Adam O'Neil

5/8/08

A friend from high school contacted me recently and urged me to join Facebook, which I did. In the "political views" field of my profile I put "cranky liberal with commando tendencies." I want to explain that. The "liberal" part means two things: a) I believe that there's a lot of social and economic injustice in the world. I think that there is a "class struggle" in this country that will eventually boil over into civil war within thirty years. Don't hit me up for specifics, but I definitely think "things are getting worse" and will eventually reach some kind of colossal breaking point that will affect everyone in a bad way. b) I believe--although with less conviction--in the right to sex without consequences; that is--I believe in a woman's right to end her own pregnancy if she wants. I get a little shaky here because I'm unnerved by women's power in this area. What if she keeps the baby after all? I can be forced provide child support--not to mention forced into the momentous psychic transformation of fatherhood. The whole concept of "sex without consequences" is therefore something I'm not even sure exists. But the "meat-beatin' daydreamer" in me still wants to believe in it. (Thank you, Salt 'n Peppa for that wonderful phrase.)

The "cranky" part means that I see complacency, hypocrisy in my liberal brethren--and of course in myself. In particular, I am annoyed--"cranky"--over the way liberals read our world situation regarding terrorism and Islam. I think today's liberal grossly underestimates the threat posed by religious fundamentalism--both here and abroad. In short, I believe that Jihad is a real problem rooted in the nature of religion and faith itself. Some of my liberal friends do not agree with me here. Typical conservatives don't follow me, either, since they think the remedy for radical Islam is radical Christianity. I am guided by a largely unwavering contempt for religion in any form. However, I must admit that my certainty here--about the universal wrongness of belief in God--is by itself not very satisfying. I am still looking for a way to make a good case against religion. It's actually a lot harder than--say--teaching evolution in public schools. (And that alone is hard enough today!)

I have struggled for a long time to articulate a theory of combating Islamic terrorism. I have found that the very thought process is itself depressing. There are no good options. I have been left stumped by the question of whether we should've used the atomic bomb on Japan, for instance. I don't share my granddad's angry certainty about it. He regretted never having personally dropped a bomb on Japan himself. I think I know where he's coming from, but--to use a cop-out argument--I wasn't there. I lean toward James Carroll's contempt for the bomb (through his book House of War), but don't quite embrace it. Carroll's argument is that the atom bomb is something fundamentally different and uniquely awful in the history of warfare. In other words, sticks and stones are one thing--the atom bomb is something else. I don't totally buy it. I think sticks and stones can be quite bad.

Regarding Islamic-motivated terrorism, my hawkish (un-liberal) attitude towards it is driven largely from the Salman Rushdie/Satanic Verses incident. When faced with the truth that Muslims rioted and plotted the killing of the author of a work of fiction because it insulted their religion, your average liberal just shrugs. Oh well. Sucks to be Salman Rushdie. (See the Wikipedia article about The Satanic Verses. As a side note--I read only a bit of it back in the day. I didn't get it. I have preferred Rushdie's short stories.) In this incident--and several others that have made the news over the years--I see a very sinister development that I believe threatens the whole world. When religion by itself enables or encourages rioting and murderous wrath--and when liberals look the other way, rationalize it, or think that it won't one day affect them--then I see in this the end of the world. I am not really exaggerating there. Religious moderates and liberals must stop making excuses for extremists and be willing to face the awful truth that faith-based goodness carries with it faith-based evil. (I am having trouble making this point conclusively for the general public.) It is one of my treasured beliefs that you can lose the faith and keep the good. This is what I think the world must do--lose the faith and keep the good.

(I also have a few comments to add about 9/11, but I'm too tired to go there. Suffice it to say, I'm still shaken by it--and I see in it very plain evidence of the corrupting power of faith to enable people to do terrible things.)

Our "war on terror" is a sorry thing--complete with an oblivious, deceived public, an exhausted and confused military, a population in Iraq battered to the point of insanity. Our leadership focused on Iraq for cynical reasons: we thought we could win--and Saddam's government was already hostile to us, so a military invasion kind of made sense. The "evidence" against Iraq that it was a bustling origin point for Al Qaeda was mostly lies. Conveniently for the current administration, our unhealthy relationship with Saudi Arabia continues to escape everyone's attention.

The only legitimate way forward against Islamic terrorism that I see is a more humble, "door-to-door" effort to fight religious fundamentalism at the root--the root of all religions. I'm not clear on what that means in practice, but I believe it has something to do with creative work by brave artists. I believe the war against religious fundamentalism will end up being waged by vulnerable, unarmed people who stand no chance against the angry, chanting mobs. I wish there was a military solution. I would love to see a righteous warrior spirit emerge in the form of American whoop-ass. The "commando" in me is really a mockery of my own admiration for the military--a juvenile, fantasy-based fixation from my days of playing with G.I. Joe figures right up through my bi-annual viewing of Black Hawk Down and The Thin Red Line.

The problem is that this American whoop-ass is tied up in the dark world of the "defense industry"--with its web of conflicted interests, large sums of money at stake, and bribed or deluded politicians--and not to mention--enchantingly terrible tools of destruction. I may be a "hawk" as far as my paranoia about radical Islam (and contempt for religion in general), but I am very different from the traditional neocon of today with his unshakable faith in the "defense industry." I should point out that a civilian-controlled military like ours--arguably corrupted by capitalism--is probably preferable to a system where the military is also the head of state. (Witness Myanmar/Burma.)

5/4/08

My dad got me Gears of War for the PC. I'd played it a little on his Xbox 360 a while back. It's a stunning package. (The trailer is GameSpy's top-rated game "cinematic moment" of all time: GameSpy article.) The game takes place on an Earth-like planet called Sera that's been ruined by global war against a batch of monsters--of subterranean origin. The unique thing here is the art work. The environments are modern-day Greco-Roman-looking cities--scorched and pounded into rubble, then aged, mildewed, and water-damaged exquisitely. It's a quite dreary place--but different from every other post-apocalyptic world you've seen--for the way it manages to evoke a recollection of peaceful times while being totally despairing at the same time.

Dad and I took turns with the game for a couple hours today. I kept playing for a while after he left, but I got frustrated at a particular point. I left the game very angry. I kept getting killed at the same point, but I couldn't tell how. There is no quick save feature in the game, so I had to keep replaying from the last checkpoint--up to the point where I kept getting killed. (The removal the of the quick-save feature in PC games today is a truly sad turn in contemporary game design.) I was so disappointed in this that it made me really resent the whole thing--despite the otherwise brilliant design.

5/1/08

We cannot effectively fight religious fanatics abroad while nurturing them here at home and--not to mention--appeasing them in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt. The argument that war in Iraq is the "front line" in the war on terror is a total sham. It is a focal point of distractions from equally sinister places in the world. Our own brand of Christian fundamentalism continues to ruin us here.

4/26/08

Quite fascinating: Charlie Rose interviews Stephen Gaghan--screenwriter and director of the movie Syriana. (YouTube.) (Thanks, Andy!)

4/24/08

Some new guidelines from the Bush administration regarding proper terminology for combatants in this "war on terror." (I feel a weariness come over me when I write those words) In a nutshell, the gist of the new terminology is to remove the religious inflections ("jihadists," "mujahedeen," "Islamo-fascism") and stick to more single-purpose descriptors like "terrorist" or "violent extremist." (MSNBC article here.) The issue--according to the article--is that terms like "jihadist" give undeserved credibility to these knuckleheads. And the term "Islamo-fascist" offends moderates.

I've been thinking through strategies for this war on terror, and I realize just now how I hate this train of thought--what it consists of, where it leads, what it brings out in me. I happen to think that the only way forward is in fact a frontal attack on Islam itself--moderates be damned. They are the greatest enablers of extremists--particularly when they prevent us from calling a spade a spade. I think the term "Islamo-fascist" is a useful coinage--although it admittedly does have a lot of American neocon baggage. I think it's still a useful term.

I keep thinking of folks like Salman Rushdie, the "Danish Cartoonists" and the like--folks who have had Islamic wrath directed at them. And then I look at this word game game played by Bush and company. It's like a software project backing itself into a stalemate.

4/17/08

A magical night seeing Sarah Vowell at my high school. (about Sarah.) A very rare opportunity--to see her in person at all--much less where I went to school in the late 80s/early 90s. I take pride in being a long time fan of hers. I had every one of her books through Take the Cannoli (--of which I had a signed copy--thanks to an NPR fund drive promotion thing a while back). Those books, though, did not survive the round of purging I did before moving to TR. This says something about by "fandom." For, while I really like her writing, I'm not super into it for its own sake. Instead, I like hearing her talk, I like hearing her intelligence at work. I treasure her grouchy, deadpan sarcasm and searing one-liners. I love her ornate and subtle shielding comprised of feminism and individualism. I don't really need to keep the "evidence" of it in the form of actual books.

Being at my high school was in itself sort of rush. (Asheville School.) I parked way in the back behind Walker Arts Center, and slunk in through an open door into one of the art studios. It looked as if Mr. Crawford, the art teacher, was nearby. Lights were on, fans were blowing (ceramics drying). The studio was smaller than I remember--probably because it was packed like an old attic with junk and student art. A welcome mat read, "You might as well come in. You can't dance and it's too windy to stack BBs." I was bracing myself for speaking to Mr. Crawford. I always liked him, but when you haven't talked to someone in over 15 years, you kinda brace yourself. But he wasn't around. I used to be sort of an artist-type person and did drawings--technical drawings of imaginary cars, airplanes, guns. I also did fantasy characters sort of like you see on Conan paperback novels and the like. I took pride in that at the time and still have some of that work, but I am embarrassed of it even so--due to the juvenile subject matter and the fact that I never really developed as an artist.

I paced around slowly--into the lobby at Walker. I was a good bit early. I strolled through Mitchell Hall hoping to see someone I knew. I did not. I eventually sat down on a brick wall in the plaza and let the time pass. Two young women whom I guessed to be students asked me the time. Turned out they had driven down from Boone--probably from ASU. We talked a little bit about our interest in Vowell. They were embarrassed that they hadn't dressed up like I had. (I was in my new J. Crew suit--sans tie--that I'll be wearing to my brother's and a friend's upcoming weddings. The pants are too tight in the waist. How depressing is that? I've had to buy more. Real bummer since they are just shy of $200.) The two women hung out with me, sort of, not quite wanting to talk to me directly too much. One of them had a book of Vowell's she was hoping to get signed. She said something about having been to a lecture by Gloria Steinem. I said a loud mental "Ah" at that, and I wanted to reply with something provocative that would reveal my sharply mixed feelings about feminism. But I didn't. I let them slip away as we filed into the auditorium, and I didn't see them again.

