Zirbert, The Irritable Saint

10 Short Thoughts Not About Glenn Gould

2011-12-21T19:01:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

Or in blog posts, for that matter.

Whoops.

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

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

Soon there will be one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes for historical purposes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crossblogging

2011-09-28T21:14:00.011-03:00

Yes, I'm lazy about writing these days.

Well, not entirely. I'm currently in the middle of writing a multi-part series outlining pretty much my biography for the last ten years, but that will never get posted here because it contains all kinds of identifying information and matters that are far too personal to put online. I recently had a chance (or, more accurately, providential) encounter with an old friend with whom I'd lost touch. After a very quick chat due to our circumstances at that time, we exchanged e-mail addresses. When I got home, I started writing to catch him up on what I've been doing for the past decade or so.

But as far as blogging, yeah, I'm very lazy now. That's why I really should take advantage of a chance like this to get a double use out of my typing.

A pro-life lady named Kristen Walker recently attended a pro-abortion group's meeting, took notes, and wrote up a report afterward. It was appalling. Somehow the fact that this rally for death was held in a church basement sends an extra little iceball into the pit of my stomach every time I think about it.

She's posted her thought on the meeting on the Live Action blog. It's well worth reading.

I posted a couple of comments, partly in response to other peoples' comments. The useful idiots of abortion profiteers are coming out to make feeble (and often borderline illiterate) defenses of the meeting, and I felt some of them could use some help trying to get back in touch with concepts like logic and compassion.

I show up over there, and some other places where I post comments, as "Zirbert Zirbert". For some reason my Google signin has decided that Zirbert is both my first and last name, which is especially funny because it is of course neither. I'm trying to fix it - get it to show either no last name or some variation on "the Irritable Saint" for the last name - but no luck yet.

Let the shameless reposting of my comments begin:

Well done. Congratulations on making it out of the meeting without being physically sickened.

This is the most crucial part of your essay:

"I was upset because I had seen evil, and evil was mundane. Evil had a
very impressive law degree and sensible brown shoes. Evil sat in pews
around me with folded arms, feeling very concerned about the plight of
poor women, wearing pants it bought at Macy’s. Evil looked like people
you see at the grocery store. And, most terrifying of all, evil thought
it was doing good."

This is, indeed, the heart of the problem in our society at this point. So many "useful idiots", so many otherwise nice people cheerfully paving the road to Hell with their good intentions. I wish more people would watch the movie Conspiracy, a reenactment of an actual meeting where a group of very polite and cultured men sat around a table discussing how to best benefit society by exterminating every Jew they could find.

The attitudes, thoughts, words, and behaviour of pro-abortionists (I reject their term, "pro-choice" - pro-what choice? The choice for abortion? Then you're pro-abortion) are absolutely no better. They're really not even significantly different.

As a side note, if anyone reading this is one of those capable of ginning up false outrage and moral indignation over comparing abortion with the Holocaust - tough. The shoe fits. Wear it.

Those who have come here to defend the pro-aborts at the meeting, and complain about Kristen's article are a huge part of the problem. Self-reflection isn't just for monks on mountaintops.

Thank you, Kristen.

(Someone else wrote) "How 'bout saving your tears for the hundreds of thousands of babies born due to a lack of knowledge, choice or birth control who are already in our fine foster care system."

So, better dead then born into poverty, born to uneducated parents, or with the possibility of winding up in foster care someday. Gotcha. Nice compassion you've got there - not all hatey like the prolifers.

You know, I've met people who were in foster care at some point in their lives, and some who were even adopted. I'm grateful they made it through attitudes like yours to be here now. I've yet to hear one of them say they would have been better off dead before birth.

(The same someone else wrote) "After a kid draws its first breath, it's out of luck. And I don't see any of the pro-birth groups using their resources to build shiny, new, state-of-the-art orphanages for these kids."

Sheer nonsense. Every pro-lifer I know also supports other causes to benefit older people (i.e., "birth-and-up") as well.

And when's the last time you saw an orphanage, at least in North America? Do they still exist? I've had friends wait years - yes, years - on lists to adopt a child. I've had others adopt from overseas for a variety of reasons, including that adopting domestically just isn't feasible much of the time due to a lack of prospective adoptees.

Please stop using the "way too many children waiting to be adopted" meme. It's silly and completely fantasy-based. If you know of a way for these children to be adopted ASAP, like now, let us all know. I know families who are waiting and would LOVE to have some of these mythical unwanted children.

(Someone named Nanamiro posted) "This mode of thinking is what allowed the holocaust to happen in a "civilized" society. Look the other way, and look out for yourself."

(Someone else posted) "No it isn't. The mode of thinking which caused the holocaust was a group in power deciding that a particular section of society should be deleted. There is no comparison with abortion which is decided on an individual, one by one, basis with no central plan to remove a partcicular section of society."

(I posted, beginning with a quotation from the last poster) "The mode of thinking which caused the holocaust was a group in power deciding that a particular section of society should be deleted." Right. Which is what Nanamiro said. Abortion is one group - a pregnant woman, her doctor, and the drum-pounding politically correct "choice defenders" - deciding that a section of society - the child in utero - should be deleted.

Your "if it doesn't hurt me, why should I care" / "if it doesn't hurt you, why should you care" attitude is amoral at best, immoral at worst. I can't share it, because I have a conscience.

(The same poster who didn't like the Holocaust comparison posted) "I'm well aware of the horrors of the holocaust but any attempts at comparison with abortion are totally invalid."

The shoe fits. Wear it. [Yes, I recycled material even within those comments.]

(Someone anonymously posted) "i have had an abortion because that was the best choice for ME. i didn't ask a stranger their opinion because it didn't matter. if you wanted me to have my baby sooo bad, you should have been sending me checks to support it because I could not afford it & didn't want to have a welfare baby which was a huge factor in my decision. if you have never been in the situation, you shouldn't look down on those that have."

Unless you were raped (which I doubt, because I'm sure it would have been in your first few sentences), you were utterly irresponsible.

However, your child was your responsiblity, and his/her father's (where was he, again?). You failed.

Have you any sense of personal responsibility at all? Why would your child be anyone else's responsibility, under any circumstances?

I am a parent. I an responsible for my child. I don't get to say " you should have been sending me checks to support" my family. That's my job. I "didn't want to have a welfare baby" either, so I got a job. Before having the child, even.

I hope you can heal from this. Sincerely. You've made a terrible, terrible mistake. Please turn your life around, if you haven't already.

Kristen's article was depressing but important. The same goes for the comments underneath. However, the comments show room for hope. There are more gentle souls with compassion for both mother and child posting than people who just want the kid chopped up and chucked out.

So far, anyway. Hopefully the article doesn't get linked at Huffington Post or Daily Kos, which tends to draw out the screaming lunatics. A Huffpo/Kos invasion always reminds me of a scene from one of my favourite movies, Escape From New York. "It's the end of the month. Crazies are out of food."

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a balloon monkey trying to get into the brownies.

It's Funny Because I Didn't Know Her

2011-07-25T17:01:00.013-03:00

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

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

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

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

There. I feel better now.

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

Educational Fascism, Part XXIV

2011-05-17T23:43:00.005-03:00

Homeschooling has been effectively outlawed in the province of Quebec. Those who choose not to hand their children over to bureaucratic babysitters for indoctrination are well on their way to be officially labelled enemies of the state.

Here's a brief rundown of the situation. More details are readily available online if you want to find out more. There's a family in Quebec who have four children, ages ranging from 3 to 9 ears. For whatever reason, they decided to homeschool their kids. It really doesn't matter to anyone else exactly why they made that choice. As the parents of those children, there's absolutely no reason why anyone else should have any say about it.

The "authorities" decided otherwise. Last year, representatives of the state decided that the two oldest, who were already of school age but not attending the state-run daily indoctrination camp, had to start going to public school. For whatever reason, the parents complied. Those two children are not thriving, to put it gently.

Now the "authorities" have decided that the younger two children, who are too young for school, cannot spend their weekday afternoons at home under the watchful and loving eyes of their family either. They have been ordered into state-run daycare.

This responsibility for this latest outrage falls entirely upon a judge, an unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur named Nicole Bernier. The "honourable" Ms. Bernier decided that she wasn't convinced that these kids would be properly "socialized" if not subjected to the Lord-of-the-Flies-esque meatgrinder that is the public school system.

It's important to stop here and note that there is not so much as a whiff of an allegation of abuse, neglect, impropriety, or even academic weakness on the part of these parents. Perhaps under the mistaken impression that fascists might be reasonable, they reportedly co-operated with all inquiries and requests for the "authorities" to check out how the kids were doing. Other than one of the older ones having a hearing problem that presented some challenges (and could certainly be handled better at home than in a large group setting like a classroom), everything was fine by all reports.

Not having any actual grounds to seize these kids didn't dissuade Ms. Bernier. She fantasized that the "socialization" of children was somehow the purview of the state, and used her delusion to invent a legal justification.

The funniest/saddest (those often blur together for me) part of this is that even if we accept the premise that the state is responsible for the nebulous category of "socialization" - and we shouldn't - there is still a glaring logical error with this judicial fiat. Homeschooled children, contrary to bigoted leftist fantasies, generally do not have social problems when compared to those raised by (not "in", deliberately) public schools. the biggest difference later on tends to be that the homeschooled students tend to be more confident (in a positive way, not in the modern empty "self-esteem" sense) and comfortable when interacting with people of different ages, social cohorts, etc. The public school veterans have twelve years or so of having been confined almost exclusively with people their own age and from similar social backgrounds. They are very comfortable with other people just like themselves, but not as comfortable (as the homeschooled students) with those who are different.

Oh, and homeschooled kids wind up much better educated than their assembly-line-product peers as well, but that almost goes without saying.

This is a travesty. The family is fighting it, and they must win. The principles of parental authority and freedom of conscience are at stake. The family, not the state, is the foundational structure of society. The suggestion that these family, or anyone else, needs the permission of the state (translation: of some clipboard-toting civil servant) to homeschool their children infuriates me. It's actually quite the opposite. The educational bureaucracy needs the permission of the parents to have access to those children.

My son is in public school, for reasons I'm not going into just now. It's complicated. However, I make it crystal clear on a regular basis to every school district employee I encounter that they need to remember who is the final authority in our relationship. Many parents take the attitude that the school is responsible to educate the children, and the parents can help. That's exactly the opposite of true. It's the responsibility of parents to educate their children, and the school can help (if the parents choose to let it). I hope you see the difference there. It's a matter of who bears the primary responsibility, and who therefore is the corresponding primary authority. Parents need to explicitly assert this principle, and keep reminding representatives of "the system" of who is really in charge, until it sinks in.

This family in Quebec has chosen to fight this outrage in court. Good for them. they're being far more patient and accommodating than I would have been in the same situation. I would have ignored the initial inquiries (that lead to the two older children being drafted last year), and had the situation escalated to where theirs did, I would almost certainly have wound up spending at least a few evenings in jail for "contempt of court" (as though this court deserves anything else) for informing the judge that they didn't have a say in how I choose to educate my children, and I really couldn't care less what they have to say about it.

But back to my opening sentence. Homeschooling has already been criminalized in some countries, like Germany. Funny, you'd think Germany, of all nations, might understand that compelling children into state-run indoctrination programs doesn't always end well.

With this ruling, if it is allowed to stand, Canada is on a very slippery slope. This sets a precedent that the legal system may decree, for no good reason, that children can be forced into public school against the will of their parents. The step from that coercion being an option to being mandatory is frighteningly small. And don't think for a second that this fascism will confine itself to Quebec.

This is a camel whose nose must be pushed back out of the tent. A few years ago, the bureaucrats in my home province decreed that requiring children to enter grade one, at age six, wasn't good enough, and kindergarten for five-year-olds became mandatory. I tried to raise the alarm that it was the thin edge of a wedge, but few would hear. Now state-approved daycare is required in some places for even younger children.

The State wants control of as many children as possible, from as young an age as possible. This should alarm anyone with any knowledge of history or sense of personal autonomy. "Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man" is generally attributed to the Jesuits, but it took the Communists to harness its full potential.

Daycare, kindergarten, public school - none of these are inherently good or evil, right or wrong. If you are a parent, you are free to evaluate your options and decide what makes the most sense for your family. But it must be your choice, not Nicole Bernier's.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of flowers I bought for my wife an anniversary or two ago. I was necessarily vague about my expectations, giving the florist a budget to work with but no particular specifications beyond "flowers, maybe in a vase or something." Thus, due to my cluelessness and the florist's lack of scruples, this bouquet cost in the ballpark of sixty bucks. Oh, and the card reads, "In appreciation for your years of loyal service." Really. But that part was my idea.

Reading Log: Outliers

2011-04-04T00:01:00.013-03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much of life is a popularity contest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very-Nearly-Year In Review

2010-08-31T21:53:00.007-03:00

This entry is being posted so that I can semi-legitimately say that I didn't go an entire year without posting. This post is not a farewell. It is not an announcement of a return. It just is.

I had no explicit intention of abandoning this blog. I still don't. I never made a conscious decision to stop posting. I still haven't. I just didn't post one day, then didn't post the next day, then it was 2010, then it was late August.

Now, for the last year-or-so. These are more or less random thoughts, barely sketched out.

I'm still in the same job that I've been in since early 2008. Starting that job - or more accurately, leaving my last job, or even more accurately, being informed that my last job was coming to an abrupt and unforeseen end, was part of the catalyst for starting this blog.

The new job I had thought imminent in the summer of 2009 still hasn't happened. It may or may not happen at this point. The prospective new employer took me on some all-expenses-paid training in the summer of 2009, and their hiring is proceeding on schedule, but I haven't gotten called up yet. There's at least one more wave of hiring to go on the project, so hope remains. I'm quite content where I am now, and more than adequately compensated, so I have no complaints no matter what happens, but I'd definitely switch over to this new situation given the opportunity.

Since I haven't changed jobs, I also haven't moved. We're still in the same house, which is now paid off in full, as are all our household's student loans at long long last. The house has also received some much-needed repairs thanks to a contractor who actually showed up and did his job, and a new back step and backyard patio thanks to my father-in-law.

My son is in school and doing fine. I'm not sure that the various school district employees who deal with him are doing quite so well, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. My favourite moment from a parent-teacher meeting was when I ripped into his teacher and a school district drone chaperone for his report card saying they'd like us to hold him back on his reading, because the material he was reading was getting too advanced. They hemmed and hawed and stammered trying to justify this in the meeting; first they were concerned that he might not be intellectually and / or emotionally ready for some of his preferred books (although, to be clear, it's not like we're letting him read a lot of novels on the theme of nihilism), then that his chosen material was so far beyond that of his classmates that they might have trouble relating. The truth is one of two things. Either his advanced reading makes it harder for the teacher, or he's reading material that his teacher and/or the useless suit-clad sycophants from the district office can't understand themselves.

My wife has returned to work, for the first time since before our son was born lo those many years ago. It's a pain. The logistics of childcare and other family responsibilities become exponentially more complicated without one always-available parent to cover home base. She's on a short-term contract, and we're kind of hoping she isn't offered an extension. We certainly don't need the money; she's working because she wanted to try getting back out of the house for a bit, and that experiment may have run its course. I also wanted her to have some more recent experience on her resume in case I drop dead tomorrow and she suddenly gets drafted as the primary breadwinner for the family.

We have a new dog. A female mutt, mostly black lab. I have a definite type (three of my last four dogs matched that description). She's six months old, and got spayed last Thursday. She's long since back to her goofy normal self. At this early stage, she's the best-behaved dog I've ever had, and I've had some very good dogs.

I've subscribed to Macleans magazine, and its arrival in the mailbox is one of the highlights of my week. Usually. For the last few issues my favourite columnist, Mark Steyn, has been notably absent, but the editors claim he'll return shortly. He'd better, for my subscription's sake. Anyway, it's two bucks or so a month tacked onto my cable bill for a weekly news magazine, so it would have been tough to pass up. Plus, although it would be a massive stretch to claim that the overall tone of the magazine is conservative, it's clear that the editors are willing to at least allow conservative voices to be heard, which is near-miraculous for Canadian media.

On to geekier stuff.

My wife and I have gone through sporadic bursts of playing Magic. I also had a brief relapse into playing the Microprose Magic game, released in the 1990s, thanks to a group of wonderful lunatics who have hacked it to add lots of newer cards.

Even that, though, has fallen by the wayside thanks to Forge. Forge has almost everything I want in a Magic program: a huge card selection, adequate single-player AI, and full custom deckbuilding capabilities. I've been playing it way too much, and building way too many decks, for the last few weeks. My wife plays it too. We have two computers set up, and it's not unusual for us to each be on one of them playing Forge. The only things Forge is missing, as far as I'm concerned, are multiplayer and the rest of the cards. Yes, my ideal Magic computer game would include every card that's ever been printed. Whereas the new version of Forge added almost 400 more cards, I get the impression that the developers have the same goal.

I also finally went to Linux. I built a new PC last fall - 2.3GHz quad-core, 4 GB RAM, 1.3 TB of hard drive space. Its name, as longtime readers (if there are any of you left) may have guessed, is Levi. Levi is the most powerful PC I've ever built by a long margin, and I decided it was time to take the plunge. I set it up to dual-boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu Studio, and resolved to stick as exclusively with Ubuntu as much as I could.

I haven't booted Levi into XP in months. Well, with one exception - I tried installing a Windows program that purported to prepare a virtual machine image based on my actual XP installation. You see, I wanted to cheat. The Microprose Magic game doesn't work under Wine (a program that lets you run some Windows software in Linux), and I was going into withdrawal. I planned to set up an XP virtual machine in Ubuntu for that single purpose. However, that little program didn't work, or I did something wrong. I puttered at it a bit, and while doing so stumbled across Forge, which works fine in Linux. I now have pretty much no interest in going back to the Microprose game, or Windows.

I've found a Linux application for everything else I want to do with my computer, with the sole exception of MP3tag, which works fine under Wine. Bye bye, XP. See you when Diablo 3 ships, and probably not before.

I got my son a Wii for Christmas last year. He loves it.

I actually bought it in the early fall, and spent every evening for weeks on end at a workbench in the basement where I'd set up the Wii, hooked to a tiny old TV set. I wasn't playing games (much) - I was modding the holy jumping monkey bugs out of it. By the time he opened it on Christmas morning, it included a media player, MAME and a pile of ROMs, emulators for several other older game systems with huge ROM sets, and an external hard drive with...well, a lot of games preinstalled. Too many, actually - to this day, he's barely scraped the surface, preferring to stick with Super Mario Galaxy (1 and 2), Mario Kart, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I sense a theme.

I could say much more about each of these, and many other topics besides. I hear there's even stuff going on in the world outside my house. Maybe I will over the days to come. Maybe not. I really don't know.

For now, I'm stopping here in the interests of getting this up before it's officially the anniversary of my last post, at which point I fear this blog might have turned into a pumpkin if left fallow.

Is anybody still out there?

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the middle shelf, left-hand side, on bookshelf # 1. Once again, spot the theme. For nonexistent bonus points, identify the two books that aren't strictly on-theme.

Yet Another Triumphant Return

2009-09-01T00:08:00.006-03:00

I recently returned from a couple of weeks of work-related travel. I had a couple of noteworthy experiences on the trip (besides the stuff that I won't be discussing on here for various reasons).

I almost got taken down by airport security at my point of departure. Besides my checked suitcase, I had a carry-on bag. It was a backpack containing my Bible and portable DVD player, and a few other books to occupy me during the trip.

The basket containing my jacket and the stuff out of my pockets passed through the x-ray screening without difficulty, and my own passage through the metal detector was also uneventful. The backpack, however, proved to be a problem. I had to put it on the little conveyor belt, and when I went to meet it on the other side a security guard was waiting for me, already holding it.

"Do you have a multi-tool in here?" he asked, in a pleasant enough tone.

"Nope," I replied confidently.

He smiled, not unkindly. "Are you sure?"

"I was, but I'm getting less sure all the time."

He chuckled, and began unzipping compartments. "Looks like it's way down at the bottom somewhere." After a minute of digging, he produced a multi-tool in its carrying case. It was the one I carried on my belt during my IT days. When I left that job (a diplomatic way of putting it), I stuck the multi-tool into the backpack, which I haul around with me anytime I go anywhere with stuff to carry. I figured that way the multi-tool would always be handy if I was out somewhere and needed it. Of course, I forgot all about it being in there when I was packing for this flight.

"I can assure you that I wasn't trying to smuggle that onto the plane. Feel free to chuck it, or whatever you do with seized contraband."

The security guard was very nice about the whole matter. Instead of just taking it, he asked if somebody had dropped me off at the airport, and if so, whether they were still around. My wife and mother-in-law were just outside the security screening area. I pointed them out, and the guard had someone take it to them. It was waiting safely for me at home when I returned.

Good thing I speak English, or I probably would have died right there, twitching on the airport floor.

Even weirder, the same bag got stopped again by security at the airport for my flight home. Once again I put it dutifully on the conveyor belt. This time, the young lady watching the x-ray monitor (which I couldn't see) stopped the belt and looked at the monitor for a while, clearly puzzled. She was tipping her head to the side, reminding me of my dog's reaction when I used to take my video camera, record myself calling her, and play it back on the living room TV. "Wait... you're on the TV, calling me, but you're sitting over there... but you're on TV... but... now my head hurts. Good thing my walnut-sized brain means I'll forget this in ten seconds, or I'd be traumatized."

The screener lady called a colleague over to join her for some synchronized head-cocking. Eventually they decided to send my backpack to someone else. It came out of the x-ray machine, and was promptly grabbed by a very serious looking guy, who said, "We've got to test this."

"OK", I cheerfully replied. I had lots of time before my flight.

This new guy dug through the bag, and ran a little wand over it. I don't think it was a metal detector. My theory is that it was a dowsing rod, and he suspected that my backpack contained an underground spring. In any case, after a few brow-furrowed moments, he handed me the backpack and said, "OK, you can go." This guy was just gruff enough that I decided not to push my luck by asking any questions. The folks at the first airport, which was much smaller, were a lot friendlier, and they busted me trying to sneak a weapon onto the plane.

It looks like I'll be flying again in October. Perhaps I should invest in some less suspicious carry-on luggage before then.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the bottom shelf, left-hand side, on bookshelf # 1. On the left are a bunch of records that don't fit on my actual records rack. Most readers under 40 will have no idea what "records" are. In the middle are notebooks and photocopies of textbooks from my university days. Yes, photocopies. I was blatantly disregarding copyrights long before anyone ever heard of Napster. Photocopies were a dime each at the library photocopiers (I liked the unsupervised one in the basement), and reduction allowed two-page spreads to fit onto a single sheet while remaining legible. Even those of us who weren't math majors got pretty good at calculating whether it was cheaper to buy a textbook or just photocopy it. Finally, that pile on the right is what remains of my Rolling Stone magazine collection. I got rid of the vast majority of them long ago.

Reading Log - Mark Haddon's Clash Of Fundamentalisms

2009-08-02T21:57:00.009-03:00

I'm back. I may talk about the trip a little some other time. For now it's Sunday, and I've got a reading log entry with potential for spiritual implications, so away we go.

One of the books I read during my exile was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. It's the story of an unusual young man's investigation into the "murder" of his neighbour's poodle. The young man's name is Christopher, and he's autistic or has Asperger syndrome. The book is written in first person from Christopher's perspective, and he has no interest in any labels anyone else may place on him, so his exact diagnosis is never revealed.

From here in there may be spoilers for anyone who intends to read this book but hasn't yet. If you happen to be married to me, this means you.

The book is compelling and Christopher, although a bit odd by western social standards, is a well-drawn character. He is extremely literal-minded and uninterested in emotions. The other characters in the book are not fleshed out nearly as well, but this too rings true since everything is narrated by Christopher, who isn't particularly interested in or capable of understanding what's happening inside anyone else's head.

Christopher will ring true to anyone who is close to someone on the autism spectrum (or on it themselves). He is single-minded in his quest to determine who killed the dog, finding loopholes worthy of a high-priced attorney in his father's orders to leave the matter alone (and thereby ceasing to pester the neighbours with questions about it).

About halfway through the book, there is a sudden shift. It's not a Shymalan-level twist, but something is revealed that simultaneously makes perfect sense and alters the course of the narrative. The book is no longer about what it had been about. It gets much better, although it had been perfectly good to that point.

I won't reveal the twist, or even whether Christopher solves the crime. Instead I want to shift gears, using the book as a segue to my justification for posting this on a Sunday, the day I set aside for spiritual themes on this blog. Part of the book's structure is that the chapters (which are numbered in ascending prime numbers, one of Christopher's obsessions) alternate between moving the narrative forward and Christopher explaining his take on some subject, often mathematical.

In several of the "explanation" chapters, Christopher mentions that he is an atheist, and goes into more detail in a few. He rejects the Bible as having any divine origin, dismisses any talk of Jesus as fable, and accepts the theories of the Big Bang and evolution as perfect, comprehensive explanations for the origins of everything.

In our modern, "enlightened" world he is far from alone in these positions. Many people agree with his articles of faith. They cling to Science as fervently as any other fundamentalist clings to their dogma. They consider themselves different from, and even superior to, those other fundamentalists because their beliefs are based on Science, not on the unverifiable writings in an ancient tome.

Their logical error here is obvious. When it comes to matters like the origins of physical reality or the human species, the writings in any science book are speculative. The theories are no more testable, no more provable, than Genesis. Whenever a physicist begins expounding on how the universe was created, utterly certain, utterly unshakable in their faith, I'm always reminded of Job 38:1-4:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand."

No, I don't have all the answers to every question in life. I can't ultimately be 100% sure that my beliefs are correct. Neither can anyone else. The primary difference between a dogmatic materialist and any other believer is their choice of sacred text. I've chosen the Bible; others choose the writings of Darwin and their high school textbooks. I note that those schoolbooks invariably get revised. I've read several science books that had forewords explicitly stating that most of the book would eventually be supplanted by newer, more correct information. I've never seen a Bible with that sort of disclaimer, and don't expect to ever see a new edition with corrections. The Bible doesn't need it.

Here's another key difference between a hardcore materialist and other breeds of fundamentalists: the materialists tend to be much more certain that they're right, and much more smug and arrogant about the discrepancies in beliefs. If I didn't believe in the depravity of humankind, I'd probably be confused when more "enlightened" people almost invariably prove themselves less tolerant than supposedly backward believers.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the fourth shelf down, left side, on bookshelf # 1. I don't seem to have a picture of the third shelf, so we'll come back to it another time. This shelf is full of psychology and criminology textbooks. The black binders on the right are full of Sunday School materials that I've written over the years. Those binders contain a lot of plastic sheets for overhead transparencies, which gives an idea how old they are. Nowadays I usually don't even bother keeping a paper copy of the handouts, and just keep the OpenOffice files.

Wednesday's Title: Avoid Me

2009-07-17T23:01:00.007-03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Notes

2009-07-09T23:22:00.012-03:00

Some hither-and-yon ramblings in lieu of a real entry. Things are still hectic.

My son and I went to see Up. It was good, if surprisingly melancholy. He appreciated the floating house and talking dogs. I appreciated the theme that we will all inevitably lose everything and everyone we ever loved. This movie was fun for the whole bipolar family.

Spoiler time. If I had been in charge of the movie, the photo montage over the end credits would have included a shot of the kid (sorry, I forget his name and am far too lazy to look it up) sitting alone in the funeral home, in a throwback to the earlier shot of the old guy (see what I said about the kid a very short time ago) sitting alone at his wife's wake. That shot seemed like an obvious capper to me, and I was disappointed that it wasn't included.

