Rightprof asked in the comments to this post if Bono was actually an evangelical. (Tried to respond in the comments, but Haloscan is being obnoxious this week. Thinking about dropping that service.)

Evangelical? Bono?

Sort of. By Irish standards. There's this interview with BeliefNet. There was mention back in the late Eighties that most of U2 were members of a Christian fellowship of some sort which sounded evangelical.

This article talks about that group, Shalom, and has a quote from Bono that he is sort-of-maybe Catholic, at least to the extent of raising his kids "technically" as Catholics. There's a chunk here that describes Shalom as charismatic & non-hierarchial, which definitely matches my informal definition of "evangelical".

This article seems rather definitive, though. They left Shalom in the Eighties over the whole rock-star thing, but are still pretty much believers in that tradition, just unchurched.

BTW, lesson from Tuesday's Halloween barbeque-and-potluck, to which the new CEO brought a bunch of candied carmel apples:

Don't eat a carmel apple when you're wearing a full beard, especially not when you're due for a trim. At least a quarter of the carmel will end up in your mustache or beard instead of in your stomach.

If anyone could argue me out of my agnosticism back into the Faith by negative example, it would be John Derbyshire. What a shallow, cretinous fool. "Mysterian" my arse - if you want to totter through life a deist, use the proper terms. His reasons for losing faith are variously foolish (human minds being wired for religion is an argument neither in favor of, nor in contradiction to, the propositions of any particular religion) racist (blacks are religious! east asians aren't! I hates me some blacks, and love those Chinese!) and ignorant (dur, never did understand biology, but now's I've been edujumicated on my Darwin, I sees as how religion is bunk!).

I mean, he's still more religious than I am, even on a good day, but I can't help but feel contempt for his irreligiosity. And I suppose you can't possibly find a better argument for man's essential irrationality than that admission right there. Or at least, my essential irrationality.

Oh, well.

Utter, vicious nonsense.

The actual article - which provides the detail which Noah fails to supply - namely, that U2 was relocating to a country which *doesn't* impose an arbitrary and obnoxious windfall tax on royalties, in addition to the usual income taxes. Furthermore, Bono and the rest of the band will continue to pay their normal income taxes within Ireland proper. Nothing illegal or even particularly immoral is going on here, by rational standards.

Noah's predicate - that if someone crusades against poverty, then he can't have his own self-interests at heart when conducting his own private business in a tax-minimizing fashion - is utter, miserable, ill-thought-out horse radish. Real anti-poverty activists - from the early Victorian bourgeois to Carnegie to Melinda & Bill Gates - have traditionally been wealthy, canny capitalists with a perfectly rational commitment to not wasting their private resources on non-tax-optimal behavior.

Bono is merely the latest in a long string of wealthy evangelical Christian do-gooders. To denounce him as a hypocrite for not behaving as an economic martyr is just foul.

On another level, U2 is just the latest rock band to become tax emigres due to confiscatory European taxation policies. Were all of those hedonistic Seventies hard-rock outfits like Led Zeppelin hypocritical for bailing on Laborite England's obscenely high top tax rates, even though that money theoretically financed the era's progressive permissiveness in some sort of roundabout fashion? Of course not.

I wonder how much of this is just a push to tar Bono as a nasty, hypocritical evangelical neocon. He's said a few too many nice things about American Republicans recently. Time to cauterize the wound, soldier! Burn him!

X_X Ugh. X_X

Halloween company picnic, with silly hats & "Pumpkin slice" contest. Ate *way* too much.

Afternoon productivity? Hah!

Z_Z

After School Nightmare and Night of the Beasts were both very much worth the purchase, BTW. Although After School Nightmare dances on just this side of my bishounen ai comfort-line, so you have been warned - not sure whether to classify the protagonist as a heroine or hero, but either way, likable person. Herm? Eh, whatever. The protagonist is one of these effeminate, hairless hermaphrodites which only exist in manga, trying "his" best to pass as male, and deeply conflicted about the whole thing. There's some sort of strange shared-dream-experience class/afterschool club thing which "he"'s being compelled to attend to "graduate" from "his" school. Lots of dream logic, conflict. Fun, although I'm not sure whether this will develop well, or just go in shoujo circles.

Night of the Beasts's heroine is thuggish and violent, which suits my personal tastes nicely. She's being semi-stalked by a superficially amiable Type A romance-novel love interest pretending to be a Type B. Since he's possessed of a beast-like demon, and there are demonic complications, things get bloody and violent quickly, but the book still has a light touch which sort of reminds me of a cross between one of the darker Yuu Watase plots and a Hojo character dynamic, like City Hunter crossbred with Ayashi no Ceres.