Oh--and as I was sitting there in the plaza, my old English teacher Mr. Bonner walked by--with Vowell at his side. Only I didn't know it was her--amazingly. (Frankly, I'd thought she was a lot heavier, but in fact she was what I would call "mean skinny." There's a real contradiction in her look--a contradiction between 65% lonely librarian and 35% hipster biatch.) Mr. Bonner recognized me and shook my hand, thanked me for being there. I was so grateful for that. He and I have not really kept in touch over the years. But it's not really necessary. He is one of my all-time favorite educators. If I ever have the chance to speak in public about him, I will thank him for introducing me to My Bloody Valentine. The two ASU chicks were standing there and they saw me shake hands with Mr. Bonner. I was glad that they saw this.

Vowell's talk went by in a haze--sort of. I sat in the very back. The place was 99% full. She talked a little too fast. Not too too fast, but--again--it's not the actual substance of her lecturing I'm interested in so much as Vowell herself. If I caught 80% of it, that was good enough.

I don't really have a full-on crush on Sarah Vowell--although I guess it's something a lot like a crush. I did write my email address on a slip of paper that I had a fantasy of giving to her. Actually, I had another fantasy of giving her a piece of paper with nothing but my name on it--no contact info. The weirdness of that would be intentional, of course--and meant to imply that I had no expectation that she would ever contact me. (But it struck me later that this act--giving someone a card with nothing but your name--could be construed as really cocky. So I'm glad I didn't do that. And no, I never had any conversation with Vowell at all and my email address is still in my wallet.)

One other thing I want to point out is that Vowell once said that she hates Garrison Keillor. She hates that jolly old patrician shtick--and I know what she's talking about. I don't hate it, nor hate Keillor, but I think the fact is that I'm attracted to women who hate Garrison Keillor. Behind that hatred is a consummate ironic intelligence that I love. But the other fact is that such women do not like me. They fucking don't. And you know what? That is okay. I have come to figure out that is okay.

I also wouldn't mind talking to the ASU chick again and telling her how I really feel about Gloria Steinem.

4/11/08

4/9/08

I have some misgivings about classifying all religious people as "full of shit" because I think there are people who do good in the name of religion. But I remain pretty disgusted with the whole business of faith in today's America, particularly. I was at Olive Garden last night and was watching a silent TV tuned to CNN. The situation in Eldorado, Texas was all over it--about the "polygamist church raid." Here, we have a group that includes "Jesus Christ" as part of its title--a group whose mission appears to be the sexual enslavement of girls and women. The fact that a group can justify its cruel vision with the Bible does not say much for the Bible. You can try to argue that these guys are just "stupid" or "crazy," but I don't buy that. If they were stupid, they would have been caught a lot earlier. If they were crazy, they'd be eating their own shit and getting hepatitis. No, what these guys are are mean, and they have read the Bible better than you and I.

The other disappointing thing here I'm noticing in the news coverage on this is how afraid we are of offending religion. I'm disgusted with how complicit we are as a nation in giving cover for religious groups like this. I'm disgusted that we don't seem to have a clear sense of right and wrong on this. MSNBC is asking the question on their home page: "Religious sect or cult?"

As if it makes a mother-fucking difference. As if sexual enslavement is protected activity for "religious sects," but not for "cults."

4/8/08

Went to my first AU meeting the other night--Americans United for Separation of Church and State. (au.org) It was a little bit exhilarating to think that I might be able to channel my anti-religious fervor into some kind of practical activism. Exhilarating but worrisome. Worrisome because in the meeting I heard the story of a woman in a small town near Charlotte who challenged her town's practice of prayer at council meetings. She won her case, and was shunned by locals--who vandalized her house and "killed her pets."

My impression from the meeting was that AU is split between hardcore anti-religion types like myself and Unitarian-type progressive pluralists. This is not a completely harmonious combination. Progressives think that "diversity" will save us from theocracy. I think it might help; but when I consider the "diversity" of religious viewpoints--they are all--essentially--competing answers to the question of when and how Santa Claus is coming to town. In other words, they are full of shit. This seems to be the hole, or the big intellectual compromise in AU's mission: they're not really an anti-religious organization, they're a Constitutionality watchdog--and they sort of "hide behind" the first 16 words of the 1st Amendment without ever really probing the reasons for them. Or at least not probing them in the dangerous way they need to be probed. In other words, they're afraid to tell people that Santa is not really coming to town. There is a sense--coming from Barry Lynn himself, the AU director--that having beliefs about Santa, or Poseidon, or Christ, or Gaia are okay. I have a problem with that, but am willing to get behind AU. I will be firmly in the "hardcore" anti-religious crowd.

I watched a debate between Lynn and some other guys I don't remember--here.

3/31/08

The new Raconteurs album is rousing, majestic, crunchy, nourishing. It's also got some abstract corners I haven't understood yet--some odd melodies in some of the middle tracks--melodies that are a little too odd. But I keep listening to the first couple minutes of the first track. It's a great opening--in which a few isolated power chords fire over a funky, sauntering beat. The guitar part has a why-didn't-I-think-of-that simplicity and strength.

3/30/08

Bought the new Raconteurs album Consolers of the Lonely. Early impressions very favorable.

If I don't remind you of a 70s home movie of people happily buzzing about inflating hot-air balloons...then I do now.

3/27/08

Forgot to mention that I read a few pages of Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now recently. It's been nagging me. I really didn't like what I read, and I feel a strong need to explain why. The book is billed as a "guide to enlightenment"--in the Zen/Buddhist sense--though it seems to be staunchly non-denominational--not really a book about Buddhism proper.

Early on, Tolle says there's more to the universe than physical reality, and he takes a dismissive attitude toward science in general. He cites the atom bomb as science's crowning achievement--and from that, disqualifies science as a useful tool for seeking truth. I admit I was left stuttering about the atom bomb comment--because, yes, that is a kind of black cloud that hangs over science. But Tolle doesn't make an actual case or argument for reality beyond the physical. He does give a cereal box description of quantum physics and teleportation--something about subatomic particles staying "connected" after being separated. I don't deny that at all, but Tolle is no physicist; and the behavior of subatomic particles--most certainly mysterious and amazing--is not evidence of a metaphysical or spiritual reality. "Evidence" by definition always points to the physical. That is the only thing "evidence" can do. In fact, Tolle simply takes metaphysical reality for granted--as does the rest of the American electorate. This is something I will not do, and this is the first big problem I have with the book.

(The other bothersome thing here is that Tolle misses the irony of citing--if very carelessly--our understanding of quantum physics as evidence of a spiritual reality--considering how much our knowledge of quantum physics owes to the development of nuclear weapons.)

At its best, science is the discipline of rationality. Granted, it's not really a guarantor of ethical behavior. A certain, ineffable spark of intuition is needed for ethics. But that spark fires (or fails to fire) in the human brain, in human flesh, human tissue. It doesn't come from out there somewhere.

3/25/08

Writing about Kitty was sort of exhausting, and the point I didn't get around to making was how grateful I am for her confession of love for me. At various times in my life I've been really down over women, but when I remember Kitty, it's like finding an illuminated stone in my pocket. That light will never go out.

I'm reading Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker. Baker is part of my personal triumvirate of literary protectors--the other two being Cormac McCarthy and John Ashbery. My connection with Baker goes back to his first novel, The Mezzanine, which I read in high school and is my favorite. The Mezzanine is about a guy who reflects on various odd topics in the last 15 minutes of his lunch hour--shoe-tying and shoelace dynamics, the buoyancy of straws in different kinds of drinks, and the awkward relationship one can have with a convenience store clerk where one buys pornography--among other things. Baker's expert and bold foray into the erotic did not take shape until two of his later books--Vox and The Fermata. Mezzanine remains my favorite for its anthemic, broad and strange scope.

Anyway, Human Smoke is about World War II. There's a fascinating interview with him on Amazon.com here that I recommend. A standout snippet with Baker's sublime command of language color-coded. Items in bold are particularly memorable.

Amazon.com: Why World War Two in particular?

Baker: Politicians constantly fondle a small, clean, paperweight version of this war, as if it provides them with moral clarity. We know that it was the most destructive five year period in history. It was destructive of human lives, and also of shelter, sleep, warmth, gentleness, mercy, political refuge, rational discussion, legal process, civil tradition, and public truth. Millions of people were gassed, shot, starved, and worked to death by a paranoid fanatic. The war's victims felt as if they'd come to the end of civilization.

But then we also say that because it turned out so badly, it was the one just, necessary war. We acknowledge that it was the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity--and yet it was "the good war." The Greatest Generation fought it, and a generation of people was wiped out.

If we don't try to understand this one war better--understand it not in the sense of coming up with elaborate mechanistic theories of causation, but understand it in the humbler sense of feeling our way through its enormity--then cartoon versions of what happened will continue to distort debates about the merits of all future wars.

He says later:

I've had some very good reviews and some very bad ones. The bad ones seem to follow the teeter-totter school: that if a dictator and the nation he controls is evil, then the leader of the nation who opposes the evil dictator must be good. Life isn't that way, of course. There is in fact no "moral equivalence" created by examining coterminous violent and repulsive acts.

So, there's that.

Recent game experience:

Assassin's Creed, on the Xbox 360. Grade: C-. I watched my brothers take turns with this recently. It looked too hard; I didn't try to play it. It takes place in the middle ages--during the Crusades. You play an assassin who goes around killing corrupt leaders in various large cities of the time--Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. That medieval period has this gritty, sinister, religion-soaked vibe that I find enchanting. (Quake uses that same vibe, in fact.)

The game itself had too much walking around wondering what to do next. And we didn't really understand how to fight effectively. If you know how, you can use combo moves during a fight to make spectacular kills, but we just couldn't figure it out. My other problem with the game was that the free-running stuff--the ability to jump over or scale almost any obstacle--was a great idea, but I didn't think it was "free" enough. There are too many obstacles that hold you back, I felt. For an intro to free running, watch the first few minutes of Casino Royale with Daniel Craig.

While the game does take place in the middle ages, there's this "time travel"-like piece to it that ties it to the present. I thought that was pretty stupid. Why can't the game just take place middle ages? Why does it need this stupid time travel shit?

Gamespy review here.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Grade: B-. This is a complicated role- and team-based combat game based on the Quake II universe. You choose a side--Global Defense Force or the invading Strogg, and you fight on an open battlefield. There are vehicles to drive and fly, a variety of weapons to master, and dozens of smaller missions within the larger mission of defeating the enemy. It's a pretty chaotic experience. Battlefield 2 by EA is sort of similar, but ETQW plays better in single-player mode, which is all I care about.

Gamespy review here.