I also liked that Pixar made a movie with virtually no merchandising potential. Nobody is going to want action figures of the old guy or the chubby kid. It's almost as though the Pixar crew were thumbing their collective nose at the Disney machine to which they were tethered. Now that the Pixar/Disney split is imminent, I know which side I'm on. My son and I will probably be at the next Pixar movie. The next Disney movie, not so much.

While at the theatre for Up, I picked up the free movie magazine in the lobby. Trendy Nitwit Monthly or somesuch. Most of it was of course vacuous fluff. I take perverse pleasure in flipping through it without reading the captions to see how few of the stars-du-summer-blockbuster I recognize. My ratio is down to about one in ten.

Anyway, one article (the movie started late, so I actually read a good chunk of the magazine) caught my interest. Not for a good reason. In an article about an upcoming werewolf movie, this passage appeared (sadly, the link means I now know the actual title of the magazine. I preferred Trendy Nitwit Monthly):

Director Chris Weitz told USA Today the requirements included having Native American or First Nation ancestry, because their characters belong to the Quileute tribe, based in La Push, Washington. “They had to have papers that proved their heritage,” says Weitz.

See the problem? If not, I'll wait.

OK. Anybody who doesn't think there's a problem with that needs to consider the logical outcome of this sort of thinking. I foresee a World War II movie in which the director insists that all Nazi characters be played by actors who are purely Aryan and have the papers to prove it. After all, racial purity is important in filmmaking, right?

When that happens, I don't want to hear any whining from anybody who doesn't acknowledge the problem with demanding racial papers from actors playing Native American werewolves.

Now there's a sentence that has probably never been written before.

Michael Jackson is still dead. Just throwin' that out there.

Actually, I've got a couple of other notes on the matter.

First up, I feel especially bad for poor old Latoya being tossed into the spotlight again. I think most of us had forgotten about her, which was the best thing for her reputation. It's pretty rough when Janet Jackson is your sister, but you're still considered the trampy one.

Second, Michael is on the cover of every tabloid this week, and most mainstream "news" outlets are still running factoids about him as their top stories. Farrah Fawcett is getting thrown an occasional bone. (Don't snicker at that phrasing. Show some class.) Ed McMahon has been largely forgotten already.

There's a worse omission, though. Where's the love for Karl Malden? The guy was in Patton, for crying out loud! That alone should be worth any number of swimsuit posters, "Hey-Yo"-s, and child molestation allegations.

Driving things further into the sewer, let's play a round of America's fastest growing quiz sensation, Choose Your Own Punchline! Today's episode is rated For Mature Audiences due to immaturity.

Today I noticed that a co-worker's wristwatch was loose. Having my watch sliding around on my arm like that would drive me crazy. He said, "I lost some weight, and now my watch is loose. I need to readjust the strap sometime."

I replied, "I don't think losing a few pounds should make your forearms shrink that much. That's a loss of muscle tone."

Knowing full well what he was getting into, he said, "Do you have any suggestions how I could build up my wrist muscles?"

Which brings us to that time again...Choose Your Own Punchline!

(A) "Get a divorce."

-or-

(B) "Stay married a while longer."

As always, your votes will be tabulated by Price-Waterhouse-Cooper! Well, Price and Cooper. Waterhouse is off somewhere building up his wrist muscles.

Hey, did a U.S. Supreme Court Justice actually say something this revealing while discussing Roe v. Wade?

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

Why, yes. Yes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you don't see the problem here, I can't help you.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the top left shelf of bookshelf # 1. This shelf is a slushpile of stuff that I haven't sorted away in a proper place yet. Highlights include several photo albums / scrapbooks (the last three on the right are full of Beatles clippings), unread books by B.F. Skinner, Ayn Rand, and Richard Matheson (I like to imagine those three hanging out together when they were alive, perhaps at one of those old drive-in burger joints with the waitresses on roller skates), and my beloved three-hole punch. It's under the monkey. No, the other monkey. No, the one in the middle with the Santa hat.

Marital Mathematics

2009-06-30T17:34:00.003-03:00

It's very close to my wedding anniversary. My wife’s, too. What are the odds of that? This anniversary is a round number, one of the Big Ones. My wife likes to call it “Ten down, two to go!”

The actual anniversary went by very recently. Or it might be coming up very soon. I forget. It might even be today, which would plausibly explain all the people in my house and possibly the balloons. However, I still haven’t gotten a satisfactory explanation for the streamers. I’m pretty sure they’re unrelated, and reject all claims to the contrary.

This is the kind of occasion when one reviews and takes stock of their life. In my case, it makes me wonder about a specific statistic. This is a delicate matter, but it should be clear from this blog that any aspect of my life, no matter how intimate, is fair game for discussion. Well, except for anything that’s actually personal.

Anyway, I got to wondering about, shall we say, “relations” statistics for my wife and I over the course of our marital career (sorry for the vulgarity, Mom!). If we appeared on baseball cards, this is the kind of thing I’d like to see on the back. So, I ran some numbers to estimate how many times we’ve (THIS PORTION OF THIS BLOG HAS BEEN REDACTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF MORAL STANDARDS ON GROUNDS OF GENERAL ICKINESS) over the last decade.

Ten years is 520 weeks, or about 3,640 nights. So, divide that out, carry the eight…

Four times. Yep, that sounds about right.

No, wait, three. I forgot that 2000 wasn’t a leap year.

In other news, reliable reports indicate that Michael Jackson remains dead. However, several witnesses claim to have seen Generalissimo Francisco Franco at the 7-11 in Des Moines, Iowa on Monday. There was a special on Slush Puppies.

We have received no new information on the whereabouts or condition of Hostage Bunny. Our prayers tonight are with Mrs. Bunny, their 74 children, and their innumerable grandchildren.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a finished frog pinata. Sadly, no photos were taken of the smashed-to-bits frog pinata that came to be soon thereafter. There was green paper mache and months-old candy (mostly hard candy wrapped in cellophane, so no worse for wear) everywhere.

Omar Khadr And Michael Jackson

2009-06-25T22:06:00.007-03:00

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

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

What, too soon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And It Gets Worse

2009-06-24T19:41:00.007-03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

[snip, snip, snip your cares away]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bite The Helping Hand

2009-06-20T22:32:00.006-03:00

I'm still alive but busy. I've been sinking a lot of time into learning another language of late. Really.

Today my son, my Dad, and I went bowling together to commemorate Father's Day. It was the first time my son ever really bowled. He'd gone to the alley and chucked balls down the lane at birthday parties, but with no structure, rules, or scorekeeping. Today we kept score. On his first string ever, he rolled a 94. I don't think I've broken 90 more than a couple of times in my life.

I'd think we might have the bowling equivalent of Tiger Woods on our hands, but he declined to roll another string afterward. Dad and I went a second round, but my son only wanted to sit at the score table and keep score instead of bowling any more. He did a pretty good job at that, too. Good addition practice.

On to a news story.

So this guy, Gilles Blackburn, and his wife went on a ski trip. They decided that they were not only expert skiers, but apparently infallible in other matters as well. They crossed over the ski resort's clearly marked boundary lines into the wilderness, ignoring posted signs saying, "Don't go past here or you will get lost and freeze." They went past, and proceeded to get lost and freeze. She died, but he got rescued a few days later.

This is a sad story. It's more of a "too bad" than a tragedy, because these people were victims of their own hubris, but they still went through an experience that couldn't be wished on anyone.

Once Blackburn began to recover and make public statements, he of course expressed his profound regret for his poor judgement, thanked his rescuers profusely, and apologized to all concerned for having caused the situation in the first place.

Oh, wait. That was in Imaginary Utopialand. In real life, he blamed his rescuers for taking so long, demanded an apology from them, and threatened to sue. At this point the word "prick" isn't nearly strong enough, but I try to keep this blog PG-13 or lower. Here are some highlights from the linked article:

"I lived in Alberta and in B.C," (Blackburn) said. "I know the ski slopes."

Blackburn said it is not unusual for experienced downhill skiers familiar with expert runs to ignore warning signs and to go off into unpatrolled areas.

Blackburn said he is only partially responsible for what happened.

I was going to say "emphasis added" and bold or italicize some of that arrogance, but I realized I'd have to emphasize all of it.

I've been tracking this story since it broke back in March, and there were a few times that I started drafting up articles about it. However, there came a point when I started feeling sorry for the guy and couldn't bring myself to slam his actions. He's been through a horrible experience. He watched his wife die in front of him. I don't even like to think about how traumatic his experience must have been, and the fact that it was his own fault only compounds it.

So, I could excuse his ranting for a while. He's projecting, unable to deal with the fact that he effectively killed his wife. She was, I assume, a willing participant, so she shares responsibility for her own death, but unless he's a completely emotionless sociopath, that's probably of little comfort to him. I couldn't hold him fully accountable for everything he says during his grief.

If I had written about it back then, I hope I would have been compassionate about it, but I suspect not, so I chose not to write. I saw a few other articles and editorials about the matter expressing the position that Mr. Blackburn needs to stop blaming others and start into therapy to figure out how he's going to get through this. This one was my favourite.

Now I find myself wondering how far that sympathy should go. Mr. Blackburn has officially filed lawsuits against the people who risked their own safety to come rescue him when he did something stupid. If I were of less generous spirit, I'd note that they may have done well to wait a few more days before hauling his butt out of the snow. Frozen corpses don't hire ambulance-chasing bloodsuckers with law degrees.

These lawsuits had the results you would expect: search-and-rescue organizations, which are operated by volunteers, are shutting down. It seems that people aren't particularly interested in signing up for arduous, exhausting, hazardous, uncompensated duties. Actually, lots of people are interested in that sort of thing, because they care that much about helping others. However, when the others they help turn out to be ungrateful wretches who file lawsuits because their rescuers don't show upon demand like magical genies, the bloom falls from that rose.

Here's the problem with the whole idea of suing volunteers. There's a contractual concept called "consideration". Consideration is a necessary element in any contract. It means what’s in it for each party. Volunteers with search-and-rescue organizations get no consideration for their efforts. As a general rule, without consideration, there is no valid contract. Without contract, there is no (legal) obligation. One can argue moral obligation, but that’s not what this is about.

As an illustration of the distinction between legal and moral obligations, suppose I'm visiting a public pool and notice a child obviously struggling then slipping below the surface. For whatever reason, the lifeguards and / or his adult supervision haven't noticed the situation, and are far enough away that they may not be able to react quickly enough. I'm a strong swimmer, and there are no life preservers or ropes readily at hand, so I should dive in and help him out of the pool. My moral obligation to do so is obvious, although some would probably (and depressingly) argue otherwise. My legal obligation to do so is nonexistent.

A volunteer organization bears no individualized responsibility toward the beneficiaries of its activities. Those beneficiaries have no basis to sue if unsatisfied with any services – free services, remember – that may be rendered. This does not absolve government agencies or businesses, both of which are compensated for their services, or situations where an explicit legal relationship with according rights and responsibilities exists (parent and child being an obvious example). If you're dissatisfied with the free service you receive from an all-volunteer organization, then by all means feel free to decline their services and take care of the situation yourself the next time around.

For Mr. Blackburn, this means that the next time he ignores warnings and takes a family member out into the woods to freeze to death, he shouldn't expect any help from search-and-rescue (assuming he hasn't managed to chase every volunteer out of the search-and-rescue field with his malicious lawsuits). He should feel free to be out there completely on his own. Well, with a companion, until his arrogant actions kill them too.

I hope that once Mr. Blackburn's mental state returns to normal (assuming and hoping that it does), he'll drop these foolish lawsuits, apologize to his rescuers for having spit in their faces, and condemn the opportunistic sharks around him who encouraged (or even failed to warn against) this shameful behaviour. If he's still holding this childish position, continuing to blame others for his own error and failure, even after his grief subsides... well, then, maybe that's the type of person he was all along. More's the pity.

Enough rambling. Here's the left side of what I'm arbitrarily designating bookshelf # 1 in my house. We saw the stuff on top of it last time out. The handprints up the side are my son's. Unlike his handprints all over the walls, windowpanes, and television screens in our house, these ones were made with parental approval.

Trivial Pursuits

2009-06-12T23:58:00.005-03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return

2009-06-05T23:07:00.006-03:00

I had no intention of letting this blog lie fallow for so long. I haven't abandoned it, at least not consciously. Over the past few weeks I've just had a lot on my plate, and frankly all of it took precedence over sitting here typing. Some of it will continue to do so.

I'm bemused to note that my traffic remains pretty consistent whether I post a new entry or not. I'm not sure what to think of that other than "random reinforcement works". I'm pleased, though, that my most popular article of late is one of the serious Bible study entries, Bible Defense: Of Birds And Bats (No Bees). That kind of article is really why I'm doing this. The other entries are fun (frequently more so for me than the reader), but of no real lasting value.

I'm also well aware that my last entry, about the horse being given to the Queen, was subpar. I'm sorely tempted to delete it or completely rewrite it to punch it up. It had some potential, but needed another round or two of polishing. For now, and probably forever, it stands as a testament to what happens when I phone it in.

If I were to re-do it, here are some of the improvements I'd make. There would be a joke about how the Queen was going to get the horse back to England. ("Can you check a horse as baggage? You'd have to do a lot more than just geld it to fit it into the overhead compartment.") The whole "telling the horse about the name change and gelding" section would be revamped ("Umm, Terror.... I have two pieces of bad news."). The reference to events before the horse was gelded would use the term "pre-gelding", which I find inexplicably amusing. And it should have been called "I Hope She Looked In Its Mouth". So, basically, yeah, I'd tear the whole thing down and start over. But onward.

Here's a very short summary of some of what I've been doing over the last few weeks. Some of these may be expanded in future entries. Most probably won't.

I had a job interview, and the new position is looking like a real possibility. I spent a lot of time preparing for it, which seems to have paid off. I passed the initial screening and some tests to get an interview, and after the interview I was asked for some references, which I take as a good sign. That's where it stands now. If I get the job (and accept it, which is a whole other question), I'll be moving, which makes pretty much no difference to this blog. I won't be any more specific about the new job than my current one. That is, it'll just be fodder for occasional True Stories that could take place in any office.

My son had a birthday, with accompanying party. My house grows ever more full of Transformers.

My wife and I are still playing Magic frequently, when she takes a break from reading the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. She's still playing Thallids almost exclusively. I usually play a black and blue bounce / discard deck, including several cards from the new expansion, Alara Reborn (I got six packs while travelling for the job interview). I love the Cascade mechanic. Deny Reality is a key card in the deck. Magic players - click on that link, and try telling me that card isn't ten pounds of fun in a five pound bag. I still rotate through other decks sometimes, too - we have 19 decks ready to shuffle and play at the moment.

My Bible study series has wrapped up. I miss it already, and may revisit it as an adult Sunday School class in the fall. On the other hand, finishing the series frees up my Wednesday nights and the time I was putting into preparation each week. I'm using some of that time to catch up on, ironically, my Bible reading. I follow the Our Daily Bread devotionals, including the "Bible in a year" reading plan, and I've fallen a wee bit behind so far this year. I'm currently on April 21. I'm catching up slowly but surely, by doing a couple of days' worth at a time. Doing more than that gets counterproductive. Trying to cram too much Bible reading at once leads to poor retention and reflection, thereby defeating the entire purpose. The goal is to internalize Scripture, not to check off chapters on a list like I'm collecting hockey cards.

I've been chasing contractors to come look at my house. I'm not quite sure why people who repair houses for a living don't seem to want my money. I have many stories on this topic for other days. A guy is supposed to be here tomorrow morning for an initial meeting about replacing some water-damaged ceiling. We'll see.

I've been sleeping (not quite enough) and eating (a little too much).

All for now. This was going to be a Quick Notes entry, with several short unrelated thoughts about random things, but turned into something a bit different as I typed. Maybe Quick Notes will be next, maybe not. Oh, and I'm fresh out of Hostage Bunny pictures. I think there will be two more. The second one is going to make Bleeding Heart Barbie (which made me laugh out loud - thanks, RebelAngel!) very, very sad. Know what makes me sad? The fact that this blog isn't the top Google result for "Hostage Bunny". Yet.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my basement. This is after some straightening up.

I Wonder If She Looked In Its Mouth

2009-05-26T22:18:00.005-03:00

So the Canadian government gave a horse to the Queen of England. I can't imagine caring. However, a couple of details stand out from the rest of the story. First, the lead sentence:

First he was a star of the RCMP's Musical Ride, and now George, the black gelding from Pakenham, Ont., has joined the Queen's royal stables...

Poor George. Sure, his other accomplishments and honours get mentioned, but the writer can't make it even one sentence without bringing up the fact that his genitals have been removed. Put yourself in his four iron shoes. Wouldn't it be nice to go even a few minutes without some jerk mentioning castration?

Later in the article, we learn that the horse used to be much cooler before another alteration. I'm going to assume there's no correlation between the two changes.

The easygoing black horse with a white patch on his forehead was renamed George, in honour of the Queen's grandfather, King George V. But his previous name, (RCMP Superintendent) Peters said, was Terror - a name chosen by a child in the Mounties' Name That Foal Contest back in 2000.

Once again, try to empathize with the horse. One day your name is Terror. You rule the meadow. You get all the mares you can handle on the basis of your name alone (this, I suppose, assumes the gelding hasn't happened yet). Then one day you're minding your own business, swatting flies with your tail or something, and some guy walks over and says "Oh, yeah, Terror - I almost forgot. Your name is George now."

From "Terror" to "George", just like that. Yeah, you might as well go ahead and have that gelding now.

The horrible cynic in me, which is never far from (in fact, rarely below) the surface, loves that they changed the name of this horse after it was chosen by a young contest winner. Screw you, kid. In fact, the article ends with a choice quote from Superintendent Peters:

"We switched the name obviously from Terror to George," said Peters.

Yeah, obviously. Stupid kid, giving the horse a stupid name like Terror. When he's older, he'll understand that George is a much better name for a police horse.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a failed Hostage Bunny rescue attempt. As you can see, Sgt. Pepper's Howling Commandos were unable to overcome the bunnynappers. (By the way, ~~I'm~~ the terrorists are pretty much out of ideas for torturing Hostage Bunny. I They welcome any suggestions. If and when the ideas run out, the end may draw nigh for our long-eared friend...)

You Get More Of What You Subsidize

2009-05-16T12:59:00.007-03:00

Lobster prices are apparently low in New Brunswick this year. The same may be true in other areas as well; I neither know, nor could be bothered to check, whether that's the case.

For those who enjoy eating lobster and live in an area where the price is down, this is a good thing. For my part, I don't care to eat underwater cockroaches, so this has remarkably little effect on my life. I always wonder two things about the first time a person ate lobster. Number one, how did they get one in the first place? Lobsters are bottom-feeding scavengers. They don't, to my knowledge, occasionally poke their eye-stalks above the surface to look around, or creepy-crawl up onto the beach for some sun.

No, it takes effort, and generally a big specially constructed wooden box, to catch lobster. I like to imagine that someone built one of those big wooden boxes and tossed it into the ocean on spec. "I don't know what'll wind up in there, but I'm eating it!"

Yes, yes. Tidal pools, accidental beachings, etc. Things that belong on the ocean floor wind up on the beach all the time. This doesn't help the case of the first person who ate a lobster they just happened to find. Take a good long look at a lobster. It looks like something that escaped from one of David Cronenberg's nightmares. The correct response of the first person who found one, not knowing what it was, should have been to run as far as they could, then dare their friends to go poke it with a stick.

This brings me to my second question about the first lobster-eating. How freaking hungry was that person? A lobster, even disregarding the possible hygiene and disgust factors of finding one lying on a beach, already dead and decomposing, is not an appetizing sight. A lobster is an aquatic earwig.

Of course, my scenario of that first lobster-finder daring their friends to go look (this, of course, assumes that finder was male) leads to another possibility. The first person to eat lobster may have done so on a dare, or possibly when bribed with the epochal equivalent of a dollar. Remember that kid you knew in elementary school who would eat pretty much anything for a buck? The first person to eat lobster was somebody who grossed him out.

Sidebar: at this very moment, somewhere out there a reader who enjoys lobster is preparing an indignant retort about how delicious it is. Save it. If it doesn't nauseate you, then by all means enjoy. The fact that I see eating lobster as pretty much equivalent to scarfing down insect-infested roadkill means all the more for you. You should be thanking me, really. End sidebar.

I have another issue, besides disgust, with eating lobster. I am neither a vegetarian nor an animal rights activist. I understand that every time I eat meat, I'm eating an animal that was killed for that express purpose, and I'm generally OK with that. However, I think that those animals should be killed in as quick and painless a manner as possible. I have a hard time seeing "dropped alive into a pot of boiling water" as humane.

Anyway, all of that was preamble to what I really intended to write today. My actual topic is the economy of lobster fishing (which should be called "lobster roaching" or something - are lobsters "fish" by any definition?).

The low price of lobster is not so good for lobster fishermen. Having learned something from the business acumen in the banking and automotive industries, lobster fishermen have responded to this downturn by asking for government bailouts:

On Thursday representatives from every wharf in the area met to discuss the issue with the hopes they can organize something to get the attention of the government, (a spokesman) said.

"We're not paid enough even to cover costs and we need help from the government."

(The spokesman) said they are hoping both the federal and provincial governments will step in to help fishermen.

Here's the problem with that line of thinking. This applies to every industry, not just fishing. The government cannot help. Oh, they can throw some money (your money and mine, by the way - the government has no money except what it takes from citizens) at a problem to try to put a band-aid on the bloody stump, but in the long term that does more harm than good. Here's how.

Let's assume there are 1000 lobster fishermen in New Brunswick who can't make any money at it this year due to low prices. I have no idea whether that number is remotely accurate, and don't care since it's only for illustrative purposes.

If the government steps in and hands them each a bag of money not to fish this year, or does anything else that has the same end effect of insulating them from any financial losses (regulating prices, etc.), then how many of them will come back and try to fish lobster again next year? Probably about 1000. Maybe more, since a government bailout means guaranteed profits.

The same problem will then repeat itself next year. And the year after that, and the year after that, ad infinitum. This is not indefinitely sustainable. At some point, an industry has to be allowed to suffer some negative consequences of economic cycles. Even if we ignore the debatable morality of the government stepping in and interfering (I'm not going there today; this is going to wind up long enough already), it destabilizes the market and leads to much larger long-term problems.

Now, consider what happens if the government doesn't interfere. Yes, it'll be a rough summer for some lobster fishermen. However, what would happen to those same 1000 lobster fishermen next year? I'll expect that by then, some of them would have found something more profitable to do. Let's say 10% of them move on to other occupations, go back to school, move to another region, whatever. That leaves 900 trying to fish lobster next year. That means less lobster on the market, which means higher prices, which means maybe the 900 can make a living at it. If not, then maybe only 700 will try the next year. Eventually, and in a shorter time than you'd probably expect, the market will stabilize and the remaining fishermen will be making money.

Sidebar for those who went to public schools in the last thirty years, or who don't see the problem with the bailout mentality: when the government keeps its nose out of things, the price of anything is normally determined by two factors: supply (how much of it is available) and demand (how much of it people want). This is called the free market, and it's a good thing for all kinds of reasons that we don't have time to go into today. Sorry to complicate this - I know those three italicized terms will be completely new and foreign concepts to a lot of people these days. End sidebar.

So if the government stays out of it, despite some tough times in the interim for a relatively few people, things will work out in the end. If the government gets involved, and they probably will, they'll destabilize the market and foster a cycle of dependency. Bailing out an industry to avoid a down market cycle (or even a long-term shift - if cars were just being invented now, governments would be making guarantees to buggy whip manufacturers) may prevent a little pain in the short term, but it causes a lot more in the long term. It's the equivalent of not teaching a child the alphabet, because that's an awful lot to ask of a toddler, to let them struggle through life as an illiterate adult.

And about that whole dependency thing, here's a quote from a spokesman for the fishermen, from later in the same article. He's talking about the possibility of the fishermen only running their boats for a few weeks this year: "How would you then qualify for EI?"

I'm not trying to belittle their situation. I appreciate how hard it is to find work under the best of conditions, and Atlantic Canada in 2009 is far from the best of conditions. However, I just don't see how it's the government's problem, or mine, if somebody can't work long enough this summer to qualify for EI ("employment insurance", which is what Canada calls unemployment benefits to try to put on an Orwellian happy face). Once again, maybe people should be encouraged to move on from an industry where you plan to collect unemployment benefits every year, and look for something more stable and sustainable.

For that matter, the fact that the I in "EI" stands for "insurance" makes the thought occur to me that planning to collect on insurance is normally considered insurance fraud. The law says I can't insure my house then deliberately burn it down, or take out life insurance on someone then kill them, and expect to benefit. Insurance is meant to compensate unforeseen losses. But this, again, is a whole other topic that I'll leave for today.

As a postscript, that newspaper I linked to earlier has a "public opinion" feature in their editorial section. I like to call it the Uninformed Person On The Street feature (I used to call it "Ignoramus On The Street", but decided that was too harsh). It doesn't seem to be in their online edition. Like Jay Leno, they send a reporter out to ask people in the streets what they think about various issues. The problem here is that most people haven't given most issues a moment's thought. This includes me - as I've noted before, I don't know enough about most things to form an opinion, and you can assume that the things I write about are the rare exceptions.

So the odds are that this feature will consist of a lineup of citizens expressing uninformed opinions about situations they don't remotely understand, and offering untenable solutions. Sure enough, that's almost always what you get.

In a recent edition, the reporter asked about this lobster situation. Several apparently random people were asked whether the government should step in to help the fishermen (without defining what that means - obviously, we all understand that it means "give them a pile of money").

Every single one of them said yes, most with emphatic emphasis.

I can only hope against hope that none of those people vote.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of evidence that Hostage Bunny is being mistreated in yet another way: the use of stress positions. You may notice that in every picture his body has been in precisely the same posture, indicating that his fiendish captors are not allowing him to move. Unless he's allowed to stretch occasionally, cramping is inevitable.

Hunger Hurts. Who Knew?

2009-05-13T00:15:00.005-03:00

So Mia Farrow has called off her hunger strike. She did this, because - wait for it - apparently not eating can be bad for you.

I can hear the shock in the voices of the Hollywood elite now: "Oh, so that's why all those people die in places where they don't have enough food!"

I recently wrote about the silliness inherent to hunger strikes, which are nothing more than tantrums for supposed adults. I stand by that piece, especially the Blazing Saddles joke.

At least Rosemary (and her acolyte Richard Branson) was throwing her public tantrum for a worthy cause. The situation in Darfur is horrible, and calling the world's attention to it is a good thing. Although I'm not quite sure what most of the world is supposed to actually, you know, do about it. Prayer is always good, and about the only way I can see to personally contribute.

So in a strange roundabout way, I sort of admire Ms. Farrow's accomplishment. She managed to draw some attention to Darfur, which was her stated goal all along. She even managed to get mentioned on at least one blog written by some Canadian dweeb, thereby getting her name in front of upwards of four readers. She did it in a very silly way, but it worked. It reminds me of John Lennon and Yoko Ono saying they were willing to play the world's clowns for peace.

Well played, Hanna (or possibly one of the Sisters - haven't actually seen the movie). Well played. No longer will I think of you only as Woody Allen's girlfriend and / or mother-in-law. Now I also think of you as a canny publicity hound, in addition to being Woody Allen's girlfriend and / or mother-in-law.

