Misinformation Age

The internet has given voice to the stupid. Before, if you wanted to get your voice out there, to be heard, you had to say something that someone else would be willing to reprint or broadcast. But these days, anyone can say anything. And the fact that there are so many dumb people out there can be a bit depressing.

You look at comments and flame wars in forums and see people with their idiot logic and their inability to spell. It kind of gets you down. Then you realize that those aren't the stupid ones!!!

And you want to die.

Here's a list of quotes taken from forums and blogs in which people argue against atheism and evolution (I rag on Christianity a lot, but I promise that the subject matter is incidental here, there are idiots of all faiths). My personal favorite is the second one down on the page, which I won't spoil it for you, but a few highlights include "Gravity: Doesn't exist" and "[atheists] are actually a different sect of Muslims" and "I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie" and one that any self-respecting person should find patently offensive: "If u have sex before marriage then in Gods eyes u are married to that person if a man rapes a woman in Gods eyes they are married it sucks for the girl but what can we do lol".

It's the "LOL" at the end that really sells it.

As internet idiocy goes, this is all rather tame. One of the reasons that I linked to a site of Christians being idiots is because you can at least trust them to keep it PG (give or take, sans a few ghastly ideas about sexuality and whom it is okay to murder). If you want truly, deeply offensive and nonsensical, check out the forums on the Google Finance DJI listing. Which frequently devolves into discussions about religion. YouTube comments are notoriously insipid (find XKCD's take on that phenomenon here and here). It's a bit too much to take. So what if we just want to sample moderate stupidity, well, that's easy too.

The moderately stupid are on TV.

Consider this clip of Bill O'Reilly explaining why Canadians have a higher life expectancy. I'll spoil it for you: because there are ten times as many Americans, there are ten times as many accidents, deaths, etc. In short, Bill, who is paid to talk on television, has no idea what a "rate" is or the math behind it. And this isn't brain-aching math, people. If there are ten times as many people having ten times as many accidents, you would expect life expectancy of the comparative populations to be roughly the same.

Bill O'Reilly is foolish about many things, but he is not a flat-out idiot. Neither is Sarah Palin, but you wouldn't know it from listening to her farewell address (She goes off-script around the 6 minutes mark in response to a heckler and by 6:30 a nice little WTF sets in).

But that's just people. We're selectively stupid. Did you know that someone polled people in the hospital who were recovering from automobile accidents where they were at fault? 85% consider themselves to be an above average driver.

Just keep that in mind. Idiocy abounds. And as bad you you think it is... it's worse.

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Camelittle

Went to see Camelot at the Muny night before last as kind of a late birthday present for Abby myself. There was a nice meal involved and it was good to get out, but I figured out something about the musical Camelot that I hadn't realized before.

It's not a very good musical.

It's very self-important and a little dull. The music is underwhelming. The characters and costumes were way over-the-top. It's hard to take people's solemn proclamations of love seriously when they're wearing tights and calling each other "Lance" or "Ginny" and making puns about sending people to "knight school".

There's no clear antagonist until two thirds of the way through the show--and that conflict is never resolved. In fact, nothing is ever resolved; the characters all end up alone and miserable and their grand plan to create a perfect order fails pretty miserably. The ending is, thus, a little bit of a let-down, and perhaps this all might have worked if the music wasn't so upbeat.

The bulk of the conflict is emotional, which means all the characters walk around carrying swords, but they almost never use them. There's a joust, but it happens off stage. There's a fight midway through Act II, but it's very brief and, in last night's production, was performed in slow motion.

This was the last of Lerner and Loewe's musicals (until their reunion some 14 years later for a film called The Little Prince). Their best known work is undoubtedly the flawed but oft-performed My Fair Lady, and they also penned a favorite of mine: Paint Your Wagon. Camelot is ambitious, but it seems to disintegrate under its own weight while simultaneous evaporating with unnecessary lightness. All told, that makes for a rather confused story without and ending or any sense of purpose.

Still, it was good to get out.

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Podcasts Or "What Is A Mericruz And How Do You Kride It?"

I prefer listening to talk over music during my daily commute or morning runs--these being the times when I'm most likely to actually be listening to my iPod. So I listen to a lot of podcasts. I like Car Talk and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which are both pretty much staples for... well, just about anyone who listens to podcasts. And since I'm on the NPR kick I also check out This American Life which is dry but rewarding and Planet Money, which is usually pretty interesting.

I tried How Stuff Works, but I just can't do it. The few gems are couched between too much drivel. And recently I was listening to the podcast from RockPaperShotgun.com, which is all about PC gaming except that it suffers pretty brutally from a lack of actual talk about PC gaming. The hosts are prone to ramble and it's pretty normal for them to spend twenty minutes of a forty-five minute podcast firmly off-topic.

Lately I've started listening, at the suggestion of my brother-in-law, to the podcast from WritingExcuses.com, and I've taken quite a liking to it. The episodes are short, the discussions are relevant but they stay on topic pretty well, and they have some fabulous tips for aspiring writers. My favorite tip so far (and I found this one while combing through their archives) came from a Q&A at a science fiction convention, someone asked how they come up with names for planets and characters, and their answers included this fabulous nugget: go to your e-mail, open the spam folder, and look through the names of senders. In about five minutes I came up with these gems:

• Gisele Tomi
• Maricruz Krider
• Lenita Pearl
• Alasdair Clayton
• Norah Amparo

And to think of all the time I spent trying to come up with names for peripheral characters while emptying my spam folder. What a waste. I particularly like Maricruz Krider. I think she may have a future.

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Lola, Meet Yoda, Yoda, Lola

On a whim I looked up chords for Lola, by The Kinks, and I think I may have to learn it. It's complex enough that it shouldn't be boring to play but simple enough to memorize quickly. Most people will recognize it and can sing along, but it's not so ubiquitous that you hear it all the time. I think it would make a good addition to the troubadour's bag-o-tricks.

And it's funny. 'Cause Lola's really a dude.

There is the slight problem of the Weird Al song. Weird Al's Yoda, which is a parody of Lola. The biggest problem is that Yoda may in fact be a slightly better song. And I don't make this charge lightly.

There's the slightly higher quality of production. There's the fact that Weird Al actually has a better singing voice than Ray Davies. There's the fact that it's a song steeped in Star Wars mythos, which gives it some serious geek cred. And of course, none of this would matter except that Lola is the setup for a single solitary joke. The song is played for comedy. We are comparing comedy songs. And Yoda, frankly, is funnier.

So that's a problem. And it's a problem of the scale that I wonder if I start playing Lola that someone will start singing the Weird Al version over me thinking that it's not grievously douche-baggy. Which it is. And if you're going to sing songs in front of other people, you sort of have to be prepared for that kind of thing.

I suppose I could just learn the Weird Al version, but that'd be... well... for lack of a better term... weird.

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I Bet Peter Gabriel Uses Red Umbrellas

Is it just me, or do financial institutions' commercials tend to play like bad performance art.

Consider this bit of weirdness from Traveler's.

Their new commercials aren't any better. Now they just have people walking around with red umbrella's and non-sequiturs written on their shirts.

But I'm serious, here. Turn on MSNBC and watch a commercial break. At some point you will have people staring at something huge floating down Wall Street that turns out to be a logo. At some point, you'll see a bunch of people doing random things followed by a shot of a whale surfacing. None of this makes any sense in a vacuum.

