Huh. So that's an Instalanche. Interesting.

Anyways, I got a look at some of the Fall anime last night at Dave's. Not a particularly impressive batch, sad to say. The Summer fling with galfeltch is starting to look more like a torrid affair, and the opening themes continue what's beginning to look like a long and painful period of hip-hop "edginess".

Bleach is a passably decent supernatural-fighting-psychic manga, but the anime adaptation is slow and obvious. The art style of the manga just screamed "Seventies Punk", so the melange of bad music which composed the actual soundtrack was a big disappointment. It's just a bland execution of material which, while not being particularly brilliant in the original form, was at least a solid, stylistic and entertaining sample of the genre.

Mai HIME is the anime everybody was talking about before the season broke, and I don't quite see why. It's a Sunrise production, and as a result it's easily the stodgiest anime I've seen in years. Flat character designs, robotic relationships and dialog, and yet more fighting-psychic-teens. The little girl with the claymore so large that she has to repeatedly spin about, sparks flying as the tip gouges up everything around her, in order to bring it to bear in a fight was the one real saving-grace of this anime. I'll probably keep watching it, because it doesn't suck outright, but it's not exactly setting my world on fire.

Uta Kata is a dark magical-girl show with bleedingly obvious porn-computer-game character designs. Our doomed protagonist is lured into some sort of "promise" by a peer-group apparition in a haunted mirror in the old school building, and the apparition claims that she wants said protagonist to write her summer-break essay-assignment before the apparition goes back to magic-land. It's strange enough to keep watching, and surreal in a restrained, creepy fashion, but I have the feeling this isn't going anywhere good.

Kannaduki no Miko is just jaw-droppingly bad. It reminds me of Gravion in that sense - a bizarre, exploitative melange of stupid ideas thrown together at high velocity with little regard for pacing, continuity, or cohesion. The two high school lesbian protagonists are "miko" who are threatened by mecha-piloting "Orochi" villains, but there's a "burning youth" boy with his own Orochi-mecha who's going to protect them. The cool-love-interest miko is named Himemiya and hangs out in a suspiciously familiar rose garden; the high school looks a lot like the one in Marimite, and there's a passing reference to a Prince of Tennis. It's exactly as derivative as it sounds. We broke out laughing at the end of the show, from sheer embarrassment at having watched it in the first place.

The real stand-out, surprisingly enough, was an August show which somebody just started subbing, Space Symphony Maetel, a "side-story" from Galactic Express 999. Normally, Matsumoto shows drive me up a freaking wall, but the first episode of this was surprisingly excellent - it had cohesion, direction, passion, and the story made sense. I actually want to see more of it, which is more than I usually say of latter-day Matsumoto retreads. Best of all? No magical girls, no galfeltch, no harems, no fighting psychics. Very refreshing.

The majors (and here, and here) are starting to get into the surge in political vandalism, theft, intimidation, and petty political terrorism rumbling under the surface right now. For every incident you hear about, there's a couple hundred stolen, shot, defaced, or burnt Bush/Cheney signs not getting reported. I know my local paper, the CDT hasn't said boo about what's going on in *this* county as of this morning.

I've come across a few reports of destruction of Kerry signs. For that, read "that story, and a few 'both sides are doing it'" fake-neutral public-virtue bullshit stories.

But I haven't heard any stories of Republican mobs rioting in Democratic campaign offices yet, or of any shootings involving Democratic facilities, or Watergate-style break-ins at Democratic campaign offices.

One of the teenagers who burned swastikas into the yard of a Bush/Cheney supporter in Wisconsin complained that what he did wasn't "It wasn't terrorism; it was activism. It was for a cause.... The whole thing is, basically, I just wanted to get the word out there that in my opinion Bush isn't doing this country any good." When was terrorism ever inspired solely by malice, without any political intent? Child, terrorism is inherently political. Inherently "activist". Inherently "for a cause". You aren't any less a brownshirt because you've tie-dyed the brownshirt, any less a thug because you're wearing birkenstocks instead of jackboots, any less a fascist because you're wearing a Grateful Dead hat instead of a Stormfront t-shirt.

This is the turning-point; you fools have dipped one toe into dark and rushing waters. Think again. Real goddamn hard.

I went into State College for dinner after work yesterday. On a whim, I turned up Allen Street on the way back to stop off at the Republican campaign office, in the old storefront which used to be Allen Street Video, was once the Democratic campaign office, and was used last January for the First Night “Instant Poetry” event. There were a couple of college Republicans manning a phone bank, checking up on absentee ballot request form distributions. I ended up helping by stuffing envelopes for a mailing for the State Representative of my old district, when I still lived in the Borough. Couple hours of mindless work, but at least I got some gossiping in with the kids.

The office was notably short of “Bush/Cheney” yard signs, and the word is that there’s been fairly massive theft and destruction of yard-signs this year in the county. The office guy said “hundreds”, from the Borough to the townships and up into the mountains. Lots of stories about pissed-off little old ladies with empty lawns, of signs being shot or burned, and people threatening to staple their replacement signs to mailbox posts, or electrify the signs in expectation of a return of the nocturnal raiders. This isn’t a Democratic county - outside of the Borough and Bellefonte, we’re heavily out-numbered, as you’d expect of “Alabama”. I told him I was worried if the vandals are going up into the mountains to steal and destroy signs, that the country folk are likely to sic dogs on ‘em, or even shoot them. He noted that all these kids are doing is pissing off the Republican base, and doing the campaign office’s job for them. We talked a little about the Knoxville shooting, which I knew more about than he.

The State Representative, Lynn Herman, came through later in the night. I told him I was making up for not being able to vote for him any more, by doing a little envelope-stuffing. He’s apparently in a serious campaign - they’re actually running TV ads, something I’d never seen him do in the ten years I was living in his district.

They turned on the radio to listen to Cheney and Edwards, fighting with poor reception and a bit of a radio shadow in that building. So I sat, stuffed envelopes, and listened to the vice presidential debate. It’s different, listening in public. I had to stop swearing at the candidates, for one thing.... Cheney seemed, to me, to have wiped the floor with Johnny Non Sequitor. Cheney’ll never set the world on fire, as a public speaker, but he’s an excellent debater. He only becomes clearer and sharper with anger, and Edwards’ ham-handed Haliburton attacks only stung Cheney to let loose with the sharpest verbal evisceration I have yet heard from a politician this season, offering an avalanche of evidence of the young Senator’s disinclination to show up for work, culminating with the personal note that Cheney, as Vice President, is also President of the Senate, and that the debate was the first time he had ever met the Senator from North Carolina. Think about that for a moment. In an organization with only a hundred Senators, Edwards had never, in four years, actually managed to be introduced to the President of the Senate.

The office closed at ten, so I caught the rest of the debate on the drive back to Bellefonte, and on TV at home. It wasn’t until I started watching it on TV that I realized that Cheney had been muffling himself by folding his hands over his own mike, thus causing periods of time where he sounded muted and distant, due to the interference. Not too swift, but I still think he did much better than the Senator. Shame they couldn’t get Cheney to debate Kerry, I suspect he’d bounce the Junior Senator from Massachusetts off of four walls and the ceiling.

Update: Oops. Presumably the out is that they weren't in the Senate for that shot...

I finished reading The System of the World last weekend. It's one of those books that devours every moment of free time, to the exclusion of other pursuits. Stephenson Demands Your Undivided Attention. It brings his "Baroque Cycle" to a close, although I now wonder if he'd prefer that you call it his "Barock Cycle", in recognition of his determinedly idiosyncratic spelling habits, adopted especial for the production of his "three-thousand-page novel".

The last installment is much less foot-loose than the first two volumes, which were restless and sprawling, swirling through every back-water of Europe and racing across every exotic inch of the Orient and the Americas. The third volume is rooted, and grounded, and static, only leaving the bounds of southern England for a number of anomalous chapters in the courts and gardens of Hannover, which themselves become English in anticipation of the coming transfer of dynasty which is the pivot-point of the story.

the System of the World is a novel of synthesis, of the setting and testing of new balances; as such, it takes the racing liquid furores of Quicksilver and the Confusion, and pours them into the immobility of the mold. That mold is, in great degree, the physical environs of early Eighteenth Century London. Stephenson, whose place-descriptions in the two prior books were exotic and picturesque and wild, delivers in this final book a city described in painful and exacting detail, with prose that can be compared unfavorably with the text of auction-catalog listings. Every wall, every street, every fortification, construction, sewer, and privy is placed firmly in the city-grid, and then defined in relation to each prior element of the city-scape. Painstaking is the exact and precise word for this exacting and overly-precise manner in which Stephenson delivers this final installment.

Stephenson's conclusion is, in the end, the setting, London As It Will Be, the fulcrum of the world, Leibniz and Newton in frozen disputation, Western thought in perpetual, balanced, opposition to itself, a synthesis awaiting the melting fire of the new flame, which Stephenson presents as an Unfinished Project, the abandoned logic-mill which figures in Cryptonomicon, the novel to which the whole of the Baroque Cycle acts as a grandiose prequel.

I am some-what annoyed that Stephenson allowed his Immortals to run away with the plot to the degree which they did, in the end. It rather lowers the tone of the whole project from Science-Fiction to a sort of Fantasy, in which Alchemical Godlings create the illusion of Science as a facade behind which the occulted magic of the Philosophical Mercury flows.

The Auction

As I walked down the highway
From my latest success
I met an old gentleman
Trudging down the crossroads west
His fine clothes were worn
Shiny at the sleeves
Dark holes torn
At his soles and his knees
Two short horns drooped
Desolate at the gravel
His sickly red pallor
Said Scratch had long to travel.