3/13/08

I had a friend named Kitty Gretsch who died of breast cancer in December 2001, I think. I'm astonished I didn't write about this when it happened, but I definitely remember the sad email from her "spokesperson" of sorts--sent to the distribution list I was on. But I'm not totally positive on when she died, which continues to baffle me. I met Kitty in the summer of '92, after my first year of college. She was living with two other women in Black Mountain, NC--Lee and Martha. (I think her name was Martha.) Lee went on to be a friend, too, for several years although we're not in touch today--due I guess to a series of small mistakes and some "tectonic drift" that happens between friends sometimes.

I had a summer job where I went to college, Warren Wilson. Lee and I worked in the same office on campus. She'd invited me over for dinner--falafels. Gosh, I'm remembering that dinner, now. Lee had a small crush on me, I'm pretty sure. But I had a crush on this girl Amanda who worked in the college press. Amanda was a sullen, skinny girl who had ruled me out early on. When Lee had invited me over, I said sure--can we also invite Amanda from next door? That must have been a disappointment to Lee, but she agreed. Lee had short, spiked hair, had been to art school, knew a lot of music, and did not get along with her wealthy, conservative parents. She'd introduced me to Tom Tom Club, Laurie Anderson, Julee Cruise, Siouxsie and the Banshees. I remember now a mix tap she'd made for me. There was a Thompson Twins song on that tape I'd never heard before (--Who Wants to be a Millionaire on the Cole Porter tribute album Red, Hot and Blue). I was and am a huge Thompson Twins fan.

I take delight in remembering Lee's and Kitty's house in Black Mountain. I was there only a few times. It was on Route 9 between Black Mountain and Montreat, on the left before you get to Montreat. It was on the side of a mountain that was covered--as I recall it--with kudzu. There was nothing very special about the house. I just liked the location, the kudzu. I liked that I was by then well out of high school and in very new territory. I liked that interesting women lived in the house and that one of them thought well enough of me to invite me to dinner.

Kitty arrived later. She had a dress on and walked with crutches. We were sitting under the deck on a patio, and I remember Kitty walking with difficulty up the wooden steps, over our heads to her room. She came down soon and we were introduced. When the falafels came out of Lee's cast iron pan, I offered to carry Kitty's plate, but she emphatically declined that assistance. She'd put away the crutches and had put on her prosthetic leg. To this day I cannot remember which leg of hers was missing. She'd had cancer as a young girl, and had had to have a leg amputated. Over time I learned to walk at her speed. Her gait was a cross between a skater's on ice and a newborn deer's.

Kitty had an almost prim, traditional manner, and her dream was to be a writer. I pictured her taking after Flannery O'Connor--Southern, but transcendently Southern. Kitty had a keen sense of foreboding. She had, I imagined, a vault of unhappy childhood memories. I think she accepted those bad memories as an energy source for her creativity--accepted that she would have to "work with" those memories forever--for better and worse. I didn't know all that when I met her, but she confided stuff like this to me over time. Today, I am so grateful for the confidence she had in me.

Kitty and I kept in touch sporadically over the years. She lived in Black Mountain for a long time, but eventually moved back to her home city of Tallahassee, Florida. She would visit NC two or three times a year. She once stopped at my house (the garage apartment behind my grandparents' house) when I wasn't there and left me several handwritten pages describing her travels. She stayed over one time. We started out sleeping in the same bed, but I remember confessing a pornographic interest of mine at the time (--the Internet newsgroup alt.sex.stories). I felt so weird and embarrassed about this that I went to sleep in the main house.

On her visits to North Carolina, Kitty would almost always stay at the Sunnybank Inn in Hot Springs, an old Victorian house run by a former Duke chaplain named Elmer Hall (article here). On Kitty's account I made several visits out to Sunnybank over the years, but never really got to know Elmer. He's an interesting guy but was once a little rude to my mom, so I don't have much use for him. Hot Springs is a somewhat mythic cycling destination for me, I'd like to point out. Some of my most grueling summer rides have involved passing through Hot Springs. There are some freaky little dirt back roads between Marshall and Route 209, which leads to Hot Springs. The way back to Asheville, along highway 25/70, is not pleasant--long, straight climbs leading up to the ridge where the Appalachian Trail crosses the highway. There's no shade anywhere, and incredibly loud motorcycle convoys are common in summer. I barely remember when that road was dangerously twisty and slow. There was a lot of protest when they eventually widened and straightened it. To this day I shudder a little at the thought of the dynamite used out there to blast away the mountains over there.

I believe it was Lee who told me in 2000 that Kitty's cancer had come back. When I met Kitty in Hot Springs later, she described to me the novel she was working on. My recollection is that it was about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship from the Civil War era. "Dysfunctional" may be the wrong word, but that's the nearest I can recall. She told me a surprising thing that weekend also that I've always treasured. She said, in so many words: look, I know I'm an angry feminist, but "I was dropped on my head" as a child, and becoming an angry feminist was the only way I could cope. She used the exact phrase "dropped on my head as a child." At that time, I was really obsessed with politics of sexual identity. I had struggled with feminism at Warren Wilson--which is to say I had self-esteem crashes stemming from jealousy of a college girlfriend's love of women. I'd had a lesbian girlfriend in college--the fallout from which was really painful for me for a long time. And part of me still craves that danger. As tempting a digression as that is, my reason in bringing it up is that Kitty and I could talk easily about these things. I could bring her poems I was working on. She'd want to hear them.

In March 2001, I stayed with Kitty for a week in Durham. She was being prepped for a bone marrow transplant--needing daily treatments of some kind. (Something like chemo, but not.) She had friends and relatives stay with her in one-week segments. Lee had been there the week before me. She was staying at a Marriot Residence Inn. I'd take her to the hospital in the morning for her treatment and sit with her in a large triangular room with other patients--about forty of them. I got to know a couple of them. I don't remember any names. One woman we'd gotten to know thought Kitty and I were brother and sister, which I took as a compliment. I appreciated being allowed in the treatment room. I was told to wash my hands a lot. I read to Kitty, gave her a few foot massages. I went by myself a few times outside the hospital for lunch. She didn't like me leaving, but she could tell I needed to get out for a little bit now and then.

On my last morning there, Kitty crawled into bed with me without a word. I was surprised but I welcomed her and held her in a loving way. I stroked her bald head. (I understand this feels particularly good to bald people.) I kissed her very gently. We laid there a long time without speaking. I had a hard-on--that I really didn't need. I'm happy to say we did not have sex. I think that would've been really unwise. As if sex is ever "wise." It isn't. For those minutes lying together, Kitty was both afraid of me and clinging to me. I dreaded seeing her mastectomy scars.

After a while I got up and had a shower. I don't think we talked. We headed to the hospital. I was to stay that day until her aunt came. In the car we had a conversation like this:

Adam, I need to tell you something.
Okay.
I love you.
I love you, too.
No, I mean I really love you.
Okay. I really love you, too.
I want you to be my boyfriend.
I don't think I can do that.
Why not?
I don't love you like that.
Why not?
I don't know.
Yes you do. Why don't you?
I don't know. The lord works in mysterious ways.

How long have you felt this way? I asked.
A long time.

Well, I think I'm ready for a boyfriend, she said.

I dropped her off at the main hospital entrance as I'd done all week, then parked the car. I joined her inside. I tried hard to act like nothing was weird. She told me I didn't need to stay--that I could go on home. I offered a token protest, but I really did want to leave. We said good-byes, and then I left, feeling awful, but also lifted. When I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from a friend of hers asking me to turn around and come back and stay another week. I called the friend back and said I "couldn't" do that. I gave her Lee's phone number.

I had no further contact with Kitty. She didn't call me, I didn't call her. I hated that, but I also hated the thought of confronting the change between us. She had the marrow transplant as planned. Her brother was the donor. I don't know the specifics, but I'm pretty sure her condition never particularly improved. (Obviously, it didn't--but I'm not sure if there was ever any real hope of a turnaround.)

3/12/08

Started on a fascinating book about the writing process and eventual failure of M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water: The Man Who Heard Voices (Amazon). (Thanks Andy!) This was my original take on the movie: blog archive.

What I find fascinating here is how blinded Shyamalan is by his own inspiration. He was aflame with inspiration--despite that the writing was particularly difficult. He believed that he'd created a myth that would go on to become a phenomenon like Sixth Sense. But as one of the Disney Studio execs, Nina Jacobson, pointed out to him--it was maddeningly unclear what the myth was really about. (Why was the boar monster trying to hurt Story, the water-nymph?) The other thing that killed the movie was all the exposition. Characters were telling the story instead of acting it. I remember now my experience watching this in the theater--my eyebrows arching in confusion when one character would ask her mother "what happens next in this story." I thought it was a terrible cop-out on Shyamalan's part.

For a long time now I've had this daydream of writing a movie adapted from the game Quake. That game's grip on my imagination has not let up after 12 years. It is a blistering fantasia of despair, violence, and loneliness. The game had a really unique and disturbed aesthetic of both medieval and futuristic touches. The spooky, trance-inducing music was done by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. But just as in music where melody is key, story is key in movies. A movie is nothing without a good story underneath, and I've been unable to settle on a good story for a Quake movie. These are the story possibilities I keep coming back to:

Futuristic version of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. (The book was set in the year 1850. Quake would be 2850.) In a wretched, sparsely-populated post-apocalyptic future, a private army contracts with the American government to eliminate unwanted populations on its western frontier. One of its soldiers has a moral awakening, begins to see the evil in what they're doing, and tries to escape the company, incurring its wrath.
In a dismal and distant future, war has become a chronic and pervasive condition driven by a single, bizarre corporation that functions like a cartel of opposing religions. Yet, these opposing religions cooperate to a certain extent to maximize carnage and destruction--because it's somehow tied to their profitability. (They see it as both a capitalistic duty and a theological one to foment constant war--as Mother Theresa would had she been a billionaire.) Anyway, they want to nominate and sacrifice a kind of Christ-warrior-champion to some kind of terrible monster (--who turns out to be a kind and gentle monster). They find a volunteer, a champion warrior, but the warrior figures out somehow that the whole arrangement is a sham and seeks to escape, incurring everyone's wrath. Imagine if Jesus figured out that God and Satan were secretly colluding, and Jesus tried to bail on the whole crucifixion thing--because he realized he was just a pawn in a sick game. Imagine also "Jesus" armed with an Ixsis RKR and wearing a Volza M1 "safesuit"--Medici Hot Rod limited edition, dried-blood brown with corroded brass trim. (Don't Google that, I just made it up. Or rather, wait a few days then Google it. The RKR is normally 80 lbs but uses a gravity offender to make it feel like 6 lbs. It uses something called "fastcrack" ammo. When the magazine is exposed to air, it "inhales" and rapidly cools air to a solid state. That's very cold. Then, the magazine compresses itself to fracture the frozen air into several sharpened pieces--flechettes, darts. The fragments are coated with something like a metallic magic shell to keep the fragments cold. When the flechettes enter the chamber, the firing pin is actually a little electric shock that weakens the magic shell coating on the rear of the dart. A tiny bit of the frozen air melts, evaporates, and ignites. The dart leaves the gun at nearly 17,000 ft/second. It takes about 20 seconds for the fastcrack magazine to cycle, and yields 12 darts. The mag will keep replenishing itself as long as you have the "magic shell" coating and the gun's main power stays on--which is provided by a small nuclear device called a "smudge." A user would typically carry two or three fastcrack magazines and keep swapping them in sequence to give them time to replenish. Smudges are toxic, and the RKR is difficult to handle safely, even with a safesuit. (The word is something of a euphemism coined by its manufacturer to mean very heavy body armor meant for impossible combat scenarios.) You would use an RKR in extreme situations such as when the armies of heaven and hell are both after you and you don't care about radiation poisoning.)