I've never heard of Night of the Beasts's Chika Shiomi, and it seems like this is her first translated manga. After School Nightmare's Setona Mizushiro apparently wrote X-Day, which I took a disliking to after the first volume, and never bought the second, so eh.

I decided to stop walking to work based on the new lack of light on the evening walk back to town. Last night, the gloaming fell as I was halfway down lower Valentine Hill road, which is not exactly safe unless I get myself a hat with reflectors or something likewise unspeakably dorky. So I drove in to work. And discovered that with the construction on Benner Pike, that it would have been faster to walk.

Argh! I want my hour of daylight back!

Oh, bollocks. The Iron Dream is unreadable except as an Eye of Argon exercise in Sturgeon's Law stamina. The prose is intensely, and intentionally, obnoxious. I certainly didn't get all the way through it, dropping out somewhere through the middle of a political streetfight-bordering-on-outbreak-of-civil-war in which the heavy-handed "truncheon" imagery just overwhelmed what was left of my good sense and better taste.

And I'm tired of having the right wing blamed for Hitler. Fascism wasn't rightwing. Need I point out, once again, the "socialist" in "National Socialism"?

"'infinite' doesn't necessarily mean 'contains all possibilities'. The sequence of all even numbers (246810121416182022...) is infinite, but the number '17' doesn't appear in it anywhere."

From the discussion following the posting of a color image generated from pi. That's about as succinct a refutation of the "monkeys typing Shakespeare" conundrum as I've ever come across.

Via a semi-random Ann Althouse link.

[But this follow-up, of the same pi derivation except in a radial arrangement, is a far cooler display.]

Ugh. Miserable weather - can't decide if it's raining or not, which leaves me wetter than if it just rained, flat-out.

And darkness is falling. Less and less time for walking & reading, as we creep towards the dark of the year. Meh.

So here's a question for you. I was talking to Bill Johnston while working ops at MangaNEXT, and he wanted to know why manga are shelved in American stores by title instead of author/artist. Bill, when he reads manga at all, reads 'em in the original Japanese, so he shops in the used bookstores and import places, where they shelve 'em the way the Japanese do - first by publisher, then by author, and then finally by title. I couldn't explain or justify why comics are filed by title, even in the real bookstores.

Of course, comics as comics have always been displayed in that fashion - it's a relic of the Big-Two-and-a-Half days, when the titles were forever - Batman, Superman, Fantastic Four, Spiderman - and the artists and writers came and went like the hirelings which they were. That explains the comics shops and the rest of the direct market. But bookstores - real bookstores - file their normal print offerings the way God intended 'em - by author. The only stuff that used to get displayed by title was their periodicals. Is it because they initially thought of manga and other graphic novels as periodicals, and thus deserving of the periodical treatment? Maybe it's the way that the publishing companies advertise the books. Title up front, artist/writer as an afterthought. Lord knows, I don't necessarily know the name of the artists responsible for the manga I read, not up front & foremost, the way I would with a paperback novel or nonfiction history or whatever.

Eh.

So I drove down to Shaler last weekend. Lots of Santorum signs. Some Casey signs - not all that many, and most of them on semi-public land rather than on somebody's yard. More Rendell signs, and some of them on people's lawns.

Fairly few Swann signs, south of New Bethlehem. Fewer as you get closer to Pittsburgh. Since Southwestern PA is supposed to be Swann territory, I'm thinking that Swann is pretty much a dead letter, which kind of sucks.

But a lot of Santorum signs. More than I expected, given the CW that he's dead, dead, dead in the water, dead as a duck, dead as a doornail.

BTW, I must have passed through Murtha territory, in Armstrong County. I saw two signs, one for Murtha, one labeled "Boot Murtha". No Ihrey signs. Damn if I know what that means.

Milesburg is kind of strange. Not a single political sign, although it was getting kind of dark when I drove through late Sunday, so I may have missed one or two. Wonder if they're having vandalism problems down there?

The hunters were out in force in the Sheetz outside of Brookville. One pair of chowderheads in a white H2 Hummer took up way, way too much space at the pump. I had to tie myself into knots in order to get the Korean import putt-putt in beside 'em to gas that sucker up. H2s are just too big for civilian use. Specifically, they're too blasted wide.

Listened to the Steelers game on the way back. Haven't done that since... well, ever. Interesting game. Shame they didn't win, but it was amusing listening to the announcers describe a half-bare-foot touchdown sprint by a Pittsburgh receiver. And that quarterback... he's pretty much cursed, isn't he?

I may be forced to migrate over to Windows XP in the next week or so. Why?

Internet Explorer 7.0.