If we weren't so used to it by now, it'd totally trip us out.

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Things You Won't Find On The Siffy Channel

So, the advances in special effects technology seem to be bringing literary sci-fi back to the big (and small) screens. I'm not saying we're there yet, but I think we're well on our way.

Blame Star Wars for the interim. Fabulous and paradigm-shifting though it was, science fiction has never been the same. Go to your local bookstore, and what will you find on the sci-fi shelves? Star Wars and Star Trek books and their myriad clones: military space dramas with lots of shoot-em-up fun. Which is all well and good, I suppose, but classic sci-fi was much more interesting.

Those stories were about something, you know? They were usually morality tales and thought experiments dressed up in bizarre worlds in order to make a point about our own. Read Asimov or Heinlein or Bradbury. Do you find any fluff there? Well, yeah, a little, but it's a far cry from the adventure-fantasy-fare of Star Wars or the prime-time escapism of Star Trek.

Used to be that only big-budget affairs could afford the kind of special effects needed to make science fiction, so you got stuff made for the masses that was fun and shoot-em-up-itty, but not very deep or thoughtful. You could never justify spending a hundred million dollars on an introspective philosophical quandary (with due apologies, to The Matrix, and honestly, who went to the those movies for the introspection alone?).

But that's changing. You're getting more and more films like Solaris, which is a slow-moving, thoughtful film set in a fantastical science fiction setting. Granted, I know a lot of people who hate that movie, but that's sort of my point. It is in no way entertainment for the masses. But it could be made with a very limited, specific audience in mind and still turn a profit.

Consider Battlestar Galactica--it sort of walks the line between what we think of as cinematic sci-fi and the more classic literary sci-fi. It's a military drama, yes, but it's much grittier and, frankly weirder than it's psychedelic TV ancestry. You could never have made compelling drama on that scale ten or twenty years ago. And while it's hardly literary, it is an incredible evolution over the original series and its contemporaries (the old Dr. Who comes to mind) who had some great ideas but couldn't make them convincingly on a TV budget--barely convincing by yesterday's standards and outright laughable by today's.

And now we're coming even further. We've got Moon out this summer, a much-celebrated film that is pure, literary, classic science fiction. It's a complex morality tale that asks questions about our own world by framing them in another. It's an independent film by first-time director, Duncan Jones. A sci-fi indy flick! District 9 is receiving lots of favorable press, also by a first-time feature-director. And these are about as non-Star Wars as you can get without leaving the genre. District 9 features aliens in dramatic and sympathetic roles, telling a tale about segregation and imperialism that you could never sell without the fantastical elements.

As the technology becomes more and more accessible, you'll see bigger and tech-ier fluff like Transformers, but you'll also see more and more movies that use it to tell an interesting story without breaking the bank (if you haven't seen it, rent Children of Men for an example of great, exciting, low-budget science fiction set on Earth--or Serenity if you fancy something spacier).

So we're not there yet, but we're getting to the point where science fiction on film is less a genre than a setting, and that's definitely a good thing. Without the accompanying expectations, it will be even easier to make movies for anyone, rather than everyone.

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Hanging Blago, Et Al

In the United States it is virtually impossible to convict someone of treason. The founding fathers made it difficult because, frankly, they were involved in an act of treason. They thought treason was permissable in certain circumstances, notably the overthrow of a corrupt or tyrannical government. This is evident in, amongst other things, the phrasing of the 2nd Amendment, which states "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

It's no stretch of the imagination to read that as a statement that corruption and tyrrany are bad and sometimes the only prescription for it is violent revolution. (Sorry, anti-gun lobby.)

So two days ago there were 44 people arrested in New Jersey for corruption, money laundering, and racketeering. Those arrested included rabbis, assemblymen, and 3 mayors. The undercurrent of most of the reports all indicate the same thing: corruption is just a part of New Jersey politics. Citizens of Chicago say the same about their hometown, and I can't imagine that these are the only locales in such straits.

Evan has made the argument on more than one occasion that corruption should be rebranded as a form of treason. Misuse of the public trust for personal gain should be punished by hanging, or something more severe than a fine and a year in prison. And I suspect that the founding fathers might agree with this.

Food for thought.

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I Was Here To See Inky Busey

Saw Incubus last night, a great show and much different from the show we saw of them last year or of No Doubt two weeks ago.

Notable difference: we got home within twenty minutes of the concerts end, substantially less than the hour it took for us to leave the parking space after the No Doubt show.

They played the hits, since their newest album is a greatest-hits/rarities compilation they really didn't have to promote anything. And they played a few older tracks, like the original version of Certain Shade of Green, but best part of the show came about a third of the way through. They stripped down to a mostly acoustic setup, with only a djembe for percussion (although Jose did, in fact, play the bench on one song) and gave almost campfire-style performances of Dig, Drive, and Talk Shows on Mute. Very intimate.

Anyway, they did not disappoint. And now I must sleep.

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Romantic Tragedies

So, while working on yesterday's piece about romantic comedies, I was reminded of movies with heavy elements of romance that are not comedies. I'm calling these "romantic dramas", but I'm using the word "drama" very loosely here. Some of these movies are very funny, but they aren't rom-com's so I've included them because of a particularly dramatic or realistic way that they deal with relationships.

Also, be warned that while yesterday's piece is about romantic comedies for guys, today's is more about my personal tastes, which I realize aren't suited to everyone.

The Crow - don't tell anyone, but this darkly gothic tale is centered on a very gripping love story, and that center is what keeps this movie together when all (and I mean all) of its sequels have fallen apart.

Braveheart - I love this movie, in spite of it's relentless disregard for history, like leaving the bridge out of The Battle of Sterling Bridge, or having Wallace impregnate the queen (they weren't married until 6 years after Wallace died), to say nothing of the fact that kilts didn't come into fashion until the 16th century. All that aside, it's a very powerful film.

Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves - it's like diet Braveheart, really, but I still like it. And you can do a lot worse casting than Mary Elizabeth Masterantonio.

Chasing Amy - a very good-but-not-great comedy with some fabulously dramatic bits in Act III. Despite it's alternative setting, it tells a bittersweet story that every guy knows, about how fear and envy can drive us away from the ones we love, making us a little sadder, a little stronger in the end.

Juno - a very funny movie about a pregnant girl who is trying to understand love, but not a clear cut rom-com.

The Secret Lives of Dentists - one of those movies that I love but no one else seems to like very much. It's about a couple having marital problems and a man's attempt to keep his wife from leaving him while she's having an affair. Based on a novella called The Age of Grief, it might have been more palatable had it kept the title.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith - more of an action-flick than a drama, but the guiding mantra is this: action is easy, marriage is hard.

The Incredibles - again, not really a romance and not really a drama, but I love the realism of the relationship between Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl. The scene that really encapsulates it for me was when they were on their way to confront the bad guy and fighting about directions en route.

American Beauty - a truly dramatic, truly strange movie that's about many different flavors of love and the different ways those loves fail.

Fight Club - not really a great fit, I know, more comedy than drama, but keep in mind that Chuck Palahniuk (who wrote the book) is a homosexual and look at the relationship between Jack and Tyler and Marla as a bizarre love triangle and you'll kind of see what I'm getting at here.

Honorable mention: The Princess Bride - more fairy tale than comedy and more comedy than drama, and while it doesn't have a particularly realistic take on love, I'll include it anyway because it is arguably the best movie ever made.