3/9/08

A really neat article in the latest New Yorker about the emotional/psychological significance of the superhero comic, here by Michael Chabon. It's one of those personal essays I like so much--my favorite being Adam Gopnik's reflections on his experience with psychotherapy. (That article is not online. The only info about is here on New Yorker's site.) Anyway, I haven't even finished the Chabon piece. That's typical of the best essays. I can read only small bits at a time before wanting to put them down and take a detour through my own recollections if they're at all comparable with the author's.

(While I'm searching NewYorker.com for old articles that stuck with me, let me point out Salman Rushdie's reflection on the Wizard of Oz, here that I wish I still had a hard-copy of. Only the abstract is available, but some intriguing key phrases will jump out: "lack of a male hero", "the Wizard turns out to be an illusion", "this radical and enabling film...", "...in the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic.")

I read a bit more of Chabon's piece, and it's really more about the super hero costume than heroics in general. It's no less fascinating--and immediately makes clear the failings of so many super hero movies: their foolish insistence on reproducing the comic book hero's costume as a real garment. Only one filmmaker I know of outsmarted this--M. Night Shyamalan with his movie Unbreakable. In it, Bruce Willis wears plain clothes, but his rain poncho--an ordinary rain poncho with the word "SECURITY" on it--takes on the deserved gravitas and mystique of the super hero's costume--while still being just a poncho! Brilliant!

But the wisdom of this has always eluded the Batman movies and many like it. I think I can now put my finger on the fail point of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. The first half of that movie is awesome--before Bruce Wayne gets the bat suit. The authenticity drops when the iconic bat shows itself. Though it is the moment the audience has been waiting for--when Bruce Wayne dons the bat suit--it is the moment that the lies begin and the movie--like every Batman movie before it--falters.

3/5/08

On a hunch, I visited Borland's web site. (www.borland.com.) 10-15 years ago, Borland was sort of an equal competitor with Microsoft, but they couldn't hang. They're still around, but they've really specialized. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they're into change control and app lifecycle management--areas I'm interested in. They were doing a survey about their web site--which I always like. These were some of the questions and my responses:

1. What were the most positive aspects of your experience today?

There were no naked pictures of me on your site.

2. What were the most negative aspects of your experience today?

The site has too much information. It's overwhelming. Too much happy talk about how great change control is and not enough straight talk about what it costs. There's a missed opportunity to connect with programmers. You go over the programmers head and connect with the manager. But the manager is not the one suffering with poor change control process in the first place.

3. What could we add to the Borland web site to serve you better?

Cut two-thirds of the text on every page. Strip it the hell down. I mean strip it down. Tell the story of poor change control and what you can do about it. Tell it in a way that connects with programmers on a visceral level--rather than connecting with managers on a cerebral level.

I have some harrowing tales of life in the corporate IT world--as it pertains to the business of software change control workflow. My experience centers around both technical and people problems: a poorly conceived and home-grown task management system, and a boss with a temper problem. My experience left me angry and radicalized--with a keen sense of what doesn't work in change control--and a slowly-emerging sense of how it should work.

But let me back up a bit...let me explain "change control" and its significance. Companies of just about any size find themselves needing to develop custom software to support their business at some time or another. That software is usually critical to the business--whether it be financial reporting, or maybe some kind of manufacturing process automation, or perhaps some kind of order entry and fulfillment system. Custom software--like any other piece of software--can be complicated. Changing it can be risky--risky in that it's easy to break--easy to introduce bad side-effects or unexpected behavior. Anyone who makes a software change usually has to really know what they're doing. Not only that--and here's the kicker--the company's leadership as a whole has to be aware of and in control of how its software is being changed. It's not enough that the programmers know what they're doing--it's that the company must also know what their programmers are doing.

There are two main reasons for this need for change control. One is the commonsense business reason, the other is audit compliance. To an extent, these two are intertwined, but audit compliance has become almost an end in itself--threatening at times to become nonsensically complicated and disconnected from its original mission. That part I have a problem with.

You can think of change control as involving these three areas:

Accepting, prioritizing, and assigning change requests. Change Requests are written requests from the business to modify software in specific ways. These are normally logged in some kind of system and studied by a manager or possibly a committee that prioritizes and assigns requests to specific programmers. This part of the process is the easiest to automate and build a system to support.
Doing the actual programming work, the testing, and getting final approval for changes made. There are several things going on in this step, but it all tends to fall under the programmer's responsibility. Aside from whatever technical difficulty there is in the specific software change, there can be some workflow challenges getting the testing done and final approval obtained. There are many opportunities for interpersonal friction here I could tell you about.
Deploying or releasing the updated software to the business for actual use. Deployment is a challenge for a couple reasons. One, the programmer is usually not allowed to do it himself. Audit standards normally require that programmers not install their own work in production. This is the "separation of duties" doctrine found in IT audit guidelines I'm familiar with. Because of this requirement, a certain level of automation is required to make it easy for someone else besides the programmer to install software. Well, achieving automation here is easier said than done. Let me just put it that way.

Anyway, there are companies that sell products geared for helping companies navigate this process. Borland is one, apparently. Serena is another. Quest is another.

One of my dream jobs would be to design these kinds of systems and participate in the marketing. (I have already started on this with a project code-named Salient.) My frustration with this stuff is that these tools are so expensive. There's no easy way for me to get into them, learn them, and start evangelizing them. They don't make an attempt to connect with the programmer, but instead go for the manager--who normally doesn't know how programmers are suffering on a daily basis.

2/27/08

			A few snowy days here in TR, back in January.
First time riding at Donaldson Center with my friend Erik.


My bike commute to Greenville, mapped here. These are some sights along the way. Notably, a nasty old train car, beautiful in its state of ruin. Half of the route is off-road, which I think is way cool. I have to walk through a creek also to avoid crossing a scary-looking bridge.

2/14/08

I've been sick since Saturday, but am coming out of it. For a while there it felt like the End of Days. I found myself actually getting depressed at one point--something I haven't felt in years. My healthy inner core struck back with a happy memory of biking north on the Parkway--from Bull Gap to Craggy Gardens. I was by myself. It was spring, and there were new leaves out and tender young grasses on the road shoulder--the brown of winter healed over. The tree trunks were dark with dampness. Clouds were up ahead I could eat if I kept going. Cloud-eating is a little-known joy of high-altitude biking along the Parkway.

I'm not positive I ever actually biked in those exact conditions. I've eaten plenty of cloud--though, sadly--not at all in SC. Anyway, the more I thought about this ride, the more sure I was it was a combination of happy memories distilled and not a single actual ride. This made me very glad since it meant my subconscious was using creative license to combat depression.

Part of me thinks I should practice this more since one day I--and everyone--will be truly incapacitated--unable to ride. The only option will be to lie back and reflect. Being sick had me thinking of this. Some other friends of mine are nursing injuries of their own right now--some ulnar nerve damage--and another guy with possibly a pinched nerve. So, I am grateful for these memories of cycling that I have, but sobered with the thought that one day that's all I'll have.

1/30/08

All of the sudden I'm sort of into the band Heart. They have a 2004 album called Jupiter's Darling. (I would've called it Darling Jupiter.) I had no idea they were still recording in the 21st century. Anyway I got one track from it sort of on impulse called The Oldest Story in the World. The sample was unexpectedly raw. The track as a whole was pretty good, I guess: soccer moms on the rampage. Reminded me of 4 Non Blondes, from a few years back. I can remember my college girlfriend blasting 4 Non Blondes in her car to suppress conversation once after she had a hard day at work or something. I think this may have ruined them for me--since she had effectively made them her band. That was plenty okay with me. To this day I am very well defended by My Bloody Valentine, The Church, Sam Phillips, INXS.

The Aimee Mann songs are getting better the more I listen--the more I sing them, actually. I drove home yesterday belting out I Can't Help You Anymore. Aimee Mann is like the patron saint of horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing bookstore hotties. The two tracks I got remind me of Beck's Sea Change--the pathos and rich, singable melodies. Also reminds me of Carole King. Mann has a deep, broad voice. She uses just a little bit of vibrato as they would in the 70s. It makes me happy. Crank it the fuck up.

1/26/08

I saw Cloverfield and loved it. Loved it. Loved it. Loved it. Sort of in the tradition of M. Night Shyamalan's Signs (2002), it shows the terror--at a human level--of a monster attack--not just the spectacle. There are some impressive special effects, for sure, but most of the punch of this movie is emotional--as it should be. In fact, the movie is really a love story. When the monster strikes, the protagonist goes toward the destruction to rescue a girl he's had a falling out with. That's really the engine of the story and is what makes the hero endanger himself. The love story angle really works here, and the ending is perfect. In skiing they call it a "hockey stop"--when you turn and skid to a stop in a single elegant move. That's what this movie does--it comes to a perfect, hockey-stop ending.

I've heard complaints about the relentlessly jerky camera work causing motion sickness and disorientation, but I didn't have much of a problem with that. I did feel pretty beat up afterwards, but it was a welcome beating. Bottom line here--to reiterate--is that this movie presents the disaster from the human point of view. It's not like other kinds of monster/disaster movies where nobody you care about gets hurt.

Grade: A

Would like to try and clarify my feelings about the Dave Matthews Band. DMB is largely meant to be enjoyed in social settings--outdoor concerts. I have trouble with concerts--a stubborn urge to sit and pout. I don't really understand that. DMB brings out the sulking outsider adolescent in me like nothing else. That alto sax of his summons friendly over-achieving white people who hate me. That violin he's got is meant for the hosts of the public TV fundraiser.

On the other hand, I do kinda like the song "So Much to Say."

On a hunch I check out Aimee Mann on iTunes and lift my DMB-induced depression with two tracks from her latest album The Forgotten Arm: Dear John and I Can't Help You Anymore.