What ho, old man
Asked I of the devil
Are the damnable as short of funds
As the rest of the debtor-rabble?

Yes, rasped he
In a voice like perdition
To-day I am, myself, the debtor
And my last soul’s done defaulted
You know god is dead
But the mortals live longer
And the bridge-loans I’ve negotiated
Are coming due next Friday.

I haven’t the interest
And I’ve spent the principal
On a lot of ill principles
And damnable invincibles
But every race-horse I back
Loses office like a hack
Or around mine own back
Finds the decency he lacked
And here come again
I’ve turned to my friend
The rutted and worn
Crossroads plain.
But all I encounter
Are tricksters and fraud
Pious bastards
They come to impress
Their congregation or mass
By beating the Devil
Those cheating white-trash!

As my debtings did mount
and receipts declined
My payables have ballooned
And receivables in arrears,
I went to the banks
Thrice-mortgaged is Hell
From every freezing cellar
To the gate-dog's stud-collar.
I’ve tried to cheat
As a good devil ought
Corrupt the officers
Buy any that might be bought
But from the tellers to the directors
Not one stays the same
And three faceless corporations
Have bought my debts in turn
The chaos is complete
Except for my account
That each board kept clear
Their best-hope arrears.

My money’s no good
My creditors no souls
My debt’s run its course
Next week I'm due in court.

So, I mused
Fingering my gavel
There on the verge
In commerce’s dark gravel

Lucifer, my man
I’m an auctioneer don’t you know
And I make my living
From ruination and woe
Poor family’s plantations
and foolish rich estates
All man’s misery
Passeth over my plate.
Destitute widowed tears
Buy my baby’s formula-milk
And the wreckage of hopes
Keeps my fat wife in silk.

Then stood him surprised
And hopeful as he
Who in hell’s heart
Ladder-hope has found
We went about and around
But I knew it was firm ground
I came to a bargain
With that broken-down devil
We negotiated a deal
To finance his retire
We bankrupted damnation
To reorganize Hell.

Oh, he couldn’t face
The liquidation of evil
The breaking-up of his Hades
His life-work in the wreckers
Old Scratch took a pension
And early retirement
Clipping in Boca
His coupons each month
Satan plays shuffle-board
In Florida’s heat;
Left me and the court
To auction off Hell.

Folks before you today,
I’ve come to break up
The Devil’s possessions
The greatest assets
Of mankind’s long misery
The tyrant’s estate
And the bond-servants contracted
Are put up for sale
For Hell’s creditors to pay.

Now I’ve sold off the brimstone
To the factories for sulfur
Ripped up the irons
For metal-hungry China
The flames are banked,
Diverted to heat
The cities of the West
And cold Winnipeg.
The frozen wastes
Hippy-gray capitalists
Have purchased an option
And are examining the finances
Of ice-cream plant expansions.
You arms-dealing devils
Long free from your bonds
I offer your fellows
Cannon-fodder for hire
For service on those
Half-acres on earth
Which the previous management
In their desperation
Alienated from the main
Left strewn about the world
Damned-spots of fire
Pain and fury
War-magnet miseries -
But demons work cheap,
In this tight-capital market
And with industry
And agribusiness
You needs must compete;
All Hell’s land is for let
And the furies are yours to rent.

Come now ye speculators
In misery and woe!
I’ve the Devil’s dreams up for auction
And Damnation on the block
From the underground Styx
To the last jailhouse lock!

10/2/04

Evan Kirchhoff of 101-280 has the best lemonade I've read today, wrung from last night's big fat lemon of a debate. Go read it, if you're at all dispirited about the whole affair.

Four versions of this piece-of-garbage yield-monitor data application, and not a goddamn one of them works for shit. Bah!

Martin Peretz eviscerated John Kerry on TNR. You know, if TNR was what I thought it would be - neolib honesty and straight-forwardness - Drezner, Sullivan, Peretz, the less annoying Kaplans, Easterbrook - I wouldn't have let my subscription lapse. Instead, what did I get? Ackerman, Judis, Chait, and that lesser swarm of bushhating yabbos who actually populate the general writing population. Once again, I have to wonder - why is Peretz editing *this* magazine?

Via the all-seeing, all-knowing Instapundit.

Normally, I try to ignore the BlogAds graphics, because they're essentially random, and that's what a good postmodern American, wise in the ways of advertising, ought to do: Ignore Everything. But they inserted a new ad for some sort of political debate site, with a black-and-white image of a young Mohammed Ali caught in the moment of bellowing something at someone. He looks like The Negro That Ate Cleveland, and it's off-putting and disturbing for reasons that I don't quite understand. I have nothing against Ali; I don't really hold a brief for or against boxing, except that it seems to have been a better sport in Ali's day than it is now, what with the ear-biting and Don King and all. I suppose it's just that the image is so amazingly unflattering that it has the raw feel of propaganda; it has the subliminal feel of hatred on sale. I’m not even sure what the bias of the political site is that is being advertised; I’m just fairly sure that I want nothing to do with it, whatever it is.

I had some hopes going into the debate, but I don’t think it went as well as all that. Bush didn’t pull any Ford-style boners, and he wasn’t a total rhetorical disaster, but he was shaky at the beginning, and clearly tired and irate. He repeated stump-speech lines where he should have been attacking on the merits, and was clearly dumbing it down for the national audience. The stuff about the war being tough work works well on the stump, when it’s clear that he’s talking about the troops and his people, but in debate it sounds like whining. Kerry was a fool on the merits, but then, he’s always a fool on the merits. He claims he has better plans, but he never gets into the details, except to say “more of the same, done better”. Bush managed to point out that we’re doing most of what Kerry claims would be a new start, but the partisan-minded will discount that without a strong rhetorical riposte, which Bush didn’t have. Bush’s problem in debates is that he isn’t a clever man, and debate requires a light deftness which just isn’t part of his character. Ductility makes for terrible policy, but it’s invaluable in debate, as we saw last night.

Slight advantage: Kerry. But only on points. The Kerry-leaning folks here in the office were giddy as I came in. This is going to energize his base, I'm sad to say.

Well, fuck. Those assholes at Tawhid and Jihad are using some sort of anime free hosting site - http://www.hostinganime.com/neda2/sout/index.htm - and no I'm not direct-linking to it. Only go there if you're planning on DDoS-ing it into the stone age. But I'm irate that my hobby has even a peripheral connection with the turds who host decapitation-propaganda. *Almost* irate enough to go learn how to be a script kiddie. Calling all whitehats...

Sorry, I should explain that. A leftist friend of mine keeps me on his mailing-list of Bush-is-the-devil clip-jobs, and this morning's E.L. Doctorow bile about Bush's feelings, or lack thereof, just was one straw too many. Considering I've seen said leftist friend actually break out the evil eye when talking about the devil Bush, I'm not really exaggerating when I say that Bush-hatred looks like the new Witch panic to me.

Witch!

So sayeth the new Puritans,
Who, observing a worldly affect
Know a man elect,
Or in cases given, not.


Witch!
You gave us over to the Devil
And his Indian hordes
In the Eastward this season past;


Now!
Spreads his society within the Bay itself.
Observe the young,
Tormented by the unseen
Writhe and shout in the public square.
It is your evil that drives them mad!


Witch-finders, witch-hunters, witch-burners,
In the end come again,
To save us from the devil
Made flesh in fallible man.

9/29/04

Driving along East Whitehall Road, in State College's "Southwest Borough", you will find a cluster of about a half-dozen modest homes with Kerry-Edwards signs in their yards, all in a row. I cannot tell if this is at all related to why every other house on that block, barring one, has for-sale signs instead. The one Bush-Cheney holdout square in the center of the Cluster appeared the week after I noticed the Cluster forming. He or she looks like she's under siege; I must be getting sentimental in my old age - I never was one for the underdog, before.

To continue my run of reviews of bad movies, I find it my sad duty to report that the Forgotten is a dire temptation and inspiration of inappropriate critical humor. You know you've got a problem when your deadly-serious dead child/abduction thriller elicits a universal and spontaneous giggle from a matinee crowd of greying adults mid-way through. The story, of a grieving mother who just won't let the memory of her dead child go, is strongly evocative of the plight of the 9/11 widows in the initial twenty or thirty minutes, and the steady tastefulness of that initial twenty or thirty minutes was encouraging. Then the NSA showed up, and seriousness went on holiday. Oh, there was no humor - no intentional humor, at least - but the writing went south along with seriousness, no doubt for a romantic tryst on the beaches around Kitty Hawk.

Our unhinged protagonist develops the belief that aliens have abducted her lost son, and not only bewitches a fellow-grieving dimbulb parent into sharing that belief, but by some miracle of fourth-wall influence, convinces the committee of scriptwriters as well. Not long afterwards, the special-effects crew, who have been unobtrusive and restrained up to that moment, introduce God's Bungee Cord, with which the mostly-unseen aliens eject any character who threatens to interfere with the plot - er, "experiment". When I call it "God's Bungee Cord", I'm not kidding. The first time we see it - a moment replicated in the trailers - it looks like the roof of the world ripping off, which seemed, from the trailer-point-of-view, a cool visual metaphor for phildickian revelation of the facade of reality being torn asunder. Not so much, in the actual execution - the roof-ripping is just the necessary and near-instantaneous prelude to the aliens attaching God's Bungee Cord to the now-unnecessary character so that he or she can be catapulted into the great empty sky. It resembles nothing so much as the punishment for getting a question wrong before the bridgekeeper in the Holy Grail.