Romantic Comedies That Don't... Erm... Suck

So we have coming out this week The Ugly Truth, a romantic comedy that is to be avoided at all costs. Currently at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, this stinker follows in the tradition of last year's horrific Made of Honor (12%), which I had the misfortune to catch the first fifteen minutes of last weekend. During said first 15 minutes, we got not one but 3 jokes about fellatio. Someone dressed as Bill Clinton at a costume party made a joke to three women dressed as Monica Lewinski (it was a flashback to the 90's). A few scenes later, Michelle Monaghan is found bobbing her head in a way that made it look like she's going down on a painting of St. Stephen. Lastly, we get Sidney Pollack in his last-ever film performance negotiating the number of monthly blowjobs he can expect from his wife-to-be.

...eh...

There's bounds of, ahem, taste that we've crossed over, methinks. And I suppose it would be quite another story if the jokes were funny. But they're not, they're just crude. These two both seem to fail in the same way: trying to spice-up a standard issue rom-com and failing miserably at being either romantic and comedic.

Now, I don't automatically hate romantic comedies. I can enjoy them, so long as the comedy is funny and the romance feels genuine (it doesn't hurt if the female lead is super girl-next-door cute). I own and regularly watch several such films, and since (500) Days of Summer hasn't made it's way to St. Louis yet, I thought it might be fun to recount some of my favorite rom-com's that most husbands (or boyfriends) wouldn't mind taking in with their significant others.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - just to spite the first few paragraphs, this film is proof that you can have penis jokes and still be funny. Also, there's a Dracula musical with puppets.

Music And Lyrics - Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant. When you need a neurotic woman who can fall in love with a smarmy Englishman, accept no substitutes. The music is fun, the dialog is witty, the chemistry is very palpable, it's like two hours of charming and entertaining warm fuzzies.

While You Were Sleeping - a reason to fall in love with Sandra Bullock. Once in a while it steers too close to cheap underwear jokes (cheap jokes, not cheap underwear), but this film is mostly driven by all-to-familiar familial banter.

Sabrina - not the funniest movie in the world, but it has lots of great moments, like a drugged-up Greg Kinnear asking "Sareeeeena" if the dry-cleaner has her car. Also, Julia Ormand is distractingly attractive for two-thirds of the movie.

Ghost Town - I really didn't want to like this movie. I'm not a huge fan of Ricky Gervais, and the premise did nothing at all for me, but it's so well executed that you can't help but like it. And the ending line is great, a widow tells a dentist that it hurts when she smiles and he says he can help her with that. It could easily have been cheesy, but it really stuck with me.

50 First Dates - I don't like Adam Sandler movies either, but this one is more or less endearing, thanks largely to the lovably neurotic Barrymore. I borderlines stupid at times, but at the end of the day, the good far outweighs the bad.

Down With Love - a brilliant lampoon of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies. Also, apparently it was the costume designer's dream come true. And there's a song-and-dance at the end.

Runaway Bride - the unofficial sequel to Pretty Woman, but it's much lighter and sweeter. That is, there's less prostitution. And the dialog is snappy and fun, like when the bride jumps a FedEx truck: "Where do you think she's going?"; "Wherever it is, she'll be there by 10am tomorrow morning."

Bonus: That Thing You Do! - not a rom-com strictly, but it's very funny and the love story is a major part of the plot. Early Steve Zahn, who has some of the most quotable lines on film.

There are plenty more that I've either forgotten or just haven't seen. Feel free to comment if I've omitted your favorite.

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Return of the Wildebeests

Happy 1st Anniversary to us.

Rather than write something glurgy, I'm going to link to something glurgy--namely, my post about the wedding that I wrote after the ceremony but before leaving Vegas. Because, as you'll note from the comments, I'm the kind of guy who takes an hour out of his honeymoon to write a 2,000 word essay about it.

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Coming Soon

I have enough little tidbits that are longer than tweets but don't really justify a full entry. So, here's what's going on in the life of Kurt.

After three weeks off, today is my first day back. Almost European, that sort of vacation. Remind me, again, why we hate their governments so much. On second thought, don't. In a related irony, my 3 week vacation was arrived at through a very capitalist negotiation. We can make something you want, and you want it badly, so this is what it's going to cost you. Thankfully my boss was the one actually negotiating. I haven't earned my bones in the company well enough to initiate that sort of stunt.

Moon was slow, but good (and short). Tour-de-force performance from Sam Rockwell, so if you can find a movie theater playing it, see it. Also on the under-the-radar/art-house/won't-win-Oscars-but-will-make-top-10's watch list: (500) Days of Summer and The Hurt Locker, neither of which I've seen yet, but I'm looking forward to.

I have gone from being an atheist to a dues-paying atheist. That is, I've devoted $20 a year to an anti-devotion, but on the plus side, I automatically get the magazine, as well as a cheaply made certificate. Probably ought not leave those sitting on the coffee table when my mother or in-laws drop by, you know, just to be polite. And that, perhaps, is the biggest difference between me and some of the philosophical company I keep. While I love the wealth of information available through American Atheists and am willing to support them financially (if only a little), they cross a few lines. For example, they've put out a call for debaptisms (that is, asking former churches to remove you from their rolls). I get the whole atheist-and-proud thing, but that just seems excessively rude, and I say that as someone who rails against God. But I do so in my own forum. If you want to be offended by me, you have to actually come to me and read what I write. That's different from me calling up or mailing a church and basically insulting them to their face. These are (or at least were) friends. And it's not like I get newsletters or anything.

Out of my entire week of I-used-to-be-a-Christian-and-now-I-think-God's-an-asshole, the thing that got the biggest response was (of course) an off-hand comment in the introduction. I mentioned that I subscribe to the Christ Myth Theory (that there was, in fact, no real Jesus and that the Jesus of scripture was a creation of Paul of Tarsus) and was challenged on a few particulars of that. I admitted that I was not as read-up as I would like to be to engage in a meaningful discussion but promised to come back to it. Well, I'm getting through the reading and that discussion is coming soon, not this week (between an Incubus concert and my 1st wedding anniversary, I'll be pretty busy), and perhaps not the week after, but soon-ish. There's definitely too much information to cover, or even sum-up in a single post, but I don't know yet if it will stretch out to cover a whole week.

My pregnant sister (due in October) is moving to Washington (state) in August. So that's exciting. On a related note (pun intended), all family is strange. At least on some level. Because it's family, I will not be elaborating, so don't even ask. But it doesn't involve Liz. She's just pregnant, not strange--at least not blogably strange.

And on a related note, can we please stop talking about the miracle of child-birth. It's not miraculous--it's happened to every single of one us. What do you call something that happens to everyone? It's like the exact opposite of a miracle. Hum-drum, almost. Okay, not hum-drum; I don't mean to downplay the significance. It's great, it's, well, life-changing, and it's extremely emotional, I grant, but we think that because we're programmed to breed--if we didn't get excited about these things, what would be the point? Similarly, referring to a paradigm-shifting change as a "quantum leap forward" is silly. Quanta are small. It's right there in the definition. So can we drop that, too? And also, would it break your finger to use a turn signal? And get off my lawn, you damn kids!!

My hair is almost-but-not-quite to ponytail length. Yay. Almost there (seriously, I like it long, but I need to be able to pull it back).