1/25/08

Recent listening:

The Way You Make Me Feel, Michael Jackson. Total impulse purchase, but a classic, satisfying pop song.
Girls In Their Summer Clothes, Bruce Springsteen. I was never a huge Springsteen fan, but I feel him reaching out to me with this new tune--a proud, vaguely bittersweet, very singable tune. I'm grateful for it. I wouldn't call it a breakthrough, but it's a great mix of happy and melancholy.
Fourth World Reel, Rare Air from the album Primeval. I heard these guys at Bele Cher years ago by chance. They mix funk, rock, and bagpipes for a fun, high-energy effect. The first minute of this song is worth it just for its rousing build up of force. I'd waited forever for this to come out on iTunes, and I was glad to hear it again, but I found it not completely satisfying. I kept stopping it and listening to just the beginning--I guess because of its long, wandering middle section. I think it reminds me of what I dislike about the Dave Matthews Band.

1/24/08

Sampling a bit of The Cribs, based on a tip from Frere-Jones. The Cribs' sound comes looking for me in my distracted, happy art school youth. The problem is that I never went to art school and so the music doesn't find me. The Cribs jangle and carouse but there are no arresting riffs such as what I hear in the White Stripes' song Blue Orchid.

Finally got around to seeing "300" thanks to movie rentals on iTunes now. I'd been curious about it since it came out, but had felt sort of icky about it, ashamed of it. It was what I suspected it would be--an ode to military service minus an honest depiction of injury and suffering.

1/14/08

Based on my liking of David Duchovny and a friend's suggestion, I bought Season 1 of the show Californication, now playing on Showtime. I kinda really almost like it a lot. I emphasize "almost." Duchovny plays Hank Moody, a loutish but ultimately saintly single father and writer who, between nightly hook-ups with random women, pleads relentlessly with his ex-girlfriend--with whom he has a daughter--to take him back and finally get married. I had trouble buying that Hank would be so hung up on his ex, played by Natascha McElhone. (She was in Ronin with Robert De Niro.) I had trouble buying that she would still be so friendly with him. You're supposed to get the feeling that the two really "belong together," and it's this immature premise that props up this otherwise smart show. The pilot and second episodes are the best.

1/5/08

My Bloody Valentine is re-uniting and going on tour this summer in Britain. Check it out. I believe a new album is forthcoming. The shows are sold out, but I had no intention of going. Aside from disliking travel (and not having a passport), I never really learned the more fundamental skill of enjoying concerts. Besides, an MBV concert would be like working as a baggage handler at an airport. You'd need some serious ear protection.

The thought of an MBV reunion is immensely gratifying to me. They mean so much to me, as I've said before. When my high school senior year English teacher introduced them to us, it unlocked something in me. I've said this already, but I feel like repeating. Not only is the music enchanting by itself--fusing a burning sensuality with gushing, relentless noise--but Mr. Bonner's recommending them to my class legitimized them--legitimized the act of getting lost in a piece of pop music. Through this, my own creative inclination was validated, legitimized, and I am forever grateful.

12/31/07

Re-reading bits from Seamus Heaney's collection of poems Field Work. I have an autographed copy of the book from the time when a small group of us went to hear him read at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, in 1992. I was never a huge fan, exactly, the way I was with Ashbery, for instance, but Heaney is a good name to know. He's a grizzled old Irishman who lived in Ireland during its turbulent times in the seventies--times I wish I knew more about. (He's still alive today, far as I know.) Heaney's poetry seems to be partially wrapped up in and propelled by that violence. Sort of like the way U2's music is or was.

But Heaney is only vaguely political, I guess. The poems in Field Work are odes to the Irish landscape. You'll encounter "gargling" tractors, farms, potatoes, neighbors, creeks, lots of place names--which I don't much care for--not knowing what they really represent. Well...more than just odes to the landscape, they are disquieting and hopeful recollections, meditations. Now, really, you could say that about just about any poet!

Here is a poem I come back to:

Homecomings

I

Fetch me the sandmartin
skimming and veering
breast to breast with himself
in the clouds in the river.

II

At the worn mouth of the hole
flight after flight after flight
the swoop of his wings
gloved and kissed home.

III

A glottal stillness. An eardrum.
Far in, featherbrains tucked in silence,
a silence of water
lipping the bank.

IV

Mould my shoulders inward to you.
Occlude me.
Be my damp clay pouting.
Let me listen under your eaves.

The stanzas are numbered like that so you will realize they're meant to be disconnected--visualized separately. I like the pair of verbless sentences that begin stanza 3: "A glottal stillness. An eardrum." I don't know what "glottal" means, but I see it as a trademark Heaney word that evokes nuanced body sensation. Something related to the throat. The eardrum is a sensitive, vulnerable organ lonely in its cave of the ear. So, the stanza works with feelings in the ear and throat. I think that's distinctive about Heaney--as opposed to Ashbery. Ashbery works with your eye and mind. Heaney is in the throat, in the ear.

12/30/07

Recent games played:

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare by Infinity Ward. As with past CoD games, the damage model is very forgiving. When wounded, you simply take cover for a few seconds, and you heal magically. Enemies die with relative ease--but not quite easily enough. When you shoot an enemy, he stumbles for a second, but then charges again as if unhurt. I have a problem with that. Still, the balancing between damage you do and damage you can take is nearly perfect. My frustration level was kept to a minimum and I played the whole game through with very little stopping. I fared worse on the second run-through, however. I got frustrated with the sniper levels that take place in ash-gray Chernobyl. Those levels are brilliantly spooky, but I ran into some unreasonable difficulty and gave up on the second play.

Also like past CoD games, Modern Warfare is very linear, very scripted. Luckily, the "script," as it were, is engrossing and I wanted to find out what would happen as much as I wanted to shoot more bad guys. In this way, Infinity Ward was totally successful with the game design.

The highly constraining linearity continues to be cause for concern with me, though I'm largely willing to go along with it here. Grade: A-

The surprising thing with this game is that it got me into playing multiplayer for the first time in a long time. I enjoyed this for a few days, but got frustrated when it felt like I wasn't getting better.
Rainbow Six: Vegas by UbiSoft. This came out over a year ago, I think. I was so skeptical--for a couple reasons. A) There was never a demo released that I know of. When a publisher releases a game without a demo, they must know the game sucks. (I got the game finally because FilePlanet.com was offering a good deal on the game, and I was craving some new single player action after finally becoming frustrated with CoD4 online.) B) The last great R6 game was Rogue Spear, from 1999. After UbiSoft acquired it, the series went haywire--probably due to rising player expectations for squad control--expectations never really met, and also due to UbiSoft's switch to the Unreal engine for map rendering. The Unreal engine allowed greater close-up detail, but forced everything to be scaled down in size. Snipers were no longer usable, and the core play dynamics were thrown out of whack, IMO.

There are no great breakthroughs in R6: Vegas. The big downers: no auto-aim. Past R6 games had this feature that helped you aim accurately and really fast. Over the years, I think this feature came to be seen as an unforgivable crutch--given the rise of multiplayer gaming, where such auto-aim capabilities are harshly discouraged. Sadly, this fascism has bled over into the single player game. I guess the reasoning is that all play styles should be equally frustrating.

It was interesting adjusting from CoD's play style. I got to where I could acquire and shoot pretty well in that game--notwithstanding my usually poor showing in multiplayer games. When I started playing R6, however, my calibration was all off and I couldn't hit hardly anything for the first hour or so that I played. That was truly maddening and threatened to derail the whole experience. But with a little persistence I managed to improve a little bit, but only a little. The absence of a quick save feature--a staple of PC games up until consoles started dominating the market--is a real bummer. (Console systems like the Xbox do not allow you to save your progress in a game except at certain "checkpoints" defined by the game itself.) I wish I knew what the hell game designers are thinking when they omit quick-save capability from a PC single player game. The theory is that being unable to save your progress at will "increases tension" by forcing you to be more careful in your play style. Really all this does is punish and frustrate the less-skilled player.

Interestingly, CoD4 doesn't have a quick save feature either. I never missed it because its combat model is so much more player-friendly than R6's. In R6, you're on pins and needles the whole time and can die at any second, pretty much. I got very mad playing R6, getting killed, and having to play large sections over and over because I hadn't reached the next checkpoint.

Another big bummer about R6:Vegas was the damage model on enemies: they don't appear to react to getting shot. Of course, they fall over dead when you kill them, but they don't stumble or act wounded when you first shoot them. You can hit them and they keep firing with perfect accuracy. It's only after you shoot them enough times that they die. This is pretty maddening. I remember the days of Rogue Spear (and Ghost Recon, for that matter) when you could shoot an enemy once he fell down dead. (GR was flawless in this regard.) In games from the last couple years, I've seen an inflation of enemy hit points. I hate that.

The last big bummer about R6: Vegas is that there are no big breakthroughs in squad control, despite some fresh efforts in this area. One of the joys the Rainbow Six games has always been sneaking up on a room full of hapless terrorists, and storming it from different angles at once. There were magically beautiful moments in older R6 games where you'd issue the "Alpha: Go" order, and your teams would storm a room from multiple entry points and shred every hostile in the room in 2 seconds. That's pure Rainbow Six bliss. The problem was always that you had to plan those takedowns before the mission started. You couldn't really set up a takedown dynamically once you were in the mission. So, in that regard, the play style was very constrained, and it took a lot of patience to make that lengthy mission planning stuff pay off. For a lot of players, I don't think the payoff ever came, so there was a lot of pressure to make the squad controls more dynamic--to cut the reliance on old-school mission planning entirely.

That is indeed a good impulse to give richer squad control abilities--like setting up takedowns from multiple attack points. Vegas does offer some new capabilities in this regard. You can sneak up to a door, stick your "snake cam" under it, see where enemies are standing, and "tag" them--saying, essentially, "You get the guy on the right. I'll get the guy on the left." Then you give the order to storm the room, and they kill the enemies as you've tagged them. That's pretty cool. The biggest bright spot I've seen in the game so far.

The problem I'm having is that this seems to work only in a limited way--on enclosed rooms that happen to have multiple doorways that happen to be accessible from outside the target room. There are lots of tactical-type instructions I'd like to give my squad, but the game has a deceptively limited vocabulary for it. You can't say, for example, "You go up the middle and we'll take opposite flanks and pinch them." You also can't ask questions, like, "Where's that fire coming from?" I would like the ability to tag any number of unsuspecting enemies and split my team up to go after them--and have them fire at once. I would like the ability to send a man out ahead a short ways and have him come back and tell me what he saw. I would like to able to say, "Let's get some coverage on the courtyard from all sides. Split up"--and have the team split up and search out different routes on their own that would let them do what I'm saying. None of this is happening today.

Grade: C-.

12/27/07

Waking up with the Sam Phillip's tune Raised on Promises in my head. I've been a fan of hers since high school. She's been called--cruelly, by idiots--a "bad Cheryl Crow." She had a small part in the movie Die Hard with a Vengeance, but otherwise she's been pretty much off the radar, quietly producing albums every few years. A first time listener's starting point would be Cruel Inventions (1991).