The movie-logic never really recovers from the derangement caused by repeated operations of God's Bungee Cord, but I managed to make through to the sappy, unearned, Hollywood Ending. Normally I fulminate against Hollywood Endings, which often will ruin otherwise-decent movies like What Dreams Might Come. (Yes, I mostly liked that movie, although in the generally-laudable rush to hate the new, piously saintly Robin Williams, I seem to be the only one left in that position.) But a Hollywood Ending can only ruin a movie which has preserved its potential intact to that point of the movie. Ruining a good movie requires that one deliver a mostly-good movie-fractionate into the saccharine-stained hands of the Endmongers to ruin. You can't ruin a bad movie; you can only bring it to a close. So they did; at that point, who cares? Send the horse off to the glue-merchants or the knackers, it's a dead horse either way.

It's the harvest season, so I'm much more busy at work than is usually the case. A few things:

Bellefonte and the rest of Happy Valley didn't escape the flooding, but it was mostly people who live or own property in the low-lying areas who got socked, mostly by Spring Creek, which overran its banks throughout the valley. Water Street was shut down in Bellefonte, and several neighborhoods in Milesburg were flooded out. When I drove through, it seemed as if every portable pump in the county was deployed along one unremarkable street, emptying basements. Houserville and Lemont also had some homes flooded out, especially in Houserville along the fringes of Spring Creek Park, which was inundated. Later in the day I saw some kids with boogie boards wading through the flood along the edge of the baseball diamond in Spring Creek Park. Earlier, I saw two idiots on mountain bikes barrel through the raging flood pouring across Puddingtown Road, up to their waists. Still can't believe they made it without getting washed into the sheep pastures downstream.

Watched about half of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The movie was like someone's plagiarized student reel - here's my version of the end of Citizen Kane, here's my take on the Hudsucker Proxy, a Star Wars-like display of archaic serial editing techniques, the fighter scenes from Pearl Harbor, the fantasy bedroom scene from Brazil, the sidekick from Destination: Moon, ooh - how about the producer's daddy's Flash Gordon? League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the Central Asian scene, the sleazy guy from the Mummy, touches of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The quality of the films plagiarized dropped as the movie went on, as well. I suppose I wouldn't have minded as much if the plot, action, and characters were sprightly enough, or distracting enough - even the Mummy Returns, as stupid and lame as it was, had moments of movie magic. All Sky Captain... had to offer, from my point of view, was (terrible) style over substance.

Best theory I've seen yet as to what the hell's going on with Ra^thergate.

Via Roger L. Simon.

I ran into Mendel Schmiederkamp at the Comic Swap yesterday. He was an officer with PSSFS back in the late 90s, before I stopped going to meetings. He's back in town, and working for PSU's Applied Research Lab. He hasn't changed much, aside from a few more pounds and a longish chin-beard. We talked a while about PSSFS's perpetual problems with its library. The latest news is that Atherton Hall came up with some sort of "lease" arrangement, and now they're threatening to terminate the lease. Nice to catch up with the old PSSFS crew. Speaking of which, the new administration has a livejournal link.

The second volume of Apocalypse Meow was in at the Comic Swap yesterday. (Damn, I wish ADV had retained the original type "Cat Shit One"; I understand that it's literally impossible to market a title with an obscenity centrally featured, but "Apocalypse Meow" is so goddamned lame.) Reading that second volume through, I finally recognized what weirds me out so much about this anthropomorphic war-comic. It's entirely from the American point of view. This was less obvious in the first volume, but after the author introduces a scaldingly incompetent Japanese ranger into the story, the issue came into focus. The comic was written and illustrated by a Japanese mangaka - one Motofumi Kobayashi. But it reads like the product of a particularly red-state army-clan type. If it actually was from the pen of said red-state army-clan American, I'd call it borderline racist.

The decision to portray the Japanese as ugly monkeys is particularly off-putting. I can deal with the French portrayed as foul, disgusting pigs - I'm naturally biased against the French. The portrayal of the various Vietnamese factions - the corrupt ARVN, the stoic Montagnards, the fanatic NVA and Viet Cong - is by-and-large sympathetic, if somewhat superior. It's hard to relate to Russian bears and Chinese pandas with anything but amusement; but the monkeys are a real poser. The Japanese idea of the monkey is somewhat different from the Western notion, I think. It probably has something to do with the commonality of non-chimpanzee or great ape-type monkeys in Japan. When we think of monkeys, we think exotic, intelligent chimpanzees. The Japanese are more likely to picture dim little thieving primates, like less cute raccoons. The Japanese notion of the monkey is a stupid, bumbling figure of chaos. That stereotype is definitely on display in this volume of Apocalypse Meow.

In truth, I have to wonder how much in the mainstream of Japanese manga Kobayashi actually *is*. Even the art feels more like American alternative comics than any of the standard schools of manga. That might just be the time-period - I associate alternative comics with an aesthetic that is strongly tinged with the look and feel of the Sixties. But it bugs me. If there wasn't a Japanese name on this comic, I'd assume it was an American Army brat who'd spent some time on Okinawa or one of the other bases.

On a variant of yesterday's theme, I find myself impelled - nay, compelled! - to link to this excerpt from C.B.S. Pinafore.

The Tragedy of Omlet, Prince of Massachusetts, cont.

(Previously, by others' hands, here and here)

SCENE III. A lavish hotel room in Cleveland.

Enter OMLET and JOHN EDWARDS

EDWARDS
My soundbites are embark'd: farewell:
And, darling, as the airwaves give benefit
And convoy each sentiment, do not sleep,
But let me hear from you.

OMLET
Do you doubt that?

EDWARDS
For Cheney and the malice of his favour,
Hold it a little cut worthy of the blood,
A rose in the age of weakling nature,
Forward, not permanent, mean, not lasting,
The skunk’s short stink of a careless moment; No more.

OMLET
No more but so?

EDWARDS
Think it no more;
For the negative, mud-slung, gathers none alone
In bundles and bulk, but, as the temple empties,
The lonesome service of the mind and soul
Grows solitary withal. Better I loved you then,
That now no soil nor cautel might besmirch
The virtue of our will: must we fear,
Our greatness weigh'd, my will so not mine own?
For I myself am subject to this plan:
We may not, as unvalued persons do,
Campaign for ourselves; for on this violence depend
The safety and health of Teresa’s whole estate;
And therefore ought our vitriol be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of sweet reason
Whereof we are the banner. Then if I say you love them,
It fits your wisdom so far to believe it
As he in his particular act and place
May give his saying deed; which is no further
Than the main voice of Democracy goes withal.
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain,
If with too vicious tongue I damn their songs,
Or lose the mobbing heart, or thus our treasure open
To their unmaster'd raging fury.
Fear it, Omlet, fear it, my dear candidate,
And keep me in the rear of that affection,
Out of the shot and danger of the fray.
Be easy then; their evil lies in fear:
Age to itself reveals, though none else near.

OMLET
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman over your part. Too-good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Urge me leap from a steep, thorny cliff in heaven;
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Warm in th’ bath of an adoring press,
Happy in your virtue.

EDWARDS
O, fear me not.
I stay too long: but here Clinton calls.

Rings DUKE CLINTON

A double helping is a double grace,
Fast food makes for long hospital stays.

DUKE CLINTON
Yet here, Edwards! attack, attack, for shame!
Their bile drips from the orbit of your eye,
And you are blind’d thus. There; my blessing with thee!
With these few precepts in thy memory
Damn their character. Give thy doubts no tongue,
Nor any proportioned thought the act.
Be thou familiar, and by all means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, no niceties further tied,
Shift away, or to our cause further steel;
But do not dull thy blade with soft sweetness
Lest some milquetoast, halfheart pundit wilt. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Drive the enemy partisans in disgust to flee.
Give every rumor thy ear, and each thy voice;
Earn them every man's censure, and stay on message.
Costly thy habit that niceness buys,
Politician never so sweet, gaudied;
But the apparel thus will wear the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Will be all you to this ticket pulls.
Neither an explainer nor an excuser be;
For halves oft loses both itself and friend,
And stonewalling locks you in the rigid lie.
This above all: to thine own message be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thine falsity will be found by no man.
Farewell: my nurse is here for my bath!

EDWARDS
Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord.

DUKE CLINTON
Her sponge invites me, go; the enemy rend.

OMLET
Farewell, Edward; and remember well
What I demand of you.

EDWARDS
'Tis in my memory lock'd,
And some future memoir published, print the truth of it.

OMLET
Whatever.

Exit

For those who insist that Bush is a freedom-suppressing tyrant taking advantage of a terror-war to crush democratic aspirations and traditions, please, please, please look to Vladimir Putin, who is in the process of giving a practical demonstration of what such a thing actually looks like in the world outside of your fevered imagination. It features the suppression of all media which disagrees with the tyrant; replacement of the process of election of legislators and provincial governors with appointment by the central government, and a return to central control.

If Bush was actually the devil of the imagination of some on the left, a Republican appointee would be Mayor of New York City, Congress would have been purged by fiat of Democratic congressmen, Paul Krugman would be in a psychiatric ward, Maureen Dowd would have been poisoned and imprisoned in a medical ward, the Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe would be permanently closed, and the Salzburgers, Ted Turner, and George Soros would be all either be doing time on trumped up corruption charges, or in foreign exile.

Don't believe me? Read the news coming from Russia. It'll curl your hair.

Via Instapundit.

After reading Nathan Hamm's take on that article, I see that I overreacted just a smidge. I'm still not too thrilled with Putin, but he's not quite gone as far overboard as the above link would indicate.