But hunger strikes are still a stupid idea.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Hostage Bunny, taken by an unmanned aerial reconnaissance drone. There are unconfirmed reports that a rescue attempt is in the works, but even if I had details, I wouldn't report them because doing so could compromise the mission. What do you think this is, the New York Times?

Kodak Customer Service Is Good

2009-05-05T23:08:00.002-03:00

Way back when, I bought a Kodak Easyshare 5100 printer. It gave me a lot of trouble, but I eventually got it working. These three posts tell that story.

Over the months that I've used this printer, it's proven itself a finicky beast. I've often had to randomly remove and reinsert ink cartridges, cycle the power, run nozzle cleanings (which suck back a lot of ink), and recalibrate to keep it chugging along. I take all of that in stride. I've been a PC user since the days of dot matrix printers that were the size of suitcases, were loud enough to annoy neighbours, and printed at speeds measured in minutes per page rather than pages per minute. I've wrestled with printers for many years, and I expect a certain amount of trouble from them.

That being the case, I shrugged off this printer's quirks. It was hard to get running in the first place, and needs more assistance to perform than Hugh Hefner without Viagra, but I can live with it. The fact that I only print once or twice a month probably doesn't help. (Another Hefner joke could easily be placed here. One could argue the greater comedic potential of either drawing a parallel or a contrast. Discuss.)

However, I hit a whole new problem not long ago. Colour was printing fine, but no black ink was making it to the page. The printer was reporting plenty of ink left in the cartridge, and I even tried a new cartridge, but the printer would only produce occasional faint grey lines where black text should have appeared. Since colour appeared as normal, as a workaround I printed the handouts for my Bible study sessions in red or blue, then photocopied them.

After accepting that this wasn't just another of the printer's quirks that I could talk it out of, I began Googling the problem. I quickly learned from sites like this one that my problem was not unusual, and indicated that the printhead needed to be replaced.

I used the contact form on Kodak's site to report my problem on a Monday morning. I outlined the diagnostic steps I had already taken, and advised them that I thought I was having the same printhead problem that others had reported, with a link to the site above (i.e., "My symptoms are just like this."). I told them my printer was out of warranty because it was over a year old, and asked how I could go about buying a new printhead, since they don't seem to offer that part for separate purchase.

I got an automated reply within a couple of minutes. More impressively, I got an actual human reply about four hours later, saying that if I would send them some info (my name, address, and "Kodak service number" from a sticker inside the printer), they would send me a new printhead free of charge, no further questions asked. I replied, and after one more quick and polite exchange because in my infallibility I forgot to include the Kodak service number, they said the printhead would be shipped out ASAP. I got that message just after midnight on Tuesday morning, less than 24 hours after my initial inquiry.

They said it would probably take 3 to 8 business days; it arrived Thursday morning, less than 72 hours after I first contacted them. It was very easy to swap out the old printhead and put in the new one, and in case it hadn't been, they included both written instructions and a link to a section of their website that explains the process in so-clear-Grandma-could-do-it detail with lots of pictures.

Their service is a lot faster than mine. It finally occurred to me over a week later to let them know that I got the part, it worked (more on that in a moment), and I was impressed with their service. I got another human reply early the next morning, thanking me for letting them know how it turned out.

There's lots of good news here. My printer works again, although it's still as temperamental as ever. Whenever I use it now, it gives constant warnings that my black ink is below 30%, even though I just replaced the cartridge. This has trained me to deal with that warning just like I deal with the Check Engine light that's always on in my car: by ignoring it.

I wanted to write this up for the same reason that I sent that last "attaboy" e-mail to Kodak: their service was superb, and I think it deserves recognition. They were amazingly fast, and each of the reps I dealt with was polite, friendly, and knowledgeable. They never questioned my need for the part (although, having been a tech, I spelled out what I had already tried pretty thoroughly in my initial description), they didn't give me any red tape, and they offered me the part freely despite my explicit inquiry about buying one. I couldn't be more satisfied with the service I received.

Kodak met my definition of good customer service perfectly with this incident. I don't define customer service as never having a problem with a product or service. Every company in the world is run by human beings, and every one of them makes mistakes. Every assembly line produces an occasional lemon. Customer service is measured by how well a problem is handled once brought to the company's attention. By that standard, Kodak gets a perfect score from me.

Incidentally, one of the forms included with the printhead was a packing sheet showing its retail price: $70. At that price I wouldn't have purchased one, since that's rather close to what the printer cost brand new. This is why Kodak can sell their ink so inexpensively. Many printer models have the printhead component attached to the ink cartridge. When you replace the ink, you're also replacing the printhead. That increases the cost of the cartridge dramatically, but has the side benefit of preventing some printhead-related problems.

However, I'm not here solely to praise Kodak. Their customer service is phenomenal, but the actual product is mediocre at best. As you can see from this article and the other ones I've written about this printer, it's been quite a headache at times. If you aren't willing to nurse a printer to get it working and don't get your onsite tech support for free, then I can't recommend an Easyshare 5100, despite their low cost of ownership. I've also never - not once - printed a photo that looked nearly as good as a professionally produced print. On the rare occasions that I want prints, I still take a jump drive to a kiosk and pay a quarter each.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Hostage Bunny surrounded by his captors. Note the rare glimpse of evil mastermind Shirtless Dr. Zaius, who could also use a belt.

Insert Your Own 'Snow' Joke Here

2009-05-04T22:12:00.004-03:00

A Canadian snowboarder has been busted for trafficking cocaine. Allegedly, of course.

Ryan Wedding was a hopeful for the 2010 Olympics -- a promising snowboarder who placed 24th in his first Games in Salt Lake City in 2002.

But now things have gone downhill for the former Olympian, who's in a California prison awaiting trial for cocaine trafficking after two Vancouver co-accused pleaded guilty to their role in the massive smuggling ring.

[snip-a-dee-doo-da, snip-a-dee-ay]

Wedding, 27, is fighting to have the case against him dismissed because of "outrageous conduct" by the American government, which he alleges used a violent former KGB agent as an undercover operative.

I suggest a new entry in the record books, in the category of World's Easiest Job: prosecutor in a drug case against a professional snowboarder. The Crown's opening statement, exhibits A through Q-17, and closing argument should all be the fact that this guy is a 27-year-old snowboarder. The only way your case could be any stronger is if he drove around solving mysteries with a Great Dane.

No, not all snowboarders are druggies. That's an unfair generalization. Not all Magic: The Gathering players are huge nerds who live in their parents' basements, either. Just look at me. I'm hardly ever in my parents' basement these days. I pretty much only go down there to fix their computer.

Waitwaitwait. Something else from this story just filtered all the way into my brain: snowboarding is an Olympic event now?

If snowboarding gets a thumbs up from the Olympic committee, why not Ultimate Frisbee, or Synchronized Hacky Sack? How about Following Phish Around In A Van Full Of (Other) Smelly Hippies? (That last joke was originally going to name-check the Grateful Dead, but that's a bit dated now. On the other hand, many Deadheads remain blissfully unaware that Garcia is gone; they just occasionally notice that these days it's a little quieter in the parking lots where they live.)

Finally, I love that this guy wants his charges tossed on the grounds of "outrageous conduct". I'm pretty sure that's not a technical legal term, and judges generally like to hear terminology that actually means something before they'll throw out a case. However, his original motion to dismiss on the grounds of "total bogosity" was denied, a fact which is in itself totally bogus.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Hostage Bunny being waterboarded. I'd like to point out that this surveillance footage was obtained by our double-secret operatives before TB's reference to "apple-boarding" a couple of entries back. Many toy Bothans died to bring us this information.

Quick Notes

2009-05-02T11:26:00.011-03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What sort of party went on down there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never called again.

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

Judgemental Bits Of Colourful Cardboard

2009-04-30T00:12:00.004-03:00

Continuing the writeup on my latest order from Magic Arsenal, received late last summer. See the previous part for introductory blather.

This time we move on to the six Judgment repacks. The rares were Wormfang Behemoth, Telekenetic Bonds, Masked Gorgon, Ernham Djinn, Shaman's Trance, and Selfless Exorcist. I don't find any of them worth further discussion. They're mostly too narrow to interest me.

Of the 18 uncommons, I received copies of 10 different cards. There were three each of Infectious Rage and Aven Warcraft, and two each of four others. As usual, I found the uncommons more interesting than the rares. Anurid Swarmsnapper, Serene Sunset, and Swelter are very playable, and Infectious Rage looks like a blast. I love introducing potentially chaotic elements into games.

The commons were an even better group. I think this was part of the problem with the long-term image of Fallen Empires - the commons were just more fun than the rares and uncommons. With Magic card collation, players tend to wind up with all the commons they want from a set very quickly. After that point they keep buying packs for the uncommons and rares. When I worked in a game shop, I had several customers who would come in to buy a pack, open it, and set the commons aside without a glance to look at the uncommons and rare. Then they'd leave the store without even bothering to pick the commons back up off the counter (deliberately). They were about as valued as the wrapper the cards came in. Many others (including me) would happily give new players stacks of commons, for free, to get them started.

As good as that is strictly from a player's perspective, it's not so good from a buyer's perspective. The downside is that heavier buyers wind up disappointed with most of the packs they buy. If they don't care about the commons because they already have multiples of all of them, and the rares and uncommons are mediocre at best, then the fun quickly gets sucked out of buying more packs and they start to feel they've wasted their money.

This is not to pass, ummm, judgement on the quality of the rares and uncommons in Judgment as a whole. I'm only considering a small selection of the frankly less saleable cards. However, it gave me an excuse to tell the above stories about Fallen Empires and my game shop days.

I got six repacks, and received six copies of Toxic Stench (1B - Instant - Target nonblack creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn. Threshold - If seven or more cards are in your graveyard, instead destroy that creature. It can't be regenerated). That's right, it was in every pack. And it's not a very good card. In fact, it's almost strictly inferior to Terror (the only benefit is that this can hit artifact creatures), and only even gets close to par after you hit threshold. This card is bad.

I also got five copies of Wormfang Newt, and two to four copies of many others. Some of the commons that I can imagine adding to decks beyond a quick test are Spellgorger Barbarian, Goretusk Firebeast, Swirling Sandstorm, Cagemail (play it on your own walls!), Sudden Strength, and Folk Medicine. My inclination toward recursion also makes me like Battlefield Scrounger and Nantuko Tracer.

I also ordered a ten-pack of black rares. I was pleased with the assortment, because I actually want to build or adapt decks to include six of them: Nihilistic Glee, Living End, Stalking Bloodsucker, Lim-Dul The Necromancer, Final Punishment, and Vermiculos. There are three more that don't appeal as much to me, although I'll given them a shot in one deck or another: Curse of the Cabal, Strongarm Tactics, and Iname, Death Aspect.

I have no use whatsoever for the last one, Spoils of the Vault (B - Instant - Name a card. Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal the named card, then put that card into your hand. Remove all other cards revealed this way from the game, and you lose 1 life for each of the removed cards). I have a very strong aversion to removing my own cards from the game, and so the prospect of losing life for the privilege of doing so appeals to me about as much as a root canal without benefit of anaesthetic. I understand the best use of this card, in a highly tuned combo deck containing four copies each of its critical cards, but that's not a deck I'd ever build, or want to.

This order included two more grab bags, one each of "Grab Bag #1" and "Grab Bag # 2". Those items don't seem to be offered anymore. Instead, Magic Arsenal seem to have replaced them with a wide selection of somewhat more targeted assortments (Standard, Extended, etc.).

Grab Bag #1 contained 23 cards. Two uncommons from Champions of Kamigawa (Oni Possession and Sideswipe), Raise Dead, and a bunch of white and blue filler. A few of the latter may not be commons (Phantasmal Forces, Wall of Air, Wall of Tears) but they're still indisputably filler.

The entire pack (which only cost $1.99) is redeemed, though, by a rare that I really like: Solarion. Doubling things is always fun, and big artifact creatures are always fun, so it's just a matter of figuring out which multi-colour deck to put this guy into. Now if I could just figure out what to do with three more copies of Circle of Protection: White.

Oh, well, I can always use more bookmarks. Or maybe proxies....

Grab Bag # 2 was $2.99 and contained 25 cards. 20 of those cards are non-noteworthy filler. These are all either commons or uncommons that aren't colour-coded as such (many of them predate colour-coded rarities) and don't stand out. I should note that this "filler" would be perfectly good stuff for newer players, or players who didn't have the luxury of getting pretty much any cards they wanted for the first six years that Magic was around. It just doesn't amount to a drop in the bucket of my collection.

I'm still happy with the pack, though, for those last five cards. Three of them are only commons, but they're commons from my "gap sets", and I like them. Spire Golem is my first artifact creature with Affinity, and Dimir Aqueduct is a land that makes more than one colour of mana. Those are almost always worth tossing into multicolour decks.

The third common I liked from this pack was Petravark. It would have been interesting enough on its own, but it's made more fun by the fact that one of the rares in the pack was its big brother, Petradon. I'll definitely be running these two together in a deck.

The last card in the pack is a legendary artifact, Krark's Thumb (2 - Legendary Artifact - If you would flip a coin, instead flip two coins and ignore one). It looks like fun, but I don't know if I can gather up enough coin-flip cards to build a deck around it. I've read that this card is legendary just so the rules team at Wizards didn't have to figure out what would happen if two were in play. That may have been a joke (which makes me think I probably read it in a Mark Rosewater article); it seems pretty straightforward to me. Since replacement effects, like this, only apply once, having two in play would mean that each coin-flip was replaced by flipping four coins and choosing one of the results, making coin-flip cards not much of a gamble.

Here's the logic: the single coin flip gets replaced by two coin flips, by one of the Krark's Thumbs. The second Thumb would then replace each of those two flips with two more, for a total of four. I *think* that's what would happen, anyway. Rules Gurus are welcome to post comments correcting me.

The final item in this order was an assortment of 200 commons from Onslaught, the next chronological set from the gap in my collection. Magic Arsenal offers these 200-commons assortments from lots of sets. My basis for choosing between repacks and 200-common assortments is pretty simple. For large sets, which usually contain 300 or more cards and so over 100 commons, I'll take the 200 commons. For small sets, the 200 commons would probably contain far too much duplication for my liking, so I'll pay a per-card premium to get some uncommons and rares mixed in.

I was pleased to see all but one of the common nonbasic land cycle included. I got 10 of these lands, each of which come into play tapped, make 1 mana of a given colour, and can be cycled at a cost of 1 mana of the colour they make. That makes them perfect for splashing into multicolour decks. If you only need one or two white mana, for instance, then once you already have them available, you can cycle the white-producing land (Secluded Steppe) using one of the white sources you already have in play. Trading a redundant land for a new card is a good deal.

Blue next, for the completely arbitrary reason that it's next in the pile. The most I got of any given blue card was four copies. I like Disruptive Pitmage, but only got one copy. Most of the others look like they have the potential to be fun, but nothing's jumping out at me as really good or really bad. Feel free to assume that a copy of that sentence could be appended to what I say about each of the other colours.

There was a lot more repetition in green. I got five copies of Crown of Vigor, six each of Barkhide Mauler and Leery Fogbeast, and a whopping eight Snarling Undoraks. As it turns out, I like Snarling Undorak, but I'm not sure I want to build two whole Beast decks to accommodate all eight copies. I also like Barkhide Mauler, although I suspect I'd always resist cycling it ("It's a big stompy creature! I can't just toss that away!"), and Crown of Vigor because I like building and playing tribal-themed decks. The only other green common that stands out to me as especially fun is Birchlore Rangers; I only got one copy.

Six copies of one white card (Crown of Awe), five copies each of five others, one to four of all the rest. Disciple of Grace (five copies) is nice, and a better use of cycling than Barkhide Mauler. While I'd always be tempted to hold a big creature for later during the early game, I'd cycle a little guy like this without hesitation once the board got beefy. Battlefield Medic (five copies) makes me nostalgic for my Fallen Empires buddy Combat Medic. Battlefield Medic is no Combat Medic, and for that reason alone I'll probably never include it in a deliberately designed deck. I'll make room for Confessor and Unified Strike in the right decks (discard and soldiers, respectively).

Red is more diverse, with only two cards represented by more than four copies: five Goblin Taskmasters, and eight Break Open. Break Open is probably the least appealing card in this assortment (although I like it more than Spoils Of The Vault). In a very morph-heavy environment it might be playable; at my "casual format" kitchen table, it would only be good if it were reuseable. Give it buyback, make it a cantrip, or make it an enchantment with an activation cost -although in the latter case I'd still probably need it to be a cantrip before I'd play it.

Despite the stack of Break Opens, the red cards as a whole look great. Lay Waste (only one copy) is good, Wave of Indifference is a cruel finisher, and I like Pinpoint Avalanche for the simple reason that it's an instant instead of a sorcery. I may need to build a goblin deck just to use the Taskmasters, Skirk Commando, and Sparksmith. Plus, Brightstone Ritual is just nuts (R - Instant - Add R to your mana pool for each Goblin in play). Unfortunately, I only got one each of the Sparksmith and Ritual.

Sparksmith is the kind of card I love: 1R - Creature - Goblin - 1/1 - T: Sparksmith deals X damage to target creature and X damage to you, where X is the number of Goblins in play. It introduces a potentially self-destructive element of anarchy to the board. I enjoy embarking on gambits where the result will either be victory or self-immolation. I'll be writing about my Warhammer 40,000 experience sometime; my fondest memories of that game involve the Splatta Kannon.

An ability like Sparksmith's will often be worth taking some damage for. You'll usually reserve it for some creature that's going to make your life miserable (or over), like a big flying creature you can't block. If you run the numbers, you'll often find that the damage is less than the troublesome creature would have done to you over the next turn or two. Consider a Sparksmith on the table with four goblin buddies and no flying allies, looking across the table at an oncoming Shivan Dragon. That dragon is going to hit for at least five damage, and probably more. Taking a single five-point penalty to get rid of it is a good investment. I find newer players tend to let the dragon hit once or twice before getting desperate enough to shoot it down at a cost of some more pain. That's certainly what I used to do, and it's a mathematical mistake.

Finally, black. There are only more than four copies of one black card in my assortment: six copies of Screeching Buzzard, which is good anyway. I like Disciple of Malice for the same reasons as Disciple of Grace (they're mirror images, or more accurately negatives, of each other). Nantuko Husk is like Fallen Angel's creepy little brother, and being a zombie is a nice bonus just because I like zombies. In general, not just in Magic. Syphon Mind and Haunted Cadaver will both go into my discard deck.

I don't like Wretched Anurid or Accursed Centaur, both for the same reason. I like playing with creatures. The anurid punishes me for doing so, and the 3/3 body just isn't big enough to offset the penalty.

I can't contrive many situations when I'd be happy to draw the centaur (B - Creature - Zombie Centaur - 2/2 - When Accursed Centaur comes into play, sacrifice a creature). His casting cost says to play him early. But you can't play him on turn one, and on turns two through (around) four you won't be willing to lose another creature, dropping behind in the arms race, for just a 2/2. Those stats don't make him one of the big boys. By the time you'd be willing to trade one of your little guys for a big one, 2/2 doesn't affect the board enough to bother. This strikes me as another bad card unless you're playing lots of creatures with potential drawbacks (like Lord of the Pit, Dormant Sliver, Minion of Leshrac, or - hey! Wretched Anurid) and you want to be able to remove one if it starts to turn on you.

That's all of this order, and I have no other orders planned for the foreseeable future. Next time I write about Magic, it'll probably either be about one of my decks, or about my game stats. I've actually recorded the results of all the games my wife and I have played over the last year or so, to see how the various decks perform against each other.

My son sometimes exhibits obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I have no idea where he gets them.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Hostage Bunny. His captors are apparently trying to break him with psychological tactics. Here we see them carrying out a mock execution - death by apple-bonking. I fear this will not end well for Hostage Bunny.

Putting Tigers In Their Tanks

2009-04-20T23:21:00.004-03:00

I know very little about the Tamil protests currently taking place in Toronto beyond the headlines and single paragraph summaries on news sites. I don't understand the issues or the situation in Sri Lanka, and have no particular intention of getting informed on the matters. The world is too big, and life too complex, to understand everything, and figuring out who the bad guys are in that mess just isn't going to make anywhere near the top of my priorities anytime soon.

That cheerfully admitted, the protests give me a good segue to talk about protests and demonstrations in general.

First up, I'm all for the right of people to freely assemble and engage in nonviolent demonstrations and protests. However, that doesn't always mean it's a good idea. Sometimes groups of which I'm a member hold public events like "Walk for Life" or other such parades. I agree with their goals, and sometimes even participate, but I'm often unsure that it does any good.

Do people change their minds on issues based on seeing a parade go by? I'm far likelier to be annoyed by any traffic interruption that may result and lose sympathy for the marching group. Maybe it's just a matter of letting people see that there's an organized movement on an issue, which may get them thinking about it, or even inspire them to join in if they already agree but weren't actively involved.

From the little I've bothered to read about the Tamil situation in Toronto, it seems well past "inconvenient" for anybody who's just trying to go about their business in the affected areas. I'd lose sympathy for the cause fast if I had to make my way through throngs of protesters to get to work, and even more so if they were aggressive or deliberately obstructive when I tried to pass.

Second, although I'm not sure who the bad guys are in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers are considered a terrorist organization by the Canadian Government. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are. Just ask Maher Arar. (Although recent developments make me wonder whether the CIA knows things about him that the rest of us don't yet...)

However, the Canadian government's designation of the Tigers as a terrorist group may be a wisp of smoke that implies an underlying fire. I'll give CSIS the benefit of the doubt. So, here's a thought. There are probably a lot of people at these protests who are in Canada illegally, or on a temporary basis, or with credentials on which the ink is still wet. And here they are, taking part in a disruptive protest, largely in support of an identified terrorist organization. Apparently some Tiger fundraising has gone on, which is explicitly illegal. Is it just me, or is this an absolutely perfect opportunity for the guys at Customs and Immigration to practice their deportation skills? There must be cargo ships heading to Sri Lanka (or whatever other countries these protesters were born in). Load 'em up.

That, of course, assumes that the Tigers are the bad guys, that the protesters support the Tigers, etc. It may not apply in this specific situation. However, the principle holds. Where were INS personnel during all the illegal alien rallies in the States last year? There's no shame in shooting fish in a barrel if your problem is that the barrels are too full of fish.

Finally, some of the protesters have taken to hunger strikes.

I really don't get hunger strikes. Although you might not think so if you only know me from reading this blog (and maybe not even if you know me in real life), I actually have some compassion. I don't like people being victimized (really victimized, not made uncomfortable). If A is hurting B without a really good reason, and I can intervene to make them stop, I will. However, if B is deliberately hurting themselves, and they seem to be of sound mind otherwise, then I see no reason to be sympathetic.

I don't understand how "Do what I want or I'll hurt myself" is supposed to be persuasive. My answer is pretty much always going to be, "Ummm... go ahead." Not only does it not persuade, it hurts your cause by making you look childish. There's a very fine line between a protester on a hunger strike and a toddler threatening to hold their breath until they turn blue if they don't get a cookie right now. Threatening a hunger strike lets me file you under "Silly person, safe to ignore." Threatening others is reprehensible, but at least it gets you taken seriously. Holding yourself hostage just implies that you've seen Blazing Saddles.

As a punchline, the article I linked to above says that one of the hunger strikers was hospitalized after complaining of - wait for it - "stomach pains." What exactly did this genius think would happen after a few days without eating? I don't know who the good guys are in the Sri Lanka situation (assuming there are any), but I'm getting an idea who the smart guys are.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Hostage Bunny in an undisclosed location.

Out Of A Closet

2009-04-19T18:30:00.006-03:00

My fake Internet name is Zirbert, and I... am a creationist.

Time to actually go back and follow through on something I once mentioned. Sometimes this blog makes me feel like Chris Claremont. (Nerdly reference explanation for those with lives: Chris Claremont was a longtime writer of the Uncanny X-Men and related titles, and was notorious for setting up subplots then apparently getting bored with them or forgetting about them, leaving them dangling for years, or forever.)

Back in this entry, I mentioned that I would be leading a Bible study series on a controversial topic. I'm halfway through it by this point, and it's going quite well. The group is currently taking a break from my series to do the Fireproof series, after which we'll return to finish off this series before breaking for the summer.

My series is on creationism. Specifically, young-Earth creationism. It's based on the Answers With Ken Ham video series, from the people at Answers In Genesis. Each week we watch one of the videos, then discuss.

I was happy to find that the study guide, with discussion questions, and more importantly, the answer key for those questions (or suggested answers, in the case of the more thoughtful questions) were readily available from AIG's website.

When we started out, I assumed I'd be preparing my own discussion materials. I was ready to do that, but having something precooked to work with is a lot easier. In fact, for the first week, I had already prepared my own material before finding out about the AIG resources.

Here's the handout I prepared for the first week, when I gave a little background on the topic and we watched the first video, with URLs converted to links. The handout is pretty much about the background, not the video. Answers to the blanks and commentary follow.

Being a creationist is one of the two things that upsets nonbelievers the most. (The other is pointing out that atheists have no objective basis for _______________.)

Stockwell Day was publicly ridiculed. Also consider this 2008 quote: “I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago. That's an important - I want to know that, I really do, because she's going to have the nuclear codes. You know, I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago... we can't, we can't have that.” -_____________, talking about ________________________.

A comment on my blog, in response to an article that wasn't even about creationism, said: “Do us all a favor, and home-school the kid so you can convince him the Earth is 6,000 years old and dinosaur bones are a trick the Devil played to make us believe in evolution.”

Even within the Church, many people will oppose creationism (or at least “young-earth creationism”). Many others just haven't thought about it, or may not think it matters.

These videos emphasize the importance of understanding your own ________________ (the way you look at the world and interpret evidence). Everyone has biases and preconceptions, and all evidence is interpreted within some framework.

“There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.”

The three best-known major creationist ministries are:

• 1. Answers in Genesis – producers of these videos, publishers of Answers magazine and the Answers Research Journal (highly technical).

• 2. Creation Ministries International – publishers of Creation magazine and the Journal of Creation (highly technical). Producers of Creation Magazine Live, a video series that can be freely streamed or downloaded from their website.

• 3. Kent Hovind – excellent debater. Many books and videos produced, with explicit permission to copy freely.

(After watching the video) - Ken Ham talked about a person who told him that they're open to all points of view - except a point of view that says others are wrong. This is called ___________________. It's one of the most common worldviews / philosophies of life in the world today. It's also illogical and self-refuting.

Key Verses:

Genesis 1:1 (KJV): In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Psalm 11:3 (KJV): If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?

John 3:12 (NIV): I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?

The words to fill in the blanks are, in order: morality, Matt Damon, Sarah Palin, worldview, relativism.

This handout was, of course, just a framework for discussion. Whether I'm the teacher or a student, I always like to have a handout with some blanks to fill in. Reading and writing engage different parts of the brain than just listening, making it more likely that the material will be retained.

I wanted to open week one by discussing the controversial nature of the creationist position in modern society. There's no shortage of arrogant evolutionists who will happily name-call, ostracize, and generally abuse anyone who doesn't believe their religious orthodoxy - and yes, that's what it is - which states that their great-great-great-(insert several thousand "greats")-grandfather was slime on a rock.

In addition to the above, my two-page handout included a cartoon. Pretty much any handout I prepare does. I can generally find something to fit the subject. In this case, I used a Doonesbury, by Garry Trudeau, in which a doctor threatens to withhold treatment from a creationist patient. Of course, the doctor is meant to be an enlightened, intelligent man of science, and the patient a backwards fundamentalist who doesn't deserve to live. Ho, ho. Why, yes, letting people die because they don't share my religion is funny, isn't it, Mr. Trudeau? You can see the cartoon here.