And one last thing. I'm following an ex-girlfriend's wedding blog, and I'm fascinated that I'm not feeling the least bit weird about it. Not a bit. I'm just plain happy for her (them). She doesn't have comments turned on, so I'll just say it here: Congrats Anne and Thom, I wish you both every happiness. I don't know Thom, but I'm glad that Anne has found someone she wants to be with.

That is all.

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Tweetie, Oh My Tweetie Pie

Which is more important? Features or functionality?

Example. Until recently I was following my tweets with Tweetdeck, which allows you to remove read tweets, sort people you follow into groups, it even hooks up to Facebook. There was just one problem.

It doesn't work.

It never remembers what you've removed, and recently it's been asking me to download an update, but whenever I try, I get an error that the computer doesn't recognize a file it's trying to open.

So I gave up and switched over to Tweetie, the Mac version of the iPhone application. No groups, no removal of read tweets. It's not nearly as customizable. But it works, and it does what it claims to do. Clean interface, good symbols, and functions at a reasonable level.

Life is about the niche. Do what you do, and do it better than anyone else, even if it only is the one thing.

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Kicking Out My Own Plug

Is there such thing as being too plugged in?

This was our first vacation in a while where I was doing a stretch without internet access. Back in 2000, when I spent eight weeks as a camp counselor, I did without e-mail and I survived just fine. But 4 days this last weekend was oppressive.

And it's not like I was disconnected--I have a primitive web browser on my phone. I couldn't exactly surf, but I could check e-mail and keep up to date on a few services, but I couldn't run anything that was heavy on scripting, so I could never have run the Blogger dashboard or checked my work e-mail.

And actually, it was the connected-ness that was the main issue. In the car I found myself checking my e-mail every 5 minutes. Granted, part of this may have been sheer boredom (it was a drive through Kansas, after all)--and when I was keeping myself busy or when I had to leave my phone behind for recharging, I was fine. It's weird though.

I mean, I like being connected, knowing what's going on, but I don't like tethering myself to things that aren't important. I find myself stressing out over "leisure" activities and that just defeats the purpose. Consequently, every now and then I feel the need to simplify my life and I think I may be approaching just such a threshold. I don't imagine it will affect my blogging all that much, but I've already begun to cull the herd I follow on Twitter.

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Iran So Far Away

So, I wonder why we've lost interest in the Iran Elections all of a sudden. Was it Michael Jackson? It might behoove us to turn our attention back that ways, if only for what it represents.

This is a populist, democratic uprising in a state whose de facto slogan was "Death to America" since '74, and it's being broadcast to the world via blogs and Twitter. The youth are using technology to promote their ideals and to challenge an oppressive government. The usual channels failed them, so they took to the streets. Keep in mind what America means to these people. We deposed their democratically elected leader in the 50's and replaced him with a tyrant who was overthrown by a reactionary Muslim government. They have no love for us.

But they want the same things we want: jobs, representation, freedom. These are ideas that are bigger than America, so much so that our enemies embrace them in spite of the fact that they share them with us. And I can't even find out the status of things over there because all anyone cares about is MJ.

So Latoya thinks her brother was murdered, eh?

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What The Hell, Kansas?

Kurt's back from vacation; consider yourself warned.

During the past week I've had occasion to drive through Kansas twice, and I've been prompted to ask the following question:

What the hell's wrong with you, Kansas? Seriously, like the only cool part of the state is overflow from Missouri. Plus that wind farm neighborhood of mile marker 215. Other than that, though...

Get this: as soon as you enter from the Colorado side, you get a billboard advertising the Oz Museum in three hundred miles. The Wizard of Oz seems to be Kansas's claim to fame, a story about a girl who left Kansas. In fact, I think the iconic line from the movie "We're not in Kansas anymore" was misread. I think Dorothy was trying to sum up her impressions of Oz, and even though it was frightening, she decided she liked it because at least "we're not in Kansas anymore". Speaking of leaving Kansas...

Dorothy's not the only one who wanted out. No less than three towns along I-70 boast to be the home of astronauts, also known as people-who-wanted-to-leave-Kansas-so-badly-they-fled-the-planet. Giving credit where credit is due, that joke was Abby's. Speaking of things not-on-this-planet...

Halfway through the state I got vocally tired of seeing billboards saying that Jesus is real, or that he trusts me (boy, has he misplaced his faith... pause for irony), or the fun little plywood-and-paint-in-a-cornfield signs telling me that abortion is murder. Christ on a cracker, people, if I'm old enough to drive and haven't already made up my mind about abortion and/or God, and the first five billboards haven't swayed me, what do you think the odds are that the sixth is gonna do it? Speaking of billboards...

Russel, Kansas (exit 184) has several billboards advertising camping and dining, only the ads don't use words for those, they use the little icons you see on interstate signs and put them across the bottom. Camping, for example, is represented by a teepee. Because that's what people camp in. Right, then. 90% of the billboard was a sunset with a silhouette of two kids on a tire swing. This prompted the following joke: "Look, hon, at exit 184 they've got a tree and a swing." Speaking of exits...

The one place that would have been interesting to visit is in Topeka, at the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education Historical Site. That's right, a state that celebrates its ex-pats also celebrates the monumental court decision that it lost!!! For those of you playing at home, Brown v. Topeka was the Supreme Court decision in which segregation was deemed unconstitutional. Abby suggested (she was all about the funny this trip) that we go in, point out how they were wrong about segregation, and then ask them how sure they were about their policies towards teaching evolution in school.

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They Might Also Be Midgets

Kurt's back tomorrow, but for today, you'll just have to wait.

They Might Be Giants

Flood

Weird never felt so good. It almost sounds like children's music more than "adult album contemporary", but I prefer to think of TMBG as the sort of music that classic folk artists would be making now if the genre had survived Bob Dylan. It's funny, it's rich with harmonies, the lyrics are sometimes truly, truly depressing, and if you think too hard about any of it, your brain just hurts.

Flood is has some of TMBG's best-known works, including Particle Man, Birdhouse in Your Soul, and Istanbul (Not Constantinople). From it's self-aware beginning to its Road-Movie ending (a song called Road Movie to Berlin), Flood is like that guy at the party that doesn't care what anyone else thinks about his dancing and just goes for it in a way that's laughable but sort of admirable all at once.

The normal standards of criticism don't apply. You can't really discuss the production quality--the arrangements are too off-the-wall to really be scrutinized (the wall being, apparently, where scrutiny happens). That said, Flood is well-written, fun, and never ever boring. My complaint: what the hell is Triangle Man so uppity about?

Favorite Lyric: "We were once so close to Heaven, Peter came down and gave us medals, declaring us the nicest of the damned." (from Road Movie to Berlin).

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Wait, Do They Even Sell Tang In Austria?

Kurt's on vacation, so today's entry was out-sourced to Mexico.

Vienna Teng

Dreaming Through the Noise

I have a lengthy, tragic, enduring love for Vienna Teng. Okay, none of that's true, but I discovered her music and have been eagerly following her releases ever since--even managed to see a few shows (and I'd see more if she'd ever venture inland from the coasts). I first heard of her on The Acoustic Sunrise, a Sunday-morning radio show that was syndicated through... KBXR in Columbia, I think. Anyway, I heard an interview that included the song Feather Moon off her then-latest album Warm Strangers and was immediately hooked and picked up all (well, both) of her albums and immersed myself.