Windows will squirt out the finished version to their XP slaves in tomorrow's updates, and they've crippled 7.0 to not support Windows 2000. I've used 2000 since forever, and have never seen any reason to change over to the latest Windows crippleware until now. But, since a significant proportion of my customers are stuck with XP, they will be migrating to the new version, and I will be at a loss in supporting their issues and complaints if I'm still running 6.0 on Win2000.

Supporting my primary website-and-database is the only use I make of IE, BTW. I shifted over to Firefox years and years ago, after it became painfully apparent that my using IE for day-to-day interweb trawling was a gaping, ineffectual, dangerous hole in our security.

But I've got piles and piles of applications implemented on Win2000, all of which still work, and show no signs of giving me any kind of problems. God only knows how many of them will get absolutely rogered by a shift over to Windows-for-Bill-Gate's-sins-sodding-XP.

Argh.

You know, for all the talk of the auto industry and planned obsolescence, at least they didn't go out into parking lots in the dead of night & smash in the headlamps of last year's model when the new lines were announced, or refuse to manufacture replacement parts for old models.

I came back from my long weekend working MangaNEXT to discover the usual mountain of work urgently needing done. It never urgently needs done when I'm actually *here*. As I finished digging out from under the pile, a customer came by my cubicle, twice, to lie to customers of *his* he was escorting through the building, claiming to one that I was the world's foremost expert on [x] and to the other that I was the greatest processor of same [x], quoting a figure at least four times what I actually process, by the most generous of computations. I hate it when people do that.

MangaNEXT was a qualified success, in that the hotel didn't burn down, and the con covered its budget. On the other hand, it just barely covered its budget, and the break-down was a bit of a scramble.

The only programming I was involved in - besides sitting in the one video room now and again to spell our sole video staffer while he did things like get dinner - was the "Manga Swap", which was four hours set aside, two on Friday, two on Saturday, in the workshop room for people to bring in their unwanted manga & see if they could trade it for something else. No cash, no trading adult material to children, but at some point the definition got stretched past just manga to include DVDs, toys, and tchotkes. This expansion occurred when I wasn't paying attention, or I'd have brought in about a dozen unwanted DVDs I haven't gotten around to getting rid of in some other fashion. Managed to unload all the manga I brought with me - yes, including Ravenskull - and mostly traded for DVDs, one of which I actually was kind of interested in.

I don't know if the event is scalable - it worked with the two dozen or so people who showed up over the four hours, and no real problems arose at that level of participation. But would it work if two hundred traders showed up, at, say, the Big Con in Baltimore? Not with only one staffer hanging out. I'd guess one staffer to thirty participants would be the necessary ratio, but that's assuming that it can actually scale. It is possible that beyond a certain point, the potential number of connections would become untenable, and thus utter chaos, no matter how many staffers were in attendance.

I thought the whole point of demotivational posters was to be condescending and mean-spirited?

Moron.

Heroes is better than I expected it to be, but it's still damnably pompous and full of weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Hiro the Japanese fanboy is particularly peculiar - he's an undeniably appealing and amusing character, but he's full of *western* fanboy tics and references. I'm fairly certain that the Japanese fanbase for the X-Men comics is miniscule approaching non-existent, so having a random salaryman making an offhand reference to Kitty Pride strikes me as a non-sequitur.

As for the rest of it - the New York subplots left me kind of cold, but Hiro & the two Red-State blondes were pretty arresting. The show may get me watching network TV on a semi-regular basis for the first time in... geez, half a decade or more.

Man, this stuff is cool: the early Voyagers are reporting from the Heliosheath - the turbulent weirdness of the outer membrane of the solar system, where the solar wind runs out of gas & slabs up against the interstellar environment. I never thought of that chunk of reality as being much more than a good deal less than the usual not-very-much, but apparently it's a complex and strange nothingness about which Voyager 1 & 2 are proving that we know even less than we thought we did.

I gotta say, though - if Voyager 1 hits a crystalline wall & goes smash - everybody duck!

H/T Robert A. Hahn on RedHot.

I bought the first volume of an OEL comic called Ravenskull based on this review and the first dozen or so pages that the publisher maintains online here. The notion of a the Dracula Tapes-style continuation of Ivanhoe featuring the villain of that piece & the semi-tragic heroine struck my fancy.