I spent much of the weekend playing games on the computer at home, and watching Fox News. They had Richard Holbrooke on the other night, opining that Iraq was “worse than Vietnam”. You know, if Kerry is a would-be Nixon, sour, foul-mouthed, secretive and unlikable, then Holbrooke is his would-be Kissinger - arrogant, unprincipled, ruthless and sharp-elbowed. The interviewer amused himself by trying to get Holbrooke to identify which parts of the current Coalition in Iraq was “coerced”, and which were “the bribed”. Holbrooke attempted to elucidate Kerry’s “Underpants Gnome” strategy for shifting “ownership” of the Iraq occupation onto the international players. If he provided a phase two, I didn’t spot it.

Bellefonte had a welcome-home parade on the 11th for a local element of the 28th Infantry Division, the 442nd Support Company, which has returned from Iraq. It was a nice little rah-rah-rah moment on a somber day. They had the company sitting on a set of chairs taped to a tractor-trailer flatbed, facing outwards. There was only a couple dozen of the returning veterans, so the next flatbed had some older veterans from Vietnam, and then the rest of the parade was composed of local supporters - little leagues, politicians, majorettes, two bands, some guys on chopped Harleys, a literal clown car, and what looked like every piece of emergency equipment in the borough. There was State Sen. Jake Corman in the rumble seat of a classic convertible, and State Reps. Benninghoff (R) and Rogers (D) in less-flashy cars. There was a file of Civil War reenactors, led by a short man with a sword who I suspect was State Rep. Lynn Herman (R), although he had neglected to bring along a sign for advertising purposes, so I could be wrong.

The reenactors showed off for the crowd by firing off a round of blanks in front of my position on the parade route, than proceeded to march off, reloading as they went. Less impressive was the group of kids with horses, who had painted two white ponies in red and blue in a flag-pattern. I couldn’t imagine that the ponies appreciated that humiliation, and they were expressing that emotion or something similar by taking a dump on Allegeny Street every hundred yards or so. Aren’t they supposed to hold off feeding show horses the day before the show, to avoid that sort of display? Or, at least, fit them with dung-bags to keep the shit off the pavement?

Was watching elfin lied over at Dave’s while my wash went through the Laundromat in his apartment complex. That show just keeps getting creepier and nastier. While watching, it occurred to me that the protagonists in harem anime are remarkably similar to what are known as “cat hoarders”, those well-meaning old ladies who have first one cat, then two, then three, then eventually, every stray cat they come across, until the population exceeds the food budget, and old cats die without being buried, and starving young ones start cannibalizing the corpses of the dead, in a horrible dark chaos that brings nothing more to mind than Make Room, Make Room. Harem protagonists are girl hoarders.

Yes, elfin lied is that kind of show. My clothes are clean, and yet I still feel dirty.

Rain, rain, rain. The mangled ghost of Frances is passing overhead, even as we speak. Pennsylvania is sort of like the rear axle of a Greyhound bus when it comes to hurricanes. The front of the vehicle might get totaled by a deer, and the mid-chassis can get banged up by what's left, but all we ever see is a spray of gore and bone-chips. This is just a really persistent rainstorm.

I really don't understand why people feel the need to move to Florida. Hot as hell, humid beyond belief, flat as a pancake, full of gators, and ground zero for at least one hurricane a season. Hope my parents' new retirement home came through the second hurricane intact. Our in-house opinion seems to be that Ivan isn't going to make the hat trick for Florida, blessed be. Jay says somewhere in the Gulf, no matter what the computer models suggest.

The Monkeysphere. It's essentially a rant on the subject of the emotional village - the sociobiological notion that we can only really maintain relationships with a set number of people - this guy uses 150, I've seen others cite 200. Nothing terribly profound, but fun. And I appreciate anyone who offers rules for understanding the world by starting with 1) You're a moron. So's everyone else.

Via Pixy Misa.

The Kerry campaign managed to organize an event in a 6-to-1 Democratic town - Stuebenville, OH - in which he was roundly booed and abused by a hostile crowd. How did they achieve this feat of negative genius? They cancelled and rescheduled an event two weeks after the first, abortive event, giving their local opponents notice and advance warning. Then they tried to schedule the event at a *gun range*, on the apparent theory that gun-lovers were representative of undecided voters. Or something. Then they had the local firefighters tell the campaign to go piss up a rope. It was apparently a perfect storm of organized anti-abortion students from a local Catholic college, Republicans, irate NRA supporters, and firefighters who descended on an open-air rally, shouting their displeasure at the Democratic candidate. This is the man that the Democratic base nominated to manage a global war of smart networks and rapid response? He couldn't keep college students and a gun range proprietor from getting inside his staff's OODA loop! How the hell does he plan on dealing with al Queda or the mullahs?

Via the Instapundit.

Correction: there wasn't any shouting. Just hundreds and hundreds of anti-abortion protesters with signs. The main point still stands - the Kerry people got upstaged at their own rally.

Well, that's that. Not exactly a ravishing or overpowering speech by Bush 43. The Fox crowd seemed bigger on the speech than I was, but I guess I agree that it wasn't a notable failure or disaster. Pataki made Bush look good in comparison. Can't quite understand the "Pataki '08" crowd - he's so utterly colorless and bland.

Tommy Franks stepped into the campaign with both feet. Good speech, but he's got a really strange public speaking style - staggered, with the end of each sentence sitting vocally at the beginning of the next, and big gaps laid in the middle of thoughts. It sounds like he's reading bad poetry. Since we know from his memoirs that he does, indeed, write bad poetry, this may not be an accident. Always good to see a member of the Brotherhood of Bad Poets do well. I caught his interview with some of the PBS silverbacks between his speech and Pataki's. The one silverback pounded at him for a good five minutes, trying to break his discipline and get him to commit to a partisan line one way or the other on the Swift Vets furball. Franks kept leading his interviewer back to the '71 hearings, and how that told against Kerry in his decision between the two candidates. For those of you following from home, Franks isn't a Republican - says he's a determined Independent, but that he felt it necessary to express his choice this year in a more public and active fashion than the usual privacy of the voting booth. I respect that.

What I don't respect is Kerry's decision to try to upstage Bush with a midnight rally immediately following the end of the Republican Convention. This is unprecedented according to the talking heads, and is certainly disrespectful of the other party. The Republicans did no such thing after the Democratic Convention. But this *type* of behavior is vintage Kerry - it absolutely reeks of his decision in the close 1996 senatorial campaign against then-Governor William Weld, when Kerry intentionally broke a "no mudslinging" pact with Weld in the last week of the campaign, timed so that Weld had no time to retaliate. Kerry likes his nastier, more mean-spirited attacks to come with no warning, and to judge from the speech excerpts released beforehand, this one will be pretty nasty.

But it seems to be a pretty stupid attack, as well. Cheney attacked Kerry in his speech at the Convention, as is the practice for VP candidates - they're there to be the attack-dogs. Kerry's apparently decided to attack the messenger, rather than the messenger's boss. Not particularly smart, I don't think. People don't vote for the vice presidential candidate, and with Cheney in that slot, thank the hypothetical absolute for *that* mercy.

Watched Miller and Cheney with the poker crowd last night. I got knocked out of the tournament early, so I was sitting on the couch playing GBA while they threw comments over their shoulders. Miller was a big hit, but no-body likes Cheney, even our vehemently pro-life conservative host. Dave A. got pissed at Cheney and left early, having been likewise knocked out early from the tournament. The resident clown was asking questions about Cheney's war record as Mrs. Cheney lauded his courage and etc. Explained how he wasn't a military man, despite having been Secretary of Defense.

Zell Miller sounds like a recording of an orator from the first half of the 20th Century. You don't hear his kind of accent much in political circles these days. Kind of bracing, like hearing from the Democratic Past. He's an angry, angry guy. Did someone think that having Cheney follow Miller would make Cheney sound less angry and scary? A rotweiler would seem less ferocious if it had to bat follow-up to today's Zell Miller.

Even the guy who didn't know Cheney's war record, or lack thereof, knew to expect a possible resignation speech. That rumor really made the rounds, didn't it? No such thing, although the first parts of his speech had all the hallmarks of a reworked resignation or retirement speech. So we're stuck with Cheney, are we? Pity.

Band-aids, flip-flops - when did the Republican rank-and-file become prop comics?

Reading this description of the protest marches in NYC, I came to a striking realization. The NYPD has come up with a brilliant scheme for defusing potential protester riots. NYC in August is a sweltering broiler of a city. The more radical direct-action types, used to much smaller cities like Miami and Seattle, think they can out-maneuver the dumb stupid cops by taking roundabout routes, and come in via the flanks. The dumb stupid cops seem to be encouraging this behaviour, sometimes with bullhorns and great enthusiasm, like blue-clad, deranged scoutmasters. From all accounts, the protesters have been weaving their way aimlessly back and forth through the endless canyons of Midtown. By the time the cops get them back to Madison Square Garden, the crowds are wheezing, sweated out, and in heavy pain.

Your black-clad anarchist cadre can't riot if they're exhausted, dehydrated, and footsore.

The Democrats in Boston tried concentration camps. The NYPD is relying on the Manhattan Death March.

Hero was a hell of a movie. Shame the name was so inapt. I'm told that the original Chinese title was Broken Sword, after the character who in many ways is the moral centre of the film. I can't imagine why the American importers thought Hero was a better idea. For one thing, it's a terribly generic title. I swear I've seen a van Damme film of the same name - well, not seen, but noticed in passing on one of the lesser cable channels. For another, the term "hero" doesn't really cover any of the personages or actions in the film.

