions that, up until now, have made the world work. In particular, Keen's great phobia is a world where expert opinions are inaudible over the throng of amateurs shouting at each other.

To illustrate that point, Keen tells the story of Dr. William Connolley, a global warming researcher who was editing Wikipedia's "Global Warming" entry. Connolley's Wikipedia permissions were limited when another user (not a global warming researcher) complained that Connolley was "strongly pushing his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own" (p. 43). Keen's view is that in the ensuing appeals process, the Wikipedia staff should have considered Connolley's expertise and rescinded their order limiting his permissions.

I guess there's something bothersome about the story. It's true that I find myself sympathizing with Connolley. If I wanted facts about global warming, I would trust what he told me more than what the complaining user told me; if the complaining user tried to interrupt his explication in polite conversation, I'd tell the user to shut it, because I'm trying to learn something. But at the end of the day, I just can't get all that riled up about this story. There are plenty of things that Wikipedia is good for, like looking up Bob Dylan's discography, or the average annual rainfall in Rio de Janeiro, or a diagram of a generic drilling rig. But I don't know anybody who thinks that Wikipedia is the place to go to learn the unassailable facts underlying a scientific controversy. Frankly, it probably won't even give you enough background to meaningfully describe the parameters of the debate. In short, the entry on Global Warming is not what Wikipedia is good for. Of course, maybe I'm overestimating people's ability to rationally rate the reliability of information on the web.

Keen makes similar arguments about blogs usurping the role of the traditional media. Again, maybe I'm behind the times, but I don't read blogs to get the news, I read them to get opinions. If a fact sounds fishy, I try to corroborate it at a reputable news site.

In other chapters, Keen takes on the future of music (there will be so much selection that you'll never be able to find anything you like), the future of the book (in which there really is only one text), as well as privacy concerns and the evils of Internet addiction. The book is at its best though when it begins to hint at a sort of malaise infecting the concept of authorship itself. Information technology has progressed to the point where every presently existing art form can be encoded in binary. And with disk space to store the ones and zeros, processors to manipulate them, and networks on which to share them, (what we now call) plagiarism runs rampant, and amateurish remixes and mashups abound.

When the barriers to entry were higher, when it was harder to get eyeballs on your work, only the most talented had any real incentive to try and get "published." Now though the Internet is an echo chamber of mediocrity: a lot of teenagers on Xanga posting their poetry, trolling other teenager's poems, and writing, "I like that - come read one of mine, and leave a comment!" The talented all of a sudden have less to aspire to, because it is harder to see that there is anything fine and glorious and noble left in the work of art.

But all those hard drives and processors and networks make this possible too, and I don't know that I would trade it. It's just that the paradigm of authorship is shifting, and I'm nostalgic for it before it's even all gone.

Anyway, The Cult of the Amateur is one of the more poorly reviewed books that I've ever looked at on Amazon. Maybe you can imagine that there would be a natural bias among online reviewers, but it really does have problems. There are good ideas in there, but they are somewhat inartfully expressed, and I found myself doing most of the mental heavy lifting when it came to organizing and analyzing Keen's ideas. The chapters on privacy and Internet addiction felt sort of tacked-on. Also, the tone in some places is extra curmudgeonly. I can't really recommend it very highly unless the topics interest you on their own; the writing alone will not be enough to hold your interest.

Beta design

2009-01-02T21:37:00.002-06:00

I've posted a beta design for this site at http://otherthaneven.blogspot.com. It's still pretty close to the Blogger default, but with a little bit more visual interest, I hope. If you both like it, I'll import the skin to this site.

Mirror's Edge Promotional Media Sparks Divison

2008-12-31T22:47:00.003-06:00

Ryan,

Yes, the game performs much like Doom, and most other first-person [shooter] games for that matter, except gunplay is mostly replaced with acrobatics, like those seen in Casino Royale's chase scene.

Unlike most 1st person games of generations gone by, current gen hardware allows for realtime reflective surfaces. With the game taking place in a clean, pristine utopia (covering seedy government evil doings), the game features plenty of glass skyscrapers. When in real-time, the player can view themselves as Faith via reflections.

