I woke up this morning thinking about the ideology of games. Since my thoughts on the subject are ill-formed and tenuous, I wanted to put together a set of links to brilliant thought on the subject. However, Google has failed me today, and all I can find is dim-witted Theory blovation and thoughtless leftist twaddle.

What I was thinking about was a friend of mine, who's playing a multiplayer beta called Pardus. It's a sort of war/economic blend of a game, where you can concentrate on war-fighting, or play the economic end of things. People can play at war, but if the economics aren't addressed, they'll be fighting with rocks and sticks, metaphorically speaking.

His alliance had gotten into bad relations with the big bad military machine of the neighborhood, and they couldn't face them militarily. Since the game is still a sort of beta, the designers are still changing the rules here and there, and my friend seized on a nasty new twist which opened up the big bad military machine to an economic vulnerability. He carefully set up a chain of conspiracy to financially eviscerate the big bad military machine through deniable cut-outs, and essentially starved off their economic base. Whoopie! Much celebration.

He was justly proud of his intellectual feat, and was clearly looking to repeat his brilliance again. I offered the example of Edward Thorp, who left Vegas after inventing card-counting, and went off to Wall Street to work on hedge strategy. Zero-sum gaming strategies are ego-boosting, but essentially dangerous. Thorp knew that he'd eventually get the hell beaten out of him, or find himself buried in some nameless pit in the deep desert somewhere. My friend's alliance was tearing itself up with paranoia about spies and the threat of retribution as of the last time I looked in on his gameplay. I told him to find a non-zero-sum strategy as brilliant as his act of economic sabotage. Better to be beloved than hated.

As brilliant as his tactic was, it was, in essence, the act of a griefer. Lots of folks, especially kids, get off on griefer tactics - destroying the hard game-work of others. But I have to wonder about the ideological and moral soundness of such behavior. As I said, the alliance which pulled off my friend's economic coup was tearing itself up. Bad acts breed bad feeling, bad karma.

My friend's literally a genius, and I hope he takes my suggestion to heart. I'm kind of interested by the clever work-arounds they used to get around the absence of true banking in the game-system. They've essentially replicated a crude pre-Renaissance-era financial network by manipulating the price of staples in long transaction-chains and de facto letters of credit. It would be very interesting if they can generate a true banking system from what is essentially a resource-exchange simulation.

Oh, btw - I've decided to ban the word "kerfluffle" from this blog. Kindly remind me of this if I ever use it again.

Interesting DoE site on worldwide energy reserves and usages on a nation-by-nation basis. Among other things, I learned that recent news reports have exaggerated the importance of the natural gas reserves of Bolivia, and that the US relies much more heavily on nuclear power plants than I had thought had been the case. 20%? Damn, considering that they haven't started a new-planned plant in twenty years, that's a lot more than I had thought...

Hey! It's March 15th, International Eat an Animal for PETA Day! I'm going to be calling in a reservation at Outbacks for dinner. So far I've only got three people here at work for the party, but I remain optimistic. Today's the day for the biggest, most hedonistically oversized steak dinner you can swing on your daily dime. Eat up! Those critters aren't gonna devour themselves!

There's a bit of a kerfluffle over an obscure black novelist of the 1890s, who turns out to not have been black after all. Emma Durham Kelley-Hawkins was *not* an extraordinarily New Englandish African-American writer, but rather, was a very Caucasian, very undistinguished product of provincial Rhode Island.

The fuss made me wonder what the point of her initial inclusion into the black canon was, really? From all descriptions, her two novels were starchy, bleached affairs of propriety and decorum. I can't help but suspect that this was a sort of petty-aristocratic appropriation...

Much of the tenor of comment has been along the lines of "the only thing that made her interesting as an author was her biography", and complaints about the historicist imposition upon pure aesthetics. I suppose I'm somewhat sympathetic to this sort of outrage, but the counter-example of two authors weigh my hand and temper my enthusiasm.

Georgette Heyer was the most English of romance writers, a fabricator of a Regency England so detailed and expansive that it easily obscures and overshadows the brief historical period upon which it was nominally based upon. The irony of Heyer's reconstruction and appropriation of this lost England is that Heyer was actually the grand-daughter of converted Ukrainian Jews, that her own family spent the period in question in some nameless steppe shetl, before emigrating to the sceptered isle a generation later. You can enjoy Heyer's marvelous novels without ever knowing this fact; the knowledge does not, as far as I can perceive, seriously affect said enjoyment one way or the other. Her ethnicity is irrelevant to her feat of invention.