Stockwell Day is a prominent Canadian politician. He's also an admitted Christian. A few years back some of his liberal (and Liberal) opponents decided it would be a good idea to make fun of that, making quips along the lines of "someone needs to explain to him that the Flintstones was not a documentary", and holding up toy dinosaurs as props at press conferences.

Interestingly, many of the opponents who were so threatened by him are professing Roman Catholics, but nobody made fun of their beliefs in a similar manner. I wonder why? It's not like it would be difficult. "Hey, here's a picture of an unbroken hymen! My opponent thinks Mary had one!"

Matt Damon's quote about Palin was included just because it demonstrates how low the secular world will sink to mock creationism, a belief that has negligible effect on day-to-day living and decision-making. Why would anyone care what Matt Freaking Damon thinks about complex political matters? However, since he was bashing the correct side, Damon's quote got media attention. Don't get me wrong, Damon may be a nice guy, and I hear he was OK in the Bourne movies (I haven't seen them), but I'll give heavier weight to the geopolitical opinions of someone who wasn't in a Jay and Silent Bob movie, thanks.

The classic "10 kinds of people" joke was included to illustrate the point that data (evidence, or symbols like "10") have meaning only within a framework. Change the framework, and the meaning of the data also changes. Your worldview is the framework you use. We all have one, and the better you understand yours, the better your thinking will be.

The "relativism" bit was included so I could tell the group a story (remember, these notes were just that, and were only a springboard) from my university days. One day I was sitting in a class, across the table from a relativist who had just proclaimed that all philosophical viewpoints are equally valid. "You're sure about that?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied confidently.

"OK, then, what do you do with my viewpoint, which is that your belief is self-refuting nonsense? If my viewpoint is valid, and you just said that it is, then your viewpoint is not."

I wish I could say that her brain fried like a computer that Captain Kirk told a paradox, but I don't remember her response. It may have involved shoving her stuff into her bookbag and stomping out of class, slamming the door behind her; I can remember a couple of other occasions when that was her answer to one of my questions. No one, including the professor, objected.

Time for my second confession (the first was the opening line of this entry), this one destined to upset the exact opposite group of people from the first: Although I'm unequivocally a creationist, I'm not nearly as convinced about the age of the Earth. Maybe it's only several thousand years old, maybe not. If I were to be convinced tomorrow that the Earth really is millions of years old (although I honestly can't think of anything that would convince me), it wouldn't disturb my belief system overmuch. I lean toward a young-Earth position, but not very strongly. Anyone who wants to argue with me about the age of the Earth, from either side, is bound for disappointment as I shrug and wander off.

Perhaps more about all of this another time, perhaps not. Unlike Claremont, I'm not actively looking to set up more threads to which I may never return.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of some computers that are in my kitchen, waiting for me to finish working on them.

Fireproof

2009-04-12T19:05:00.005-03:00

Sorry I haven't been around much lately. I spent much of last week setting up a computer that I bought for my parents as an anniversary gift.

I could get a story or two from that experience, if I was hard up for material. Suffice it to say that if you're buying a computer from a reseller and it says that it comes with a Windows XP "COA" (that means certificate of authenticity, or in other words a legal XP licence), it may not have Windows preinstalled or an installation disc included. Then, when you ask the reseller about it, they may suggest that you "just go download a Windows CD off the Internet", and act surprised when you tell them that's illegal. They then might get a lot more cooperative when you mention that Microsoft's customer support operators were intrigued by their suggestion.

So, the XP snafu combined with my thinking for some reason that my parents' anniversary was a week later than it actually is led to my spending a few late nights watching installation progress bars creep across the screen.

And speaking of long marriages...

My wife and I recently watched Fireproof. If you've even heard of the movie, then I'm not really spoiling anything by telling you that there's a happy, marriage-affirming ending. Yes, you know how it will end pretty much from the start, but that's true of most stories in any medium. The interesting part is seeing how you get there.

This movie is far, far better than I thought it would be. It's genuinely funny in several spots (not just "for a Christian movie" funny), and not nearly as emotionally manipulative as most movies. It's definitely worth watching.

It stars Kirk Cameron. Move past that. He's actually a talented actor, despite being best known for having starred in one of the worst sitcoms ever. He's completely believable in this role, and it's clear from some of the outtakes, especially the "pranks" reel, that he doesn't bring any ego issues to the set.

Going into this movie I expected that the marital problems of the lead couple would be the man's fault. That's The Law of Modern Relationship Storytelling: if a relationship is unhappy, it's the man's fault. He's insensitive, he's distant, he's aloof, he's a workaholic, he's any of the other seventy or eighty other awful things that used to just be called "a man".

This movie holds true to that, but it's so well written, and Cameron is so good, that I bought it. The state of this marriage at the outset of the movie is his fault. An early scene showing the two bickering seemed at first to show that she was as bad as him, but as the movie progressed I realized that she had only become that way as a result of his behaviour over the years. Since I'm something of an antifeminist male chauvinist pig by the standards of modern society (again, what used to be called "a man" before the Great Castration), it's tough to sell me yet another relationship story wherein the poor set-upon heroine's suffering is entirely the fault of the brutish lout she had the misfortune to love, but this movie did it.

I'm not surprised that this movie wasn't a box office smash, but I'm certainly glad that the filmmakers didn't compromise. The Gospel is explicitly presented more than once, and Scripture is not only quoted, but shown onscreen. The people that made this movie clearly get the principle that if your relationship with God isn't what it should be, then it's easy for the rest of your life to follow into disarray. I studied psychology a couple of lifetimes ago, but abandoned it as a career option when I realized that. It's tough to make a living as a counsellor in the secular world when your first recommended treatment for almost any addiction, relationship problem, or emotional issue is Jesus. That's not always where the treatment ends, but for best results that's where it starts.

The reviews of this movie from the secular world were not kind. It has a 37% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and I read several of the reviews and comments. Interestingly, many of the negative reviews weren't really reviewing the movie so much as the worldview it presents and defends.

I especially enjoyed a comment on one site (unfortunately I read it over a week ago now, don't remember which one it was, and am not going trudging through again to find it) that said something to the effect that "the Bible goes on and on about wives being submissive, but doesn't say a single word about how husbands should act."

Really, now, it's in the next freaking paragraph. You probably don't even need to turn the page. How lazy, both physically and intellectually, do you need to be to remain that willfully ignorant?

Here's Ephesians 5:22-33, with some edits to tighten it up but leave the point intact. If you think I may have snipped out bits that talk about Christians wanting to set up theocracies and round homosexuals into work camps, click the link, or better yet crack open a dead-tree Bible, and read the full passage for yourself:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy... husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church... each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Nope, nothing at all about husbands in the whole Bible. Yeesh.

In fact, to really get what that passage is saying, you need to back it up one more verse to include Ephesians 5:21:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Unfortunately, many Bibles have the text divided into thematic sections and leave that verse at the end of the preceding section. My current primary study Bible does, but has a footnote saying that this verse "goes equally well with both the preceding and the following sections, but it is especially basic to the following paragraphs." The editors correctly figured out that this verse should go at the start of the "marital obligations" part. It's an introduction to this new topic, not the conclusion of the previous one. So why didn't they put it there?

Verse 21 states that both the husband and the wife are to submit to one another. The following section, quoted earlier, expands on and clarifies that idea. You may still not agree, or not like it, but at least try to understand it. Husbands are actually called to greater responsibility and greater personal sacrifice. If you're offended by the idea that wives are to submit, with no reciprocal obligations from their husbands, then you're offended by an antibiblical idea and I agree with you.

Back to the movie.

Although this movie deals with deeply personal and mature issues, there's nothing in it that's inappropriate for children. The filmmakers were very careful in choosing the words and images used. I especially like how they handled a discussion of Cameron's character's web-surfing habits. Adults will understand exactly what they're talking about, and the implications of the argument, but it would all sail over the heads of young children.

I also liked the portrayals of the counsel offered by friends of the husband and wife, because they were so realistic. The man's friend advised him to smarten up and start being a better husband. The woman's friends squawk about how she should leave immediately, she'd be better off without him, etc. In my experience, this is how it works in real life. In general (maybe I should put those words in a large, all-caps, bold font for emphasis), the male idea of "supportive" involves urging and assisting people to do what is right even if it's painful, difficult, or not what they want to do. The female idea means, "whatever you say (or want) is right." The male concept is based on honour and duty, the female on emotion.

I said, "in general". The exceptions you know are exactly that.

Hmm. I hadn't expected this discussion of a movie to turn into a treatise on gender differences. Perhaps I should move on before this degenerates further.

The movie is not perfect. I would have cut the scene with the doofus talking to the mirror. On my first viewing, that scene seemed to go on forever. On a second look, it's actually quite short. The theory of relativity in regards to time ("One second with your hand on a hot stove lasts as long as an hour talking to a pretty girl") holds.

I would also have cut two stereotypes. Yes, stereotypes sometimes become stereotypes for a reason, but there's no need to encourage them.

First, early in the movie, one firefighter is dressed down for poor performance. He's later made the butt of a practical joke. He seems a bit slow. And, of course, he's overweight. There seems to be a shorthand in movies. If you want to show that a character is incompetent and probably not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, make them chubby. Too many casting directors think that "fat" equals "stupid".

While we're on the topic of practical jokes, although the mild one played on the slow character is a bit cruel, I have no problem with the harsher one played later on the mirror-talking doofus. It was a targeted attack on his raging ego. I like to see people being taken down a notch when it's called for, and this one was.

The second stereotype I would have avoided came from the two black nurses. I wish all black actresses would instantly reject any script that calls for them to raise an eyebrow and say "Mmmm-HMMM!" For that matter, if the casting sheet describes your character as "sassy", walk out of the audition and fire the agent who sent you.

In conclusion, Fireproof is well worth seeing, even if (maybe especially if) you have doubts about its "religious" content. Yes, it's predictable - you didn't really think they'd be divorced at the end, did you? However, it takes a few interesting twists, foils some expectations, and says several very interesting things along the way. And watch the extras, especially the Pranks section.

Enough rambling. Here's another picture of my dilapidated roof. Same board, opposite end.

Canada's Racist Firearms Act

2009-04-04T11:33:00.004-03:00

The Firearms Act, the law that regulates just about everything to do with civilian firearm ownership in Canada, contains several clauses pertaining solely to aboriginal peoples. This is, of course, racist on its face. As a refresher, I define racism as interjecting ethnicity into situations where it is not relevant. Since freedom of expression is sacrosanct around here, you're free to disagree with that definition. If you choose to do so, I am in turn free not to care.

I explained that definition of racism in this post, way back in May of last year. In that post I also said that I intended to write this article "soon". That says much about my sense of time's passage.

It's unsurprising that this Canadian law contains provisions for specific people based on their genetic makeup. Canadians, being open-minded, liberal, well-meaning folks, frequently try to enshrine helpful exemptions for the "disadvantaged" in law. However, given the barely concealed contempt for aboriginals that Canadian legislators demonstrate as often as they get the opportunity (see this article for a horrifying example), it's also unsurprising that the "Aboriginal Adaptations" are offensive and insulting to aboriginal people.

There are five ways that the Firearms Act treats Aboriginals differently. I said four back in May 2008; I was mistaken. I've edited a correction into that article. Revising history is fun when you're the one who gets to do it. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

I need to say at the outset that I'm going to have trouble linking to original sources for these. The RCMP took over the Canadian Firearms Program a while back, and a lot of the web links have been redirected or just no longer exist. You can find most of this stuff - maybe all - if you dig through the RCMP's current Firearms Program info page for Aboriginals, especially the Fact Sheet, and this now largely obsolete PDF booklet on the Firearms Act that was prepared for distribution to aboriginal peoples. The quotations I provide below are from one of those sources.

Let's start by listing the five provisions, and explore them each afterward:

1. Service in a language other than English or French (i.e., a traditional aboriginal language).
2. Possession Only Licence eligibility without owning a firearm.
3. Minor's Licences for children under 12.
4. Safety training exemptions.
5. "Recommendation for approval."

1. Service in a language other than English or French (i.e., a traditional aboriginal language). Canada has two official languages: English and French. If you want to deal with the Canadian government in any way, you better know one of them. However, although no promises are made, the Canadian Firearms Program (CFP from here on, because I'm tired of typing it out) says in that PDF booklet that aboriginal people may be able to take the normally prerequisite firearms safety course in their own language.

I don't care about this one, and wouldn't care even if the CFP's language was stronger, using terms like "make every effort to accommodate". As long as no actual obligations are taken on by the CFP (or any other government agency) to provide service in languages other than English and French, I don't care if they have somebody at the office who happens to know another language and is willing to talk to citizens in it. Same goes for Chinese, Italian, or any other language. This one's boring, but since it exists I wanted to list it. Let's move on.

2. Possession Only Licence eligibility without owning a firearm. Here's where the Act gets a bit complicated. There are two kinds of firearms licences: Possession Only Licences (POLs), which let you keep any firearms you already have but not get any more, and Possession and Acquisition Licences (PALs), which let you keep what you have and get more.

A POL is normally only available to people who already own at least one firearm. In fact, a POL is not available at all anymore to anyone who doesn't already have one, because all firearms in Canada were supposed to have been registered by a deadline some years ago. The legal logic was that anyone who already owned firearms should have already had their licence by then, since you need a licence before you can register, so in theory on the registration deadline there was nobody left in Canada who owns a firearm but doesn't have a licence.

It also seems logical on its face that if you don't own a firearm, you don't need a POL. So, the law says that if you don't own a firearm, you can't have a POL.

Unless you're an aboriginal person. You see, the law figures that aboriginal people might have access to and want to use communally owned firearms. Davis (from Corner Gas) may not personally own a rifle, but his aboriginal community might have one that he wants to take out once a year or so to hunt. Perhaps the Canadian government figures that aboriginal society hasn't quite reached the level of the whole "private ownership of property" thing.

I actually don't have much problem with this adaptation, aside from the snarky aspersion in the previous sentence. I'd call this what it is: letting someone who doesn't own a firearm get a POL so they can borrow firearms that belong to someone else. Their band office, their neighbour, their cousin, whoever. The problem is that this option is not available to anyone who isn't aboriginal. If I want to get a POL just to borrow firearms, the CFP shuts the door in my face and tells me to get lost. It's a PAL, which means I have to take a safety course that isn't required for a POL, or I can go hunt ducks with a slingshot.

3. Minor's Licences for children under 12. Here's where things start to get really ugly. From that official RCMP - CFP info page I linked to above:

In most cases, the minimum age for obtaining a Minor’s Licence to borrow non-restricted rifles and shotguns is 12 years old. However, there is no minimum age for Aboriginal children who take part in the traditional hunting activities of their community.

Got that? Most kids have to be at least 12 to get a Minor's Licence (which allows them to borrow and use, but not take ownership of, firearms). Aboriginal kids have no minimum age limit.

Translation: "We wouldn't let prepubescent white children play with guns - their lives are valuable and filled with limitless potential. Aboriginal kids, on the other hand..."

Time to state a principle, while some readers are off looking up a phone number for the Human Rights Commission complaint hotline to file their complaints against me, thereby proving that irony is not dead.

I seriously doubt that any legislators consciously held that intention. Their intentions were probably good, although misguided and condescending. My interpretations are informed by my steadfast beliefs that (a) all human beings are created equal, with variations in skin colour ultimately being about as significant as those in hair colour, and should be treated as such under law; (b) failure to uphold such equal treatment is prima facie racism; (c) all human beings are inherently flawed and prone to doing wrong, stupid, and / or evil things. Yes, very much including me. This idea used to be called "original sin". These days it's called "nonconstructive thinking" by aromatherapy devotees and other deep thinkers.

So, while those legislators didn't set out to be vile racists, they crafted some vile, racist policies because they didn't agree with (a) and didn't think themselves subject to (c). Seeing it that way is all a matter of interpretation. As we'll be discussing more in future articles, the same facts can often be interpreted in very different ways depending on one's underlying beliefs, or worldview. Which interpretation is correct depends on which underlying worldview is correct. My worldview includes the three elements stated in the previous paragraph (with (c) as the foundational bedrock). I'm not aware of a single good argument against any of them. Your evaluation of any such arguments may vary depending on your worldview.

And yes, I'm deliberately presenting the most provocative interpretations I can here, to make the point. However, this is sincerely how I see it. Furthermore, I don't see any way you could cast these last three adaptations in a positive light, at least without tossing the three beliefs I outlined above.

4. Safety training exemptions. Time for another principle that really deserves its own entry. In fact, I started drafting one last June or so, and still have the first couple of paragraphs saved on my hard drive, but never finished it.

Here's the principle, stated very (probably overly) simply: when you see statements about (or references to) some identifiable group, try changing the identifiable group, preferably to its perceived opposite, and see if your feelings about the statement (or reference) change. It's easiest to do with gender or "black" and "white", but any group identifications work.

Some examples might help. Try reading a transcript of an interview with Al Sharpton or Spike Lee. Forget who the speaker is, and while reading switch "white" and "black". If it makes you really uncomfortable and sounds like a speech that could be given at a Klan rally to thunderous inbred applause, that means you get it.

Try these on for size: United Caucasian College Fund. Health clubs specifically forbidding women to join. An all-white awards ceremony instead of (or alongside) the NAACP awards. White Entertainment Television. Men's drinks half price at the local bar. "It's a white thing - you wouldn't understand." Stuff Asian People Like. "I accept this award on behalf of white men everywhere!"

Some of those may bother you more than others. Some may not bother you much at all. If none of them bother you, you probably should be bothered by that.

Which brings us to the problem with the safety training exemption idea. As noted earlier, you need safety training to get a PAL. However, one of the Aboriginal Adaptations exempts Aboriginals. It's not a rubber stamp - they still have to request and justify their exemption. However, the underlying logic is that using firearms is part of aboriginal culture. Put more bluntly, the assumption is that it's in their blood.

Let's do a little substitution. Instead of "Aboriginals generally know how to handle firearms - it's part of their culture", try, "Young urban black males don't need to take handgun training. It must be part of their culture. (After all, the statistics show that they already know how to use them.)"

This is how Canadian legislators think. People aren't individuals - they're only members of their group.

5. "Recommendation for approval." Pasted from the RCMP's site:

Background checks are performed to ensure that licence applicants are not likely to be a danger to themselves or to others. In some cases, the Chief Firearms Officer (CFO) may issue a licence but place conditions on the licence that would limit the licence holder’s ability to use a firearm.

Aboriginal persons who are concerned that they might be refused a licence or that conditions may be placed on their licence may ask an Elder or leader in their community to sign a declaration on form CAFC 1016 to confirm the importance of their being able to take part in traditional hunting activities of their community. The CFO must consider such recommendations from an Elder or leader before refusing or placing conditions on the licence of an Aboriginal person.

The Chief Firearms Officer is the government agent in charge of actually deciding yea or nay on any given person's firearms licence. If a person is refused, a cause must be given. It's usually because the applicant's history makes them look like a public safety risk: a criminal record, mental problems, substance abuse, a history of violence. A person whose application is refused has a right of appeal.

This "recommendation for approval" is nothing but a preemptive appeal. The nice folks who wrote this law figured that so many Aboriginals would be refused and wind up needing to appeal that they might as well just get the appeal started right off the bat. After all, everybody knows that Aboriginals all have criminal records, mental illnesses, and / or substance abuse problems, right?

It's part of their culture.

This is how Canadian legislators see Aboriginals.

I know I shouldn't have to close with a disclaimer, but I have visions of some of my statements in this article being taken out of context. So, for the record: there are passages in this article where I employ a literary technique known as "sarcasm". I am not saying that I want aboriginal children playing with guns, that all Aboriginals have criminal records, etc. I'm trying to make the point that the Firearms Act was apparently written by people who believe these sorts of things, consciously or not. Those legislators would no doubt disagree with my interpretations. I think they would do well to take a long hard looks inside themselves and at the Act before trying to argue the matter.

For that matter, where are the protests from aboriginal people?

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of part of the roof of my house. I'm currently wasting a lot of my time chasing contractors to come replace that board. That's a whole other article, maybe a series. I could try replacing it myself, but by the time I was finished my lack of any useful physical skills whatsoever would probably manifest as a large crater where my house used to be.

Tormented Bits Of Colourful Cardboard

2009-04-03T14:10:00.004-03:00

Quite a while back, I placed another order with Magic Arsenal for a bunch of cards. I didn't write about that order before now because we took a Magic hiatus around my house starting late last summer so my wife could throw herself into a batch of crocheting projects, some of which you've seen here.

The crocheting has died down again, mainly because for the first time in recent memory none of our friends have babies either on the way or newly born (other than the ones who have already received a crocheted "welcoming present", of course, like Pastor Derek and Homeschooler's boys).

With no playing going on, I didn't want to spend too much time digging through those cards. Why torture yourself by browsing the candy store when you're on a diet? But play has now resumed, so these cards will soon be getting scattered and combined into new decks. Just in time, too - I'm down to only 16 ready-to-play decks on hand.

I wanted to write up what I got mainly to say what kind of stuff I got in the Magic Arsenal repacks and grab bags. Other people may be interested in that sort of thing before placing an order. I know from Google Analytics search term reports that last time I did this, I had people drop by for exactly that reason, using search terms like "Magic Arsenal repack contents". So this isn't entirely self-indulgent diary-keeping. Note the word "entirely".

Once again, I'll be talking about individual cards without doing Gatherer links for each. If I had done so, then each card name would have been a link, and you could have clicked on its name to have it pop up. That would have been nice, but this entry would have taken far, far longer to prepare by inserting all those links, so I took the easy way out.

Gatherer is an official online database of Magic card information, maintained by Wizards of the Coast themselves (the folks who make the game). To see the Gatherer entry for any card, go to this page and type the card's name into the search field. You'll see the card, along with its official wording (long story - most cards don't do quite exactly what they say anymore), rulings, what sets it's been in, and more. I'll provide the text for some noteworthy cards as we go.

First up, since the biggest limit on my deckbuilding was the number of basic land cards I owned, I got a pile more. 40 of each type except Islands - 60 of those. I like blue.

Then, since there were some cheap cards that I really like but didn't have multiple copies of, I got more: Soldevi Digger, Capsize, and Phyrexian Vault. All three feed my obsession with card advantage and recursion. The Capsize can get used turn after turn because of its buyback, the Vault lets me trade creatures who have outlived their usefulness (or who are about to die anyway) for a new card, and the Digger lets me re-churn my graveyard. All three fit my playing style perfectly, and I may well build a deck than contains the entire trio now that I have extra copies.

Capsize (1UU Instant, Buyback 3, Return target permanent to its owner's hand) is a card from the Tempest block, which came out while I was working at a comic and game store and playing dozens of games of Magic a week. It immediately became one of my favourite cards. However, I never bought or opened packs for myself, and even though Capsize was a common, nobody in my area would part with them. I only ever had one copy. With this order, I finally rectified that.

I also got two more Thorn Thallids; I had some, but they're badly beaten up. The same copies have been mainstays of my green decks since 1994, and I usually played unsleeved. The backs of those cards are now well into "marked" territory. Now that my wife plays Thallids, I figured I might as well replace my battered copies with fresh ones.

On a related note, I still play most of my cards unsleeved, but I occasionally used to crack open a pack of sleeves for myself back in the comic shop days, and still had some. I figured in the interest of being able to continue playing with these cards for many years to come (note: NOT to protect them to "maintain their value"), I got some more with this order. I got two packs of the "Player's Choice Holo-Blue Sleeves", which were under three bucks a pack. I got two because I don't generally build small enough decks for one pack to be of any use.

Despite their low price, these sleeves (which have now been playtested) are holding up well. The solid colour backs obscure the card back completely, allowing play with marked cards (or even proxies or tournament-illegal cards like collector's set editions) if you so choose. At my house we don't enforce the official tournament floor rules. Although even opaque sleeves wouldn't let you play a beat-up old card at a tournament, at our kitchen table it's no problem.

At this point, 3 of my 16 decks are sleeved, and those three were rather arbitrarily chosen. My wife's favourite deck, which gets the most play of any of them (I rotate around more), is not sleeved. She would find a sleeved deck harder to handle and shuffle, and I'm more concerned with making it easy for her to play than with protecting the cards.

The fronts of these new sleeves are treated with some sort of holographic process (hence the "holo", I guess), making all the card fronts sparkle like foils. While that's kind of neat, it has a side effect of sometimes making it hard to read cards from an angle. Actual foils inside one of these sleeves don't look any more impressive, not that I care about that anyway. Overall, I would recommend these sleeves to cost-conscious players, and will be adding a pack or two onto any of my future Magic Arsenal orders.

Enough about the stuff I specifically ordered; let's move on to the grab bags and repacks. As always, I love grab bags. Offer me a mixed lot at a really good price, and you can have my money. The fact that this is my second Magic Arsenal order containing grab bag assortments should speak for itself as to whether I was happy with the first batch. However, let's get into the contents.

My Magic card collection stopped cold when I stopped working in a game store, and didn't resume until I started buying Time Spiral packs many years later. I owned lots of cards from all sets up to and including Apocalypse, then not a single card from any set after that until Time Spiral. My first Magic Arsenal order changed that, getting me a bunch of Odyssey cards. There were a few strays from the sets in between in the grab bags from that first order, as well, but for the most part my collection still had a big gap between Odyssey and Time Spiral. Continuing the practice of working up chronologically, I got assortments from Torment, Judgment, and Onslaught this time out.

First up, the six repacks of Torment. This gave me a sampling from that set of 6 rares, 18 uncommons, and 66 commons, which I think is enough to get a feel for a small set. The 6 rares were Shambling Swarm, Turbulent Dreams, Hell-Bent Raider, Possessed Centaur, Possessed Aven, and Possessed Nomad. I kind of like that out of six rares I got three that are in the same cycle, and it's a pretty good cycle. I'll probably also play Shambling Swarm more than the obligatory one or two tryouts that the Raider and Dreams will get.

I'm not going to list all 18 uncommmons. There were two copies each of Pyromania, Hydromorph Gull, Hypochondria, Pardic Collaborator, and Dwell On The Past. All the other uncommons were single copies.

I love Dwell On The Past. It's a sorcery that lets you shuffle four cards from your graveyard into your library, for one green mana. Gaea's Blessing is an automatic inclusion in almost every green deck I build, but I don't have many copies and few people will trade them cheaply. Dwell On The Past is a worthy substitute, and next time I order cards I'll want more copies.

I thought Boneshard Slasher was terrible at first (1B - Creature - Horror - 1/1- Flying. Threshold - As long as seven or more cards are in your graveyard, Boneshard Slasher gets +2/+2 and has "When Boneshard Slasher becomes the target of a spell or ability, sacrifice it."). I'm not a big fan of creatures with the "skulking" drawback. However, considering that 1B is the standard cost for a 1/1 black flyer anyway, it's not a bad deal.

The only other uncommon I got that bears discussion is Flaming Gambit (XR - Instant - Flaming Gambit deals X damage to target player. That player may choose a creature he or she controls and have Flaming Gambit deal that damage to it instead. Flashback XRR). This may be the worst red X-damage card I've ever seen. If you got to choose the target creature when you cast it, it would be playable. As it is, it's an X-damage spell that might as well read, "Your opponent may sacrifice his most useless creature to prevent all damage this deals." The flashback cost is reasonable, but it doesn't elevate the card to useful status. This one goes straight into a binder, never to be seen again, after I go through the formality of including it in a deck for a one or two game test drive.