Outside of in-game action/cutscenes, the game also employs third-person animated cutscenes between gameplay chapters that take on a slight artistic deviation from the in-game vision, but retain most of the same qualities albeit stylistic cartoony CG.

But everyone's most common view of Faith came via EA's massive ad campaign. EA, now the second largest video game publisher in the world thanks to the Activision-Blizzard-Vivendi Universal merger, threw a great deal of money into the game's promotion hoping to create interest in the new IP (sidenote: EA gave much more promotion to Mirror's Edge than Dead Space, yet DS was a much larger commercial and critical success by far). Wanting to keep the game's unique premise (1st-person free running) under wraps until closer to the games release, many gamers' only connection to ME was promo art and in-game shots of Faith herself. Actual video from the 1st-person perspective wasn't released until May of this year, 2008. Pretty late to the game (reminds me of Nintendo).

For many gamers, Faith was Mirror's Edge. And the controversy started accordingly.

The controversy's roots are firmly established in video games general role of women as sex objects. Video games being stereotypically male FUBU (for us by us), female character designs have become increasingly err.... eyebrow raising to the point of absurdity. See: Here & Here. I enjoy boobs as much as the next guy, but it's reaching the point where I find myself near embarrassed to be a gamer. I'm not alone in my opinion, but most arguments about over-the-top, oversexed female design usually devolve into trolling with such rhetoric as "lol, ur gay".

Venturing into the "Oooh, shit! I shouldn't be here!" realm, there's a series of Nintendo DS games that have you investigating witchcraft at a school. In order to out the witches, you have to use the stylus to touch/rub the jail bait witches. I'll leave the areas to be "investigated" up to the imagination.

Really, it seems that a portion of gamers and video game designers/publishers have pushed female character design into palm face FetishLand. Worse, these games DO sell. Very well. With video games becoming much more expensive to develop, promote, and ship due to the massive expansion of the industry, many companies need a "sure hit" to survive and others just want to play it safe. Enter boobs. It sells.

Thankfully, not every company falls into this trend. Nintendo is typicallyconservative of its female characters (here & here), focusing more on game play/design, and their respective games still sell. Valve's Half Life 2 set a new standard for character depth with a female who was very attractive while still being down-to-Earth and normally proportioned. DICE deserves props as well for employing the use of a female that doesn't wrongfully distract from the game. Nod to EA for financing DICE's vision without pressure for change.

As for Mirror's Edge, the final retail product, I have not yet purchased it, though I am still intrigued. I downloaded a playable demo of it a while back and was left impressed. When the price dips, I'll probably take the blue pill.

[...and this is how I open 2009]

The Tifa-Aeris Debates show my age

2008-12-31T18:32:00.003-06:00

Stirling,

What you're talking about reminds me of the Great Tifa-Aeris Debates of 1997-1998. Nominally, the issue there was, in a perfect world, who is more compatible with Cloud? The subtext of the debate, though, becomes clearer in retrospect, and it was this: who better confirms your vision of femininity, Tifa (busty, and in immodest attire, but also visibly childlike, and shy) or Aeris (slender, and dressed conservatively, but also outgoing and temperamentally childlike).

(I will note, Stirling, that along with you, I'm somewhat bothered by the fact that I find myself employing the word "childlike" to describe both characters).

But to return to your point, I'm not sure that what rankles me in your story is so much the specific differences between Eastern and Western men's tastes in women. What bothers me more is the assumption made by the fanartist and others that the game designer created a flawed product when he failed to account for their particular tastes in women. The implicit premise that those people rely on is that we ought to be lusting after the women of video games, and when we aren't, then we can blame the game designer for not making them attractive enough.

The idea that a video game heroine ought to be a wet dream is so deeply ingrained now that it passes without our notice. Frankly I'm glad that the game designer in this case ruffled a few feathers with his choices, and not necessarily because his vision of Faith incorporates my own ideas of physical perfection; rather, it's because it shows that the market for video games has broadened to the point where they don't all have to be about adolescent wish-fulfillment anymore.

I haven't played Mirror's Edge, but I think I remember seeing it advertised on TV. You refer to it as "an urban free-running game in first-person perspective." I assume that this means a literal, behind-the-eyes perspective, in which the heroine rarely appears on-screen. Sort of the way that the protagonist's face never appears in gameplay in Doom. Is that right? Because if so, doesn't it seem odd that all this hay should be made over what the girl on the box looks like?