I like her seriousness and her total un-interest in projecting sex appeal. And of course, she wouldn't be in my iTunes library if she didn't have a knack for melody.

She started out in the contemporary Christian music scene and did one or more albums under the name Leslie Phillips. She had some kind of falling out with that crowd. She was too liberal, thank goodness. Her Christian introspection and conscience still show--and I like her for that. (Although, if given the chance, I would certainly argue with her about some of that.)

I have also been listening again to the later tracks on Beck's must recent album The Information and liking them much more now. I had initially found them too "abstract." The song We Dance Alone is what you listen to walking home alone by the railroad tracks, by abandoned buildings. Onlookers will think you have ants in your pants for the way you'll move to it. The song is a fantasia, a roiling, all-loving dusk-darkened cityscape. The song No Complaints is all acoustic, as far as I can tell, which is happily unexpected here. It's got this nearly expressionless but catchy melody. Hear it played on front porches in poor neighborhoods on overcast days--among kudzu and rusted junk. The song 1000BPM gets weird fast, but the rhythm is unmistakable and compatible with all bodies. The song Motorcade is another kooky number, visually rich and emotionally neutral like a Shaman. That's what I like about Beck--this mystical individualism.

There are still a couple tracks I don't connect with--New Round and Dark Star.

The crowning achievement on the album is still the title track. I've said this already I think, but the song The Information would work as the closing song on a movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. If this movie is made, I will be gravely disappointed if the song is not used.

12/16/07

Lately enjoying a couple of songs by Trashcan Sinatras from their album Weightlifting:

All The Dark Horses--a sunny, jazzy, sauntering walk in the park. ("Manfully crossing each bridge..." wrote Wordsworth somewhere, I think.)
Trouble Sleeping--a brooding, sleepily soaring tune. It starts in a minor key, then shifts to major--as when a spring rain stops abruptly.

Trashcan Sinatras have been a nice fit with my own brand of solitude for a long time.

In other news, I had to pee all the way through I Am Legend, but it was so engrossing I didn't leave my seat. However, I wanted to rewrite the third act because I could've written a much better critique of religion than the movie's timid and self-defeating attempt at this. But it's really impossible today to make a truly controversial movie that makes millions of dollars. The big-budget movie industry will continue appeasing American spiritual complacency and gullibility. Bummer!

You know I'm also on the lookout for any emotional falseness. Will Smith is pretty good, I'll say, but I didn't quite buy all of him. I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say he acts a bit crazy in a couple scenes--crazy in a way that doesn't jive with the rest of his sane behavior. So, there's a small problem I have there.

Let's compare with another apocalyptic work--McCarthy's The Road. The Road is really a more intense, cathartic, and dangerous work. The Road keeps a knife to your throat the whole time, and does not release you. McCarthy's characters are so helpless and so strongly connected as father and son--and surrounded by so much evil and despair. At least Will Smith has electricity, a fleet of Ford vehicles, free gasoline, and no child to look after. He's got a bachelor's freedom, in other words. The only thing that really does anchor and propel him, emotionally, is his dog. (Dog owners will want to hug theirs after this movie.)

12/7/07

In other news, my workflow project has gone sour, and is currently stalled. I am more intrigued by project failure and wish to study it more than I am disappointed--although I guess I am that, too. I told the project leader that I'd become "very invested in a data model" that is flexible, but flexible only in some specific ways. It doesn't handle some of the realistic business cases we'd wanted to use it for. I have more to say on this, but must get to work.

12/6/07

I drove home today worried about where we're headed as a nation. I fear the rise of the religious right. I was thinking about the speech Mitt Romney gave recently--which I've read only snippets of--in which he argues for keeping religion front and center in public life. He says that "freedom requires religion." This gives me chills. He seems also to make a plea for a kind "religious tolerance" (--"a President needs prayers from all faiths...," he says, if I recall)--but I feel it's mainly a pitch to Evangelicals who are very suspicious of his Mormonism. Indeed, I hope this intra-denominational strife continues. Infighting among religious conservatives over denominational superiority is probably what's preventing a theocratic landslide. Catholics are too busy hating Baptists, who are too busy hating Pentecostals, who are too busy hating...and so on. I'm not sure how the battle lines are actually drawn.

11/29/07

An engaging episode of The Unit in which a team member starts to have second thoughts about all the killing they do. He talks to the chaplain about it, pointing out the commandment against killing. The chaplain replies--and I've heard another Army chaplain say this in an interview once--that the Bible doesn't prohibit "killing" but rather "murder." Supposedly, the ancient Hebrew makes a big distinction here.

I don't buy it because the difference between "killing" and "murder" is a human value judgment influenced by political and strategic motives. It's not an absolute difference, in other words. The Army chaplain reasoning will appease gullible people, but not me.

Now, I am not a pacifist by any stretch. I have a little bit of fascination with the military and have the faintest inkling of regret that I have not served in the military myself. But it's only an inkling. I would really much rather build databases and ride my bicycle. My point is that I believe there are ethical reasons to kill, but that the distinction between "murder" and "killing" is fundamentally political and will appease only stupid people.

11/27/07

In the theater, at the sudden ending of No Country for Old Men, a woman behind me muttered That was awful, and my feelings were immediately hurt. It meant that the enchanting and macabre wisdom of this story was lost to her and presumably lost to many other movie-goers. I want to try to reach these people--those who don't get Cormac McCarthy. In fairness, I should point out that the movie does have an unresolved thread of the plot, but this might be the only legitimate complaint. Let me also summarize in a nutshell the pleasure of this particular story: it's a deeply introspective thriller. It's so introspective, in fact, that the "thriller" aspect is largely just a booster rocket meant to propel the introspection where it couldn't otherwise go. Tommy Lee Jones, playing the old sheriff, has a simultaneously awful and triumphant realization in the end--that the world is lost to evil, but that his way is not completely lost.

11/19/07

Couple of quick thoughts about Beowulf movie before work. The adaptation is "modernized" in two important ways:

Recognition of the pervasively corrupting force of sexuality. This idea probably did not exist when the poem was first written. It has taken millennia of morality and repression of sexual urges to see lust as the destructive force presented in the movie.
The modern day story hinges on the significance of "the broken home"--an idea that probably did not exist when the poem was written. There is this modern idea in the movie of the marriage in trouble--the sharp distinction between mistress and wife. Pretty sure this idea didn't exist back in the day.

11/18/07

The first few seconds of Alan Silvestri's theme for the new Beowulf movie tell you what you need to know: the unexpected squawk of a modern-day synthesizer morphs into a chant, and then the majestic, pounding theme follows. (I can already feel the pushups.) The original tale has indeed been updated for today's audience. We have reason to be cynical about Hollywood's ability to stay true to a classic story when re-telling it. (Witness Wolfgang Petersen's Troy.) But the new Beowulf movie has single-handedly changed my mind about this. I believe--now more strongly than ever--that there are good reasons to tweak a classic story--a new resonance and improved coherence can be achieved.

I don't want to give too much away. The "improved coherence" I'm referring to has to do with how the dragon comes about. In the original poem, if I remember, the dragon is enraged because some unnamed character steels a goblet from his treasure. In the movie, the dragon sequence ties into the overall story much better. And there's a golden horn-goblet in the movie that I think is a symbol of masculine honor.

You may have heard already that Grendel's mother is played by Angelina Jolie. Her role in the movie is much different from her role in the poem. Here, she's the Arch Temptress, Homewrecker Extraordinaire. This ties into the controlling idea of the movie--that society's ruin can be blamed directly on man's tendency for sexual lust--but also that man can redeem himself--by raw strength and self-sacrifice.

I'm curious to know how women will react to this. There are a couple of important female characters, and they will be easy to see as victims of patriarchy, and then as damsels in distress--a character template that feminists usually hate. There are also some passing but important references to Christianity. One character asks the king if they should "pray to the Roman god, the new Christ Jesus god," and the king (played by Anthony Hopkins) replies, "No, the gods help only those who help themselves."

Some recent pics:

11/13/07

A riveting speech given by Sam Harris here: samharris.org. Titled "The Problem with Atheism."

11/7/07

I left work today at a bad stopping point, but I had to get home at a certain time. I drove home with my mind still chewing on the day's business. This combined with the inherent stress of automobile travel did not sit well, but what could I do? I've been unusually excited these past 24 hours because I'm working on a difficult programming challenge at work, which is so rare. I'm usually watching the clock and sort of forcing myself through the day, sometimes looking in my wallet multiple times for a dollar that I know isn't there. With that non-existent dollar I sometimes walk to the vending machine and look for a Rice Krispy Treat that I know is also not there.

A few weeks ago one of the process engineers at my company approached me about developing a system to track the workflow of special orders. A "special order" is one that, for whatever reason, doesn't follow the path of a normal order, and it's difficult for the company to stay on top of these. I am always flattered when people approach me with problems like this, but in my work, I cannot just decide to work on something because it sounds interesting. I took the engineer to my boss and the three of us had an impromptu meeting. My boss was skeptical that the engineer had a legitimate need, and kept talking about other projects in the works now that I thought were irrelevant. I didn't say so, not because I'm afraid of sharing my opinion, but because I've kinda learned what my place is. It's not be up to me to make the case for a new system. There are other people positioned much better to do that. I would count this as something valuable I've learned: to "play my position" rather than trying to prove competence at everything. I'm not sure I do this all the time, nor if my reputation really squares with this insight. But it is something I think about and believe in. My boss did promise the engineer to contact the head business analyst and get the two of them talking.

That happened, and lo, the business analyst thought the engineer had a legitimate need for a new system. A few weeks later, another meeting was called. That was yesterday. During the meeting my boss was sort of pushing back on the whole idea that a new system was needed. To be fair, it's an IT director's job to be skeptical of new projects, and I have tremendous respect for my boss's clear-minded way of evaluating potential projects. I think he was getting a tad bit stubborn here, though. Near the end of the meeting I finally spoke up and said that I didn't think the system would be very hard to make, and that I could have a demo ready within a week.

Statements like this--off-the-cuff project estimates in front of senior managers--particularly for projects that have not been fully defined--are uniquely dangerous in the corporate IT world. Timelines and cost estimates are sacred things. They can be. But I had been quiet most of the meeting, and my mind had been racing, studying the flow chart prepared by the process engineer that described elements of the special order process. Now, I have to tell you that "flow charts"--the old 1970s notation of boxes, lines, decision diamonds and so on that I was looking at--are not--by themselves--actionable starting points for a real computer program. Not in my world. The only real starting point of a computer program that I understand is something called a data model--a representation of what data a system will store and work with. More or less everything about a system can be derived from its data model. So, during this meeting, my mind was racing to translate the flow chart before me into a data model that I could work with. I do this in my head and make very few notes. I am easily distracted and usually make no apparent progress until I am alone afterwards and things have quieted down.