That brings us down to the commons. In the six packs, I got five copies of Frantic Purification, four copies of a few others, then one to three copies of the rest. The commons have lots of threshold, as expected, and the flashback costs are pretty reasonable. Branching into alternate flashback costs, rather than just mana (two mana and pay 3 life is a frequent cost) definitely made the mechanic more useful.

Wizards must have felt that red direct damage needed to be taken down a few pegs when this set was in development. Flaming Gambit was awful, and then I see Kamahl's Sledge at common (5RR - Sorcery - Kamahl's Sledge deals 4 damage to target creature. Threshold - If seven or more cards are in your graveyard, instead Kamahl's Sledge deals 4 damage to that creature and 4 damage to that creature's controller). 7 mana for a common is an odd strategy, and one that says, "We don't want people playing red in draft or sealed formats." It's not a terrible card once you reached Threshold, but until then it's overcosted and simply too expensive for many decks.

I'm stopping this part now. It's more than long enough already. I'll cover the rest of the cards I got in this order, with lots less backstory, in the near future. Probably not my next post - so it'll be safe for the non-Magic folks to return - but I'm going to start that writeup today, so it should be soon.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my black Orks.

Bible Defense: Everybody Likes Pi

2009-03-29T17:17:00.016-03:00

Today's Bible Defense article was inspired by a comment on my explanation of the birds and the bats. In the comments on that article, someone with the handle Evil Bender posted this:

Of course, one could ask why God would have the Hebrews using a word that groups animals by flight, not by relationship. Surely he could have given them a better understanding of nature?

That the Creator of the Universe would conflate bats with birds (while apparently excluding flightless birds) does not help your case for infallibility.

Nor does the fact that pi is not equal to 3, nor that the gospels disagree about the event leading up to Jesus' death.

And that's without even getting into different lineages, iron chariots, and heaps of other biblical contradictions.

First of all, I'd like to thank E.B. for making a polite, thoughtful contribution to the discussion. All too often this sort of thing turns into a flamewar, consisting of nothing more than name-calling substituting for argument. E.B. has not done that, and I certainly don't intend to either.

Before we get into the meat of this new entry, I'd like to reiterate the point I wanted to make about bats and birds: there was no need for God to explain that bats aren't birds, since the ancient Hebrew word translated as "birds", 'owph, does not mean "birds" in the modern sense. It would have been completely nonsensical for the Bible to stop at that point to explain that bats are not birds, since in the original language "birds", in the sense of the category as it now exists, was never used. If the word "birds" is a problem, then forget that it's there, and mentally insert the word 'owph at that point.

In short, "birds" is an imperfect translation of the original word, which in no way meant or implied that only feathered egg-laying animals were intended. There's no need to defend the idea that the Bible calls bats "birds", because it doesn't. It calls them 'owph, which they are, and we translated it imperfectly.

Put another way: "That the Creator of the Universe would conflate bats with birds..." He didn't. Those who don't understand that 'owph does not mean "bird" did.

I don't know how to put it any more clearly.

However, E.B. raised another point that I'd like to address: the value of pi. His other alleged discrepancies fall into the category of "stuff I haven't researched or thought about enough to discuss intelligently". Maybe some other time.

Many people over the years have argued that the Bible says that pi is equal to three, based on this passage, I Kings 7:23 (repeated in II Chron. 4:2):

He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.

Before we get into why this passage does not say that pi is equal to three (and why some people think it does, in case you've put all that stuff from geometry class behind you), let's talk about some of what those things mean.

Ritual washing was a huge issue for the priests of ancient Israel. There are many passages, especially in Leviticus, that go into great detail explaining exactly when and how priests are to wash before carrying out their duties. Most of the explanations boil down to cleanliness being a symbol of holiness; it would be an insult to God to appear for His service looking anything less than one's best. The phrase "cleanliness is next to Godliness" does not appear in the Bible, but it's easy to see how people make that logical leap.

The principle still holds today. Nobody wants to show up for a job interview, or the first meeting with the parents of someone they're dating, with a stain on their shirt or a milk mustache. It would be embarrassing to appear before someone whose approval you seek without cleaning yourself up.

The Old Testament rules of washing served a health purpose, as well. The priests handled food that was offered as sacrifice - which was then eaten. Long before humans understood germ theory and bacteria, God was promoting safe food handling techniques.

"The Sea" was a large basin, put inside the temple for the priests to use for washing. I don't know if they actually got right into it and bathed, but it was certainly large enough for them to do so. It was pretty much a huge bowl of water.

So, how huge? Most of us don't know offhand what a "cubit" is, so that "Sea" might only be big enough to dip a Star Wars figure's head.

It turns out that a cubit is about 18 inches. We'll be coming back to that "about". So, this basin was about (there's that word again) 15 feet across, 7 and 1/2 feet high, and 30 feet around. That should explain why it got named the Sea (a term that appears several more times, capitalized as a proper noun, in the Bible).

Overall, though, you don't need to worry about what a "cubit" is. The conversion of cubits to metric or imperial measurements isn't the issue - the ratio between the distance across the Sea and the distance around it are what matter.

So, then, this passage seems to say that the Sea was 30 cubits around and 10 cubits across. In geometric terms, it had a circumference of 30 cubits, and a diameter of 10 cubits. But wait. The formula for the circumference of a circle is pi times the diameter. Pi is an irrational number (that is, it has an infinite, nonrepeating series of digits after the decimal place) a little larger than 3. It's been calculated out to thousands of places beyond the decimal, but most people are content to use the very reasonable approximation of 3.14159 in its place. Some use 3.14, but they're just lazy.

If we use the stated diameter of 10 cubits and multiply by pi the way the nuns back in parochial school taught us, we find that the circumference should be 31.4159 cubits, not 30. Conversely, if we start with the circumference of 30 cubits and divide to find the diameter, we find that it should be about 9.5493 cubits, not 10. So what's going on here?

To be fair, most people attacking the Bible over this aren't seriously suggesting that Bible believers think pi is precisely equal to 3. There's an urban myth that state legislatures have in recent years tried to pass legislation forcing pi to equal 3 on Biblical grounds, but it isn't true (which I didn't realize until researching this article).

Instead, those people are usually using this passage to "prove" that the Bible is unreliable on factual matters, usually to bolster their skepticism on other Biblical issues. See, for example, this article. The endgame argument tends to run along the lines of, "How come you understand that pi doesn't equal three even though the Bible says it does, but you still believe in the Virgin Birth just because the Bible says so?" For "Virgin Birth", feel free to substitute "global flood", "resurrection", "seven-day creation", any miracle, or anything else the Bible records that runs contrary to our everyday experience and modern, scientifically enlightened popular belief.

No matter what you substitute, the underlying claim is the same: the Bible cannot be trusted on factual, scientifically measurable matters. When the Bible and modern science conflict, the Bible is to be rejected. Refuting that argument in its entirety is well beyond the scope of this article (and probably beyond the scope of my knowledge and writing skills). However, we'll carry on with our look at pi, which may also chip away a bit at the argument outlined above.

The argument is that the Bible herein proves itself inaccurate and unreliable by stating that pi is equal to three. The implication of the argument is that the Bible is therefore untrustworthy in its entirety. I will not be addressing the implication (beyond to say that it requires a leap in logic which would bear further examination before acceptance), but I see three immediate responses to the argument about pi. Once again, in researching this article I found that others have made these same points before me. No matter.

These three offered responses are not mutually exclusive. The truth may lie in some combination of them, or indeed in some possibility I have not considered. I would only have people think before rejecting the Bible, and hopefully this helps.

First, the numbers indicated in the passage - ten cubits across, thirty cubits around - may well be approximations. This passage is a description meant to convey a visual image to the reader, not an engineer's blueprint. There is a large bookshelf a few feet to my left.If I say that it is five feet wide and six feet high, I would consider that sufficient to give you an impression of its size. I would not feel I had been proven a liar if you were to take a tape measure to it and find that it is in fact exactly 4 feet, 10 and a quarter inches wide and 6 feet, 2 inches high. This is the argument you will find in the notes of most study Bibles and commentaries - the numbers given here are rounded approximations.

A variation of this is closely enough related that I will treat it under the same heading. A good explanation of this variation can be found on this page at Purplemath, which also covers what I'll be coming up to shortly as number two.

There was no standardized definition of a "cubit". The word itself means an approximation, based on the length of a man's forearm from elbow to fingertip. As you can imagine, this isn't the same for all men. The cubits of the circumference may not have been precisely identical to the cubits of the diameter. Due to the rounding / approximation issue, this doesn't really matter, but I thought it worth noting.

Second, the measurement of 10 cubits "from rim to rim" could well be a measurement of the external diameter - that is, from the outside edge of one side of the basin to the outside edge of the other. As noted earlier, that would describe a circle with a circumference of 31.4159 cubits. (As earlier, don't get hung up on the units - the mathematical ratios are what matter.)

However, this huge bowl could not have had zero thickness, and certainly not negative thickness. Perhaps the 30 cubit measurement of the circumference was taken around the inside. Purplemath again does a terrific job with this argument, complete with diagrams, explaining that a second mold would be required for the inside of this basin, and that the 30 cubit measurement could have described that smaller mold.

A circumference of 30 cubits indicates a diameter of 9.4593 cubits. That leaves a discrepancy of .5407 cubits, or about 9.7 inches, to account for the thickness of the rim. Divide that in two for the two sides when measuring across, and you wind up with the brass walls of the Sea being 4.95 inches thick.

And, hey, what's this we read about the Sea in I Kings 7:26?

It was a handbreadth in thickness...

A "handbreadth" is another of those Biblical-era ad hoc units of measurement, and means pretty much exactly what it says: the width of a hand. The almost-five inches we calculated is a bit on the high side from what most study Bibles and commentaries say (although my own hand is considerably wider than the three inches they suggest, and I'm not a real big guy), but not unbelievably out of line. Besides, the rounding / approximation issue I described in my first response easily allows for that rim to come down (or go up...) by an inch or two. Assuming that's logistically feasible, of course. Not being an engineer, I don't know how thin those brass walls could get before giving out under the weight of all that water.

Once again, those who attack the Bible haven't read a few verses down from the verse they're basing their argument on....

On to my third possible response. To assume that a stated circumference of 30 units and a distance across of 10 units proves a mathematical contradiction is to assume that the object being measured is a perfect circle. I'll ignore the fact that physical reality contains no perfect circles, and no straight lines, for the sake of this argument. I like philosophy as much as the next guy, but I'm not going to use that kind of esoteric argument to try to get out of this. By "perfect circle", we mean one that is close enough to perfectly circular to treat it as such for all intents and purposes.

However, we have no reason to believe that the Sea was a perfect circle. "Circular", yes, meaning round, but once again we have to remember that this description was written to evoke a visual image of size (and therefore grandeur) and was not an engineering blueprint. It could just as well have been described as "immense, thirty cubits around".

I did some online research about the measurements. This reminds me why I love the Internet. Not so many years ago I would have pondered this for a few seconds, thought perhaps I should go digging through some geometry books sometime, shrugged, and forgotten all about it. Thanks to Google I was able to find some ellipse calculators and try out some numbers.

To get what I'm saying about the possible shape of the Sea, pick up a fairly rigid round plastic cup, and look at at from directly above. The mouth of the cup should look like a circle. Now, with your hands as close to the base as feasible, squeeze the cup until the mouth begins to distend slightly. The mouth will now be elliptical, but I wouldn't be shocked if someone was still willing to describe it as "circular".

That's what I'm saying about the Sea. It could have been slightly elliptical, and the 10 cubit measurement could have been taken across a wider section (in geometric terms, closer to parallel with the major focus than the minor). For that matter, the measurement across may not have been taken directly across the centre point, again affecting the results.

I found an ellipse calculator on 1728.com, and plugged some numbers into Calculator Two. If you enter a major axis of 10 and a minor axis of 9.08, you'll get a perimeter of 30.035 (remember, units don't matter, only ratios). Then, you can put those same numbers into the ellipse generator at Geek.Casaforge.com to see how close to a circle the results look. You'll find that "circular" is a fair description for purposes of the layman.

Feel free to play with those numbers - by adjusting the axes, you can get very close to a perimeter of 30 while the resulting figure looks very much like a circle. Remember too that the sheer size of the Sea would make a slight deviation from circular even less noticeable.

I wound up playing with those ellipse pages far longer than I should have. At least it wasn't as bad as that cursed online Spirograph simulator that held me in its grip many moons past. I almost wound up getting an intervention over that thing. But I digress.

While researching this article, I was pleased to see some sites where these (or similar) arguments were accepted to debunk the "the Bible says pi is three" trope. The "Atheism FAQ" at this site is a good example. Often people on one side or another of a debate, and I'm including my allies in this, are only too willing to throw any accusations they can find against the wall and see what sticks. Consider the 2008 presidential election campaign, when Democratic supporters were openly encouraging the spread of rumours that they knew to be false about Sarah Palin; as long as it made voters question her, the ends justified the means.

I don't like to see bad arguments getting used by either side of a debate, and the best way to prevent that is to police your own side. It's good to see anyone saying to their allies, "That argument has been refuted. Let's stop trying to use it and move to stronger ones."

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my yellow Orks. I usually ran these guys as Mad Boyz.

Reading Log - Essential Spider-Man Volume 4

2009-03-28T18:14:00.007-03:00

I never intended, and still don't intend, to write Reading Log entries for most of the comics that I read. However, I'll be making exceptions here and there for trade paperback collections and graphic novels, especially if I have something to say about them. Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume 4 is one of those. It's officially, "Essential Spider-Man Volume 4" but I'm making the distinction because there have been Essential volumes for other Spider-titles since this line started, and there may be others in the future.

My copy of Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume 4 turns out to be the "second edition", according to the indicia (that's the tiny print at the front with publisher info, for those of you who aren't publishing geeks). It collects issues 66 though 89 plus Annual # 5, all from the late sixties.

I normally wouldn't care about it being a "second edition". I'm a reader, not a collector, and couldn't care less about things like first printings and limited editions. Books that enter my house generally won't be leaving until an estate sale that's hopefully far in the future, so I don't care what they're "worth". However, it turns out that my copies of Volumes 1 to 3 of this series, that I kept from back in the days when I ran a comic shop, are first editions (and first printings). Volume 3, first edition, collected Amazing Spider-Man issues 44 to 68 with no annuals. Volume 2, first edition, included annuals 2 and 3.

See the problem? Volume 4, second edition, doesn't pick up where Volume 3, first edition, left off. The new trade dress - translation from industry jargon: "how the outside of the book looks" - doesn't bother me. At least they didn't print the title upside down on the spine (i.e., reading from bottom to top when the book is placed on a shelf) the way they did on Volume 1, first edition.

I also don't mind the overlap. Three issues (66, 67, and 68) appear in both books. However, the change of contents from first to second edition results in my missing Annual 4, which must have appeared in the second edition of Volume 3. If Marvel thinks I'm going to repurchase the new edition of Volume 3 to get that issue, all I can say is "go fish." That's what torrented scans are for. I'll continue to pick up Essential volumes, but I won't be buying any doubles for one or two "new" stories.

This book is also noteworthy for its poor manufacturing. I don't expect leatherbound archival quality for the $17 (U.S.) / $27.25 (Canadian) cover price, which I didn't pay anyway thanks to the miracle of online discounts, but the pages of this thing came unglued from the spine before I finished reading it. The re-gluing I gave it seems to have held, though, so no harm done.

On to the actual content. By the era represented in this volume, Spidey's storytelling engine was pretty well established. I don't think these issues introduce any new characters or concepts that have "mattered" in the long run. Contrast this with the first two Spidey volumes, where it seems like almost every issue introduced a character, gadget, or plot point that still features in Spider-Man comics, cartoons, merchandise, and movies to this day, over forty years later.

However, the work here is definitely solid. Many of these stories are far less remembered now than those groundbreaking early issues, so in their own way they may seem fresher to the reader. Every Spider-Man fan remembers the Lizard's origin, but how many remember the time that the Human Torch showed up to help Spider-Man stop him, and Spidey had to keep trying to stop the Torch from simply frying the Lizard to a shriveled crisp?

That storyline, incidentally, started in Amazing Spider-Man # 76, which holds a special place for me because for many years it was the oldest issue of ASM that I owned. I started reading ASM when I was a very young child, and kept most of the issues I ever got, although they were much-loved and therefore pretty battered by the time adolescence rolled around. I began reading around issue 180. Those first issues I ever got were included in Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume 8, which I snapped up the first time I saw it. Nothing else sells comics like nostalgia, unfortunately for the comics industry.

For the next fifteen years or so, I grabbed every Amazing Spider-Man back issue I could find (and afford). This was before the Internet, and I didn't often patronize mail-order dealers, so I was limited to what I could find in comic shops and used bookstores (remember when they all carried comics? For that matter, remember when there were used bookstores in pretty much every town?). I eventually had an unbroken run from issues 167 to around 325, with a good handful of earlier issues, but never owned an issue earlier than # 76. My run of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, was complete from issue 1 to issue 152, and I was only a few issues away from a complete set of the 150-issue run of Marvel Team-Up, almost all of which featured Spider-Man.

I wandered off from comics altogether around 1990, and only read a few issues from then to when I opened a comic shop a few years later. But that's another story that may or may not get told here someday.

All for now. Here's a picture of my Ork army. This is the start of a picture series, albeit maybe a very short one. I had intended to write an entry explaining these pictures when I posted the first of them, but decided otherwise, mainly because I'm low on pictures. Maybe that'll be my next post. Probably not.

Celebrity News

2009-03-24T22:47:00.009-03:00

Now there's a title you never expected to see on this blog. Don't worry, I haven't suddenly developed an interest in manufactured pop stars climbing out of limos sans underwear, or who wore what, who wore who, or what wore who to self-congratulatory awards ceremonies. I just don't feel like writing a major treatise on anything tonight, and there are actually a few celebrity stories floating around that interest me. I'll be keeping these brief by my standards, but some heavily slanted commentary is a given.

David Letterman has reportedly married his longtime girlfriend and the mother of his child. (No, he's not a polygamist, they're the same woman.)

I was a huge Letterman fan for many years. I once went about seven years (from junior high to university) without missing a night. No, not an episode, a night. Including reruns. This was not healthy. Granted, I often set the VCR to tape it, went to bed, and watched it the next day, but that's still a lot of hours.

I'm glad he finally took this step. He often joked that having been married once before "was plenty", but I really expected him to do the right thing after his son was born, right around the same time as mine.

Here's the commentary for this one: I highly recommend marriage, to put it mildly, for anyone who's ready for it. And if somebody is ready to shack up and play house, they're ready for marriage. Common-law "arrangements" are disrespectful to both parties involved, and downright irresponsible once children are involved. I'm happy to see Letterman and his wife setting things right.

I could rant on this topic much longer, and probably will one day (it's on the list), but let's move on.

In other marriage news, Eddie Van Halen is also engaged. That fact isn't as interesting to me, though, as what Eddie said in this interview about his planned nuptials: "My brother is going to marry us. He can actually legally marry us. He’s an ordained minister. Reverend Al."

I'd love to think that Alex Van Halen has actually become a Christian - or, at least, a public one, since I've never heard him say that he isn't already. I'd love to think that he was honestly saved and went through the training to become a legitimate minister of the Gospel. I'd love to think that about any of the members of Van Halen, or pretty much anyone else for that matter.

Why, though, do I suspect that Alex Van Halen's "ministerial credentials" were obtained through a website that will certify anyone as an ordained minister (or locksmith, or dietitian) for fifty bucks?

In other self-destructive musician news, Steven Page has left Barenaked Ladies. I'm disappointed by this, first because BNL was one of the newest bands that interested me. I haven't enjoyed one of their albums all the way through since Born On A Pirate Ship, but each album since had at least a couple of good tracks, which isn't a bad batting average.

When BNL first showed up, I thought they were a novelty act. All I heard were the "big singles" - mostly If I Had $1000000, which was omnipresent. Then one day I decided to listen to Gordon, their first major release, all the way through, and was blown away. These guys were actually good, far better than the funny singles had indicated. I loved the thoughtful songs, often featuring lyrics that bordered on self-loathing, like Wrap Your Arms Around Me and The Flag.

They really hit their stride with the next two albums, Maybe You Should Drive and Born On A Pirate Ship. Of course, being more intelligent, these albums didn't sell nearly as well as Gordon. The band was considered a one-hit wonder novelty act for a while. I loved both of these albums, and Page's contributions both as writer and vocalist were big reasons why. Great Provider, "A", I Know, and I Live With It Every Day are masterpieces, and Page's vocal on Break Your Heart is one of my favourite performances.

The bloom came off the rose for me with Stunt. They had finally made a comeback, largely by breaking through in the United States, but the songs just weren't as good as the old ones. There were still highlights, like One Week and Call And Answer, but the album as a whole was weaker than the last two. It's all been downhill from there, as each album since has had fewer tracks that appealed to me.

I wasn't surprised to read later that Page had suffered from depression and substance abuse through the nineties. In retrospect, it was all there in the lyrics. Like John Lennon, Page seemed to use the recording studio as a confessional.

I was still disappointed to see later that Page had separated from his wife and been arrested on drug charges. It seemed like he was destined to become a Behind The Music cautionary tale. Seeing now that he's out of the group doesn't lessen those fears. Over the past few years, Page has lost his wife and his band, and obviously fallen prey to a worsening drug problem. I worry that he's adrift. A lot of his identity would have to have been wrapped up in his marriage and his career with BNL.

I hope this all ends well for him. I don't want to see a news story (it wouldn't make the front page, but it would be on the Net, and it would make the back pages of the papers here in Canada) that starts, "Steven Page, former singer with "If I Had $1000000" band Barenaked Ladies, was found...."

Linking this to the last story, several years back I felt the same trepidation for Eddie Van Halen. His marriage ended, he had medical problems, and the band that had been his life for decades was in shambles. He seems to have made it through and turned things around. I hope Page can do the same.

In other Canadian news, I am pleased to note that zombie guru George Romero has reportedly become a Canadian citizen.

As a zombie movie loving Canuck, I would like to welcome Mr. Romero to our chilly nation, and urge him to get to work on several more films whose titles end with "Of The Dead", toot-de-freakin'-sweet (that's how we talk up here - he'll need to know that).

It's nice to see Canadian immigration officials make a good decision. I'm not sure how George was allowed in, what with having no terrorism or prostitution charges (that I know of) on his record, but I'm glad they didn't apply those usual admission standards to him.

While I'm in this neighbourhood, I'd like to take a moment to encourage Canadian border agents to stand by another good call and keep terrorist cheerleader George Galloway out of Canada. He's making thinly veiled threats to just show up at the border trying to bluster his way in and dare them to arrest him.

If he does, call his bluff. Arrest him and any members of his entourage who want to press the matter (giving them each an opportunity to back off), and "extraordinary rendition" their butts off to a prison in one of those countries that Galloway likes so much more than Western democracies. I hear Syrian prisons are as far from nice as you can get at this time of year. Or any time, for that matter.

Confiscate all their luggage, of course. Anything that's nice and looks like it might fit can be given to George Romero as a welcoming present.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the train station platform from which we watched a parade of huge terrifying electric fish. That's my son standing right-of-centre (genetics win out!) in shorts and blue T-shirt.

Watchmen

2009-03-21T12:36:00.011-03:00

First off, yes, I normally like to give my posts "cute" titles. Usually too cute by 40% or so. I can understand why Jerry Seinfeld forbade his writers from giving episodes funny titles. It really does distract from working on the content. Truth be told, I've actually got a couple of titles that I'd like to use, but for which I can't come up with any article ideas, not that lack of ideas always stops me from posting.

If I gave this one a cute title, it would probably have to be "I Watched The Watchmen." Thus I would have appeared to join the thousands of hacks who think that level of triteness is funny. Sure, it would mean that I could write for Entertainment Weekly or pretty much any regional newscast, but I'd be forced to abandon the shred of self-respect I sometimes manage to feign.

On to the point. This week my wife and I went to see Watchmen. Not long ago she had asked if I wanted to go see it, and I answered unequivocally, unhesitatingly, and negatively. It was only after reading several thoughtful reviews and discussions that I decided I would be willing to lay down the eighteen dollars for two tickets.

My belief before the reviews started coming out was that Watchmen was essentially unfilmable. The content is so wed to the comics medium that I thought any adaptation doomed to failure. I only half-jokingly suggested that it would probably work about as well as an attempt to make a movie adaptation of a Beatles album.

From this point forward, there will be spoilers, and not just for Watchmen. I discourage you from reading the rest of this article if you plan to read any books, watch any movies or television shows, attend any plays, or listen to any limericks in the future.

Once we paid our ridiculous admission price (it always occurs to me that I could buy the DVD for what it costs us to go to a movie, and that way we wouldn't have to watch it with chattering teenagers), I wandered the lobby a bit and saw the Watchmen movie poster for the first time. What an awful poster. If I had never heard of Watchmen, there's no way I would go to the movie after seeing that poster. It looks like a really bad X-Men knockoff.

Actually, it looks like the promo / first issue cover shot of every Image Comics team book of the nineties, with a group of grimacing people posing and trying to look tough. The standard checklist of characters was used. Mysterious Guy With Full Face Mask, Guy With Gun, Cowled Batman Knockoff, Creepy Glowing Floaty Guy, and Girl With Way More Skin Exposed Than Most Of The Guys were all present and accounted for. Definitely a vintage Image-style shot, which takes us full circle to "really bad X-Men knockoff."

However, that poster also probably fools innocent passersby into expecting a standard super-hero move, which pleases me very much. I'll come back to that.

We settled into our seats, and after I loudly complained all through a commercial, we got some previews. Apparently there's a new Star Trek movie coming out. I need to get in touch with the marketing people at Paramount, because I have a perfect advertising tagline for it:

Star Trek.
If You Care, You're Probably A Virgin.

The next preview was for Mall Cop II. Oh, wait, sorry, it was Seth Rogan's new movie about a mall cop. Observe and Detain or something. I don't remember the title and really couldn't be bothered to look it up. It's ostensibly a comedy, and looks freaking hilarious.

Oh, don't get me wrong, it looks painfully awful. However, I could enjoy it immensely if I watched it with the mindset that it was a grand perverse experiment in uncomedy, in the tradition of Andy Kaufman seeing how long an audience would tolerate him reading The Great Gatsby onstage.

This movie looks like the filmmakers deliberately set up premises that could have led to humourous punchlines, then willfully subverted them by not only not delivering, but by actually veering off in the least funny direction possible. If I watched the movie with that mindset, I'd probably laugh the whole way through it because of the sheer audacity of the experiment and consider everyone involved to be comic geniuses.

On to Watchmen. I'll start with the bottom line. I thought it was very good. If I hadn't read the book, I'd probably think it was great.

I'm not much of a movie reviewer. I'm more of a movie discusser.

The director, Zack Snyder, has been saying on his promo tour that people should watch the movie before reading the book. He's right. Since I'm a longtime comics geek, I'm deeply familiar with the source material and carried a lot of backstory into the theatre. My wife just read the book over the past couple of weeks in preparation for the movie, partly at my suggestion; that may have been a mistake.

Watchmen is definitely not for everyone. It's absolutely not for the kiddies - there's a lot of graphic violence, including an onscreen rape attempt that should make you wince at the very least, visible nipplage, both covered and uncovered (some of the movie takes place in cold locales), and some sex - consensual this time - that's surprisingly vigorous for an R-rated studio release. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot - a big blue computer-generated nuclear penis gets lots of screen time.