Vienna Teng is a Taiwanese-American singer-songwriter-pianist who describes her music as "chamber folk". Dreaming Through the Noise is her third album and is the first that actually sounds like a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs, which is not to disparage its predecessors, mind you, just to highlight the evolution. The main musical influences going into it seem to be jazz and folk, but there's more than a dollop of Arabic flare dropped in (a curious choice, considering this is a post-9/11 album) and the occasional tinge of bluegrass.

Despite all that, the songs are rooted in pop songwriting sensibilities, so they creep under your skin and stick with you. She has a move-you-to-tears beautiful voice, the piano work is incredible, the arrangements are unique and well-suited. But I'm most fond of the storyteller aspect of her music. I can only listen to so many love songs.

The album's opener, Blue Caravan, is about moving, about giving up a life that you once new in favor of another (incidentally, the title is a reference to the make and color of the vehicle she moved with, although I enjoy the double entendre of it). 1Br/1Ba is about a horrible new apartment. City Hall is about couples celebrating that they are finally allowed to marry (although it's never stated explicitly, that those couples are gay is implied). Love Turns 40 is about a woman who is unhappy with her evaporating youth and projecting that anger onto her marriage. The album's closer, Recessional, is about a couple who know that they aren't right for each other and are sharing a brief moment before saying goodbye.

Dreaming Through the Noise pulls stories and influences from all different directions to make a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts--at times quiet, at times thoughtful, at times funny, often mellow, always enjoyable.

Favorite lyric: "She dreams through the noise, her weight against me, face pressed into a corduroy groove. Maybe it means nothing... but I'm afraid to move." (from Recessional).

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Sounds Socialist To Me

Kurt's on vacation, so you get to read about music he'd rather be listening to, if only Abby hadn't taken control of the stereo.

R.E.M.

Automatic for the People

Maybe it's a little too early to call this album a modern classic, but I think history will vindicate me if I give it the honorific title prematurely.

Widely considered the best album from one of the most influential bands in recent history, Automatic is, quite simply, a beautiful album about death. It came when R.E.M. were at the top of their game, nestled between Monster and Out of Time, and while it contains neither of the band's most enduring hits--those being Losing My Religion and It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)--it is still a monumental piece of pop poetry.

It's contributions to radio include Drive, Man on the Moon, and the fabulously drab Everybody Hurts, but if you're like me you'll find that the songs in between are much better. Actually, this album is a lesson in ways to write interesting song titles, by joining words needlessly (Ignoreland or Nightswimming), by turning accusatory phrases (Monty Got a Raw Deal), by sending up other well-known song titles (The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, also Everybody Hurts, which is loosely based on Love Hurts), or simply by streaming random words together, as in what I consider to be the best song title ever: Star Me Kitten. (Actually, it's not that random, there's a line in the song that occurs several times: "Fuck me, kitten").

From start to finish, this disc is packed with emotion (mostly sadness, but whatever), introspection, and discovery.

Favorite Lyric: "Baby, instant soup doesn't really grab me, today I need something more sub-sub-sub-substantial, a can of beans, some black-eyed peas, some Nescafe and ice, a candy bar, a falling star, or a reading from Dr. Seuss" (from The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight)

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I Assumed Porcupines Were Born, Or Maybe Hatched

Kurt's on vacation, so you get to read about some of the albums he's listening to in the car.

Porcupine Tree

In Absentia

Sitting somewhere between prog-rock and art-metal sits Porcupine Tree, an enigmatic British band who make long albums that aren't so much radio-friendly but are still laden with good, catchy music. They draw comparisons to Tool, which is how I heard about them. An acquaintance burned me a copy of it on "it's kind of like Tool, and you like Tool" grounds. I loved it and promptly purchased a legit copy. Funny how that music-sharing thing actually led to a sale that wouldn't have happened otherwise, isn't it? Okay, I'll stop editorializing.

In Absentia is atmospheric and big. The songs are more-or-less guitar driven, although you get some bass- and keyboard-heavy fare throughout. The album generally vacillates between up-tempo rockers and slower, more introspective lilting numbers. There's some playing-around-with of time signatures and lots of technically impressive musical feats (notably on the drums), but what the album really has going for it is solid song-writing, which thankfully strays out of the normal love-song routine.

Consider songs like The Sound of Muzak, a diatribe about the corporatization of the music industry whose chorus wails "One of the wonders of the world is going down". Or look at Heart Attack in a Layby, a sort of depressingly mellow song about having a heart attack. In a layby (that's a rest stop, for my fellow Americans).

The song I care for the least is, ironically, the single, Strip the Soul, which seems to be trying just a little too hard to shock without actually conveying much meaning.

Highlights: Trains is great, but my absolute favorite is the album closer, Collapse the Light into Earth which doesn't sound a whole lot like the rest of the disk, but it's a great listen.

Favorite lyric: "When I hear the engine pass I'm kissing you wide, the hissing subsides, I'm in luck." (from Trains)

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Known For His Pepper Assault

Kurt's on vacation, so you get to read about his favorite albums.

The Beatles

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

This is the album that introduced me to one of the greatest bands of all time. I decided I needed to own some Beatles, and this is the album my parents got me. There's kind of a standing debate between Beatles fans about which album is their best, and the top contenders usually include this one and Revolver (although my wife prefers The White Album), and while Revolver is a great listen, I have to go with the Sergeant.

It is wildly experimental, wonderfully written, bouncy, jaunty, and infinitely singable. It was also the first mainstream "concept album", so it gets some props for that, paving the way for epic works like Dark Side of the Moon or... well... other concept albums. Some of their most recognizable material shows up on this record, including With a Little Help From My Friends and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds as well as the incredible and hugely progressive A Day in the Life.

I can fawn and awe over it a lot, but I'll stop. I don't have any complaints, per se, but I do think the George Harrison contribution Within You/Without You is a little weak. Pause the acid rock, kids, we need to do a quick sitar break. Which is not to say that it's a bad song, it's just a little out of place.

Favorite lyric: "Then somebody spoke and I went into a dream." (from A Day in the Life).

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I Have Doubts

So Abby and I went to see No Doubt last night. I think the most disturbing thing I saw was a tween in a Hooters shirt. Here's the rundown:

The first opening act was called Bedouin Soundclash, but you wouldn't have known it because they only said their name once and who actually knows how to spell "Bedouin"? Pretty good, if you like reggae. They played about six songs.

The second act was Paramore, and it was obvious that many, many people in the audience were there to see Paramore. They played well, but I wasn't exactly wowed, but I'm not exactly a fan. The only song of theirs I genuinely enjoy is Crush Crush Crush, but I didn't care for their live rendition. The bass player did a flip at one point, and the band seem to have mastered the mythic "coordinated head-bang" pretty well--well enough that it was featured on at least 3 songs that I saw. They played a few new tunes and dedicated a song off the Twilight soundtrack to "Edward". Buh. Again, I was not engaged, but I was more or less entertained and it's not like I was there to see them anyway. They played a fairly short set.

Finally No Doubt came on, and it was about what you expect from a band with that much experience: high energy, superb technique, very professional, lots of production value. But unlike some other touring-veterans I've seen (Tool come readily to mind), No Doubt managed to engage the audience. Gwen can work a crowd like no one else. It was a greatest hits show, so they played, well, every single song off of their greatest hits album (except Trapped in a Box, because nobody cares, really) plus Rock Steady (the song, not the album) and something I didn't recognize but that Abby tells me is from Gwen's first solo album, during which all the members of the opening acts came and joined No Doubt on stage and played trap sets while Adrien Young (No Doubt's drummer) walked out into the audience wearing a snare drum and a tutu.