"Hero" means a lot of different things. There's the original Greek meaning, literally, a demi-god - a person who becomes divine by intervention of the gods or by his own extreme exertion. Hercules was an exemplar of this type of "hero". No children of gods in this film, although the various great warriors are near-godlike in their gravity-defying prowess. Call it an "eh".

Another meaning of hero covers the military angle - the soldier or warrior who performs great feats in battle. Well, OK, this is close to a description of the various assassins in this movie, but really, people rarely use "hero" to describe assassins.

A third meaning of hero is a rough synonym of "champion" - a protector of a land, or an ideal, or a group of innocents. The various warriors of Hero/Broken Sword are hunted assassins. There is one scene where they defend a calligraphy school from a storm of arrows, but they brought the attack down on the school by hiding there, drawing the threat themselves. The warriors are determined to avenge, not defend. This definition suits the movie least of all.

A fourth meaning of hero is an exemplar of courage, someone who is willing to sacrifice themselves for their ideals. This is probably the closest the movie comes to the proper textbook notion of heroism. In the end, the protagonist sacrifices himself for a new-learned principle. This is explicitly noted in the movie's postscript, although I don't know if that's something added by the American producers, or an original element of the film.

These days, I see all art in the prism of politics, or perhaps I should say, these days I find art to be the prism in which I see the day's politics. Hero/Broken Sword is clearly a work of Chinese nationalism. It built around the nation-founding legend of the First Emperor, and specifically the bloody, heart-rending conflicts before the founding. The First Emperor is a deeply ambivalent figure in Chinese myth. For every nationalistic happy-talk myth of probity and unity, there is another of cowardice, savagery, and iron-willed slaughterous tyranny. The First Emperor was a figure much like Alexander the Great - a megalomaniac and a genocide, but also a great leader and a nation-builder.

Where Alexander died early of dissipation and possibly poison, the First Emperor lived a long, determined life by protecting that life from accident and assassination. There are plenty of stories of his well-founded paranoia which provide the basis for Hero/Broken Sword's plot - that of a king locked securely behind walls, officials, thousands of guards, and a black-pillared, vast, empty hall, under constant threat from assassins and would-be regicides.

The assassins have good reason for their emities. The king has destroyed their country, and is in the process of subjugating the rest of China. For subjugation, read slaughter, destruction, and organized annihilation. The only glimpse the movie gives us of this merciless process is the assault against the calligraphy school, but it is an impressive scene. Tens of thousands of black-armored soldiers in regimented, endless lines assemble before the school on an empty, windswept desert plain, and mass bowmen, crossbowmen, and siege machines in a vast array of mechanized death. As a single entity, the army flings great swarms of black arrows into the sky, which rains down on the school like Hamlet's "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". This single, extended scene has more gravity, tension, and terror in it than in the entirety of Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The structure of the film is roughly like that of Rashomon - repeated flashbacks to action from a single scene in the film present. The recounted events are tinted by color-schemes denoting the different threads - red for lies, blue for hypothetical suppositions, green for doubled flashbacks, and black or white for the undyed truth. The movie is at the same time less lyrical than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and more aesthetically oriented. It's impossible to not compare the two movies, for they are achievements of similar scale and ambition. While Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a Daoist movie of individualism and spirituality, Hero/Broken Sword is a nationalist movie of idealism and political morality. Both take a dream-like view of action and violence, but where Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a fantastical dream-ballet , Hero/Broken Sword is a swirling, animate painting in primary colors and imagery.

This is a movie which has to be seen. It demands attention.

Watched McCain and Giuliani on C-SPAN last night in the humidity and heat. McCain didn't really set the roof on fire, although the draft-McCain undercurrents at the convention kind of came to the surface in the midst of his speech. Hand-lettered "Bush-McCain" signs appeared on the convention floor, some of them even held right-side-up. But McCain's speech had a section lauding Cheney, and mentioning him specifically as the vice-presidential candidate. I think that ship has sunk, sadly. The high-light of the speech was probably his incidental calling-out of Michael Moore, who was there for one of the media outlets. The hall rang to angry shouts of "four more years!" from the irate delegates. C-SPAN caught the fat "documentarian" waving to the crowd as if to his fans. Say one thing to Moore - he certainly thrives on the hate of his victims. The rest of McCain's speech was a paean to Bush's leadership, and a heart-felt expression of McCain's hawkish determination that the country not flinch from its duties and obligations. Not a great speech, but straight-forward.

The Giuliani speech, on the other hand, was a grand old stemwinder. Giuliani is a real ball of fire on the stump - the first time I've ever seen him speak at length. He was fierce, funny, animated and warm. I can see why he was elected twice as Mayor in a majority-Democratic city like New York City - he's immensely likable. He raged against anti-Semitism, and what he called the perverters of a great world religion. He essentially made the neo-con argument for the war on terror, and thundered in favor of the offense.

He also tore into Kerry, hitting every non-historical major argument against Kerry, except my favorite "secret plans/Nixon II" line of attack, which perhaps is a bit extreme for a national audience. He tied Edwards' lame "Two Americas" theme into Kerry's inconstancy, speculating that the Democratic ticket needed two countries - one in which to vote for the exact thing Kerry would vote against in the other. If this is negativity, let's see more of it. The press sometimes seems unable to distinguish between honest doubts and distinctions and mud-slinging. Pointing out Kerry's misunderstandings and straddling isn't mud-slinging - it's an honest description of his policies and political history. The press in general ought perhaps to look into the habit. It seems to be something they're generally loathe to do. Giuliani wrapped up his speech by returning to his central theme, which is that the Republican Party's special charge is the expansion of freedom, citing as exemplars Lincoln, Churchill, and Reagan, and tying their stubbornness and determination to Bush's stubbornness and constancy. Of course, Churchill was by no means a Republican, but the neocons and other engagement-minded Republicans regard him as a saint of conservative values, so let it go, let it go. It compared strikingly with McCain's interesting, if rhetorically less deft co-option of FDR's "Rendezvous with Destiny" speech. Between the two of them, they seemed to say, "Keep your JFK and your imaginary Camelots- we'll take FDR, Reagan, and Lincoln - the warriors and their realities of good fights well fought".

Some folks say Giuliani's speech was an audition for the presidential candidacy in 2008. That would make more sense if the old networks had bothered to cover the speech. Giuliani's audience was political activists on the floor, and political junkies on the news networks and C-SPAN. Of course, Lincoln's own Cooper's Union speech in the same city was before activists to whom he had been something of a cipher - that long-ago introduction of a regionally popular Mid-Westerner before a doubtful crowd of New York Republican echoed today by a New York Republican speaking before red-state delegates. A lot of fuss has been made in the press about the distance between the conservative base in the crowd and the moderate Republicans on the stage, but it strikes me as a sort of conciliation - an essayed union between the two arms of the party, the base and the mainstream. Last night, at least, it worked. We'll see.

Update: added links to the transcripts on Command Post, above.

Since my folks have moved closer to the city of Pittsburgh for the few months before they head south with the rest of the snowbirds to Florida, I took Rt. 22 on the way back from visiting. I hadn't been on the old "Ho Chi Minh Trail" for at least five years, and things have changed a lot. For one thing, downtown Pittsburgh has changed. I haven't been through the city since they rebuilt the Lawrence Convention Center, and boy, howdy, does it change the skyline. Freaked me out a bit - I kind of swerved a bit on the Veterans Memorial Bridge while I gaped at the unexpected, huge, tent-like structure. Looks sort of like a steel rack of BBQ ribs.

The endless construction on Rt. 22 between Ebensburg and Murraysville isn't anywhere closer to completion. In the meantime, the businesses and buildings along the route continue to decay and fade. Many minor buildings, businesses, and homes have been abandoned along the route, and more than a few double-wides were disappearing under the burden of runaway vines and vegetation. Kind of dispiriting. That end of the state looks to be dying. Even the warehouses look undermaintained and decrepit.

Read Shea and Hess's Pea Ridge: Campaign in the West last weekend. Excellent read, dunno about the historical accuracy. (Pea Ridge was a battle in March 1862, in northwestern Arkansas just that side of the Missouri border.) TransMississippi Civil War history is pretty thin on the ground. The salient points from the book is as follows: Confederate Major General Van Dorn was criminally incompetent, Union General Curtis was excellent, and Union General Sigel was a really interesting flake.

Sigel was a German immigrant-politician without any serious training or talent for war. He had been involved in the 1848 revolutions, which led people to think that he had more military experience than he actually did, and was something of a charismatic. This meant that he was a typical "political" general - promoted through connections and his popularity with voters, rather than any actual skills or performance. His military instincts, in fact, were almost always disastrous. The summer before Pea Ridge, he talked Lyon into dividing his tiny army in an ill-advised attack against a superior enemy at Wilson's Creek, which got Lyon killed. Sigel went on to bumble the rest of his career after Pea Ridge, finally being put on the shelf after a particularly embarrassing defeat in the Shenandoah Valley at New Market in 1864.

Sigel seemed to possess one military talent, and that was for retreat. During the initial advance of Van Dorn's overwhelmingly superior force on a town in northwestern Arkansas called Bentonville, Sigel got his main force away with plenty of time to spare, but then left his rear guard in the town, apparently so that he could showboat in the face of the on-rushing Rebel cavalry. After putting himself and his rear guard in an impossible situation, he managed to cut his way out through an improbable series of skirmishes and wild chases, suitable for the silliest of historical action movies.