A more important warning is called for over the entire movie's tone. It's very, very dark, and unrelentingly bleak. This movie is a study of what it means to be human, and so it takes a long hard look at human nature. The picture isn't pretty. Lord of the Flies is just the tip of the iceberg. Once those kids grow up they can start into the real savagery.

This movie is brutal and unflinching. It amuses me to think of people going in expecting a Spider-Man type feelgood movie and coming out completely shellshocked. Too bad they hadn't waited to release it during summer blockbuster season so that even more innocent passersby could walk by the theatre, think from the poster that they were in for a popcorn movie with plenty of explosions but no ideas, and get completely suckerpunched.

The casting was quite good. There were a few actors in the cast who couldn't quite keep up with the others, and one bit player whose performance I didn't buy at all, but I don't want to dwell too much on the negatives. The big positive was that the actor playing Nite Owl was perfect. That said, a few casting notes are in order.

They didn't go with huge names for the cast. There are a few people in this that you'll recognize, but no budget-busting stunt casting. I generally prefer it that way. I also love to see Matt Frewer, a favourite of mine since his short-lived sitcom, Doctor Doctor, getting work.

I found that a couple of the cast reminded me too much of bigger names. The actor playing Ozymandias constantly reminded me of Seth Green. Not a problem, normally, since I enjoy Seth Green's work. However, Ozymandias represents the pinnacle of human physical and metal perfection. Seth Green strikes me as a very sharp-witted guy, but when I think "perfect human being", he just doesn't come to mind.

Also, the actor playing the Comedian was a dead ringer for Robert Downey Jr., so much that I kept forgetting it wasn't him. This is entirely subjective, of course - I've talked to other viewers who didn't see it at all - but it seemed pretty obvious to me. Again, I like Downey, and he could have capably played the role, so it wasn't a problem.

There were other performance issues that I can't really lay at the feet of the actors - the director, and possibly other people on the production side, have to share the blame. For instance, I found it distracting that Seth Green's - sorry, Ozymandias' - accent came and went at random.

Speaking of things that came and went... boy, there's no delicate way to get into this, so I'll just dive in. When Silk Spectre / Laurie was in costume or civilian clothes, she appeared to, shall we say, amply fill out the top half of her outfit. She wore a low-cut formal outfit for an early dinner scene, and was in danger of spilling out of it at any second. However, when the same character appeared topless later in the movie, well, they weren't so much there anymore. When she got dressed again, they were back. Don't get me wrong, at no point was there anything wrong with the lady's build, but there sure seemed to be some garment-based enhancement going on when she was dressed.

Toward the end of the movie, there's a scene where the character is wearing a snug sweater and appears to have gained twenty pounds, all just a few inches south of her shoulders, since we last saw her in costume. The poor actress then had to deliver a most unfortunate line: "There's something I have to get off my chest." Yeah, I'd guess four inches and two cup sizes worth of padding. That line was the funniest thing by far in the movie (which contains very few laughs, even for cynics).

While we're in that area, Silk Spectre's costume appears to be skintight vinyl, and she doesn't seem to wear anything underneath (at least on the upper half of her body). Chafing must be an issue.

Anyway, let's move on. I apologize for the last three paragraphs, but I'm a guy. I notice these things.

Of course, being a good comics geek, I'm unhappy with some of the changes that were made from the original comics. The first example isn't even an objective change - it's just something done differently than I would have wanted. Jackie Earle Haley does a fine job as Rorschach, but he doesn't deliver some of his lines the way I "hear" them when reading the book. He's too aggressive. In the movie, Rorschach growls and barks many of his lines. Many of his sentences would, if transcribed, end with exclamation points to demonstrate his anger. In the book, at least inside my head, Rorschach delivers virtually all of his speech in a monotone, completely devoid of any affect or emotion.

The best example is when Nite Owl / Dan asked what ever happened to their old partnership. In the movie, Rorschach snaps, "You quit!" An accusation with a definite exclamation point, meant to sting. In the book, the same words are delivered with a period. No emotion, simple statement of fact. Rorschach is not hurt by his old partner's abandonment; he's incapable of feeling anything, for good or bad. This is more devastating in its way, as Dan is again confronted with the fact that he can no longer relate to his former friend. There may not even be anything left inside him to relate to. Another character later mentions, in the book version, that Rorschach's lack of vocal modulation makes her uncomfortable. Having him occasionally raise his voice to make a point misses the point altogether.

That's a change or a different interpretation, though, not necessarily a mistake. At least the filmmakers resisted the temptation to make the line, "Never disposed of sewage with toilet before" into a joke. That line is faithfully delivered with no intonation, so it doesn't come off as a standard Hollywood one-liner. Few filmmakers would have shown that restraint.

Most of the movie used the original comics as a script, with the panels as storyboard. However, there were three changes to the dialogue that really stood out to me, and not in a good way. In all three cases, the original dialogue was better.

First, when Rorshach is telling the psychiatrist about when he made the change from being Walter Kovacs to being only Rorschach, right after killing the kidnapper. In the book he says, "It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again." It's much less poetic in the movie; something along the lines of "Kovacs died that day."

Second, when the thug reaches through the bars of Rorschach's cell and asks, "What have you got?" The response is one of my favourite lines in the book: "Your hands. My perspective." In the movie, it becomes "Your hands. My pleasure." I understand that it saves the average movie viewer from loudly asking what "perspective" means, but it's far weaker dialogue, and borderline nonsensical. He "has his pleasure?" What?

Third, a minor change that harms the flow of a moment. After Veidt explains his plan to Dan and Rorschach and they state the cliche that they'll never let him get away with it, in the book he says, "I did it thirty-five minutes ago." This is one of the great moments in fiction, as the "villain explains his plans, including possible points of failure, to the heroes so they can escape and foil him" trope gets the upset it deserves. Despite what every James Bond movie has taught us, few people would ever be that stupid.

In the movie, a subtle change is made, to "I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago." To my ears, that word change hinders the effectiveness of the sentence. I realize the irony in my preferring a simpler, more succinct wording, but there are times when that's the best way to generate emotional impact. This was one of them. Exact wording matters. It's not unusual for me to spend several minutes deliberating over a word choice before moving on, often while re-reading an article before posting. My wife has often heard, "Which word is funnier in this sentence?" For the sentence under discussion, neither word was funny, but "did" was far better.

Now let's move on to non-dialogue changes. Again, these are not errors, but changes that interested me. The removal of the squid didn't, so unlike far too many nerds I won't be complaining about that.

The ending actually improved on one aspect of the book. In the book, no entirely satisfactory reason is given for Dr. Manhattan deciding to leave Earth. He's bored, and it's shown that he's satisfied that Laurie has moved on from him, but he doesn't really need to leave. The movie gives him a good reason.

The group was never called the "Watchmen" in the book. The reader was left to figure out for themselves the relevance of the question "Who watches the watchmen?" However, as already noted, the average moviegoer is considerably dumber than the average reader. Filmmakers don't have the luxury of assuming that their audience will be capable of thought. So, in order to pacify the masses, things need to be spelled out in movies that the author of a book can leave unsaid. For instance, who the "Watchmen" are.

Second, another removal of subtlety. In the movie, we actually see Roschach looming over Big Picture in the washroom. The book handles the same events more discreetly, and far more effectively.

Snyder also had to change how Rorschach killed the kidnapper. This change was mostly forced upon him. Going with the original method from the book would have lead to charges of ripping off a Mad Max movie, or, far worse, one of the interminable Saw movies. Showing Ozymandias watching a Mad Max movie later on was a nice touch.

The movie indulged one bit of comic book nonsense: the idea that a little domino mask would protect someone's secret identity. Think about it for a second: would you fail to recognize one of your friends if they showed up with a raccoon band around their eyes? The book dismissed this. When Dan and Laurie arrive at the prison, they're able to identify Rorschach by his posture and gait, even though they've never seen him without his mask. That's the way it would actually work. There's more to recognizing other people than their facial features. If you can recognize anyone you know while walking up behind them, before you can see their face, then that person would not be able to fool you by putting on a mask.

Yes, Lois Lane and Commissioner Gordon were idiots.

Believe it or not, this movie actually contains some good theology. Even before seeing it, I had been thinking about an article on "Dr. Manhattan as sermon illustration", based solely on the book. I may still write that up, since I haven't touched on what it would have said in this entry. This one is going to be long enough before it's over.

The foundational fact of Christianity, and one that is largely denied in the modern world, is that we are sinners. Every one of us is prone to commit acts of unspeakable evil when our innermost natures are allowed to run free. The western decline of Christianity is directly due to the rejection of this truth. Until someone realizes and understands that they are a sinner, they will never accept their need for a Saviour.

North American and European society have for some time now rejected this idea in favour of a vague notion that man can create his own utopia. Evil is an aberration, and if everyone would only embrace their inner wonderfulness and chant "Yes we can!", we could solve every problem and create paradise on Earth, and cancer would go away and leave us all alone to sing Kumbayah.

That's a nice idea. It's the foundational belief of what's normally described as "liberalism" these days, and it's certainly what the public educational system seeks to teach our children. The problem is that it has absolutely no basis in reality. Human beings are inherently prone to selfishness, to greed, to violence, to hatred. If you want to fight against those tendencies, which are inherent but not irresistible, you must first acknowledge that they exist. To fail to do so is to lose the battle before it begins.

Watchmen understands this. The Comedian, standing in the middle of a bloody urban battlefield, joyfully proclaims it the realization of the American Dream. Rorschach explains that God can't be blamed for atrocities, because people gleefully perpetrate them quite without His help. The characters largely agree on the fallen nature of man.

They're correct. Human nature is dark, evil, and awful. God offers a way out, and most people reject it then think themselves enlightened for doing so. This is the Gospel. Watchmen is a deeply theological film. I am tempted to call it a deeply Christian film.

Watchmen works on several levels. It is a murder mystery, action movie, sociopolitical commentary, and character study (these are without exception broken people). However, the level that most interests me is its examination of human nature.

The three main characters in the story (as I see it) are Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, and Ozymandias. Each of them in their own way rejects their membership in mankind, losing sight of or actively abandoning their own humanity. They each move to a different level.

Rorschach sets himself below society, living in the gutters and peering into the darkest corners to hunt down murderers. He interacts with society on the micro level, intimately punishing individual criminals and avenging their insignificant (to larger society) victims. He looks into the world from underneath.

Ozymandias sets himself above the masses, proclaiming himself worthy to sacrifice others for the greater good. He looks down on the world from above. He is the inevitable product of a society that preaches self-esteem to its young. The problem is that the self-esteem taught is usually not tied in any way to merit. Veidt / Ozymandias actually is smart, strong, and capable. His self-image would be fine without any pushing. When someone is capable of actual accomplishment, they don't need constant reassurance. Heaping praise on such an individual results in what we see here - a narcissistic and arrogant god complex.

Dr. Manhattan's separation from humanity is obvious and explicit. He exists on a quantum level, seeing human beings as collections of atoms. At one point he openly states that to him, a living person is no different from a dead one - they're both just arrangements of molecules.

However, before the story ends, all three have made contact with their former selves. Veidt points out that Dr. Manhattan still feels far more human than he even realizes; Veidt manipulated him into washing his hands of Earth. It is significant that Rorschach removes his mask at the end, choosing to die as Walter Kovacs, the man Rorschach had already buried long ago.

Ozymandias himself is a trickier case. I think he was telling the truth when he expressed empathy for his victims ("I've made myself feel every death..."). Others (including my wife) contend that this statement was just more manipulation and he didn't mean a word of it. I think he meant it, but that he has become so detached that his empathy doesn't run very deep. He detached not by choice but because he needed to in order to carry out his plan, which, remember, he sees as necessary to save the world. He honestly sees himself as a hero. A saviour.

The book does a better job of expressing the moral ambiguity of Veidt's actions. He's a more straightforward villain in the movie, not least because his "badness" is telegraphed from early on. I've read online stories of Watchmen newbies spotting him as the villain from his first appearance, standing in front of a nightclub looking arrogant. I believe them. Personally, I probably would have figured it out at his attempted assassination if I hadn't already known. The book shows him as a much nobler, much nicer person, and so it's far more shocking when his plan is revealed.

Anyway, that's probably enough for now. I recommend Watchmen to anyone who hasn't experienced it yet. See the movie first, then read the book, or the movie will suffer by comparison. Be forewarned: both the book and the movie require the audience to think. Hopefully that's a plus, not a minus, to anyone reading this, but I think it explains the movie's sharp second-week dropoff at the box office.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a receptacle for soiled linens.

The True Identity Of Jack The Ripper

2009-03-17T17:31:00.005-03:00

Here's what my brain did to me today.

The identity of the Whitechapel murderer, popularly known as Jack the Ripper, has been a mystery for over a century. Many have tried over the years to prove that one suspect or another was secretly Mad Jack, the sociopathic killer. No one has ever conclusively proven their case.

Until now.

The true identity of Jack the Ripper was, in fact: Muppeteer Jim Henson.

It seems obvious now that it's been pointed out, doesn't it? I bet you feel really stupid and inadequate for not having realized it sooner. Suddenly, life makes sense.

What better cover for a methodical serial killer than to become a beloved family entertainer? No one ever suspects the guy with his arm up Kermit the Frog. Being born decades after the Whitechapel murders was a masterstroke of misdirection. Very clever, Mr. Henson! But not quite clever enough.

Consider: not a single prostitute murder in the Whitechapel district has been attributed to Jack the Ripper since Jim Henson passed away in 1990. There are also no published memoirs of Victorian-era prostitutes recounting tales of meeting Jim Henson. This can only mean that he left no witnesses. Not a single Victorian-era prostitute saw Jim Henson's bearded face and lived to tell the tale.

When this theory occurred to me, I first considered Walt Disney as the possible culprit. I was forced to abandon that path of thought because it hit a little too close to home. I'm really not sure about old Walt.

I have developed an elegant proof of this theorem, but unfortunately this Internet is too small to contain it.

Oh, all right, I'll try to cover the high points. You should be able to fill in the details for yourself. Suffice it for the moment to say that an irrefutable mathematical proof of my theorem exists, wherein we begin by letting X = "Jim Henson" and Y = "Jack The Ripper". Before long, X equals Y. It all hinges on the remainder left when 5 disemboweled Victorian prostitutes are divided by "Gavin McLeod".

As opposed, I suppose, to being divided by the Ripper's sharp instruments.

I would have liked to include some diagrams to support my theory, diagrams being an excellent way to sanitize complex mathematical concepts for the consumption of the unwashed masses. Maybe some pie charts. Everybody likes pie charts. But thinking about that got me to thinking about pie, so I went and looked in the kitchen only to find no pie, but I found some strawberry shortcake shells and some strawberries, but no whipped cream, but we had some whipped cream mix so I mixed that up and had a nice strawberry shortcake and by the time I was finished I had forgotten all about pie and Jim Henson being Jack the Ripper.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son (at left, in camo in case his keenly honed survival instincts compel him to take cover in a wooded area of the mall), Pastor Derek and Homeschooler's daughter (in pink) and two innocent bystanders, mere moments before the situation turned ugly.

Bible Defense: Of Birds And Bats (No Bees)

2009-03-15T20:14:00.009-03:00

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. The thesis of this article presented itself quite uninvited inside my skull not long ago, and I thought it original. However, while researching, I found that the exact same argument has already been made, probably more effectively (and certainly more maturely), by others. We'll come back to that.

But, onward. I'll pretend for the moment that you haven't heard this before from anyone else- after all, a few hours ago, I hadn't.

Bible bashers like to seize on any supposed contradiction they can find in Scripture and use it to attack Christianity. If you're lucky, these issues will be presented in a calm and rational manner, leading to a stimulating discussion.

Usually though, they're phrased more like, "Silly Christians! The Bible is megadumb! NARF!" The attacker usually doesn't understand the alleged contradiction and couldn't cite the Biblical reference, but they're pretty sure that they heard about it from Christopher Hitchens or Michael Moore or George Carlin or somebody who must be right or they wouldn't be famous.

Today's example of an attack from the uninformed (or simply question from the curious): why does the Bible say that bats are birds? Does that prove the Bible can't be trusted? Leviticus 11:13-19 is a list of "unclean birds" that the Israelites were not to eat (NIV, emphasis added):

These are the birds you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.

Sure enough, there's the bat, large as life and twice as ugly, clearly listed as a bird. No question about it.

Here are some reactions to this, found with a really quick and superficial peruse of the web. The first few words of each are linked to the source. Unlinked entries are from the same page as the one before. Spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar errors are presented as found, despite how it pains me to repeat them (but some PG-13 language redacted):

The Bible says that bats are birds but we all know they are mammals...? ... why should I believe anything the Bible says?

Why the bible says that bats are birds?

wasnt the bible the so called "word of God" didnt he know that bats are different from birds when he created them?

Bats are birds to the biblical God.

I realize that the Bible says that bats are birds, but they're not-- they're mammals. Yes, that's right: something in the Bible is wrong! Sorry to p*** on your parade.

The creator of the universe and all living things surely must know that a bat is not a bird, no matter what label the two are given. So how is the Bible the voice of God here?

Still, if it was the infallible word of your imaginary friend, he would tell them it was not a bird.

Your sky-buddy would have planned for the future if he knew everything... Oh, and existed.

I mean, come on, he's supposed to be all-knowing, right? Scientists aren't out to refute an old collection of fairy tales; they are out to pursue knowledge. Your pretend god would have found a way to plan for the change in the bat's classification.

God would have known that bats are not birds, and that flight does not make something a bird. He would have known about flightless birds. He would have known bats are much more closely related to rats than to birds, and would not have made Himself look foolish by having his scribes record incorrect information.

The God you claim wrote the Bible could have ensured these details were correct. That He didn’t means either a) the Bible was not inspired by God, b) it may have been inspired by God, but it was written by humans and so cannot be expected to be correct in matters of science which they were unaware, or c) God did not intend it to be correct on matters of science, and wrote it as a spiritual guide, so we should not expect it to be correct where spiritual things are not concerned.

I realize that was a lot (and I actually cut it down significantly before posting), but I wanted to make sure that a good sampling of ignorance and arrogance was provided.

I am not, nor have I ever been, an ornithologist. My interest in bird species begins at "which ones scatter my garbage all over the street if I set it out on the curb the night before" and ends at "which ones taste good fried". Sadly, there's no overlap between those two groups.

My understanding, limited though it is, is that bats are not classified as birds in the modern taxonomy. However, whether that means that this Biblical passage contains an actual error depends entirely on the meaning of the word "bird". More specifically, it hinges on the definition of the ancient Hebrew word that our modern Bibles translate as "bird".

Interestingly, I didn't find an actual scientific definition of the word "bird". Wikipedia says, "Birds (class Aves) are winged, bipedal, endothermic (warm-blooded), vertebrate animals that lay eggs." Other sources seem to indicate that feathers are the key. My favourite tongue-in-cheek attempt came from a fellow named David Marjanovic, who wrote, "The definition of 'bird' is 'I know it when I see it'...I don't think there is, or should be, a scientific definition of 'bird'."

All the proposed definitions agree, though, that bats are not "birds", and I've never met anyone who claimed otherwise. Of course, I've only been around since sometime in the twentieth century. Had I lived a few thousand years ago in the ancient near east, the story may have been quite different.

The Hebrew word here translated "bird" is 'owph. That word in no way means "bird according to the scientific concept of same that will be in place by the dawn of the twenty-first century." In fact, it means something very close to "non-insect flying creature." Bats are not birds, but bats most certainly are 'owph.

Some modern Bibles, especially those of the study / reference variety, will contain a note to this effect. They are correct. The translators had a choice: either use a much less concise phrase, or go with the single word that all readers will understand and that mostly fits the bill. I consider it unfortunate that they made the choice they did, because it leads to nonsensical responses like those I quoted above.

It simply is not logically valid to attempt to apply a modern taxonomic definition to an English translation of an ancient Hebrew word, then cry Biblical error when it doesn't fit.

That said, I'd like to credit some of the places where I found this addressed and answered well. I stumbled across these while looking for either definitions of "bird" or non-Christian (and in some cases downright anti-Christian) reponses, not knowing how unoriginal my idea really was. Note that some of the attack quotes above come from comments on these sites. I didn't read everything written by the authors of these sites, so this is not necessarily a blanket endorsement, although I suspect it easily could be:

"Bat Mobile" by James Patrick Holding, on the Tektonics.org page.

Errancy.org - Bats

"Of Bats And Birds" on Vox Veritatis.

Hopefully this information will come in handy if you're ever accosted by someone wanting to argue about the birds and the bats. You may choose not to debate. However, if you decide to engage, you are now armed with a cluestick to brandish. Wield it well. A good whack with a cluestick sometimes yields wonders.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of something else my wife made. I have no comprehension whatsoever of how fuzzy string gets turned into this sort of thing. I suspect witchcraft is involved.

Canadian Immigration Policy

2009-03-14T01:28:00.003-03:00

I've written twice before about Robert Dziekanski's death. Time for round three, as we briefly look at the results of a Canadian opinion survey on the matter:

61 per cent of those surveyed felt the officers used excessive force when they confronted Dziekanski and stunned him several times with a Taser.

Apparently 39 percent of those surveyed think that "holding a stapler while foreign" is an offense deserving of death. I've heard of people getting pulled over for "driving while black", but this is a new one on me.

Meanwhile...

Toronto terror suspect Mahmoud Jaballah taught the children of Ahmed Khadr in Pakistan, says a new document from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that closely links Jaballah to a Canadian clan known for its terrorist ties...

The federal government has been trying to deport Jaballah, based on CSIS allegations he is senior member of the Egyptian terrorist allegation Al Jihad - a charge he denies... He is one of five foreign-born terror suspects whom the government is trying to deport.

For the record, here's Canada's apparent immigration policy: Senior member of an Islamic terrorist organization? Come on in! Stay as long as you like!

Polish man coming to stay with his mother? Please wait here for nine hours while we frustrate you with bureaucratic incompetence (which is awfully close to redundant). A group of large men with Tasers will be along to shock you senseless at the first available opportunity. And, yes, Canada has public health care, but that would only help you if we bothered checking your vital signs after knocking you unconscious. Needless to say, we won't be doing that.

But don't worry! After we kill you, an inquiry will be held!

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of more stuff my wife made. These were for Pastor Derek and Homeschooler's daughter.

Quick Notes

2009-03-10T23:53:00.005-03:00

Another assortment of quickies in lieu of a longer, better thought-out entry. I like doing these because they make me feel like Andy Rooney.

I've been quiet lately for two main reasons. First, there's a big project going on at work, and staff were offered two hours of daily voluntary overtime. There weren't many of us who accepted, and even fewer who did more than a handful of days. I've stayed for the extra time almost every day since late January.

You wouldn't think that a mere two hours added to the end of the work day would have such an impact, but it definitely has. I haven't even mustered up the energy to do my tax return yet. Since I'm expecting a sizable refund, that's saying something.

The second main reason for my radio silence: Gamehouse Sudoku. I normally play level 8, and my average time is about four minutes. I thought that the Automarks would make me lazy and actually atrophy any Sudoku skill I once had, but they only remove some of the grunt work. You still have to do your own thinking, which is the fun part anyway.

Rebelangel has been posting lots of interesting stuff lately, trying to make up for the days she missed during her recent computer problems, and get back on track for her Blog 365 target. When there's nothing going on here, check over there. (When there is, check over there afterward anyway.) I'd be posting comments on some of her articles if I didn't have so many important video games to play. Maybe once the overtime wraps up (supposedly soon).

Pastor Derek and Homeschooler's newborn twin boys are still in the hospital. This article has an update and some new pictures. Poor Henry looks so sad in the first and last pictures. He looks like he's far more aware of his discomfort than he should be at this age. Those are spookily wise eyes.

On to less personal stuff.

The attorney representing child-killer Christopher Pauchay (remember him?) says that he was "surprised by the judge's assessment that Pauchay lacks insight into his behaviour."

Over fifty criminal convictions and decision-making skills that led him to carry his daughters outside in a blizzard to freeze in a snowbank, and his attorney is "surprised" by a suggestion that Pauchay might not think too much about his actions.

Maybe an IQ test should have been administered before the bar exam.

The pictures I post here should start looking much better. I use Irfanview for most of my digital image manipulation, and recommend it highly. As I demonstrate on a regular basis, I'm not much of a photographer. My shots tend to come out with a yellowish tint. I've played with the colour balancing tools in Irfanview (Image - Enhance Colours), but all I've ever managed was to replace the yellow tint with a red or blue tint.

The other day, just for the heck of it, I clicked the Auto Adjust Colours option in that menu for the first time.

Wow! Never again will I mess around with manual colour balancing. With a single click, that button makes my shots look clear, colourful and vibrant. I'm tempted to repost some of my old shots with that option applied, especially the pictures of my wife's crafts. She does much better work than you would think from looking at my washed-out pictures.

My local supermarket has Pringles on sale for $1.99 a can. The regular price, plainly visible on the sign announcing the sale, is "2 for $4.00."

I thought this was entertainingly idiotic and/or idiotically entertaining until I thought it over. You may laugh at a savings of a single penny, but think of the big picture: if you bought a million cans, you would save $10,000. When's the last time you had an opportunity to save that kind of money by buying vaguely potato-based snack foods?

I may need to rent a storage space.

There are currently nine books in my "finished reading this - now write a Reading Log entry" pile. I finished some of them as long ago as last summer. I may not remember much about them now. I've also bought five more books in the last couple of weeks, all of which will join that pile soon enough.

My MP3 player, which I listen to much of the day at work, has had Bob Dylan's Infidels album on it for a couple of weeks now. Since I normally rotate its contents every day (usually two albums / concerts daily), that means it's holding my interest pretty effectively. I had never heard it before. A friend at work is a big Dylan fan, and after we discussed the three "born again" albums, he brought it in for me. I may write an entry on it in the future. I already have draft notes.

Today's other selection was "Beatle Mash" by "The Liverpool Kids", a no-budget and no-name exploitation released circa 1964 to cash in on Beatlemania. It's not awful, but it's certainly not memorable. Generic early sixties R&B, with one Beatles cover (She Loves You) and one "original" that's such a knockoff of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" that the producers would surely have been sued for plagiarism if the album had been noticed at the time. It's a closer copy than "My Sweet Lord" is of "He's So Fine" - and that's pretty darn close. This album won't be held over.

In the mid-eighties, the writers of Spider-Man comics did a storyline that tied into the much-maligned Secret Wars II (which rocked my barely-pubescent world, despite being sheer crap in retrospect). The Beyonder turned an entire Manhattan office building, and all its contents, to solid gold.

Hijinks ensued as Spidey had to rescue its occupants and neighbours (a solid gold building apparently cannot support its own weight; I'm sure the writers had engineers check all the math), the Kingpin tried to steal it, and finally the government stepped in to confiscate it and get rid of it (I don't remember how, and I'm not subjecting myself to re-reading a Secret Wars II tie-in).

The writers showed some real economic insight here. It was explained that the sudden ex nihilo introduction of all that gold would destabilize the world metals markets, and ultimately the entire global economy. You can't just suddenly flood the market with a previously scarce commodity without doing far more harm than good. An inflationary spiral, followed quickly by economic chaos and collapse, invariably ensues.

This goes for a government introducing large amounts of previously nonexistent currency into the economy, whether by actually printing bills (remember Germans needing wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread under Hitler's economic stimulus package?), or by giving large amounts of money that only exists as numbers on a screen (most "money" doesn't physically exist anymore, it's all abstract) to... well, anyone.