So, there was some spectacle. Incidentally, I've decided that Adrien Young and Brian Viglione need to start a compendium for talented-but-clinically-strange percussionists. Anywho.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of the entire night was when Gwen found her "favorite person" in the audience and pulled this person up on stage. The "favorite person" was a girl, neighborhood of 8 years old, who was very nearly Gwen's miniature doppelganger with similar hair and matching black-and-silver-sequence dress. The girl immediately started crying (in that good shaken-with-emotion way, not in a bad-touch way) and then she and Gwen hugged and it was all very precious. There was some brief chatting and picture-posing and the girl gave Gwen something that looked like a hot-pink beach towel, but I couldn't tell for sure.

Adorable.

So I enjoyed myself quite a bit, but not nearly as much as Abby, who had a jumping-up-and-down-while-singing-every-single-word good time. In pigtails. That too was pretty adorable.

Looking forward to Incubus on the 23rd.

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Note: Abby and I will be on vacation for a good part of next week. Expect filler.

And In This One, We're Gonna Shoot ALIENS!

When Halo came out on PC, it had already been out for the XBox for like six months or something. This was the game that brought Microsoft into the console game market--that made the XBox a must-have system of the last generation of consoles (a generation thoroughly dominated by the PlayStation 2). When the PC version came out, someone held a contest pitting PC gamers versus console gamers. Even though the console gamers had a six-month head start on the game, the PC gamers kicked their asses. This is because a hand-held controller will never, never match the control you get from a keyboard and mouse for first-person shooters.

Apropos of nothing, right? We'll get to that in a second.

I've been playing The Conduit lately, the much-anticipated game that was supposed to introduce hardcore gaming to the Wii. Thoughts?

First, let's take a step back and consider the sheer magnitude of the hype around this game. It was announced in, when, 2007? Finally, an exclusive title that was designed for serious gamers--a hardcore first-person-shooter with blood, cursing, the whole 9 yards. It won awards half a year before it was even released. There are hundreds of stills and dozens of videos from it on IGN, all leading up to what was being heralded as a--ahem--game-changer. It finally arrived, on my birthday, no less. And after all this anticipation, what could stand up to expectations?

Let's get a few things out of the way--it's a perfectly good game. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just not revolutionary. It's one of your standard FPS stories, you're a human and you're facing off against aliens--which I prefer, frankly, to the other stock FPS story: the WWII. You're a grizzled secret-service agent (as opposed to a grizzle space marine) trying to save the planet, or country, or president, at any given moment. The Conduit takes the Halo approach to weapon-management and damage control--two weapons, primary and backup, limited but replenishable ammunition, a limited damage bar that recharges if you can get out of trouble quickly, and grenades. The control scheme is based on the Metroid Prime 3 configuration, using the Wiimote as a gun and the Nunchuck for movement.

The controls are fully customizable, which is an awesome, awesome feature that I will never, ever use. Thankfully the defaults are pretty usable, and the addition of a button that makes you do a quick 180-degree turn was much appreciated.

The big new idea for this game is the ASE (short for All-Seeing-Eye). It's the story-driving McGuffin that you obtain early on, and it allows you to hack computers and find invisible doorways and enemies. Its use never exactly feels shoe-horned in, although it doesn't always feel completely organic. Since you can't, for some reason, carry both it and a gun at the same time, trying to kill off regenerating enemies while blowing up invisible mines and not running out of ammo makes for some tense moments.

The story and story-telling are quite good, but not great. Ditto the voice-acting. The game looks good without being so über-realistic that it isn't fun (note to game designers, reality isn't fun, that's why we play games). Power-ups glow so they can be spotted at a distance, and the game is bright and colorful enough that it's easy to spot enemies. The map more or less directs you where to go, and if you get truly lost, the ASE can direct you towards your objectives. There have been a few moments where I was in the room I needed to be in so the ASE was no use as a guide, and it took me a while to sort out what I needed to do before I could advance. Annoying, but hardly crippling.

All in all, it's a perfectly good FPS, which is a little disappointing given expectations--but that's not my complaint about it. Here's where I tie-in to the Halo discussion above: as much as I've said in the past that the Wii is built for FPS's, as much as I still believe that a Wiimote gives you better control than you get from an XBox or PS3 controller for this genre, it still doesn't quite match up to a PC. Maybe it's all the Left 4 Dead I've been playing lately, but once you get immersed in the world of FPS's on PC, it's tough to go back to consoles, no matter how customizable the control scheme.

In fact, I can think of only one reason to put an FPS on a console rather than a PC: local multi-player. This is what made games like Goldeneye on the N64 take off, or even games like the aforementioned Halo. Halo may play better on a PC, but you can't have three buddies over to sit around and duke it out on PC's. So I suppose I would feel better about The Conduit if it had local multi-player support.

But it doesn't. Online only. Lots of online, but online only. And it's fun, but it's online, so you have the occasional lag, plus insurmountable load times. And if you want to play against your friends, they all have to have their own systems, their own games, and you miss out on the cat-calling and face-to-face antics of playing together in the same room. We've sort of gotten away from that, which is too bad.

Mostly because the people that play online are dicks.

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The Sleepy Kurt's Revenge

It's time, once again to retrain the Sleepy Kurt. The Sleepy Kurt is the Kurt that only exists from the time the alarm goes off to about ten seconds after the alarm has gone off, and he's usually not a bother for myself (the Waking Kurt) and Abby.

The Sleepy Kurt, his brain more or less detached from his body, can detect the presence of a loud noise, and can often pinpoint the source, but he will not be able to identify it as an alarm clock. He might think it is a predator of some sort, or the distant cry of another Sleepy. But every few years the Sleepy Kurt figures out how to turn off the alarm clock (not hit the "snooze" button, mind you, but actually turn the damned thing off) and requires some stymieing.

This is best accomplished by placing a book on top of the alarm clock so that the Sleepy Kurt will reach for the buttons, become confused, and transition immediately into the Not-Quite-Awake-But-Mostly-Functional Kurt who is capable of realizing that if he turns the alarm off, his wife will oversleep and be angry.

I get tickled by the idea that I have to knowingly fool myself--that I have to set a trap that I will fall into. People talk about internal conflict all the time: arguing with one's self, lying to one's self. Me? I fool myself into not knowing how an alarm clock works for ten seconds or so.

I'm amused.

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Enemy Of The Who, Now?

Over the weekend I received something in the mail that I've been waiting for since... well... college. MTV's The State has arrived on DVD, and through some funky (read as: "funky but legal") pre-ordering, I have obtained a copy a week and a half before its release.

I've been subjecting my wife to it. She's been a very good sport about the whole thing.

The State was MTV's first foray into sketch comedy via a half-hour show starring and written by an eleven-member black-box comedy troupe with some very strange ideas about comedy. It started in 1993 and ran for four seasons before the group moved to CBS and ended up disbanding to work on other projects. 3 members are on Reno 9-1-1, Michael Ian Black has been featured in every single VH1 I Love the ______ series produced (and there are tons of them).

Etc, etc, etc.

But for those who remember, you can now own all 24 episodes of the show (MTV had some funny ideas about what constituted a "season" back then), ripe as it is with early 90's fashion sensibilities, bizarre sketches, memorable characters, and perhaps the most annoying theme song ever made.