Sigel's performance on the second day of Pea Ridge illustrated yet again what he was capable of when he thought he was retreating. Van Dorn had stupidly marched his starving force off their feet, but his army collapsed square across the Union Army of the Southwest's sole line of communication, supply, and retreat. The commanding Union general, Curtis, was well aware that he had Van Dorn's exhausted, half-defeated force on the ropes after a day of fighting, but Sigel, being an uneducated, excitable politician, was convinced that the Union army was doomed, and only he could save it by cutting a line of retreat back into Missouri. Since the highly competent Curtis had concentrated the Union army in an advantageous position, and left the excitable Sigel in charge of his wing, conditions had been set for the following action, but you have to give Sigel credit - he did the fighting. Van Dorn had a three-to-two advantage in infantry, and a two-to-one advantage in artillery, but Sigel actually put his artillery to use, and orchestrated an improbably masterful combined artillery-infantry advance, his batteries smashing Confederate batteries as they were fed piecemeal into the battle, and, driving the Confederate infantry back from their positions, allowing a triumphal rush by the well-marshaled and enthusiastic Union infantry.

This is distinctive, because it's one of exactly two cases of massed artillery succeeding in an offensive assault. Sigel's Napoleonic tactics of staggered battery advances weren't supposed to work on a battlefield dominated by rifled musket fire. It probably happened because Van Dorn had offered battle dozens of miles from his trains, and had mis-placed his supplies - his troops were not only starving, but also out of ammunition. Nevertheless, Sigel, who thought he was cutting his way through for a general retreat, smashed the Confederates as they began to retreat, themselves. As Van Dorn slipped off to the east, Sigel drove directly north, hell-for-leather, nominally chasing routed fragments of the enemy, but in actuality pursing a pre-planned retreat. It took the better part of a day for Curtis to retrieve his wayward second-in-command, by which time, the Rebels had literally disappeared in the usual post-battle rain and bitter cold.

Confederate Brigadier General Rains bitterly complained to his troops that "the only one whipped at Pea Ridge was Van Dorn"; unfortunately for Rains, he made this observation in earshot of Van Dorn, who had him put under arrest. But Rains had a point. The Confederates rarely enjoyed a numerical and positional advantage like that at Pea Ridge; it took a general with Van Dorn's unique anti-genius to produce such a preposterous reversal, to such a preposterous victor.

Andrew Sullivan's back. I'm having difficulty mustering enthusiasm about it, though.

There's a new high-end burger joint on South Atherton Street in State College, where the old Panda Chinese restaurant used to be, next to the North Ridge motel across from Hills Plaza. It's called Back Yard Burgers, and would seem to be a new franchise, or at least new to the Northeast. I drove over there yesterday after hearing an ad for the place coming into work that morning. Who said advertising doesn't work?

I got a mushroom & swiss burger with waffle fries, but since I don't particularly appreciate lettuce and tomatoes on a burger, I got it stripped down. It was OK, but not really excellent. It was lacking in the nutty-gravy sauce that really makes a good mushroom-and-swiss burger. This was just a burger with mushrooms and swiss cheese on it. Not at all the same thing. Hardees really does an excellent mushroom-and-swiss, but the closest Hardees are in Dauphin and Bedford, far too damn far to drive for fast food, no matter how tasty.

Anyways, Back Yard Burgers. The meal cost me about six-and-a-half, seven bucks, which is acceptable for their sort of high-end fast food. They confused the hell out of me, because they've got a drive-through, but at the counter they give you a number and tell you to go sit down and wait for your food to be brought out to you. Since the food was delivered, and not in a wrapper, both of my criteria for tipping had been met. But it was a fast-food joint! Argh! In the end, I didn't tip, since you also had to bus your own "dishes" - actually a little plastic basket - and I doubt the right people would have found the tip, even if I had left it. The waffle fries were waffle fries - not particularly brilliant, but not noxious.

All in all, not a terrible place to eat, if it were someplace convenient. Since it's a good twelve mile drive from work, and fifteen mile drive from home, I don't think I'll be making my way out there that often. Even if I were to go down that way, the Ponderosa down the hill serves lunch buffets for about the same price.

Update: Not only are Hardees burgers excellent, they were comping free meals to reservists down in Florida for a few days during the Hurricane Charley cleanup. I wish I agreed with van Steerwyk that Hardees is going to eat Burger King's lunch, but my experience is that they keep losing franchises in Pennsylvania. I don't know what drives it, but they seem to have difficulty maintaining competitiveness around these parts.

Holy shit! There have been rumors that Cheney wasn't on board with the whole FMA thing, but I never expected him to bring up the subject this close to the convention. I sure the hell hope this isn't part of a "Cheney falls on his sword" vice-president slot swapout. I was generally in favor of such a maneuver, but this would be a pretty damned shabby way to go about it. I can't think of a thing more likely to leave me sympathetic to grouchy, evil-tempered, cantankerous old Dick, or an act more designed to sabotage him with the "base" he was allegedly keeping in the fold.

Damn.

Via Roger L. Simon. Go buy one of his books. Director's Cut was good.

Salam Pax is back, blogging up a storm. Sounds like he's freelancing as a cameraman, journalist, translator, and just about any other news-related thing he can get a gig for. I especially like the bit where he's translating a conversation between the Iraqi journalist and an American soldier just before a combat advance against some insurgents, and realizes what he's translating is a request for permission to walk their camera rig out into the middle of an impending firefight. As the war wears on, Salam sounds more and more pro-American - one post is him chiding the ever-xenophobic Riverbend for her anybody-but-the-Americans rants on the subject of Sadr and an Najaf. Very odd.

Finished reading the last volume of Hitosi Iwaaki's Parasyte over lunch today. Decent ending to a plain, but very striking manga. The story and art survives everything that early-industry boneheadedness threw at it, from silly localizations - whoever heard of juvenile deliquents named Londwell and Mitch? - to art-flopping mirroring - at one point in the last volume, our hero gripes about a machete being for "left-handed people", as if the world was built for the minority of the left-handed. Anyways, Parasyte's blend of flat-toned, undecorated blandness with shocking ultraviolence and massive, grotesque slaughters made for a hypnotic comcs experience. People seem to relate most to the cloying, muddle-headed humans-are-poison, destroying-the-world-with-pollution line of argument made by the villains, human and monster alike. Personally, I found the message of "Lefty", our protagonist's parasitical, ultrarational, totally unsentimental mirror-flopped right hand, to be the more compelling point of view. "Lefty", who failed to develop the usual monster-hatred of their human prey when he failed to devour his host's brain, is still a very inhuman character. As the story progresses, his host takes on more and more of "Lefty"'s philosophy, which can be summed up by this final set of observations, late in the last volume:

If we protect other species, it's because we're lonely.
If we protect the environment, it's because we fear our own extinction
The only thing that matters to humankind is its own satisfaction.
But that's okay. That's all that matters.
There's no point in despising our own behavior.
Human beings can't love the Earth without loving themselves. Otherwise it would be a contradiction.

I think it's probably this base viewpoint of radical anti-sentimentality that makes the self-demolition of the monster "Tamara Rockford"/"Tamaya Ryoko" so utterly affecting. In a certain sense, Iwaaki shares with John Woo this sense of high sentimentality rising from the unflinching acknowledgement of sudden violence. Parasyte wouldn't be nearly as interesting without that base of harshness and savagery.

The reason I'm getting into all of this is that the last few pages of the manga volume is taken up by the musing of the Hollywood producers who've optioned the story for a movie. They're a couple of guys who were involved in Men in Black and Beatlejuice, but their ideas about the story are far more Men in Black's wanna-be hipster bullshit than Beatlejuice's willingness to shock. For one thing, they want to do a PG-13 movie. Now, while I can see how a story based on Parasyte could get cut down to R without doing major violence to the concept, we're still talking about a story revolving around creatures that devour their hosts brains, and live by devouring human beings in a messy, butchers-shop sort of way. It just isn't PG-13 material. A straightforward adaptation of the manga as presented would definitely get a NC-17 for violence. Secondly, they're talking about localizing to an American setting. Thirdly, the protagonist is no longer a teenager. Finally, they seem much more taken with the schmuckbait philosophy of the human-hating monsters and their Stockholm-syndrome human sympathizers than the hardboiled anti-sentimentality which is the actual central view-point of the narrative. While some of these points aren't too distressing - the story wanders far enough from the high school setting in the manga as to not make it absolutely vital, frex - once you pile them on top of each other, the resulting pile, creaking in the breeze, looks precious little like the original architect's plans. All you've got left is a guy and his CGI-a-riffic mutating hand, versus freaky shape-shifting beasties. The whole thing reminds me strongly of why the Filthy Critic likes to refer to Hollywood folk as "grassfuckers". 'Cause this grass done been violated, that's for sure.

The rain gods seem to have agreed with me as to the undesirability of a Bellefonte arts and crafts festival, as it rained like the dickens this weekend past. I saw vendor after vendor poking at his or her tent-roof, dislodging pockets of rain-water trapped in the sagging vinyl or canvas with whatever was handy; several left early, disgusted with the low turnout. But, the rain eventually broke on Saturday, and the show must needs go on. The vendors were less rural than I expected. I mean, there were the expected Amish with their cheese and fudge displays, and there were far too many Christmas-themed vendors than should ever be seen in the steaming dog days of August (even an unseasonably cool one like this year's), but still and all, precious little in the way of cartoon cows. There was a guy with enormous wooden cartoon pigs, but no cows.

I bought a pinecone dipped in heavily scented beeswax for an air freshener for my increasingly musty apartment, and a couple Bellefonte-themed painted blocks for my mother's collection - one of the Sterling Mansion, and another of St. Pauls Episcopal Church. The lady selling them told me that blocks of the Bellefonte Academy had sold out early, and indeed, I saw one holding the place of honor in another vendor's non-painted-block-themed display. There's no novelty like destruction, I suppose.