There are different data modeling notations and terminology out there, depending on how smart you want to sound, but they all boil down to describing the tables and columns in a database. Tables and columns. That's all there is in my world are tables and columns. The process of absorbing information about a system and mentally laying out the tables and columns that will comprise it is exhilarating and potentially unpleasant if things don't fall into place easily. Later in the evening yesterday, some of my confidence was starting rattle because the data model was not coming into full shape, mentally. To make a long story short, I wrestled it for a couple hours last night and got it under control. These are the table names and their descriptions--the important ones, anyway:

Workflow	Defines the top level container of steps in a workflow. For now, there will be just one called "Specialty Cable." This is mainly a nod to possibilities for expansion to other workflows later.
Project	Tracks the status of a specific workflow in time--a specific cable order, that is. Records the date, time, user info of the last completed step in a workflow as well as the order number that project corresponds with.
Form	A specific step in a workflow that represents an HTML form. Given as a title and the role responsible for filling it out.
Field	A specific field on a form, something entered by the user during a specific workflow step. Can be an Oracle-based drop-down, a system-defined drop down, or plain text.
OracleFieldBuilder	A SQL SELECT statement that is executed and its values captured as fields whenever a Form is completed. The user might enter a PO number in a Field, for example, and an OracleFieldBuilder would lookup the corresponding customer information. This is to prevent embedding Oracle SQL in the code and to save user from retyping stuff that's already in Oracle.
Routing	Defines the steps of the workflow in the form of "source" and "target" forms. Optionally, there is a condition (expressed as SQL WHERE clause) that limits when a target form is applicable. This is what defines the actual sequence of forms in a workflow. The forms are not numbered themselves.
CurrentRouting	Tells you what the next step (or steps) are in any given project. It's sort of like the "to-do" list for a project. As forms are completed, rows are deleted from this table. Depending on the routing instructions for the form, new rows are added. There can be multiple current steps, which is why this is not stored at the Project level.
User	Represents a user of the system--names and email addresses of the buyers, engineers, CSRs, and so on.
Role	A position of responsibility meaningful in a workflow. Every form has a role assigned to it that defines who is responsible for it.
ProjectRole	A specific user's assignment to a role on a specific project.
CompletedForm	Every Form submission is captured here. Fields are captured here in numbered attribute columns.
OracleField	Captures the output of an OracleFieldBuilder, linked to a CompletedForm.
DataType	Defines the different data types we will support in custom Fields: Dates, Numbers, and Strings. This is necessary for mapping Fields onto the numbered attributes of CompletedForm.

I spent all of today fleshing this out and began the heavy lifting of writing the ASP web pages. After creating this data structure, I had to fill it with actual data that will become what the end user sees and works with. I would like to show you what that's like, but that's a whole separate story. Near the end of the day I had the form routing appearing to work, but had not done any of the Oracle integration. Oracle is a whole separate story as well that I haven't really described to you. My company uses Oracle applications for its day-to-day operations, and all the critical company data is in Oracle databases.

So anyway, at the end of the day it looked like it was working--apart from the stuff I hadn't started yet--and then I found a problem. In cases where there were multiple concurrent steps in a workflow, the system was advancing to the next step before all the parallel steps had completed. In practical terms, it meant that an order was being submitted for scheduling before all three procurement people had signed off on the material availability for that order. This is what I have to address today. I kinda know what I have to do.

10/28/07

Recent music purchases

Blur, song On Your Own. This rattling contraption of a song blends electronic and electric sounds nicely, with a foot-stomping tempo for bonfire parties. It's lacking a great riff, however, so I can't give it five stars.
Clinic, song The Bridge (from the album Walking With Thee). It's brooding and steady, spin class friendly. See also the song I.P.C Subeditors Dictate Our Youth. This one is more experimental, with a shifting tempo and an organ used like a table saw. But still a good beat and tune. I was researching this band, trying to identify a song received on a mix CD from a friend. (Incidentally, I figured out that the song is called "The Second Line." Sort of a jazzy, rumbling avant-garde shoulder rub of a tune.)
Jeff Buckley, song Hallelujah. A sadly haunting, heart-melting rumination. Originally by Leonard Cohen.
Third Eye Blind, song Semi-Charmed Life. I'm a little embarrassed by this one; it got a lot of soccer mom radio play a few years back. But all this time I've been missing its uplift. It's a good tune. As far as I know, this was a one-hit-wonder band, however. These guys don't have the cooler-than-thou grad student sneer of acts like Weezer, which is good. But they have some kind of uneducated cockiness that limits their nutritional value.
Seether, song Remedy. This is backwards-worn ball cap American rock. It's a rousing, charging tune, dusted with a little bit of British noise pop shear. See also the song Fake It, a sauntering rant with an enveloping, seductive melody. Still very muscular, masculine. Fountains of Wayne consider themselves too smart for this kind of music, but may secretly envy Seether's riffs.
George Michael, greatest hits album. Didn't really mean to get the whole album, but there was one song I wanted whose sample revealed a killer bass line (Killer / Papa Was a Rollin' Stone) and it was a blasted "album only" track. Fortunately, there are several good songs on the disc I'd never heard that almost justified the purchase: Outside, Star People '97, Freedom '90.

10/27/07

I've always liked Wes Anderson's movies, but I just saw his latest The Darjeeling Limited, and it never really takes off. It's kinda funny and almost touching, but it just doesn't quite cut it the way his earlier movies Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums did. The movie is actually two movies--a 13-minute short followed by a regular-length feature. The short, called Hotel Chevalier, stars Natalie Portman and Jason Schwarztman. I really liked this. There's a lot of unspoken depth and history between these two characters--conveyed with extraordinary economy and a ringing truth. The rest of the movie doesn't have that ring. Owen Wilson is likable and zany as always, and Adrien Brody puts his back into it, but the story is not quite cooked. I love the idea--it's about three brothers trying to re-unite after a family tragedy. It just doesn't quite ring.

On the plus side, there are some moderately funny moments and some great camera work. The story takes place in India, and the title refers to a train. I loved the quieter moments when the camera lingered over the lovably silly details of the grungy train and some of the Indian countryside. But even these shots would've rung a bit truer had the movie looked more directly (if only briefly) at the poverty in India, as well as maybe the caste system.

I watched most of Dances With Wolves. I kinda liked it, after the overbearing music from the first half hour finally died down. I didn't finish it because I could tell Kevin Costner's character was about to have a falling out with his Native American friends that he'd worked so hard to build trust with. I couldn't bear to see that happen. I also didn't want anything to happen to his wolf friend Two Socks.

10/21/07

A fascinating article by music critic Sasha Frere-Jones in the most recent New Yorker about the "fall" of indie music in the 90s. Frere-Jones is sort of a hero to me as a writer, an explainer of things musical. In a nutshell, his point is that indie rock music in the 90s suffered when it became too racially white, when it unconsciously (or consciously?) broke away from its black heritage. There's an audio interview with Frere-Jones that I highly recommend, available at newyorker.com here. I was listening to his interview, then scurrying over to the iTunes store to buy music he talks about in the interview--Jeff Buckley "Hallelujah" namely. He closes with a riveting comparison of Whitney Houston's and Dolly Parton's renditions of "I Will Always Love You." He says this is why he loves America--because Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton "have both created this earth-enveloping moment....You can hate the song if you want, but..."

10/19/07

I watched the movie Solaris just now--the one with George Clooney. SPOILERS AHEAD. It had a spooky and provocative setup, but it wimped out with a happily-ever-after ending. Clooney plays a psychologist who visits a space station in distress, and finds some kind of living clone of his wife who'd died long ago. I wished the writer had been more content to let that weirdness play out naturally instead of contriving a way to "make it all better again."

In other news, I played the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare demo by Infinity Ward. Check out the rousing trailer at gametrailers.com. The first 3 games in the series were WWII shooters; this is their first modern-day shooter, and it looks like an impressive package--gritty and frantic action played against the existentially tragic geopolitics of the present. The previous CoD games in their WWII setting had a more hopeful and morally straightforward demeanor. "Modern Warfare" has a more futile and confusing purpose that I think is fitting for today.

I came within inches of pre-ordering the game from Best Buy ($49.99--it comes out in November), but didn't pull the trigger. The CoD series has been great, but I have some doubts about it. At its best, the CoD series of games put you into this fluid zone of perpetual killing. It demands some precision, but rewards you with the helmets of Nazis jerking from their heads when you get a headshot. Most of the game goes by in a loud hail of bullets--bullets everywhere--and you sort of learn to dance among them. That's the thing about CoD--you can get hit like two dozen times before you die; it's very forgiving and unrealistic in this way. When you're hit badly, the screen goes red and you just take cover for a few seconds. You heal magically and return to the fight. I think it's brilliant game design. (The other brilliant thing--while I'm thinking of it--is that it's always very clear in Call of Duty where to go next. There's a little blip on your compass always telling you the direction of your next objective. I think that's very smart--but there is a price I mention in a bit.)

The thing I don't like about CoD is that the enemies respawn--that is, they keep magically appearing until you clear your current objective. This creates the feeling that the whole thing is staged and discourages any tactical creativity on your part. This is bad. In the CoD4 demo, I had a chance to shoot some distant enemies with a long rifle. I realized that it made no difference--that other bad guys would magically come and replace the guys I'd just shot. That's kind of a bummer. The Call of Duty games have always been like that. I've overlooked that a good bit because, like I say, there is some good action here. It's just got some "artificial fillers."

The other misgiving I have about the game is also something good about it--the objective direction indicator. It's always clear where to go next, which solves a major problem I have with games--when there's only one correct path through a game level but you get lost trying to find it. CoD solves this, like I said, by placing a little indicator on your compass always telling you where to go next. The bad thing is that there's only one path through the game.

Half the fun of Ghost Recon is studying the terrain and deciding where to go from among several options. There's no single correct way to play it. This is a more ambitious and deeper--a better game design all around. And I miss the tense and lengthy quiet times in Ghost Recon. I remember playing the first mission and hearing crickets in the woods tree trunks creaking in the wind. Your ears adjust to the quiet. When the bullets eventually start flying, they are all the more loud and mean.

10/10/07

Caught this today here about an interesting lawsuit here--in which the ACLU defended a ninth-grader expelled from a public school who, for religious reasons, refused to comply with the dress code.

"Punishing Claudius for practicing his religion is both unnecessary and illegal," said Kary L. Moss, Executive Director of the ACLU of Michigan. "Students should never have to choose between remaining faithful to their religion and getting an education."