Some favorites:

• Barry and Levon, in which two men in velvet robes romance $240 worth of pudding
• Service With a Smile, better known as the "Chicken Sandwich Carl" sketch
• The Barry Lutz Show, in which we learn important facts about monkey torture (notably: they hate it)
• Porcupine Racetrack, a musical
• Tenement, a dramatic script with the language "toned down" a bit.
• Muppet Hunting
• Etc.
  

I could honestly go on and on. But it's worth a rental if you enjoy sketch comedy. Some of the material is dated, and they did do that thing everybody does where they try to link sketches together with random go-betweens that only sometimes work. But their material was original, really funny, very strange, edgy for its time, and they kept the sketches short--unlike some other shows I won't (MadTV) mention out (SNL) loud.

Also, this DVD comes with the promise of a Daria set due out in 2010, so that's exciting. My teenage years come home to roost.

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Do's And Don'ts

We've made it this far into the iTunes list, let's see what we have. First the Do's.

• Weird Al Yankovic - Do I Creep You Out
• Queens of the Stone Age - Do It Again
• Prince - Do Me, Baby
• Jimmie's Chicken Shack - Do Right
• Manfred Mann - Do Wah Diddy Diddy (any body else feel like they got a really rough take on this one?)
  
• OK Go - Do What You Want
• U2 - Do You Feel Loved
• Franz Ferdinand - Do You Want To (which, when played right after a U2 song feels drastically under-produced)
  

Then we get a break populated mostly by songs with the word "Dog" in the title. And on to the Don'ts, which is probably the longest stretch so far.

• SEATBELTS - Don't Bother None (regular and long versions)
• INXS - Don't Change
• Ben Folds Five - Don't Change Your Plans
• Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Don't Come Around Here No More
• America - Don't Cross The River
• Gun's N' Roses - Don't Cry (two versions)
• Seal - Don't Cry (different song)
• Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Don't Do Me Like That
• Weird Al Yankovic - Don't Download This Song
• Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over (80's-tastic)
• Dave Matthews Band - Don't Drink The Water
• Toad The Wet Sprocket - Don't Fade

Whew. Then we get two versions of (Don't Fear) The Reaper, the Blue Oyster Cult original and a cover by The Caesers. Okay, back into the list.

• Alice In Chains - Don't Follow
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Don't Forget Me Now
• Gorillaz - Don't Get Lost In Heaven
• R.E.M. - (Don't Go Back To) Rockville
• Elton John and Kiki Dee - Don't Go Breaking My Heart (a good song, but his duet of it with RuPaul was better)
• Limp Bizkit - Don't Go Off Wondering (Elton John into Limp Bizkit... not a smooth transition)
• Nerf Herder - Don't Hate Me (Because I'm Beautiful)
• Norah Jones - Don't Know Why
• Pink Floyd - Don't Leave Me Now
• Thelma Houston - Don't Leave Me This Way
• Weezer - Don't Let Go
• En Vogue - Don't Let Go (Love)
• The Beatles - Don't Let Me Down
• Elton John - Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me
• Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger
• Coldplay - Don't Panic
• The Beatles - Don't Pass Me By (such a weak addition to their catalog... oh well)
• The Offspring - Don't Pick It Up

Whew. Last leg. Note the total lack of Journey. We start off with Don't Pull It Down from the Hair Soundtrack. Then:

• No Doubt - Don't Speak
• The Police - Don't Stand So Close To Me
• Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop
• Michael Jackson - Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
• Yarbrough & Peoples - Don't Stop The Music
• Jonathan Coulton - Don't Talk To Strangers (yes, it's a cover)
• Madonna - Don't Tell Me (god help me, I do love this song)
• Metallica - Don't Tread On Me
• Ace Of Base - Don't Turn Around
• Husker Du - Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely

Damn. That's a lot of Don'ts.

Christian Founders, My Ass.

It's Sunday, and we all know how much I enjoy blaspheming on Sunday. But I gotta credit Evan for the idea on this one. It was all him.

What would happen if a president announced that he had a new Bible. He had taken bits of the New Testament, just the bits that he liked--the stuff that seemed the most plausible, and just thrown the rest out. What do you think the public response would be?

There would be howls of anger from the religious right, saying that this president was unpatriotic for spitting in the faces of our Christian forefathers. Am I wrong?

Just keep that in mind when you look at this: The Jefferson Bible.

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Democracy Is Broken

Happy 4th of July by the way.

Let me go ahead and disclaim this by saying to the federal agent reading this post--I'm looking at YOU, Jerry--that a) I don't know anything better than democracy off the top of my head, b) I am not proposing violent revolution, and c) I criticize because I care--these are things to fix, not reasons to jump ship.

What do you get when you look at all five of our trends? You get the U.S. government.

Monetization is decoupled from service.

Officials aren't elected by voters. They're elected by contributors. Contributors elect officials based on the promise of funding (or ideology) being funneled to the right causes. Money gets funneled to projects based on what's good for congressmen and they're contributors. None of this, incidentally has a damned thing to do with actually governing the nation.

This circle of funding, incidentally, can have horrible, horrible repercussions when it comes to policy. You've no doubt heard that there's a debate about the reality of climate change. You have been lied to. Every single national science academy that has ever said anything about global warming has said that it is real. There is no controversy. But we can't even have an honest national discussion because it is not politically expedient vis-à-vis the economic impact it might have on certain contributors.

Causal conditions are incorrectly assumed to be normal or permanent.

The Constitution is an incredibly flexible document, but the world has changed a lot since it was first penned. I'm not saying we should scrap the whole thing and do a page one re-write, but I do wonder if our amendment system isn't insurmountable. But amendments aren't used to amend the Constitution anymore, they're used to pick fights with the Supreme Court (see also: gay marriage amendment).

More to the point, the way our government was set up was so that the country would be run by the elites, by people with national recognition. This was immediately undermined by the two-party system (which sprang up immediately, I don't mind saying). And with our modern Information-Age culture, it is legislatively impossible to think more than two years into the future. Times have changed and we need to change. And we do change, but right now we're on the trailing edge of those changes.

Inherent conflicts of interest arise from incentive schemes.

What kind of person runs for office? The kind of person who wants to run the country responsibly? No. The kind of people who run for office are the kind of people who like to win contests. They are proud, showy, attention whores. Mostly. This is why we now have a two year election cycle. More time is spent gearing up for the next win than actually doing any governing.

A caveat to this is that you can't take anything back. Reneging on even the most obvious of bad ideas is seen as an admission of failure, so while it might make for better government, it hurts your chances of winning. This is why drug laws will never be effectively updated. Not seriously or soon, anyway.

Design is decoupled from use.

You know that old saying? "Government does not exist for the benefit of the governed?" It's not true, of course, but it is kinda true, and that's a little bit scary. If a Health Care bill comes down the pipe, it becomes THE Health Care bill. If you oppose it, for any reason, you oppose Health Care. If you oppose funding for the war, it's because you don't support the troops. People vote on issues, but issues are not what are passed, laws are what are passed, and we don't seem to be able to see the difference between the two.

Furthermore, laws become pieces of propaganda. You know what I found out that thoroughly boiled my blood? Remember the Patriot Act? "Patriot" is an acronym. The actual title was the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001". That's right, it was named so it could be called the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act with a straight face. And it's not limited to Bush-era Orwellian legislation either, or haven't you heard of the "Preserving Access to Targeted, Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and Services" (P.A.T.I.E.N.T.S) Act of 2009?