As I walked around, eating my dinner of crab cakes and lemonade, the band in the pavilion in front of the statue of Gov. Curtin shifted from Skynard-style rock to a pretty straightforward version of "Don't Rock the Jukebox", which, I figured, was country enough for government work.

As something of a consolation prize for Hot Gimmick vol. 6 not coming out when they said it would, I went and bought the ill-named Tramps Like Us. This is a manga originally published as You're a Pet, which isn't much better as a title, but at least has some bearing on the theme and plot, unlike the Springsteen-lyric-pulled-out-of-a-hat non sequitor that TokyoPop saw fit to hang on it. I'd have guessed it was josei given that the protagonist is a professional of a certain age, but this resource identifies it as shoujo, and I'm willing to take their word for it.

Sumire is a journalist with a large Japanese newspaper, who's laboring under the jealous eyes of her non-peers. She's too tall, she's too smart, and she's too successful for her age. Her fiance recently dumped her ass for his knocked-up mistress, and she's recently vowed to find a boyfriend who satisfies the so-called "Three Highs" - higher income, higher intelligence, higher stature. Sexist as hell, but so are the Japanese. Just after she makes this vow, she finds a slight little bishounen hiding in a box nearby her apartment. She takes the injured guy in, names him "Momo", and declares she's going to keep him as a pet. He's a professional dancer, but the sort of kid who can't keep himself, who'd probably starve to death if left on his own. She keeps herself amused by feeding him, babying him, and bullying him as an outlet for all of the "ice queen", passive-aggressive harassment, and nonsense she puts up with from work and her unenviable social life. Even though she bathes him every night, it's theoretically platonic. She leaves her co-workers and boyfriends with the idea that Momo is literally a pet - a cat to her co-workers, a dog to the boyfriends, which makes for some slapstick and misunderstanding-comedy. Very cute in a sketchy sort of way.

It's not nearly as salacious as it sounds, but I still liked it anyways.

I tried to arrange to go visit the relatives in Pittsburgh - they're going to be out of town this weekend. I was going to go hang out in Northern New Jersey and Manhattan with Dave during a board of directors meeting for another convention. That's apparently fallen through. I think I'm doomed to a weekend spent with Bellefonte's Arts and Crafts Festival, which they are busy setting up on High Street and Allegheny Street as we figuratively speak.

I joked about cartoon cows and the Arts Festival in State College last month, but the Bellefonte Arts and Crafts Festival is the real thing. Gingham, cows, lace doilies and whimsically carved blocks of wood designed to make living rooms feel more rustic and kitchens more rural. It's going to be wall-to-wall housefrau all weekend, which I suppose is an improvement on wall-to-wall mullets for the Bellefonte Cruise, but still and all, I'd prefer wall-to-wall empty air, given my druthers.

Not to mention all the bogarted street-level parking. Bah.

You shouldn't drink liquid nitrogen or breath xenon. For those of you, y'know, contemplating either act. You know who you are.

Ugh. Nothing I hate more than inaccurate ship lists. I've gotten violently addicted to Hot Gimmick, and various lists from the publisher, Diamond Comics, and other online merchants made it seem as if the sixth volume would ship at various dates this month. I thought for sure that if Diamond Comics was talking about ship dates, it'd make it to my local comic shop, the Comic Swap down on Frazier Street in State College. No such luck. They didn't even have anything else worth buying as a consolation, not even the Happy Mania volume Dave had asked me to look for. Feh.

Damnit, I want my middlebrow shoujo!

You know, for a bunch of people who were chastising the French for going on their habitual month-long August vacations in time to let thousands of the elderly die of heat-related conditions, the blogsphere is remarkably quick to go on weeks-long vacations this time of year. A good half of my blogroll was, is, or is just coming off of, some kind of August break or "vacation". It isn't as if there's an actual "dog days of summer" this year - there's news all over the goddamn place.

Vacations are for Europeans. Be American, damnit! Working yourself to death is the American Way. Well, since the Japanese imploded, anyways...

I've been informed that some of our people, who were going to be flying out of University Park Airport for a meeting tommorrow in Mississippi, are stuck at the airport because of a plane crash, that a plane tried to land with broken landing gear and wiped out. There isn't anything in the local papers yet about it online. I'm not sure if they're coming back to the office to wait for their rescheduled flights, or are going to just wait it out at the terminal.

Update: the delayed travellers just walked in the front door. Apparently there were no injuries - the plane in question just belly-flopped onto the tarmac, with a minimum of fire, smoke, or even dust. The delay for the airport apparently is more a matter of doing the paperwork and proper reporting than anything really on the emergency side of things.

I was standing on the bridge over Slab Cabin Run on South Atherton Street yesterday evening after dinner, reading a Georgette Heyer romance, when two young ladies in nice, conservative dress came walking down from the direction of town. They had flyers and copies of the Book of Mormon in their hands, and asked me if I wanted to talk. I sadly informed them that I wasn't religious, and that I didn't really want to talk about it. After some back-and-forth, they accepted, and walked on, most likely towards the remains of that trailer park down the Shinglestown road. I didn't want to be unkind, and I'm sure I would have been unable to avoid informing them just how silly I find their beliefs if I had engaged in discussion with them. Don't get me wrong, I think that of all the creepy post-Christian successor cults, the Mormons are least deranged, but still and all, it's a foolish faith.

Dave says I should have got them talking about the advantages of polygamy. Dave, if you haven't noticed recently, is a pig. What is it about post-Christian successor cults and polygamy, though? Mormons, Muslims, Koresh's wackjobs... seems to be an excessively common feature, doesn't it?

If you haven't encountered CBFTW's war-blog yet, today's as good a day as any to point it out. He's a machinegunner with the Stryker Brigade in Mosul. Soldiers who blog or journal in-theatre almost always get into trouble when folks notice them, and it gets back to their chain of command that they've been broadcasting in technical defiance of rules and regulations on the subject of operational security. CBFTW came to the attention of his superiors after his vivid description of an early August firefight made the rounds of the war side of the blogsphere. Unlike most soldier-bloggers, he managed to come to an arrangement with his superiors, in which they'd let him know if he overstepped operational security, and, apparently, he wouldn't identify localities and specific actions. He's covered that by usually talking in terms of "Today we drove around somewhere to do something."

Today's entry is a surreal story of the usual routine of infantry in Strykers in hot pursuit of insurgents with mortars, half of them immersed in various books - a survey of western philosophy, an Anne Rice novel, George Carlin, and our correspondent with Homage to Catalonia - while the driver furiously races through the mean streets of Mosul. I have to respect a soldier who would read Orwell while on patrol. That's sangfroid.

We had elections for the non-profit corporation that runs that convention I mention from time to time. My candidates won, for the most part. It looks like I'll be taking over the registration department, much to my surprise. I used to be a leadership guy in the organization, but after a one-year stint as president, I had enough of such things. I hadn't planned on running anything again, but the head of registration is taking some time off, and the other people in the department are either not interested in running things, or have gotten themselves into the figurative doghouse.

Registration is one of those departments which is difficult to staff in a volunteer organization. It's a colorless, grinding, grey-flannel-man sort of place. The people who work registration have to be dedicated, concentrated, and resilient. In a registration environment like ours - where tens of thousands of members need to be processed in two five-hour periods - the stress on the line staff in the department is considerable. Furthermore, the organization is full of fun, creative alternatives to registration's austere, vital drudgery.

The great irony here is that I was arguing in speech in favor of one of the presidential candidates that fan-based organizations normally suffer from an excess of inspiration; I now find myself in a position where I'm going to have to summon up enough charisma to inspire a number of staffers to abandon the bright, shiny, entertaining portions of the organization for my monastery of a department.

Just finished Tommy Franks' memoirs. He's a great general, but a bad poet. Good to know I stand in such impressive company...

Striking book. I recommend it for anybody interested in the military, or current military affairs.

I see that HPS Simulations is releasing a Campaign Gettysburg as the next installment in their "Campaign" wargame series. I'm still playing through their Campaign Franklin, so I'm not going to rush to order Campaign Gettysburg, but it sounds like an ambitious, sprawling attempt, if it's including Brady Station in the campaign. Hopefully it'll have more branching choices than Campaign Ozark or Campaign Franklin seem to have. I rather think it defeats the purpose of a "Campaign" game, if the scenario sequence is essentially linear.

Campaign Ozark, while fun and interesting on a battle-by-battle level, didn't make a particularly good campaign set, if only because it was designed as three mini-campaigns - summer 1861, early 1862, and fall 1862 - which don't flow into each other. Since the AI in these games tends to be fairly weak, Campaign Ozark campaigns tend to end up as a brief, single-battle routs. I had to play the stand-alone scenario to even get to Pea Ridge as the Union in the early 1862 campaign - played in campaign mode, it was too easy to destroy the Missouri Rebels in a piecemeal battle before you even got across the Arkansas border.

Campaign Franklin is more unitary - it's just the single central Tennessee campaign - but still very linear. Battle at Spring Hill; battle at Franklin; battle in front of Nashville. Franklin is somewhat challenging as the Rebels - interesting, at least.

Campaign Corinth has been the best installment up to this point. It was large, heavily branching, unitary, and sprawling. There was a lot of variation, and you could go all sorts of interesting places. The structure of Union reinforcements and the branching meant that the typical annihilation-style combat didn't curtail the campaigns prematurely, at least while playing as the Rebels.