Joseph Conrad, on the other hand, was a Polish immigrant of the generation previous to Heyer, fleeing Russian oppression. He became an English subject, and spent his active life and career becoming as much of an Englishman as is possible for anyone not born to the land to be. His many novels are as much a part of the English literary tradition and the culture of the British Empire as any native-born Englishman or Scot. But Conrad's biography is inseparable from his literary product. How can you reasonably discuss his Heart of Darkness without reference to his operation of a riverboat on the Congo, or the Secret Sharer and Lord Jim without talking of his time as a tramp ship captain? Nostromo and the Secret Agent are comprehensively influenced and illuminated by Conrad's characteristic viewpoint as the imperial outsider.

If it were revealed that Conrad had not been the Polish immigrant that we thought him, but rather a well-traveled Welshman, then what would we make of his body of work? It would *utterly change them*. The author himself is assumed to occupy a particular viewpoint, a vantage. To change Conrad from a Pole to our hypothetical Welshman, or a lowland Scot, would be roughly akin to discovering that el Greco had perfect vision, and his distortions and elongations were artifacts of artistic intent entire.

Via the Instapundit, because I'm lazy that way.

I don't know what to think of the pro-Syrian demonstration yesterday. I can read the Lebanese and Beirut blogs and reassure myself that it's just the old tyrannical mob-mobilization tactics at work, but it's pretty damn easy to coddle yourself with those who are telling you what you want to hear, isn't it? (Omar from Iraq the Model pitches in to describe the festivities as echoing the usual Baath tactics, but once again, what I want to hear...)

The fact remains that Hezbollah and the Syrians between themselves put at least 200K men in the heart of Beirut. That's a lot of bodies, and a lot of young military-age bodies at that. Even if they were coerced, ordered, shangaied, and shipped in, that still represents a capacity for crowd control and logistics which suggests that the weakness of the tyrants is exaggerated, suggests that the totalitarians can still totalize their masses against the will of the individuals of the whole.

Not good, not good at all.

Yesterday's WWI color photos link went bye-bye, so I spent the lunch hour putting together a photo page on my old freeservers site to preserve the interesting bits. Any takers on how long it lasts before freeservers shuts my bandwidth-hogging ass down? Yeah, yeah - I know it sucks. My photo-handling skills can be contained in a thimble, with room left over for you and me.

These French color photographs from World War I are weirdly nostalgic. Maybe it's the rural-forested-crumbled ruin aspect of it all, but I keep getting these feelings of deja vu from them. My mind isn't trained to expect pictures of World War I wreckage and ruin to be in *color* - and so very clear color at that! - so it keeps slotting in other experiences to fill in the emotional gaps. The ruins look like abandoned industrial ruins I've seen all over Pennsylvania - quarries, abandoned factories, etc. The gatherings of soldiers under tents and lush pine-forest canopies bring back memories of Boy Scout camp-outs. It all looks so - immediate. And strangely peaceful.

Via Bill at INDC Journal.

Oh, for the love of God... the US is in the process of destroying its last mustard gas stockpiles. Why the hell would we be using that noxious shit in Fallujah? Look around for pictures of Marines, troopers, and soldiers from second Fallujah. I challenge y'all to find me one of somebody in a gas mask, let alone a MOPP suit.

This report is coming from an Iraqi official from the Health Ministry. What the hell is wrong with the Iraqi Health Ministry? It seems to be the go-to place in that country for misinformation, enemy propaganda, and gross ignorance.

Ahh... maybe I'm overreacting. It's entirely possible that there are large swathes of Fallujah's citizenry with a history of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons usage. Veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, the Anfal campaign, or just peacetime usage and exposure. Not to mention farmers and people living in contact with well-sprayed agricultural areas...

Via the Iraq Coalition Casualties Count page. Yes, I do check it on a daily basis, hoping that there's nothing new...

Austin Bay writes that, though triumphalists have become quick to see in 2005 another 1989 in the offing, that this is no year for end-games. He's right - 1989 was a year of paradigmic shifts, a vast and sudden collapse. But the Cold War lasted for forty turmoilent years of ups and downs, and to look for parallels in every new year the ending-year come again is to build oneself a machine for disappointment. There were years of movement and apparent success whose offings devoured the optimistic and revolutionary.