Asian Women: East vs West

2008-12-30T21:11:00.009-06:00

EA, in an attempt to move beyond their yearly sports offerings of football, baseball, skateboarding, etc., has used this year to bring new IPs under their banner, notably Dead Space (a mix of Event Horizon, Doom, and Resident Evil) and Mirror's Edge (an urban free-running game in first-person perspective). While Dead Space can be seen as "surprise of the year" (mainly for being a non-sport game from EA that didn't suck, though many would simply be surprised that EA released a quality game at all), Mirror's Edge was largely forgotten and ignored.

Developed by Sweden-based DICE, "Mirror's Edge introduces players to Faith, a "runner" in a world where communication channels are highly monitored and the movement of human traffic is closely watched. When Faith's sister gets framed for a murder she did not commit, Faith finds herself on the edge of the city, on the wrong side of the law.

Mirror's Edge delivers players straight into the shoes of this modern day heroine as she traverses the vertigo-inducing cityscape, engaging in intense combat, fast-paced chases and challenging puzzles. With a never-before-seen sense of movement and perspective, players are drawn into Faith's world."

In Faith, DICE created a female protagonist who wasn't a tits n' ass showcase. Slender and a bit rough around the edges, Faith appears to be a woman who could handle herself and has done so many times. Oh, and she's Asian!

And that's where the mini-internet-based controversy began.

At some point in the early fall, Faith fan art surfaced. The "fan art" is basically official promotional art of Faith except touched up to better suit the tastes of Asian males. The areas affected are the eyes (which are wider), the face (which is much rounder), and, most obviously, the boobs (which are quite larger).

Kotaku, a popular international gamer blog, published the fan art along with the artist's comments, restating the artist's opinion that the Western stereotypical view of Asian beauty does not reflect the standards of beauty from an Eastern perspective. The Kotaku blog post got 500 comments debating the East vs West Faith designs and got picked up by a Japanese game site.

The issue got another kick in the pants when a DICE producer went on record denouncing the touch up, saying Faith looked like "a 12-year-old with a boob job". He then defended his stance on Faith's design stating that she serves the purposes of the game and the goal's of the team.

From an American/Western perspective (mostly my own, but supported by many of Kotaku's comments), Faith's Western design gives off a strong presence and inner strength. In the Eastern design, Faith is certainly much more feminine, uncomfortably a bit too young, and lacking in presence. The Eastern Faith is designed as a sex object which makes things all the more awkward with Faith's decrease in age into jail bait territory. Looking back at Western Faith, I find her the more attractive version based solely on the characteristics/qualities one assumes about her character upon viewing. She has the Sarah Connor vibe going for her and who wouldn't do Sarah Connor?!

The Asian perspective is much more blunt, stating that Westerners (typically Americans) always go hotshit crazy for the ugliest of Asian women. The Western Faith is seen as an unsightly middle-aged woman with the assets of a 12 year old boy. The Eastern Faith, on the other hand, is more attractive with much to offer physically and lacking the stereotypical slanted eyes. As for the age issue, I don't see much of one on the Eastern front. Eastern Faith is hot. That's kinda where it ends.

Some comments have noted that Westerners seem to prefer the body of a 12 year old while Easterners prefer the face of a 12 year old.

I have seen attractive slender Asian women. I've seen attractive curvy Asian women. I've certainly seen attractive power women. Everyone has their own taste in women, but I find the "younging down" curve in Asian culture as a symbol of beauty to be a bit disconcerting.

Though the young curve prevalent in Japan, and other Asian nations, as well as their other puzzling sex issues could fill many posts.

Sidenote: How hard is it to find asian women wearing clothes on image google to use as examples in this post? Answer: Harder than one would think. I pretty much had to settle for the ones I used. Damn those sex-mongering Westerners! *raises fists*

Let's go to the mall?

2008-12-30T18:28:00.000-06:00

I read an interesting article today by one Chadwick Matlin, suggesting that it's time to shut down all the malls. What initally caught my eye about this article was the weird-to-bad job it does of encouraging readers to YouTube How I Met Your Mother's "Let's Go to the Mall" video. Other pop culture shout-outs are made therein to the films Dawn of the Dead and Mall Rats. It's an article that spends a lot of needless time searching for a hook it never finds, before making a less-than-compelling case for its conclusion.