How sad is it that Spider-Man writers of the mid-eighties were smarter economists than anyone in the Obama administration?

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son doing his absolute best to hold still. Check out that sharply-defined colour!

He'd Also Like A Pony

2009-03-06T23:31:00.005-04:00

So this guy, Christopher Pauchay, drank himself incoherent one night and decided to go visit his sister. Not that unusual a story so far, at least in my hometown.

The first complication is that there was a snowstorm going on, and the temperature was around minus 50 degrees Celsius with the windchill. For those of you more accustomed to the Fahrenheit scale, that converts to "incredibly freaking cold."

Still, his sister's place was nearby, and surely he could coast that far without even feeling the cold with that much alcohol in his system.

Then comes the second complication: Chris was watching the kids that night.

This is about to get really awful. You are warned.

Having been left in charge of his two daughters (aged 15 months and a little over three years, respectively), he at least knew better than to leave them home alone. So, he did what I'm sure every parent has done at one time or another: he picked them up, one in each arm, dressed only in diapers and t-shirts, and carried them out into a blizzard in the middle of the night.

In his drunken stupor, he didn't get far. He was found the next morning, frostbitten and probably still feeling the booze, on a neighbour's front step. His daughters weren't with him, and it was several more hours before he told anyone that he had brought them outside. Of course, they were found frozen to death in the snow.

At this point, the story is sickening and tragic. What came afterward compounds the outrage.

The guy was charged, as well he should have been. To his credit, he entered a guilty plea. However, before the a real judge decided on his sentence, he got to have a "sentencing circle". I've written about these mockeries of the criminal justice system before.

Let's look at some highlights from that process:

Pauchay's lawyer, Ron Piche, (asked) for a conditional sentence.

A "conditional sentence" means no jail time. Probation and community service, maybe a little house arrest. Why stop there? Why not nominate him for the Order of Canada? The precedent of giving it to child-killers has already been set.

The mother of the two girls, Tracey Jimmy...told the circle she believes Pauchay is a good man. Ms. Jimmy said she knew when she met Pauchay that he would be the father of her children.

But not for long.

She cried as she talked about how her third child -- the one she was pregnant with at the time of Kaydance and Santana's deaths -- was taken away after an incident eight months ago that resulted in assault charges and a restraining order against Pauchay.

This doesn't sound like he's learned much about parenting. Hopefully this child gets far, far away before Daddy comes back to leave her somewhere to die.

The group (of sentencing circle participants) recommended Pauchay take drug and alcohol treatment and assist elders with cultural and spiritual activities. None of the recommendations involves sending him to jail.

The punchline to all this hand-wringing is that the guy already has what you could call a history with the law. He is, as they say, "known to the police" in his area. To the tune of over 50 (yes, fifty, ten times five) criminal convictions.

I don't even understand how someone can ever be out of prison with that kind of record. Sure, even the best of us invariably winds up with a handful of convictions on our rap sheet, but when you're at two score and ten, it's time for society to send you to the showers.

Oh, wait. He was walking (or, more accurately, staggering) around free for the same reason that he got a "sentencing circle", instead of a judge immediately bringing the hammer down - the colour of his skin:

The Criminal Code also dictates that a judge should take into account the special circumstances of aboriginal offenders, regardless of whether they partake in sentencing circles.

I've written about this before, but it bears repeating until it changes: the Canadian government assumes that Aboriginals cannot be held responsible for their actions. Our legislators think that they aren't as civilized, aren't as smart, and just aren't as capable of understanding right and wrong as us white folks. I didn't think anyone would ever seriously compliment someone else by saying, "That's mighty white of you!", but considering things like this, it wouldn't surprise me coming from a Canadian Member of Parliament.

The bigotry of low expectations (there's nothing "soft" about it) kept this man out of prison, and his two children are dead because of it. All the "progressives" who think that they're being enlightened and generous (and how condescending is that?) by having legal exemptions carved out for minorities have the blood of those girls on their hands.

Now for the final insult to the memory of those two girls. Their Daddy just got his sentence for killing them.

Three years. Three stinking, lousy years.

That's less than the lifetime of his oldest daughter. Far too short in both cases.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the two children this S.O.B. killed. Man, was I ever tempted to write out that abbreviation.

Painting Testimonial Pictures, Oh, Uh-Uh-Oh

2009-03-03T22:48:00.002-04:00

Things aren't looking good at the hearing into Robert Dziekanski's death after being Tasered at the Vancouver airport. More specifically, the testimony of the police officers involved seems to be unravelling more and more each day. I can only think of a few reasons why people would lie so blatantly, and most of them revolve around them being completely and utterly busted for having done something wrong.

This story claims that there are at least six definite discrepancies between the story told by the police officers and what can plainly be seen on the tape. Please note that I'm not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with that claim, having neither listened to all the testimony nor (full disclosure time) given the video more than a cursory glance. I'm not a fan of snuff films. However, it seems like the kind of thing that would be pretty easy to fact-check before printing in a major newspaper.

One of the officers, Constable Kwesi Millington, has apparently at least developed the backbone to admit that he lied about several things:

Millington's testimony varied from what he told homicide investigators investigating Dziekanski's death. He told investigators in October 2007 that Dziekanski was yelling with the stapler held high before he was stunned. The officer also said Dziekanski was standing for the first three jolts, and that officers had to wrestle him to the ground.

After watching a bystander's video, Millington agreed Dziekanski might not have been yelling, but he insisted the man raised the stapler out of view of the camera. He conceded that Dziekanski was only standing for the first stun, and fell to the ground on his own.

A form that Millington was required to fill out because he deployed a Taser also included numerous errors, the inquiry heard. Millington wrote that Dziekanski was swinging the stapler "wildly" at the officers, but conceded in his testimony that didn't happen.

At the rate that these guys are backpedalling, we're probably going to find out that Dziekanski wasn't even in the airport. He was walking down the street in Krakow, minding his own business, when some RCMP officers came out of nowhere, Tasers aglow.

This, however, may have been the low point in Millington's testimony:

The officer also said he was trained that multiple stuns could be "hazardous" and should be avoided unless necessary, although he couldn't remember why more than one stun might be a bad idea.

If you can't remember why repeatedly running 50,000 volts through a human being is a bad idea without checking your notes, then a career in law enforcement may not be for you.

I really hate second-guessing police officers. I watched the entire Rodney King video several years ago, and have thought ever since that those guys got a bad rap. King was completely out of control, and kept getting back up and coming at them. The admittedly severe beating he was given, which was the only part of the tape most people saw or wanted to see, only came after several previous attempts to restrain him using more moderate force failed.

So far, my main concern about the Dziekanski case is that no one seems to have been interested in checking on him after he stopped moving. It seems to me that once somebody has been subdued to the point of unconsciousness, it falls upon the personnel present to, you know, make sure they're still breathing.

That may not be my main concern for much longer if the hearings keep going the way they have been. I'm just glad there was a camera around to keep these police officers from selling their fabricated story.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of giraffes sticking their heads out of the Ark at the Holy Land Experience. Sigh. And after they did so well on the scale model.

A True Story From One Of My Jobs

2009-02-26T21:16:00.007-04:00

This is a followup to something that I posted on January 29. I actually went through with what I suggested in that entry.

The following is an actual e-mail exchange that took place yesterday between me and one of the administrators of the building where I work. The only editing I've done is to arrange the messages in chronological order, remove the repetitive subject lines, and replace the names of the people involved. "Admin" is the building administrator, and "Me" is… well, me.

From: Admin

Sent: February 25, 2009 12:19 PM

To: All Building Occupants

Subject: Fire Alarm

There are gentlemen from (our building service contractors) in the building doing the monthly Fire Alarm and sprinkler testing. If the Fire Alarm bell rings, please just ignore it. I will advise you when the testing has been completed.

From: Me

Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 12:19 PM

To: Admin

What happens if there's actually a fire in the next few minutes?

From: Admin

Sent: February 25, 2009 12:24 PM

To: Me

Pray.

From: Me

Sent: February 25, 2009 12:25 PM

To: Admin

You win.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the train station platform from which my family watched the parade of giant electric fish.

Obamamania Comes To Canada

2009-02-24T23:49:00.009-04:00

This article has been composing itself in my head for a while, but it's finally prompted by a CNN Breaking News E-mail Alert I just got, quoted here in its entirety:

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama vows "we will recover" from economic crisis.

Really, now, CNN. We've been over this before: for something to qualify as Breaking News, there should be somebody, somewhere, who didn't see it coming.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a contingent who really expected him to come out and announce, "It's been fun, gang, but the American economy is over. Grab the canned goods and run for the hills!"

His Royal Awesomeness recently visited Canada. Observant Canadians may have noticed it mentioned in the paper, or when it was THE ONLY FREAKING THING ON ANY CANADIAN TV CHANNEL FOR THREE DAYS.

I'm glad he made it safely back home. Unlike my leftist friends, I have no wish to see harm befall the President because I disagree with his politics. I hope Obama fails in his goal of turning America into a politically correct commune with abortions and bailouts for all, but I hope he lives a long, healthy, happy (except for the incidental frustration of having his aforementioned goals thwarted) life. It would have been all kinds of bad if something had gone wrong during his visit here. It's bad enough our geese are taking down airliners over New York City; we don't need any more international incidents.

I'm normally a pretty security-conscious guy, and cooperative with people who are trying to keep us safe. This article, however, describes a security precaution that went way over the line for my inner libertarian (who usually isn't far from the surface):

Behind barricades, thousands of adoring fans will strain to get a glimpse of Barack Obama. Homeowners and the few businesses along the Colonel By Dr. route, which runs parallel to the Rideau Canal, will be told they can't open their doors or windows when the motorcade goes by.

Within those bold letters lies a major problem. If I were one of those homeowners along the route, I wouldn't be interested in sticking my head out the window to watch President Rockstar's limo go by anyway. I'm not one of those who believe that a mere glimpse of his glory could cure my dandruff.

Furthermore, if the security people suggested that keeping the doors and windows closed would be wise, or even if they politely asked me to do so, I would almost certainly comply happily. However, the moment that I'm told that I can't look out the window of my own house because of a celebrity driving by, we have a serious problem. I live in a free country, and my right to look out the window of my own house is sovereign and absolute.

I realize how ridiculous it may sound to draw a line at this sort of thing, but it matters, and most people don't even understand that it does. It's really very simple: if you don't want to risk my seeing you when I look out my living room window, then don't use the public street that goes by my house. I will not pretend to be a prisoner for anyone.

The Bible repeatedly scorns the idea of treating some people differently than other because of their social status. It's called "respect of persons" - perhaps counterinuitively, a phrase that means "having more respect for some people than others without a valid reason". Romans 2:11 (like a bunch of other passages) says that God shows no respect of persons, and neither should His followers. If I won't hide in my house with the curtains drawn to avoid upsetting any random passerby, I won't do it for President Godiva.

My other problem is with the President's choices of people with whom to meet. The Prime Minister, sure. The Governor General, OK (although maybe her agenda should have been about Canada, not Haiti...).

But waitwaitwait.

The guy's in town for one day, and is booking half-hour meetings... and he has time for Iggy?!?

If Iggy got half an hour, then I hope Don Cherry and Brent Butt each got a slot. For that matter, if Obama had time for Iggy, then he should have had time to stop by and see me.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Cinderella's Castle as seen at night from a moving train through the lens of a digital camera with a very slow shutter speed. If you look closely on the right, you can see the Mothership landing.

Snow Day

2009-02-23T23:40:00.002-04:00

We got thwackhammered by another snowstorm starting late last night and continuing well into this afternoon. My son and I got to skip school and work respectively. I don't quite feel like starting into a real entry, so I'll just make a few quick notes.

Our roof is leaking. Thankfully it's confined to an entryway, not a main living space, but it's still troublesome. You could take a shower by walking through that area just a bit slowly. The worst of it is that it'll be at least six weeks before winter has passed enough for a roofer to even consider taking a look at it. Then, we'll need a contractor to come in and replace a chunk of ceiling where the drywall panel has gotten soggy and begun to sag. Apparently there's a reason it's not called amphibiouswall.

I'm not complaining about the amount of snow I've shovelled this year, for one simple reason: I remember last year, which was much worse. There may have been more total snowfall this year - I don't remember the snow reaching the roof of our shed last year - but if so, it's been paced much better. Last year we had a long run of snowstorms every two or three days. I wouldn't even have finished cleaning up after one before the next one hit.

Another major difference in my shovelling this year: I haven't been the least bit sore the next day, even once. Before this winter, each snowstorm left me stiff and barely able to move for several days afterward. This winter, no problem (yet). That may be because I bought a new "ergonomic handle" scoop this fall, but I prefer to credit the exercise regimen I started in early 2008. It's laughable by the standards of anyone who's actually the least bit interested in fitness, but I guess any (regular) exercise is better than none.

My wife and son spent most of this Free Bonus Day working on a Beatles jigsaw puzzle. It includes the cover of Let It Be, so I thought it appropriate to put that album on for them (him, really) to listen to while they worked on it. He liked it, and spent much of the day hollering "Nothing's gonna change my world!" after hearing Across The Universe.

We went to visit Pastor Derek and family on Saturday. We had a nice but very short visit, although oddly we never did see the newborn boys. They're in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and there are very strict visiting requirements. Between our tight schedule and not wanting to bring more germs than necessary in around them, we stayed outside the unit while Homeschooler went in to do the feeding and whatever else goes on in there. Then we had lunch at a mall food court (swanky!), let the kids play for a while in the mall's play area, and came back home. Not an ideal visit, especially since Homeschooler was so busy with the boys that we barely got to see her, but far better than none, and probably the best we'll be able to fit in for a while. Adding two newborns to the mix will not simplify their family's social calendar.

Why do people always talk about the weight of newborns, anyway? I can only see two reasons for concern with something's precise weight: either you're planning to put it in a box and mail it, or you're calculating its cooking time. Call me old-fashioned, but I just don't think either of those should apply to newborn babies.

Even with the paucity of posting hereabouts of late, I'm averaging better than a post every four days so far for February. Not what I might have hoped, but I'm not terribly disappointed with it.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a courtyard at the Holy Land Experience.

Legend Of The Five Rings

2009-02-21T21:30:00.009-04:00

Apparently the Olympics are coming to my nation.

Whee.

I think the Olympics, no matter where they're held, are little more than an embarrassing orgy of nationalism (hey, remember way back when I posted this?). There's no one whose ability to play a game impresses or even interests me. I think that we as a society should be ashamed to spend a dime on Olympic spectacle while there are still real problems to be solved and better uses for the ridiculous amounts of money that get poured into watching people lift things, jump over stuff, and whatever else they do at the Olympics.

I admit to one exception to my lack of interest: the luge is fun to watch, because those people - who are ballast, not athletes - are clearly out of their minds. Rational persons do not wish to go tobogganing at those speeds.

All that stuff a couple of paragraphs back having been said, I wouldn't bother actively opposing the Olympics if they were entirely privately funded. Get corporate sponsors, charge a fortune for admission and broadcast rights, merchandise the daylights out of it, rake in the cash, and keep your hands out of the taxpayers' pockets, and I have no objections. And the Olympics do all those things, except that last one. I'm pretty sure a chunk of my tax money will be paying for some people to jump, swim, and hop, and for other people to watch.

If the Olympics were privately funded, then they would not concern me overmuch. I'd still think they were silly and a waste of money, but I have no right to forbid other people to be silly or waste their money. I'm free to think their decisions are irresponsible, and say so, but my freedom of expression in no way overrules their freedom to be foolish.

Quick sidebar: it often occurs to me that I should be downright ashamed to have a penny in the bank (and I have a couple, albeit not many) if there is one person anywhere who is genuinely suffering solely due to poverty. There was a famous Christian of some years back who expressed this same idea, saying something like, "If I die with a penny to my name then I will have lived as a thief." I can't remember the exact quote, or who said it. Anybody out there know?

I rationalize my material comfort by choosing to suspect that few, if any, people in developed nations are really suffering due to poverty - they may have to drive an old car, or rent instead of buy, or live with a basic cable package instead of having HBO, but that's not suffering. And most of the suffering in the developing world cannot be resolved by simply throwing more money at it. Freighters full of donated food show up at ports in starving nations, and thugs with guns confiscate it all for the treasuries of their warlords. The problems are political, not financial.

This justification allows me to live with having cable television, a high-speed Internet connection, and a whole bunch of junk I don't need.

Don't burst my bubble. I'm not sure what's inside.

End sidebar.

So, totally privatize the Olympics and leave me, and every other taxpayer everywhere, out of it. I'll still ignore and / or mock them, but I won't consider them evil because they're funded by taxation / extortion.

This is all preamble to something I read today about the Vancouver Olympics security costs (which will be sucked out of my pockets as a Canadian taxpayer. Did I mention the problem with that yet? Oh. Never mind, then.). The funny part is in bold:

The federal government will pay $647.5 million, as well as cover any unexpected costs. British Columbia's share is equivalent to $252.5 million, but only a fraction of that will actually be spent on security.

Instead, the two sides struck a deal that sees Ottawa pick up a greater portion of the security tab but give B.C. less for new buildings and roads over the next three years.

Excellent negotiating, B.C.! Not long from now when the law of entropy rears its ugly head and your roads are in dire need of repairs, you can take solace in the fact that just a few short years earlier you got to watch people ride bobsleds. Good call!

I don't understand why any city (or nation) would want to host the Olympics. I've been paying a little attention to Vancouver's preparations, and it seems like a huge inconvenience for the administrators and a borderline nightmare for the city's residents. If I lived in Vancouver, I think I'd plan to go visit distant relatives during the games.

The problem is that the Olympics are essentially a giant party for athletes and their groupies. Imagine the loudest, most raucous parties you ever saw going on at the jock dorms on a university campus (or ever saw in a TV show or movie). Yeah, they look like fun, but would you want to host a party like that at your house? The Olympics mean all the top jocks in the world hanging out at your place. And they each brought two bimbos and a keg.

My condolences, residents of Vancouver. Remember to turf the city councillors who invited the football team to crash at your place when the next municipal elections roll around.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the train station at Disney World, as seen from the street below. Regular viewers of my photos will notice that a way to adjust my camera's shutter speed woud be helpful.

Unclear On The Concept

2009-02-20T23:30:00.003-04:00

So this poor guy, Robert Dziekanski, flew from his native Poland to Canada to see his Mom. He didn't speak English or French, and after a long day of travelling then an over nine hour runaround at the Vancouver airport from a whole bunch of people whose most commonly spoken phrase appears to be "that's not my job", he got confused, frustrated, and disoriented. Eventually Robert got agitated, the police were called, he got Tasered, and he died on the airport floor. His Mom had already gone home during his nine hour wait, unaware that he was even in the airport and thinking he must have missed his flight.

Now, I don't know the full details of what took place, and I'm not in the habit of second-guessing police officers. They aren't all angels by any means, but I generally give them the benefit of the doubt. This post is not about their actions, because I don't understand the situation well enough to comment on their actions. Not many people do, which is why there's an inquiry going on.

However, I can certainly comment on the logic expressed by the guy in this article. Robert Ginter is the "airside safety officer" at the airport where Robert Dziekanski (and you better believe I'm using copy-and-paste for that name, instead of typing it out) died on the floor. He's the man who decided not to dispatch an emergency response services (ERS) team to see if Dziekanski's life could be saved.

Ginter told an inquiry examining Dziekanski's death that the airport could have been caught flat-footed if ERS was dispatched while virtually the entire security and operations departments were already on-scene. "It would expose the airport on secondary issues. Our ability to respond to any other issue, whether it be a fire alarm, debris on the runway, any issue that required an operational response, we would not have had anyone to respond to that incident."

Translation: "If our emergency response teams are running around responding to emergencies, then they won't be available to respond to emergencies!"

You know what? This is too depressing even for me, and I don't feel like writing any more about it. If you don't get the problem here, then I can't help you.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a huge electrical fish rolling down the street. I've never dropped acid, but I'm guessing this is what it would be like.

A True Story From One Of My Jobs

2009-02-18T23:44:00.005-04:00

One of my jobs involved handling deceased clients. That is, when our organization found out that someone with whom we had dealings had passed away, I was the guy that took care of getting all the loose ends tied up and the client's file closed. I saw a lot of death certificates, and got even more informal notes or phone calls stating that somebody was dead, which meant I had to investigate further.

In a revelation that will surprise no one who either knows me or has read this blog's archives, I frequently encountered things in these duties that I found funny. As I've said before, you can either laugh at life or cry about it, and I made my choice a long time ago.

Today's story came about when I received notification that one of our clients who we hadn't heard from in a while had passed away. Specifically, he was killed by an animal. More specifically, the notification I received said, and I quote because I must, that "he was stampled by a bull."

That's right. "Stampled."

I take this to mean "half stomped, half trampled." I hope that the bull was merciful in deciding which half to stomp and which half to trample, but deep down inside I know he probably wasn't.

Most people who heard about this assumed that the unfortunate fellow was some sort of farmer or rancher. Oddly enough, he was an accountant. The bull came in for help with an audit, and lost his temper when he heard that some of his receipts weren't deductible.

The person who notified us seemed a bit too certain about the cause of death. Was anyone around when it happened? If I were a bull planning to "stample" somebody, I'd try to make sure there were no witnesses. Then when the investigators showed up, if they so much as glanced at me, I'd accuse them of unfair profiling. "Oh, sure. Every time somebody turns up stomped into a puddle in my neighbourhood, and I happen to have a little blood on my hooves, it's the same old story: blame the bull." This is the classic defense strategy known as "playing the bull card."

For a while after we got that notice, whenever one of my colleagues announced that they were going out and added the standard "I'll be back (whenever)", I replied, "Unless, of course, you get stampled by a bull. There's a lot of that going around. It's a full-fledged bull-stampling epidemic. Or half-fledged, at the very least."

The person was usually long gone before I finished. Sometimes they were already back.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son in Minnie Mouse's fireplace.

Musical Notes: Flying High To Sesame Street

2009-02-14T22:08:00.010-04:00

Almost every day, I load up my MP3 player with two albums (or concerts) and listen to them through the day at work. I tend to run in themes - for instance, for several weeks, one of my two albums each day was by Larry Norman. I also expect to go into a Harry Nilsson phase soon, due mainly to having recently obtained the entire Harryties bootleg series .

One of my two albums one day last week was a tribute album called Flying High Again: The World's Greatest Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, released in 2006. It follows the usual pattern for tribute albums in the hard rock / heavy metal genre - most of the songs are credited to a (reasonably) big-name vocalist with a (reasonably) big-name guitarist. For instance, the first track on this album is Mr. Crowley, performed by Tim "Ripper" Owens and Yngwie Malmsteen. Neither is a household name, but if you're a fan of hard rock you've probably heard of both of them.

Also like most of these tribute albums, the majority of the tracks are pretty much karaoke, with the arrangements not straying far from the original recordings. Since all the guitarists are veterans of the shred scene, the music is all perfectly fine but doesn't bring much new to the table. The vocals are where we get some interesting variations.

Most of the vocalists fall into one of two categories: high-pitched screamers the likes of which I thought had become extinct in the late eighties, or acid-gargling snarlers from the hardcore / death metal genre. The opening track shows Ripper Owens to be one of the former. After an intro that sounds carbon-copied from Ozzy's original, he begins the vocal by screaming the opening line an octave higher than Ozzy's version. If you're going to listen to this album at high volume, please extend the courtesy of providing any nearby dogs with earplugs first, and beware of bats showing up to investigate the frequencies.

For the first ten tracks of the album, it's a competent but forgettable karaoke night. It's interesting to hear Lita Ford perform Close My Eyes Forever live as a solo song (with a really lame joke at the start that she seems to regret as soon as she says it), and Dee Snider's rendition of Crazy Train with Jason Bonham on drums, but there's nothing on here that will make anyone forget Ozzy's original versions.

Until we get to the last two tracks, that is. I'm going to discuss them in reverse order.

The album closer, Goodbye To Romance performed by the Alex Skolnick Trio, is by far the greatest departure from the original arrangement, and an odd ending for the album. Knowing Skolnick from his work with Testament and his columns in guitar magazines, I had expected just another karaoke carbon copy. Instead, it's an instrumental jazz version that clocks in at over seven minutes. Skolnick turns on a distortion pedal for the last couple of minutes, but most of the song sounds like it could be played as background music in an upscale cocktail bar.

I don't mean that as an insult - this is lounge music, but it's very well-done lounge music, and fans of easy-listening jazz (I'm not one of them) would probably enjoy it. It seems an anticlimactic way to end such a loud and heavy album, but placing this track anywhere else in the sequence would probably have resulted in most listeners not hearing anything after it. It certainly would have been a disastrously atypical opener. In the final analysis, there was nowhere it could go except at the end.

The most interesting track, though, is number 11: Revelation (Mother Earth), performed by Novembers Doom (whose name sounds to me like a possessive but inexplicably does not include an apostrophe). On the day that I listened to this album, my second selection was a Rutles album. The Novembers Doom track (man, do I ever have a hard time not inserting an apostrophe into their name) was still the funniest thing I heard that day.

The lead vocal - well, most of it, but we'll get to that - is performed by a member of the low, growly death-metal school. However, it doesn't come off quite right in this song. The instrumental intro sounds pretty much like Ozzy's original, slow and soft. Then the vocal comes in, and sounds just like - I assure you I am not making this up - Cookie Monster.

Yes, this album includes an Ozzy track as performed by beloved Sesame Street character Cookie Monster. That alone makes it a must-hear. The vocal is so reminiscent of the beloved Muppet that I was surprised every time the first-person personal pronoun ("I") appeared in the lyrics. It sounded wrong, because everyone knows that Cookie (we're tight, I can call him that) has trouble with his pronouns and always says "me".

Then it gets better.

Around a minute and a half in, a second vocalist joins in. The line "Father of all creation..." is sung by what seems to be another celebrity impersonator. Actually, an impersonator of an impersonator. This second vocalist seems to have a thick eastern European accent. However, he doesn't sound quite like Arnold. Instead, he sounds like an Arnold imitator - Hans and Franz, or perhaps Ranier Wolfcastle.

The song continues for a couple more minutes, with Cookie and Ranier trading lines. To be honest, though, despite playing it several times, I never got to hear most of it because I was laughing too hard. Which got me odd looks from my co-workers, but I'm used to those.

If you're a fan of Ozzy, Sesame Street, or just weird stuff in general, you owe it to yourself to seek out this song. I tried to find somewhere to listen to it online for free, but all I could find (and get to work) were places like Amazon, where I could only get a short preview. That clip allows you to hear Cookie Monster, but ends before the duet with Ranier / Ahh-Nuld begins. More's the pity.

The real punchline came when I read a little bit about the band online. The death metal genre with its attendant snarly vocalists tends to be prevalent in northern European countries. Between Cookie Monster's vocal style and Ranier's accent, I was sure that Novembers Doom (must remember to go back and delete the apostrophe that my fingers refuse to omit on the first pass...) would be from Iceland, Finland, or Some-other-really-cold-place-Land.

They're from Illinois.

This song almost makes me want to embed the audio in this article so all my several visitors could hear at least a few seconds of the wonderful awfulness. However, two things prevent me from doing so.

Number one, I hate it when sites embed multimedia content. It's getting better now that it usually doesn't start up unless you explicitly ask it to by clicking a Play button. However, for most of the Internet's short history, sites that use multimedia content have usually started it automatically, clogging bandwidth, dragging your computer to a halt, and blasting you with something you probably didn't want to hear if your speakers were turned up. It'll take me a long time to warm up to embedded content because I've been thoroughly conditioned to hate it.