Consider 1956, the year that Khrushchev's liberalizing moderation met the people's will, and recoiled in a great sudden withdrawing, like the waves from a Sri Lankan beach on a late December morn. The light dawning from under the foul and dark cloud over Tyrant Stalin's mouldering corpse, and Eastern Europe stirring from its ill dream.

Happy Hungary, her chains put by the side, stands from her crouch, back aching from long years of subjugation and toil. Democratic forces on the march. Then the counter-march.

Her border groaning under the tank's tread, and the gentle wave returns with tidal recruits, to sweep silly dreams of sudden liberation away in a crush of shattered masonry, molotov-fire and petrol-station flame-thrower desperation.

Not all years are miracles, and the tyrant has his own ballot, large-bored and heavy-calibred, unanswerable and uncontestable when backed by mushroom-cloud MADness. And 1989 itself ended in a massacre of silly hopes under grinding tank-tread roars and machine-gun fire before a paper-mache statue of Liberty.

Well, hell. Some poor kid from Kentucky coal-mining country got arrested for writing a SF-ish short story about a high school overrun by zombies based on a law against making terroristic threats against high schools. His grandparents turned him in. Is this typical behavior among coal-mining folk? If so, I start to see where Fred's coming from, on the subject. For some reason, I thought that one of the virtues of Appalachian hill-folk was clannishness - you know, protecting one's own. Not turning your grandkids in to the thought police.

Those rumors about Lynn Swann getting ready to run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Pennsylvania appear to be true. A black conservative football hero as the Republican candidate. That ought to be entertaining, if it comes off. There'd be blood on the wardroom walls in Philly.

Via Professor Bainbridge.

Jessica, I don't know if you've seen this, but I seem to remember that you were playing around with knitting a while back, and I thought that you might be amused by the notion of radical political knitting, and the idea of someone trying to show that knitting is transgressive and "erotic".

That last bit really cries out for illustration, doesn't it? No links to follow, sorry.

Anime Jump is pretending to introduce an anime-con advice column called Con Nazi. Half amusing, half annoying. But the scalding hotness of the pink-haired girl in the "sign whore" photo has left me too busy drooling to complain. Much.

I just submitted a write-up for the year I was con-chair for the Big Anime Con Which Shall Not Be Named, only five years after it was due. The Vice Chair verbally spanked me for naming names in the manuscript. Hey, I'm still the only ex-chair to submit a writeup for his or her year's events, so pttpth. I'll link it when it goes up.

Jack Chalker died earlier this month. He had something of a reputation on the con circuit, and I haven't read one of his novels in years, but he was something else in his prime. I used to devour his novels as soon as they appeared on the shelves in the local bookstores. They got me through some fairly grim and lonesome years when I was a kid. I can't say I'm surprised that he died - he wasn't exactly the healthiest of individuals, even back in the days when I still went to SF conventions - but it's still a bit of a shock.

Fred had something on his blog the other week about Mountain English, and hillybilly jokes. (Fred, I have difficulty telling whether or not the Daily Blatt is back or not. Sorry about delinking you for so long - thought it was in abeyance.)

I have to admit that I've told dumb-mountain-hicks jokes before, and played up the whole "mountain man" routine. To be honest, I'm not hill country - I grew up in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, which, while hilly, isn't Appalachia - more like yunzer territory, strained through a generation-and-a-half of suburbanization. But the full beard and the glower fool people into thinking I'm something I'm not - a local - and thus I'm in a position to play games with expectations. I don't know, is that a sort of blackface? If so, I apologize.

I don't generally have an ear for dialect - I can barely identify my own, let alone replicate that of others'. I do think that dialects are dialects, and t'heck with these goofy half-languages - I don't care if you have an army, you're still mostly English, or mostly Dutch, or whatever. Which reminds me of this highly amusing post about the trials and travails of "UlsterScots", newly-recognized minority-language of the EU.

But I never had to lose my yunzer accent, nor was I pressured to do so, aside from the twice-yearly finger-waving article in the Pittsburgh Press or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the horrors of sounding like a Arn City hunkie. In fact, when I remembered to, I often played up what little accent I had while I was at college, doing my best to drive the Philly folk bonkers. It still drives Dave Asher nuts whenever I propose to "worsh" some clothes.