Matlin discusses three justifications for the advent of the mall—why we needed them in the first place—and then explains how times have changed such that these justfications no longer apply:

1). Malls were justified because they saved time by allowing us to combine trips. But Wal-mart, Target, and Amazon.com now perform the same function.

2). Malls were justified because renting retail space in a mall was more cost-effective than purchasing retail space. But as property values decline, being your own landlord becomes less and less expensive.

3). Malls were justified because retail creates jobs for young and working class people. But getting rid of the mall doesn't mean getting rid of the stores; it just means that the stores move. Except for mall security and mall administration, the jobs created by the mall ought to remain even if the mall itself closes.

Argument (1) is pretty solid. The Wal-mart Supercenter and e-commerce are not passing fads, we can all agree; they are forever. But (2) and (3) don't seem quite so sturdy.

(2) is not so much a reason why I should favor closing the malls; it's a reason why, if true, they're already doomed.

(3) is even more flawed. It presumes that the stores will be just as profitable outside the mall as they were in it. Seriously? Do you know anybody who is responsible for his or her own transportation, who thinks that a drive across town to check out what's new at just Spencer's Gifts, or just Hot Topic, or just Claire's Boutique, is worth it? Would you stand in line for a Mrs. Fields cookie or an Orange Julius if the storefront didn't lie precisely on the footpath between points A and B?

My point is that a non-negligible portion of the job market is founded upon foot traffic, and if you take away the traffic, those jobs go with it.

In our area anyway, malls aren't going anywhere. They're just evolving into outdoor, pedestrian-friendly shopping spaces. Witness the new outdoor extension to the Mall of Louisiana, and the development at Perkins Rowe. In Bossier City they have the River Walk. The stores in all of these developments are somewhat higher-end than you'd expect from a mall, but the idea is the same. Stores that are too niche to make it on their own are able, with the aid of a pleasant atmosphere, to band together and forge a working eco-system of commerce. You can't just break up that eco-system and expect the constitutents to remain as functional as before.

John Chavis apparently in as Defensive Coordinator at LSU

2008-12-29T22:02:00.000-06:00

ESPN is reporting that John Chavis, formerly defensive coordinator of the Tennessee Volunteers, is likely to take over as Defensive Coordinator for the LSU Tigers next season. So here's a question for you, Sean: how is it that we didn't come up with John Chavis's name when we were listing candidates for the open position?

The Tennessee fans appear to be split concerning whether he'll be a good hire for LSU. His reputation is that he's one of the best, but there's a persistent beef with him, that he prematurely deploys a prevent defense in close games, and Vols fans are blaming this tendency for a bunch of last minute losses.

The talent level at LSU should be better than it has been at Tennessee for the past several years. I just hope he can put the fear of God into some of the LSU defenders; maybe scare them into holding on to their tackles.

Another steady current of the comments to that ESPN story is this: that it was soooo professional of Les Miles to ensure that both LSU co-defensive coordinators had found other employment before the identity of their replacement was leaked. The idea is that his dilatoriness allowed each man to walk away with his dignity. I've heard this view espoused in casual conversations with other LSU fans as well. Maybe I could stand to be more sympathetic here, but based on the performance of the LSU defense this season, and the new jobs that these two men accepted, I'd have a hard time claiming that either walked away with his dignity intact. Peveto is moving on to a head coaching position at the greener pastures of Northwestern State University in Nachitoches, Louisiana ("The City of Lights!" proclaims its water tower). NSU went 7-5 this season, 4-2 in the Southland Conference of the FCS. Mallory is off for the University of New Mexico, one of several perennial doormats of the Mountain West, though by no means the most pathetic; it went 4-8 this season, 2-6 in conference.

What I will say is that, if you are willing to credit him with it, you might see some Machiavellian shrewdness in Les Miles' much-maligned decision to go with co-defensive coordinators in 2008. By refusing to fill the position, he created a situation that was sustainable for as long as he needed it to be in order to wait for a qualified candidate. Here's hoping that John Chavis was worth the wait.