Second, I haven't the foggiest idea how.

If you're the criminal sort, there may be legally dubious places online where you could obtain this album for free. However, being a law-abiding blogger, I could never in good conscience suggest that anyone do so.

I could also never recommend that you could use a torrent client, like uTorrent, that allows you to only download the files you want and skip the rest.

Unless of course you live in a country where such things are legal, in which case have at it.

(Disclaimer: nothing on this blog should be taken as legal advice. The guy writing it may not even be a lawyer, for all you know. In the event that you are arrested and/or sued because you chose to do something that this blog said you shouldn't but you thought there was an implied nudge and/or wink, don't come around asking to borrow bail and/or settlement money.)

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the cover of Flying High Again: The World's Greatest Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne - a tribute album that does not actually include a performance of its title track.

If It's Monday, We Must Be In The Gutters

2009-02-09T17:56:00.003-04:00

I'm on my last day of a short vacation. We had intended to spend this weekend getting in one last visit with Pastor Derek and his wife, known around these parts as Homeschooler, before their newest children (yes, plural) were born and their lives became an unrelenting cycle of "feed-change-try to sleep for ten minutes then do it all again".

However, the kids decided to throw those plans into disarray by coming out earlier than expected. See this post over on Pastor Derek's blog for the details. Congratulations are certainly in order, but our visit got derailed for the time being.

That left me with a couple of days booked off work and nowhere to go. I spent the time sleeping, reading, preparing material for the Bible study I've been leading, and playing computer games. I had already intended to go a few days without posting, and so I did.

Now I'm back, at least for today, and thought I'd revisit (and finish) an old series. A looong time ago, I wrote about my number one and two reasons for liking Mondays on the Internet; today I present number three.

I've been out of the comics business for a long time (longer than I was in it). However, I still read a few comics news sites on a regular basis. My favourite comics column is Lying In The Gutters (LitG), an industry "gossip" column written by Rich Johnston. It's hosted on Comic Book Resources, whose main page is usually worth at least a a daily skim.

LitG is usually posted each Monday. It's not unusual for it show up late in the day, so I often wind up reading it on Tuesday, but its official regular schedule gets it into my "reasons Mondays aren't so bad" category without being too much of a cheat.

Some of the stories are a bit Anglocentric (Johnston lives in the U.K.), and you can usually count on a gratuitous-but-charming plug for at least one of Mr. Johnston's own published works somewhere along the line. However, the column is well worth reading if you have any interest in the behind-the-scenes workings of the comics industry.

The "gossip" isn't lurid tabloid nonsense about personal lives, but information about projects both proposed and cancelled and all sorts of insider information about the comics industry (the kind of stuff that doesn't get reported in Wizard magazine). The LitG forums are interesting, too, but I find that far more questions get asked than answers proposed over there. It's worth a look, but I don't bother checking in with the forum more than once a month or so.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son harassing Spider-Man in the Orlando airport.

The Price Of Freedom

2009-02-02T23:16:00.004-04:00

It has come to my attention that the threatened Canadian Human Rights Commission complaint against Andrew Lawton of Right Wing Canada, which was the subject of my last post, may be a hoax. That would be both good and bad, since it would mean that Andrew doesn't get to present his defence (with the attendant publicity for the cause of free speech versus Islamofascism), but on the other hand it would mean that he doesn't have to go to the bother and expense of defending himself.

Apparently the alleged complainant has the same name as a known terrorist. I read about this on a few leftist websites, some of which linked to me and other pro-freedom bloggers. I won't link back to them, because having read those sites, I prefer not to promote them. The reaction of those sites to Andrew's announcement of the threat, as well as my reaction and a few others on the correct side of the free speech issue, can be summarized thus: "FAIL! right-wingz iz the STOOPID! LOLZ!!!eleventyone!! they fell for da hoaks DANCE MONKEES DANCE".

They're failing a few basic logic tests.

First of all, they're assuming that no actual complaint has been filed. That may be the case; unless and until Andrew hears from the CHRC directly, there's no way to tell. (Unless, of course, one of them was the fake complainant.)

Second, they're assuming that if a complaint was filed (the prospect of which doesn't seem to bother them), the complainant's real name was Mohammed Al-Zahar, just like the terrorist. Right. Because nobody ever uses pseudonyms on the Internet. So sayeth Zirbert, The Irritable Saint.

An alternate possibility is that these amused-to-death folks assume that that the use of the same name as a terrorist "proves" the message is a hoax. Because, you know, it's unthinkable that two people in the world can have the same name. Given that there have been two famous professional athletes named Kareem Abdul-Jabar (phonetically identical, albeit spelled differently), I can't give that theory a lot of support.

Here's the real rub, though. Even if these people are right and it's a hoax, I'm still glad that I wrote what I wrote. I'm still glad that Andrew, The Canadian Sentinel, and Right Wing News all reacted publicly. It demonstrates that we're on alert.

Yes, this alleged complaint may be a hoax. (Or, as noted, maybe it isn't.) However, the threat is completely plausible. It uses the same type of mindless rhetoric and manufactured outrage as actual complaints against people like Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. Laughing at people who actually care about freedom of speech for reacting to it is a lot like laughing at the fire department for showing up when a false alarm gets triggered.

As far as I can see, nobody overreacted. Nobody put expensive attorneys on retainer or even started fundraising. Nobody went into hiding, or took up arms and opened fire. A handful of people took a few minutes and wrote blog posts or e-mails. If that's your idea of monkeys dancing, then you've lost perspective and really need to hang around some less shiftless people.

I would have been far more concerned by a lack of reaction to this threat. Cynics may mock the notion that the triumph of evil requires only that good people do nothing; anyone with a basic knowledge of history (or human nature) knows it to be true.

As for those sitting in the bleachers, giggling like idiots at the prospect of people caring about the right to self-expression and being prepared to defend it, I have a message for you:

If this threat is genuine, Andrew will not face it alone. Even if it isn't, people like Andrew, Ezra Levant, and a plethora of others you don't respect in the slightest will continue to defend free speech, even when they disagree with it. Your words may be childish, irresponsible, even hateful, but they should be rebutted or ignored, not silenced by the power of the State. When the speech police accuse you of a Thoughtcrime, those you now consider fools or even enemies will oppose them on your behalf.

You're welcome.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of Cinderella's castle, as seen at night from a moving train.

Me Too! Me Too!

2009-01-31T18:58:00.007-04:00

Somebody here in Canada who doesn't quite get the whole "freedom of speech" thing has filed a complaint against the owner of RightWingCanada... for daring to use Barack Hussein Obama's middle name.

Here's the e-mail that the silly person sent to the site's owner, with his misspelling of "derogatory" intact. Note the inclusion of his e-mail address, in case you'd care to exercise your freedom of expression in the direction of his inbox:

Your hateful blog
Mohammed al-Zahar
(mohammad.alzahar@yahoo.ca)
Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 5:48 PM
To: andrew@rightwingcanada.com
Mr. Lawton:

I am writing today to inform you that as of 10:27am EST this morning, I have filed a claim against you under the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Among other hateful and inflammatory remarks made on your blog, www.RightWingCanada.com, you referred to President Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama," citing that he is an Arab-American. This was made in a hateful and dirogatory manner, and such racist propaganda is forbidden under section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

I hope that you go down in flames like your other Nazi friends.

Ma-Z

First up, let me say for the record:

Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein.

Hussein, Hussein, Hussein. That's Barack Obama's middle name, yes indeedy.

That doesn't mean anything. Even if he were of Arabic descent, and I don't know or care whether he is, so what? I've written before about how the actual racism lies in taking offense at a fact, not in the pointing out of the fact itself. To make this more clear, consider this hypothetical dialogue about my favourite whipping boys, the Freedonians:

"Did you know that (Public Figure X)'s family came from Freedonia?"

"HOW DARE YOU call (Public Figure X) one of those filthy Freedonians?!?"

Who's the racist in that scenario, kids?

I consider it a point of failure that no one has even hinted at filing a "Human Rights Commission" complaint against me yet. If it ever happens, my entire response at my hearing will be to read from a transcript of what Ezra Levant said at his. I could never top the absolute drubbing he gave them.

In a blatant attempt to rectify that, I'll be sending the following e-mail to Mohammed Al-Zahar (mohammad.alzahar@yahoo.ca) right after I finish posting this (with hyperlinks spelled out to make it easier for him):

Dear Mr. Al-Zahar:

I am writing to express my gratitude to you and offer some assistance.

After about a year of regular blogging, I have yet to be the target of a Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) complaint. However, your complaint against Andrew Lawton of RightWingCanada has shown me the way.

Over the past twelve months I have reposted the Mohammed cartoons, explicitly stated that I support Israel (so much for the "Nazi" accusation - by the way, why throw random, arbitrary labels around? You may as well call Mr. Layton a "soccer referee", a "harmonica", or a "Wankel rotary engine" as a "Nazi"), and said many things that could easily be construed as derogatory to Islam. I'm not going to provide direct links for you, because I could use the hits. Feel free to browse the archives and take advantage of the search functions at http://zirbert.blogspot.com to find all the evidence that you and your Orwellian Commission friends could ever hope for. I look forward to a traffic increase.

However, before today I never had the sheer audacity to publicly state Barack Hussein Obama's middle name. It never even occurred to me that doing so could offend anyone. I have now rectified that oversight, with premeditation and malice of forethought. Of course, use of his middle name means absolutely nothing, but based on your complaint it seems to be a line that must not be crossed.

I wish you good luck in your quest to erase the President's middle name from public discourse. To facilitate your task, I've prepared a list of some more entities who have had the nerve to use Barack Hussein Obama's middle name on their websites. They, of course, must all be shown their place. I look forward to seeing announcements of your CHRC complaints against each of them:

Google
Wikipedia
Biography.com
ArabNews.com
NPR
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The White House

Unless, of course, it turns out that you only drum up complaints against people you've already decided must be silenced.

I've already put this up on my blog. Come by and take a look, then peruse the archives. Be sure to bring your righteous indignation.

-Zirbert, The Irritable Saint
http://zirbert.blogspot.com (Make sure you spell it right when you file your complaint.)

Two other quick notes before we go:

It occurs to me to wonder whether Mohammed Al-Zahar (mohammad.alzahar@yahoo.ca) was born in Canada. If not, then I suspect a one way boat or plane trip back to his homeland would place him in a more comfortable "intellectual" climate. If he was, then he's clearly the product of either an Islamic private school or a Canadian public school "education".

Second, if there were a prominent conservative whose middle name held negative connotations (say, "Rush Manson Limbaugh" or "Ann Hitler Coulter" or "Sarah Osama Palin"), do you suppose the media would apply the same "no fair using the middle name" rule?

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of some giant neon fish.

A True Story From One Of My Jobs

2009-01-29T22:08:00.001-04:00

A few days ago everyone who works in my office got an e-mail from building administration: "If the fire alarm sounds within the next half hour, it will be a false alarm because they are working on it. You do not have to leave the building."

Whenever this happens, I wonder the same thing: what if there's really a fire during that half hour? I've never bothered asking this question to my supervisors. I already know what they'd answer: "Impossible. There are no fires scheduled for today." The sad part is that they wouldn't be joking.

Since that was so short, let's have something else before we go.

Last Monday marked the Chinese New Year, as we began the Year of the Ox. If past experience is any indication, I'll still be writing Year of the Chicken on my cheques for the next couple of weeks.

An old and obvious joke, yes, but the classics never go out of style. Although whenever I write a joke that I could imagine Jay Leno doing on the Tonight Show monologue, I feel dirty somehow, and not in a fun way.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of tourists walking around a whale.

Reading Log: The Serpent Said

2009-01-28T23:51:00.004-04:00

Let it be known that this entry's title is an extremely obscure musical reference. I'd be surprised if anyone in the world would get it without Googling. Trust me, it's geeky - which makes it an excellent fit for this article.

I recently finished reading Monty Python Speaks, by David Morgan. Morgan winds up being more of an interviewer and editor than author per se on this book, because the vast majority of the text is direct transcripts of interviews with the surviving Pythons and various friends and colleagues. (As usual, I have plenty of other books that I read first backed up, but this one's overdue from the library.)

I've read several books on the Python crew before, besides watching all their TV show episodes, movies, and spin-off projects; listening to all the albums, interviews, and DVD commentaries; and, of course, memorizing pretty much the entire text of Just The Words, a complete collection of the TV show scripts. Finding that last book on the shelves of my local bookstore when I was a teenager was a Holy Grail moment (I really didn't mean to include that pun, but had very little choice). A few of my friends and I all bought copies, and held deeply nerdy memorization contests for weeks thereafter. My well-thumbed copy still sits just a few feet behind me, on an eye-level (when sitting in this chair) shelf for quick access,

That being the case, Monty Python Speaks didn't tell me a lot I hadn't already heard. I was expecting more about the other members not much liking Eric Idle; however, I'm actually starting to wonder whether that dislike has been exaggerated for comic effect. Idle himself certainly plays on his image of being vain, greedy, and selfish, so it may all be a joke. However, his well-attested falling out with Neil Innes over credit for and control of the Rutles seems to indicate that there may be some truth behind the barbs.

The only real surprise to me was Graham Chapman's status within the group. I'd long known that Chapman's alcoholism and unprofessionalism caused problems, especially during the making of the movies, but I didn't realize how bad it was. When John Cleese called Chapman a freeloader at his memorial service, I had assumed it was another joke, especially given the irreverent (to put it mildly) content of the rest of the "eulogy".

Upon reading this book, I think Cleese may have been more honest that we realized. It seems that there was an attitude in the group, especially from Cleese, Graham's writing partner, that Graham never quite pulled his weight. They're all quick to point out that he was prone to moments of genius - "Splunge!" is frequently cited as an example - but wasn't particularly disciplined or reliable about writing or performing.

Back to that memorial. In case you're not a complete geek and so don't know it, John Cleese got up at the memorial service for his dear friend Graham Chapman and presented the following eulogy. I've edited the naughty words - and the fact that there were naughty words to be edited should give you fair warning. Presented in its entirety, because it deserves to be:

Graham Chapman, co-author of the 'Parrot Sketch,' is no more.

He has ceased to be, bereft of life, he rests in peace, he has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the Great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky, and I guess that we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, such capability and kindness, of such intelligence should now be so suddenly spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he'd achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he'd had enough fun.

Well, I feel that I should say, "Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading b*st**d! I hope he fries. "

And the reason I think I should say this is, he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. I could hear him whispering in my ear last night as I was writing this:

"Alright, Cleese, you're very proud of being the first person to ever say 'shit' on television. If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to be the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'f**k'!"

You see, the trouble is, I can't. If he were here with me now I would probably have the courage, because he always emboldened me. But the truth is, I lack his balls, his splendid defiance. And so I'll have to content myself instead with saying 'Betty Mardsen...'

But bolder and less inhibited spirits than me follow today. Jones and Idle, Gilliam and Palin. Heaven knows what the next hour will bring in Graham's name. Trousers dropping, blasphemers on pogo sticks, spectacular displays of high-speed farting, synchronised incest. One of the four is planning to stuff a dead ocelot and a 1922 Remington typewriter up his own arse to the sound of the second movement of Elgar's cello concerto. And that's in the first half.

Because you see, Gray would have wanted it this way. Really. Anything for him but mindless good taste. And that's what I'll always remember about him---apart, of course, from his Olympian extravagance. He was the prince of bad taste. He loved to shock. In fact, Gray, more than anyone I knew, embodied and symbolised all that was most offensive and juvenile in Monty Python. And his delight in shocking people led him on to greater and greater feats. I like to think of him as the pioneering beacon that beat the path along which fainter spirits could follow.

Some memories. I remember writing the undertaker speech with him, and him suggesting the punch line, 'All right, we'll eat her, but if you feel bad about it afterwards, we'll dig a grave and you can throw up into it.' I remember discovering in 1969, when we wrote every day at the flat where Connie Booth and I lived, that he'd recently discovered the game of printing four-letter words on neat little squares of paper, and then quietly placing them at strategic points around our flat, forcing Connie and me into frantic last minute paper chases whenever we were expecting important guests.

I remember him at BBC parties crawling around on all fours, rubbing himself affectionately against the legs of gray-suited executives, and delicately nibbling the more appetizing female calves. Mrs. Eric Morecambe remembers that too.

I remember his being invited to speak at the Oxford union, and entering the chamber dressed as a carrot---a full length orange tapering costume with a large, bright green sprig as a hat----and then, when his turn came to speak, refusing to do so. He just stood there, literally speechless, for twenty minutes, smiling beatifically. The only time in world history that a totally silent man has succeeded in inciting a riot.

I remember Graham receiving a Sun newspaper TV award from Reggie Maudling. Who else! And taking the trophy falling to the ground and crawling all the way back to his table, screaming loudly, as loudly as he could. And if you remember Gray, that was very loud indeed.

It is magnificent, isn't it? You see, the thing about shock... is not that it upsets some people, I think; I think that it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realised in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important.

Well, Gray can't do that for us anymore. He's gone. He is an ex-Chapman. All we have of him now is our memories. But it will be some time before they fade.

I first read this years ago, and going through it again today I still find it touching. What a wonderful thing to have friends who are willing to be this completely offensive and inappropriate on your behalf because they understand that you would have wanted it that way. I hereby formally request, to any of my real-life friends and family who may read this, that you feel free to make a complete mockery of my funeral when I go. I'll try to help by dying in some way that lends itself to plenty of cheap, obvious jokes.

I recently discovered that Youtube has video of Cleese presenting this eulogy. As promised, some of the other presenters later on were even worse. Do a Youtube search for "Graham Chapman Memorial", or start clicking on the suggested related videos, if you have a very black sense of humour and a few hours to kill.

My dear wife gave me a Monty Python DVD box set for Christmas - Monty Python's Holy Trinity. Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and Meaning of Life, each in two-disc special editions. Even better, of those six discs, my substantial Python DVD collection only contained three of them. I haven't broken the shrink-wrap on the box yet, only because when I do I may descend into a spiral of geek ecstasy from which it will take days to return. There's a four-day weekend coming up at Easter. That seems so completely inappropriate that I may have no choice but to go for it. I have a feeling Graham (and the other Pythons) would be pleased with that.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of some fake animals at the Holy Land Experience. Those sheep look suspiciously like they might live on a farm with a friend named Shaun.

Crossblogging And Comment Followups

2009-01-27T19:11:00.004-04:00

Pure laziness on display today, as I get an entry out of copy-and-pasting what I wrote somewhere else. I'll also be responding to some comments, which means letting other people do some of the work.

First up, the crossblogging. I already dealt with this same issue, possibly raised by the same silly person, here back on January 20th. However, when Cassy Fiano wrote an entry about a site dedicated to thanking former President Bush for keeping America free from domestic terror attacks for over seven years, the same silly response got raised. Copy-and-pasted from her comments section, here we go. First, a response from "Baz":

The mission is accomplished? Complete? I did not know that.

Of course, you know that this a faulty syllogism anyway, the notion that he kept us safe. Like my cat keeps me safe from rhinos. No rhinos in my yard ever since I got my cat. That’s security.

Proximity does not prove, or even imply, cause. To suggest otherwise is magical thinking.

Then I replied (edited slightly to minimize my typos in the revised history books of the future):

Baz - I can’t be bothered to check whether you’re the same person who posted this exact analogy on the American Spectator site a few days ago, or just somebody who read it and thought it was clever enough to plagiarize. Either way, here’s how I responded to your idea on my blog, back on Tuesday:

——
“The lack of terrorist attacks means nothing; I haven’t had any problems with Rhinos in my yard ever since I brought my cat home. Therefore, my cat keeps Rhinos away? No.”

I trust I don’t need to point out the logical error in that spectacularly arrogant display of nitwittery.

The heck with it. I can’t resist dropping a hint: how many rhino attacks do you suppose this person’s yard suffered before the cat entered the scene?
—–

One other question, in case you still don’t get it. Do you have rhinos skulking around your neighbourhood and openly plotting attacks, only to be repeatedly thwarted by your cat blowing up their headquarters and killing or capturing their ringleaders? If not, your analogy is even dumber than it looks at first.

Baz came back for another round:

Zirbert: My argument is straight out of Critical Thinking 101, *really* basic Junior High stuff. Faulty syllogism. Look. it. up. Your analogy is irrelevant and beside the point.

Glutton for frustration that I am, I responded:

Baz: You’re correct about the analogy being irrelevant. However, it’s yours, not mine. I made no analogy. I just pointed out the inability to see cause and effect inherent to yours.

Can you give an example of a situation where you *can* relate cause and effect? You apparently don’t think that increased security leads to fewer security problems.

Here’s a hint to get you started: do you brush your teeth? If so, why?

That's where things stand for now. Nobody else has posted a comment to that thread. Hopefully if anyone does, it won't be Baz, because I don't think I'd have the patience to try to explain his / her logical error any more clearly. By his / her - you know what? I'm going to assume that Baz is male so I can stop doing that. If I find out I'm incorrect, I'll switch, but for now: By his logic, armed guards on board armoured cars do nothing to prevent armoured car robberies. After all, my car has no armoured guards, but it's never once been robbed. The fact that no robbers have ever targeted my car, and would never have any interest in doing so, is completely beside the point.

A faulty syllogism would be something like, "Since Barack Obama became president, two of my son's front teeth have gotten loose. Therefore, Obama causes children's teeth to fall out." Understanding that the policies of the people in charge of national security did, in fact, have an effect on national security is about as far from being a faulty syllogism as you can get.

Now on to comments. I'll be replying to comments on my story about the night when I met a strangely combative fellow at the gas station.

TB (who has been a friend in real life for many years) said,

Here's the thing- you ARE a nerd.

Spoken like a gentleman, sir! (Note: this is to be read in imitation of John Cleese in the "Eric the Half A Bee" sketch, from the 1972 album "Monty Python's Previous Record". If you prefer, feel free to substitute a hearty "Agreed!", a la Terry Jones in the Wizzo Chocolate Factory sketch from "Live at the Hollywood Bowl", when told that one of his company's candies is particularly nasty.)(Good thing I'm not trying to argue your point. I wouldn't stand a chance.)

How many articles on computer repair and Magic have you posted here?

Computer Repair - 12.
Magic: The Gathering - 6.

If I had better interpersonal skills, I probably would have realized that your question was rhetorical. (If it makes anybody feel better, I more or less made up that first number.)

I bet that guy will be embarrassed when he reads about himself online.

This made me laugh. I'm not sure which word I find funniest - "online", or just "reads".

I actually wondered for a moment on my drive home that night, what story would the other guy be telling the next day? He was pretty much a jerk and (failed) bully. It would be tough to paint him as the hero of the incident, and everybody wants to be the hero in their own story.

Then my cynicism returned, and I realized that his version would be no problem. Here it is from his perspective (albeit with better grammar and an expanded vocabulary):

"I was sitting back, waiting to gas up my van. This one guy finished pumping his gas and went and paid, but when he came back he just started his car and sat there. After a while I went over and asked him if he was going to move or what. He was a real jerk, whining about not having enough room to get out. He was driving a little tiny wussmobile of a car, and my van was way back out of the way. He had all kinds of room, but I guess the little princess didn't think it was enough. I told him off, then backed up even further so the sissy had enough room to put a transport through. I guess that was finally enough space for him to get out without calling his Mommy to come steer for him, so he left. Jerk."

On to the comment from RebelAngel, who does not know me in real life, as evidenced by her opening:

What is it about your personal appearance that gives people the clue that you are a nerd, even while sitting in your car at the pump? Horn rimmed glasses? Pocket protector? Magic: The Gathering t-shirt?

Oh, where to begin. Would you like that alphabetically, or in order of importance?

I was wearing a coat, zipped all the way up, so he couldn't see what t-shirt I was wearing. For the record, though, Magic t-shirts are for newbies and poseurs. I'm old school. I'm more likely to wear a Netrunner t-shirt.

Sadly, the bit about owning - and wearing - a Netrunner t-shirt is true. Perhaps more sadly, I'm kidding about mocking Magic t-shirts. I've got a couple, and wear them regularly. All the gaming shirts are left from when I ran a comic and gaming shop, back in the nineties. Wizards of the Coast used to send them out free to store owners for promotional purposes. In retrospect, it's surprising they ever sent any that fit me. My weight has never gone over 145, which is about half an average comic shop employee over age twenty (to eliminate the skinny high school kids who work part time for store credit).

Anyway, to go back to your actual question: you'll just have to trust me when I say, "you'll just have to trust me."

I agree with you that a**hole would have been a more appropriate choice than nerd.

Thanks. So does my Mom.

I think you intimidated him, actually, and he tried to cover it up by blustering.

I really don't think so. I mean, I hope not. I wasn't trying to be intimidating, and it's safe to say that I'm usually not. I intentionally try to be pretty agreeable and non-confrontational when dealing with people outside my house. As far as depends on me, I try to get along with people. I'm like Rodney King without the crack pipe and baton scars.

There. I'm out of jokes about this stuff.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a scale model of Noah's Ark according to the dimensions specified in the Bible. You may notice that there are no trunks, tails, ears, or giraffe necks sticking out of it to comedic effect.

Separate But Equal (And Other Stuff)

2009-01-26T20:41:00.005-04:00

There's lots of interesting stuff going on in the world. Too bad I don't have the time / energy / ambition to write more often.

Well, the "time" excuse is a complete cop-out, as it is for everybody who ever uses it. We all get the same 24 hours in each day, and make choices on how to spend them. To say that we don't have time for something - which I claim constantly - is simply to say that other things were more important to us.

I'm pleased to see that the Flagcounter over on the right reports that today I hit the 1000-Canadian-visitors mark. Traffic isn't what I'd hoped back when I launched this blog, but that's still not too bad. I also recently passed this blog's first anniversary (and my 200th post). I had considered doing something to commemorate the occasion, like maybe going over some old posts to discuss some favourites in a "director's commentary" type article, but.... I guess I didn't have time.

Posting may pick up over the next few days. I've got a few articles worth of material stockpiled, and rather than post a long hodgepodge, I intend to have smaller entries spread over several days. We'll see how it goes. We all know what "intentions" are worth. Anyway, on to the news:

The Canadian federal government (and provincial government of British Columbia) have taken a giant leap forward toward the widespread adoption of Sharia courts in Canada:

The Prince Rupert Aboriginal Justice Society has signed a formal partnership with both provincial and federal government agencies. Yesterday, the society signed a protocol agreement with a number of agencies, an official recognition of the alternative measures used to deal with offenders outside of provincial courtrooms. Those agencies include the Prince Rupert Detachment of the RCMP, the Attorney General of British Columbia, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Ministry of Children and Family Development, the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, Community Corrections, and the Public Prosecution Service of Canada.

The message is: everybody gets their own court. Aboriginal? Here's your sentencing circle. Muslims, step right this way for your Sharia court. Catholics, the Council of Bishops will determine your penance. Dungeons and Dragons players, remember that your Dungeon Master's decision is always final.

This is an obvious mockery of the notion of equal justice, and therefore a step toward anarchy. More disturbing, though, is the precedent set for Islamists who are pressing for Sharia courts in Canada.

Any movement away from the same justice system applying to all citizens plays right into their hands. The biggest problem is that they're the only large, organized group who acknowledge their intention to rule over the infidels, so there's very little organized resistance to their plans. They'll claim, of course, that Sharia court will only be used for Muslims who voluntarily submit to its authority. And that's exactly how it will be.

At first.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son sitting in the parted Red Sea, courtesy of the Holy Land Experience.