I'd never actually read Ivanhoe before, but with a library within walking distance that was a problem easily remedied, and I read a library copy while waiting for Amazon to get around to shipping the comic. For those of you who've never read the Sir Walter Scott novel, it's essentially a nineteenth-century Marty Stu rehash of the Richard the Lionhearted/Robin Hood stories, with a lot of bollocks about Saxons and Normans and a tone peculiarly stretched between that of Scott's contemporary Romantics and the previous generation's skepticism and cynicism. As a romance, Ivanhoe is about four-fifths of a really great book, but the last fragment lets it kind of fall apart. Scott lets himself get pulled in different directions, and never can really decide whether he's writing tragedy or comedy, including bits of both, undigested and sitting side-by-side like Susquehanna valley rock formations. The best sections are those eventually-orphaned tragic moments, such as Ulrica's death-song immolation & the turret-top debate between the unbelieving cynic and false Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert and the Jewess Rebecca of York, his captive and object of obsession.

In the end, Scott drops the tantalizing suggestion that he was going to make a Miltonian project of Sir Brian's monumental pride and self-will, and lets him expire in a rather deflating and unheroic fashion in the climax, thus committing in the end to a sort of comedy. Rebecca, easily the most admirable and noble character in the book, is saved from a witch's incineration, only to be summarily drop-kicked out of the story into a Jewish form of nunnery which I strongly suspect is a product entire of Scott's overheated (or possibly overtaxed) imagination, leaving the rest of the ending to the less substantial, duller heroine & hero & numerous clowns and supporting characters.

I can easily see why Ivanhoe would attract authors of fanfic & glorified doujinshi, in which category I'd place Ravenskull. The dynamic of Rebecca and Sir Brian *screams* for a good het-slashing, the tension is palatable, and their respective endings so perfunctory as to almost demand a good re-write. In fact, I suspect if I dig around, I could find in the depths of literature and fanfiction some two or three examples of what I expected, based on the introduction, Ravenskull to be. A grand, baroque, dark, thoroughly Romantic spasm - self-sacrifice, guilt, witchcraft, a re-gendered Eurydice and Orpheus - a rich vein of deep potential, indeed.

It's rather a shame that Ravenskull isn't that story.

Oh, the art's there - a little shoujo-generic at times, there's something not quite right about the eyes at certain points, the occasional slight SD affection is off-tone for the material - but overall, for OEL pseudo-manga, it's quite good. The bizarre choice to mimic the Japanese style to the extent of following the unflopped back-to-front layout is, however, rather off-putting. You people aren't Japanese, this story wasn't scripted in that language, no-one involved seems to be Japanese, the source material is the product of a pre-Victorian Scotsman - stop trying to pretend otherwise!

But really, the problem with the comic is in the writing. I suspect the writer has no essential grasp of character conflict. The essential and sustaining conflict of any story based on the Rebecca of York and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert presented by Sir Walter Scott ought to be romantic tension. The text of Ivanhoe offers a Rebecca who explicitly despises her suitor, and a Bois-Guilbert who is enraged by his inability to rearrange the world and his love-object in line with his self-image and cynicism. The entire emotional journey of a proposed sequel based on their relationship ought to be between that impasse and the eventual resolution of happiness or self-destruction, or possibly both at once, in the spirit of Scott's own depiction of Ulrica's deathsong, perhaps. This particular journey is completed by the writer of Ravenskull in the first third of the first volume, at break-neck speed, skipping many steps, in a dream-fugue depiction of the road to hell.

Having broken the neck of romantic conflict like a farmwife breaking that of a chicken destined for the soup-pot, the writer then goes on to address what he apparently prefers - artificial divides between already-committed lovers and RPG-style macguffin hunts & generic indestructible villains of the most generic sort. You can see the artist struggling with the material handed him by the writer, and making the best of a bad script. But it wasn't really what I had signed on for, and I rather object to the bait-and-switch. I found myself re-writing on the fly, which is always a sign that the authors have lost me.

Such a shame. I really would have liked to have read the book in my mind, the anticipated story rather than the one delivered. Oh, well.

Hah! That's great - the ethanol replacing MBTE in gasoline has been scouring out the meters in the pumps, biasing the measures downwards so that consumers have been getting a hair more gas then they pay for, on average. That's a benefit of ethanol I hadn't considered! Although it'll probably bite us in the end as we pay for the increased cost of the gas inspectors' time & the early replacement of the eroded, damaged meters. Among other parts, no doubt.

h/t Gas Buddy, which is a daily, sick fascination. And a good source for energy stories.

Could someone in a position to do so remind Ma Nature of the existence of the calendar, and the fact that we have more than a week left in Summer according to that lovely invention? It's been chilly and overcast for three days or more, and I'm not ready for it to be autumn yet. I've still got all of these clean short-sleeved shirts, and somebody just gave me a pile of second-hand shorts that it's too damn cold to wear.

I recognize that nobody can do anything about the fact that dawn is creeping up on me, making my morning commute somewhat gloomy, but the temporary removal of the Grey Monocloud of Fall would definitely brighten up the few remaining days of "summer".