Humans, as a rule, have a fundamental misunderstanding of themselves.

This is the two-way street of failure right here. Voters forget that legislators are people--this is why we have such blatant disregard for the future. Issues are boiled down to bumper sticker slogans, not honest, public discussions. Likewise, voters forget that legislators are people--an affair should not be career-ending, but it is in politics. Or, at least, it can be.

Mostly, we all just sort of forget what it is to be human.

So Happy Birthday, America. I'm sure we'll talk again next year.

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Drug Laws Are Broken

Everything that I've discussed so far has had one thing in common: an underlying cause, if you will, for the broken-ness that permeates our culture. Systems are designed and implemented by people. They are used by people. People don't really understand people very well.

Humans, as a rule, have a fundamental misunderstanding of themselves.

Take a quick look at drug laws. Drugs are bad (this point is highly debatable on philosophical grounds, but for this argument let us concede that drugs are often detrimental and, in the long run, certainly aren't good for you), so we make them illegal--in other words, we make them even worse by attaching a prison sentence to them. Our expected outcome is that people will stop using drugs.

Only it doesn't work. People still engage in recreational drug use.

So we amend our laws. We make the sentences even harsher. We throw more resources into catching drug users.

That doesn't work either. People still engage in recreational drug use. Not only that, but the prohibition of drugs has led to a vast black market and a system of organized crime. What's going on here?

Specifically, we have what's called Optimism Bias, the phenomenon by which people grossly overestimate the outcome of events. It doesn't matter how harsh a sentence is because people assume that they won't get caught. This same mechanism that gets people to play the lottery over and over and over, even though the odds of winning are diabolically low.

In a more broad sense, our whole approach to handling the "drug problem" is flawed because our collective understanding of people is flawed. We think that if we threaten people, they will give up "undesirable" behaviors. We think that if they aren't listening to our threats, we need to make harsher threats. When confronted with our failures in these areas, we admit nothing and change nothing.

Look at the torture debate going on right now. This is a huge point of contention over whether or not it is ethical to do the unspeakable to someone if it might save lives. The debate is passionate and interesting, but it completely disregards the data, which shows us that torture does not provide reliable intel. Ethics don't enter into it. It doesn't work, so why are we still arguing about it?

Because we think it should work, because we don't understand why it doesn't.

Ditto drug laws. Our war on drugs has been an abysmal failure. You can talk about whether or not it is ethical to legalize marijuana, but that's hardly the issue. The issue is that criminalizing it hasn't worked. Why are we bothering to talk about ethics?

A better approach to handling drug addition in the world would be to treat it as a public health problem rather than a crime problem--concentrate on eliminating the addiction factor, rather than thinking you can just eliminate drugs altogether. Maybe there are other ways as well that we just haven't thought of yet. The point is that our current approach is based on a poor understanding of the human condition and it needs to be re-evaluated. But it never will.

Find out why tomorrow.

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Disney DVD's Are Broken

Today's cause of broken-ness is what Seth Godin calls the "I am not a fish" principle. Take a look at this culvert:


Salmon trying to swim upstream would have a lot of difficulty navigating a culvert like this, and that's because whoever designed it was, clearly, not a fish.

Design is decoupled from use. Also known as: I just build these things, I don't have to work with them.

User Interface design is one of the great challenges of programming, and for every truly great UI, there are scads of pitiful ones. Restaurant websites are notoriously awful, but my go-to example for horrific design is the Disney DVD.

These are interfaces designed by a committee that is completely divorced from the world of watching-movies-at-home. Where else can you get the trademarked "FastPlay" option? FastPlay, for those of you playing at home, is a button you press that jumps straight to the movie, but not without first showing you every preview on the disc in an unskippable manner. And good luck trying to find a feature, because you can't. Features are arbitrarily divided into incomprehensible menus based on... well, god knows what. I'll give you an example.

Pop in the features disc for Monsters, Inc., and you'll find that all of the special features are divided into "monsters only" or "humans only".

Buh?

Abby wanted to show me a feature off that disc and we searched through probably three or four menus before we broke down and consulted the flow-chart. You read that right, flowchart. Disney is completely aware of the fact that their DVD menus are non-navigable, and their solution to this is to include a fucking map.

Disney's bad, but they're far from alone. Software is, on the whole... awful. For a great discussion of a would-have-been good game mired by poor UI, I recommend Evan's review of Empire: Total War. He also has a good piece comparing search engines by their interface (this was pre-bing). For examples of UI done right, look at anything made by Google or Valve--there are reasons both companies are at the forefront of their fields. Both started small, but they work hard to make things usable (Valve kept Team Fortress 2 in development for 9 years, because they refused to put out a game that wasn't fun).

What can Disney learn from them? It's not enough to make a good product. You have to make it usable as well. The fact that your customers are children is not an excuse. You just have to work harder.

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Music Reviews Are Broken

Hard to know what's good in new music these days, isn't it? Also kinda tough to find legitimate reviews for what's new. That's because music reviews are victims of the third cause of broken-ness.

Inherent conflicts of interest arise from incentive schemes. Also known as, you want access, you better give us a reason to give you access.

Ever wonder why even the worst movies have some critic blurbing about how awesome it is on the poster? Well, that's because by shamelessly sucking up to the studio, you can get your blurb on a poster--it's a way for hack writers to get their name out, and it happens all the time. And it's not just movies, it happens in any situation where someone is critical of someone else but requires the consent of that someone else to get access to whatever it is they're criticizing.

Reviews, the White House Press Corps, everywhere. Although sometimes it's not about access but about advertising, and that's where the phenomena is the most blatant. There was a row a while back about Gamespot firing an employee for giving a bad review to a game whose ads were plastered all over the website. You see how the incentives line up. My website reviews games, it's frequented by gamers, and my revenue source becomes game makers, so it behooves me to not shit on their product.

But if you look at critic aggregators like MetaCritic (useful in this example because it reviews both games and music), you see that there are plenty of people doling out bad video game reviews. Check out their page for (picking a systems at random) the Wii and you see scores all over the place, which is about what you'd expect: lots of greens, lots of yellows, a few reds (the greys are as-yet-unrated). Ditto their movie page.

But take a trip over to music-land and what do you see? Solid green, with a sprinkling of yellow. It looks like a surreally-healthy lawn in here. But when's the last time you read a negative review? You never do, because there's no money in writing negative reviews. Just take a look at the exceptions. MetaCritic lists only eleven albums as "bad" since 2000. Bear in mind that MC doesn't write reviews, it only tabulates what other reviewers have said. The worst reviewed album, with a score of 15 points (and a 13-point lead on second place), is Kevin Federline's Playing With Fire, an album that no one ever expected to take seriously. Hell, even Paris Hilton got a 57 for her vanity project.

To get an idea of just how worthless music reviews are, read this Hitsville article that recalls Rolling Stone's reviews of R.E.M. records from Accelerate back to Up, a chronicle of that great band's waning years, a string of solid "meh". You'll see how every single album review decries the previous albums and calls this new work their best record ever.

Entertaining read.

Sadly, I really don't think music reviews can be saved. The album is dead and music is such an experiential medium these days, it's not any trouble to just take a listen for yourself. Unlike a movie, it's not a $10, 2-hour investment, and thankfully film has it's own sort of "critic culture" that has kept it less susceptible to this sort of atrophy. But time, as always, will tell.

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