I think you do have to choose between religion and education. If the kid (or just his parents) lives in a universe where it's a sin to get a haircut, then what does "education" mean at that point? I would think there's no such thing as "education" to these people. There's just Bible or no Bible. The ACLU looks like the big dupe here--their idealism strained to a point of meaninglessness. ...Something worse than meaningless--as unwitting accessories to the barbaric strictures of the Old Testament. You might well ask if refusing a haircut makes one a barbarian. I say it does if you're taking directions from the Old Testament.

10/9/07

I've been sitting on some pics for a while now. Manually inserting them in this HTML document had gotten to be pretty tedious. I have sped up the way I size the images and build thumbnails now with Microsoft Office Picture Manager. But the HTML side of it was still pretty time-consuming until this afternoon when I wrote a macro for building the image table and inserting the thumbnail image links in it. I use Microsoft Expression Web Designer to do my HTML work. Expression Web Designer is just a re-packaging of Microsoft FrontPage with improved CSS support. Like FrontPage, Expression has Visual Basic for Applications support, but I'd never written any significant FrontPage/Web Designer VBA code until today. I did run into some frustration near the end that almost sent me asking for help online. Like Excel, Web Designer VBA was giving me some infuriatingly vague error messages that seemed to indicate a problem with the product. I got it to work, finally, but I had to work around what appears to be a defect in the Web Designer object model.

Included here are pics from the USA Cycling Pro Championship road race here in Greenville this past September. There are some other odds and ends. I had a crash a couple weeks ago, and I have a picture of my beat-up handlebars and bloody stem. I also did a ride with Charlie on his birthday this past Saturday in the Barnardsville/Burnsville area, mapped here at MapMyRide.com that we called Righteous Loop.

		Out and about one Saturday morning.
Pro Champ road race in Greenville.


First cool day in a while. This ride is mapped here at MapMyRide.com.

		Day of my crash. This ride is mapped here.
		On the Righteous Loop with Charlie, mapped here.

10/08/07

Mixed, but mostly good feelings about the show The Unit. It's about a modern day special forces team and their adventures--both in combat and at home. It's a tad more realistic than The A-Team, but beware of civilians commenting on the authenticity of TV shows about the military.

But how can I not be in love with this show? My fascination with the military goes back a long way. I remember a time before kindergarten when I fantasized about rescuing girls from danger. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking at all. I was acting out some kind of primal hero impulse, imaginatively embellished.

I struggle to remember when I had my first intuition about the misery of war. I remember having a Sergeant Rock comic book many years ago, and I remember my dad's scorn for it. He said something like, "You like war, don't you?" There was wounding sarcasm in his tone. I think it may have been in that instant that I steered myself left, politically, to chase after his approval from then on. It's a path I'm happy to be on today, but self-conscious of it just the same.

9/29/07

The current movie In the Valley of Elah is stunning, tremendous. It's equal parts whodunit and a pure load of sadness over the Iraq war as a whole. I would definitely call it an "anti-war" movie, but it's much more of a cry of pain than an argument or polemic (--unlike the vibe I'm getting from Robert Redford's new movie whose title escapes me--) and therefore it hits harder.

Jones' character is a quietly devout man who searches for his son who's gone missing upon his return from Iraq. The key word being "quiet." He says grace in silence. He seems to be juggling both his faith and an unspeakable, pervasive feeling of horror. I wouldn't call it a "spiritual crisis" or "inner conflict." I would call it simply how he is. The title refers a detail from the David and Goliath story--the place where they fought. "It's in the Koran, too," he quips.

I don't think the movie is a David and Goliath story exactly, but rather about a place made sacred by violence and courage. In Iraq, violence and courage are hopelessly entangled beyond our ability to sort out. The movie has a great way of conveying this--as Jones' is able to dig up video footage captured on his son's cell phone. The footage turns out to be critical to the movie--but it's damaged almost to the point of being meaningless. A wise comment on our current situation with news media and world events in general, I believe.

Contrast this movie with the Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg's movie book-ends with shots of the American flag waving in the wind--faded with direct sunlight--but proudly waving. Then watch Elah. (But give yourself a few days rest in between.)

9/25/07

A lot of hype for Halo 3, the long-awaited Xbox title from Bungie. One of my friends from high school, Ryan Martell, worked for Bungie many years ago as a programmer--worked on some games I never played but that had some success, so I hear. He was (and I believe still is) a very smart dude. I remember playing Shogi and Go with him, and he would crush me every time. Maybe it was then that I began my life-long string of "honorable defeats" that George Packer says is one of the defining aspects of being a liberal--having one honorable defeat after another. (To this day I'm no good at strategy games, although I love to contemplate their design.)

Back in the day, I had the hots for a girl who happened to be Ryan's girlfriend at the time, and I hit on her. I was 15. She lived around the corner from me. I called her one day, asked her to meet me outside. (Pure masochism is driving me to write this.) She met me outside. I told her I had a "sudden urge to kiss her." She withdrew quickly in horror, and I went home and cried. I remember being very ashamed and afraid that Ryan would be mad. But I was also pathologically attracted to this girl, and possessed with a surreal bravery that enabled me to call her several more times that summer. Some part of me didn't care what Ryan thought--which still scares me today.

I came up with admirably realistic-sounding reasons to ask her things--such as what the "key" is of a piece of music. For some reason I had a book of Led Zeppelin sheet music. She would talk to me for a little while, but not long. I cringe now to recount this. When school started, I don't remember saying anything to Ryan about my behavior over the summer, but it sort of haunted me--and I guess still does.

...Which brings me to today's lesson--that Halo 3 sucks, as does every other Halo. It's been marketed as a rousing Homeric war epic, some kind of grand, cathartic, defining experience. Maybe it is--for the masses of distracted, moneyed middle-schoolers who wouldn't know a war epic from a Linkin Park concert. Halo has no human center. It's just a hackjob of every PG-13 sci-fi cliché. The game designers sleepwalked through it, like somnambulist fashion designers, listlessly fingering various "interesting fabrics." Laser guns there. Spaceships there. Maybe a monster there. More laser guns. A green metal anodized groin cup there.

We're a long way from the grit and tantalizing vagueness of Quake. (Arguably, the genius of Quake--its very vagueness was due to its low budget and id's own self-defeating internal politics.) We're a long way from the harrowing hostage rescues of Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. And we're a long way from the rainy, ruined cities and smoldering fields of east Europe in Ghost Recon.

9/22/07

The dude who lived in my place before me had a subscription to Bicycling magazine, and so I get it every month. In the latest issue, there's an uncommonly deep article about Tyler Hamilton's doping scandal--and about the people around him who believe in his innocence. In fact, the article is really about the people around Hamilton--the "Believers" as they call themselves. They've turned their belief in Hamilton into a mini-religion, and judge others according to their position on Hamilton's honesty.

The article's author, Christie Aschwanden, grapples with the problem of how to engage these believers--grapples with how much of her own skepticism to reveal--because the Believers are an intimidating lot, frankly. She concludes, rightly, that the Believers are just doing their best to support a friend. The Believers genuinely value their connection to Tyler, and so they have no choice but to insist on his innocence. My main response here was a cautionary note to myself about not putting athletes on pedestals. Being too strong a fan of this or that athlete sort of makes you into a doofus. I'm a strong believer in "doing your own thing"--riding your own pace, going your own way. But I admit I partially regret not being more competitive on the bike. Some of my proudest moments were actually competitive in nature. (Coming in 169th in the 2003 Blood, Sweat and Gears century was a very proud moment for me. Results here. I remember--near the end of that ride--entering an enraged trance on Hwy 321. There was a merciless headwind, but I slugged it out as hard as I ever did on a ride like that.)

Aschwanden says that to believe in the science of Hamilton's doping test results requires a bit of faith--that there actually is some possibility that the drug tests yield false positives. I saw her point, but didn't quite agree with that--that faith plays a part in the belief of science. I guess on a simple level it's true, but science--at its best--welcomes new and contradictory information. Treasured beliefs in science are meant to be overturned if evidence warrants. Hardcore religious faith doesn't work that way. It constantly tries to square new information with old conclusions. If faith is at work in both science and religion, there's only a superficial commonality. (I always stress science "at its best" because I know that money, politics, and psychology can corrupt science at any time.)

9/18/07

I watched Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi over the last couple nights. Liking Star Wars too much will diminish one's cool, but the truth is that these movies will always mean a lot to me, despite some misgivings I have about the Force and the overall childishness of these movies. I'd forgotten how much I liked the love story between Han and Leia. I remember, as a kid, wanting to be the bumbling bad boy Han Solo, and wanting a girl like Leia who would pretend not to like me, though I would know better. Or suspect.

The Light side of the Force is Buddhism, I guess. And I guess my problem with the Force, or Buddhism, is its tyranny of emotional perfection. Yoda warns Luke repeatedly that negative emotions ("anger," "fear," "hatred") spell instant doom for the Jedi. Indeed, the Emperor's attempt to "turn" Luke to the Dark Side hinges on getting Luke to lose his temper and kill Darth Vader. I very much like that climactic scene where the Emperor goads Luke into fighting Darth Vader. Luke comes within inches of killing him, but then surrenders, tosses away his light saber. I think that is genuinely beautiful. But, still, my opinion is that the Yoda doctrine is naive about the nature of emotion and its role in our lives.

If a Jedi's true enemies are "anger," "fear," and "hatred," then a Jedi is his own enemy, and real evil will elude him. I think a warrior must maintain a truce with his shadow, not simply banish it--for the simple reason that you cannot realistically get rid of your shadow. Not without living in the dark always.

9/16/07

It's not simply a couple Bible verses showing Jesus' darker side that has turned me against Christianity. It's a lot more than that. ...As if I need to go into it for the umpteenth time.

I was out biking today (this ride--MapMyRide.com) and saw this on a church sign: "Follow me and I will give you rest." The tune for this refrain even got stuck in my head for while. The honest version of this would go: "Follow me and I will give you rest. I'll fry you in Hell if you don't." These gentle assurances from Jesus about how great it will be in Heaven have (often) unspoken warnings about failure to comply theologically. Never mind morality. It's not enough to be a decent person. You have to "accept Jesus as your savior." Failure to do this gets you an eternity of suffering. That's right--an eternity of suffering for those who won't be bullied or seduced into believing something. That's right--we're talking about believing something. Merely believing the wrong thing about the theological structure of the universe lands you a deep fryer for eternity. And they call Him a loving God! I don't get it! I don't buy it!

Richard Tarnas' book Passion of the Western mind--a history of philosophy form Plato to the present--looks at this duality of the Christian vision. Tarnas brings vastly more patience and nuance to the subject than I can. Unlike Sam Harris or Chris Hitchens, Tarnas is unfailingly, astoundingly neutral and deep in his talking about religion--particularly about the very subject I brought up above--about the two-pronged message of Christianity:

Here we may begin to recognize t