I'm a little disappointed that they went with a Campaign Gettysburg. Tiller's old Battleground Gettysburg is still playable, if somewhat elderly and creaky. Gettysburg is such a massive singular battle that I can't help but think that it isn't really suited to the "Campaign" conceit. Additionally, there are a ton of neglected campaigns and battles in the East that could have been interesting. The Overland Campaign of 1864, for instance, would be well-suited to a "campaign" wargame style, if rather oversize for the engine. Of course, a Campaign Gettysburg is, itself, rather oversize for the engine. A Chancellorsville installment would have made for an interesting maneuver wargame. You could follow the old "Battleground" conceit, and recycle the Rappahannock battlemaps for a Fredericksburg-Chancellorsville-Wilderness packaged wargame. A Penninsular/Seven Days wargame in the "Campaign" mode would be massive but interesting. Hell, even a packaged Valley set along Campaign Ozark lines would be fruitful - a "Jackson in the Valley" campaign, combined with an "Early/Sheridan in the Valley" campaign sort of thing. It would even suit the scaling limits of the "Campaign" engine. But Gettysburg? It's been done. Again and again.

I got talked into watching a Luc Besson movie last night called Wasabi. It's a slapstick action-comedy starring a very worn-looking, tired Jean Reno as an ex-spy who discovers that he has a recently orphaned kogal daughter. It's a fun movie in a this-really-doesn't-make-sense sort of way, and reminded me heavily of Lost in Translation with gunplay and yakuza. The sidekick is a ratlike character actor named Michel Muller, who most strongly resembles Jerry Lewis playing Renfield in a stock-company production of Dracula. I always knew that France's national Jerry Lewis obsession would result in something sickening and untoward; thank god it's something as incidental and inconsequential as Michel Muller.

Nelson Ascher has an interesting post on English, Hungarian, and various Romance languages from the view-point of the would-be poet. Interesting, but his comments brought home to me just how long it's been since I wrote a line. I've yanked the "bad poetry" bit out of the header, since I seem to have dried up into an empty husk devoid of poetic substance.

Last night, I was pleasantly surprised to feel a chill as I walked my laundry back from the washer-and-dryer set in the Crider Exchange. Last weekend, I was sweltering at 2 AM, walking by the Inner Harbor. The temperature and humidity gradient between the mountains of central Pennsylvania and Baltimore's Inner Harbor is truly impressive. There are reasons to be mountain folk, people. August is definitely one of them.

Spenser Ackerman ought to be fired for spectacular intellectual dishonesty, unless I'm misreading the tone of that lame rowback, and it's actually one of his co-authors who wrote the linked followup. Their "July Surprise" was supposed to be a top-three al-Queda arrest. A minor regional figure like Ghalani does *not* count.

This is the moral equivalent of predicting a major earthquake in Tokyo on a specific week, and then claiming any earthquake in the north-eastern Pacific Rim as vindication. Firstly, the magnitude isn't comparable - you predicted a major earthquake, or a major-league al Queda capture - this is a "moving the goalposts" violation. Secondly, the area selected is highly biased towards producing such a similar event on any randomly chosen period of the same length. Earthquakes are always, always occurring all along the Pacific Rim, on a daily basis, let alone weekly. al Queda captures occur on a monthly basis, often on a weekly basis, especially in Pakistan, which is rife with al Queda and al Queda-affiliated radical groupings. This is a selection bias error.


Fire Ackerman, and give Judis an early job review. Otherwise, don't expect me to pay attention to the New Republic on foreign policy matters. TNR is supposed to be a hawkish left-wing magazine. Prove it! Fire Ackerman!

Bought a collection of Kyle Baker's strips called Cartoonist.

Now, Kyle Baker's main attraction used to be his sharp, cynical, talky approach to the graphic novel; in addition, his deceptively simple monochrome art style relied on a deeply expressive sense of character design. I still regularly re-read my battered and much-foxed copies of Why I Hate Saturn and the Cowboy Wally Show, nearly a decade after I first read them. Baker's older work is right up there with Bujold and Glen Cook for re-readability.

Later on, Baker started getting into a more cartoonish, garish style, with books like You Are Here and I Die At Midnight, but the continuity was pretty clear. I even liked the graphic novel which was what was left over from his abortive run at animation, the sardonic King David. I'm just not sure what to make of Kyle Baker, strip cartoonist. It isn't really his thing, I don't think. The collection isn't bad - I laughed a couple of times - but his pacing and timing isn't really suited to this sort of thing. He really is a graphic novelist, and his humor relies on a sense of accumulating absurdity to really kick into gear.

I don't know. I don't regret buying the book, but mostly because I'd be willing to pay him another ten dollars every three years after I re-read Why I Hate Saturn or Cowboy Wally.

I've got some thoughts in my head about M. Night Shyamalan's the Village, but the "no goddamn spoilers!" haze that surrounds every one of that guy's movies is something of a deterrence from talking in depth about them. I mean, is the embargo on discussing the plot twist at the end of the Sixth Sense over yet? I mean, will I be spoiling anybody if I let slip that Bruce Willis was dead? Red doorknobs and all that?

Shyamalan seems to have something about reds, though. The "bad color", which is shown in every ad for the Village I've seen yet, so I'm not spoiling anything, so there - to end this endless series of equivocations and elipses, is red. Here we are again, with crimson. What does it mean to Shyamalan? Of course, I don't remember any specific meaning assigned to the color in Unbreakable and Signs aside from it being largely neglected in favor of whites and blues (for Unbreakable) or blacks and greens (for Signs).

Anyways, there's a warning that I intend to write about the Plot Elements That We Don't Mention, probably tomorrow, probably under spoilerspace unless I feel particularly mean or spoilerish on the morrow. Specifically, something about why the critics are so impatiently infuriated with Shyamalan's fairy tale, and why the largely crank-liberal critical set is so resistant to a movie which seems to be largely sympathetic to their general principles and ideals. Tomorrow.

For all those who are googling for reviews of the concert by that band who played at the convention which shall not be named, I'm afraid that the closest I ever got to the festivities was escorting the family of a set of Japanese guests through the scrim on the mean streets of Baltimore between the BCC and the Arena, at the request of another ex-con-chair. The chaos involved in shepherding some nine thousand lemming-daft fanchildren through three blocks of a city as mad as Baltimore left me with nothing but admiration for our dedicated crowd-control experts, several of which I spotted along the route, playing traffic-cop at the crossings and lights, restraining the crowds from crowding the narrower sidewalks, and keeping the children and rats hydrated as the piper played on.

I suppose you'd have to ask the audience if the result was worth the effort, treasure, and dehydration involved. Most sounded tolerably amused. I find that I'm poorly equipped for the task of telling the difference between true joy, and the amusement which is the desiccated, deceased husk of joy.

Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard managed to inspire a sort of pity and sympathy in my rocky, arid heart for the lowly reporter on the political beat, whom he describes en masse in terms that are instantly recognizable to any con slug on the fannish scene. He's almost got me convinced that most of the political election cycle is driven by lonely journalists looking to hang out with their fellow writers at events like the Ames Straw Poll and the national conventions.

"We cannot survive without credulity. It is a fundamental part of our sociability. We need people to tell us things we don't know, and we need to believe them."

Damn, I wish I had said that. It's the most concise argument against radical skepticism I've come across so far.

Ugh. Long weekend. I begin to think that my habit of working long hours on vacation isn't the best long-term leisure strategy I could have possibly chosen for my life. It begins to feel like going to Disneyland to help run it, rather than riding the attractions.

As usual, I walked my feet to shreds. I didn’t really walk all that far, either. I'm starting to suspect that this aching feet thing is some sort of psychosomatic reaction to the city - it only happens when I go visiting a major urban centre like Baltimore or Manhattan for an extended period of movement. As soon as I got back to Centre County, my feet were no longer aching, even though the blisters and raw spots were still in the same places…

The lowball projections were correct - a little less than 21,000, although there were enough problems with mail-in preregistration that you couldn't be certain of the numbers on the high end - too many people whose cheques had been deposited without entry into the database. Correspondence's name is shit this week. A push for a full-time employee-secretary is definitely in the works. Aside from some self-destructive mania late Saturday night, the con was relatively peaceful. Some girls tried to steal a banner off of the Pratt Street lobby balcony, and were damned lucky they didn't accidentally jerk themselves off the balcony to a horrible impaled death on the field of stansions below. Some hacky-sackers lost their hacky-sack on the top of one of the cross-bars in the lobby, and decided to form a human pyramid to retrieve said four-dollar toy from its perch fifteen feet from the floor of the lobby. We managed to get them down without any injuries, although one of the monkeys managed to hang by his fingernails from the edge for a bit.

They say the concert went well. I hope it went well enough to justify the murderous cost of the whole thing.

The numbers of homeless sleeping in the Inner Harbor seems to increase from year to year. I kept running into clustered nests of them while walking back to the hotel late at night. There was a particularly aggressive cluster southeast of the Wyndam on Sunday night, in the plaza beside the theatre. Very off-putting, given the lack of light there. Really, though, the big difference between those hairy-looking vagrants and I is that I make my nest on the floor of a two-hundred-fifty-dollar-a-night room in the Harbor Court, instead of under the stars by Pratt Street or where-ever. I felt weird about sleeping on the floor in such a high-tone hotel, but the beds were too damned small to share in that room unless you were really, really friendly with the other guy. The Harbor Court Hotel is just not otaku country. It's decorated like a combination of a museum and a pretentious gentleman's parlor. It doesn't actually look like the fancy European hotels they no doubt were going for, but the effect achieved is still impressive in its own snooty way.

I didn't really have the energy to see much of the con itself. Some folks mentioned that everything went pretty fast this year - seems we're getting old, where time begins to race the clock in our heads. That would explain the fatigue, I suppose.