That's just fucking charming. Choads.

I feel sick. Whenever someone goes on about tradition and honor, think about a young woman tied up in the back seat of a taxi bound for the empty desert. Murderous fucking lunacy. Don't let the bastards tell you it's their religion. This shit isn't about some atheist's projection of "sky bullies" or "bearded vengeance-demons", it's about the self-regard of miserable, selfish old men and their solipsistic and blasphemous worship of their severely over-extended egos.

These men are the same breed of bastard who become family annihilators in the West - those moral cripples who think of their families as literal extensions of their selves, so that when they commit suicide, they start with the outer-most extensions, and work inwards towards the core, eventually reaching their physical selves. Except the honor-killing traditions allow them to just stop with an expendable daughter, or sister - expunging the shame with the least loss to the collective self.

Via K.J. Lopez at the Corner.

"Josve novem svete, tak prohoba speak American!"

Ann Althouse, in a discussion of Greg Easterbrook's nth partial-ingestion of his footwear, on the subject of lingua francas and whether minority languages ought to be neglected or celebrated, linked to this impassioned Irish defense of minority and artificial-nationality languages. [I really ought to re-subscribe to the New Republic. I let my subscription lapse last year, but maybe it's time to go on back, yes?]

First of all, I don't think that Easterbrook would actually argue in favor of enforced monolingualism. He doesn't strike me as that sort of guy - but I will have to find a copy of the full, unexcerpted piece to double-check my assumptions. The excerpts seem to suggest that he's arguing for benign neglect - an absence of celebration of microculture. Musgrave, the irate Irishman, talks as if he's infuriated by this suggestion, but then proceeds to give an account of the Gaelic League, and Irish nationalism's obnoxious use of Gaelic, which does everything but march across a Pyongyang stadium waving flags in synchronized-uniformed-proletarian-crowd fashion to convince me that the politics associated with minority language and nationalities based on minority languages are noxious, fruitless, and scary.

There are two examples of modern nation-states which have used an artificially-resurrected language, reclaimed from the bin of history, as mortar for their new nationalities - Ireland and Israel. Israel's self-invention through the reintroduction of Hebrew makes perfect sense to me, really. The various Jews, Christians, and Muslims who transformed the bulk of the British mandate of Palestine into the nation-state Israel didn't share a common lingua franca. The local Jews, Christians, and Muslims spoke Arabic, as did the Sephardic Jews who fled the Arabic pogroms of the late 1940s. The European Jewish settlers, and later refugees from the Shoah and American Jewish settlers after the founding, however, spoke no such thing. They spoke Yiddish, or English, or French, or Russian, or whatever. The reintroduction of Hebrew, a liturgical language not used in daily life, anywhere, prior to the Zionist foundations of the late Nineteenth Century, provided a common difficulty - the learning of a new language which didn't politically advantage any of the linguistic factions involved in the founding. It was a common linguistic gathering-point for a polyglot collective defined not by language, but religion, ethnicity, and accident.

The Irish-Gaelic counterexample, however, is a completely different story. Here, we are presented by the example of a colonial population, mostly absorbed into the dominant culture, in which the original language is a rural remnant on the decline, even in the countryside. Everybody either speaks the lingua franca, or aspires to do so, for social and economic reasons. The political re-introduction of the remnant-minority was used as part of a non-rational program of cultural idolatry - ancestor-worship through a dying language. There was no need to cement together populations divided by language, because they were already speaking the same, dominant, imperial language - there was just a minority who spoke something else while at home. Note in Musgrave's account, that it wasn't the rural speakers of Gaelic who typically pushed the nationalist-adoption of the language, but rather, academics and middle-class revolutionaries and radicals who saw that adaptation as a form of exclusion, of definition.

The Irish use of Gaelic was not inclusive, but rather analytical - not centripetal, but centrifugal. The Israeli usage of Hebrew was to make Jews (and local natives) Israeli - to weld together a polity. The Irish usage of Gaelic was to make individuals not-English - to renounce membership in the Imperial project.

In many ways, the Gaelic project was compulsive - which rather explains why modern Gaelic is not a living, breathing language, but is rather more of a liturgical language in the Irish civic religion, and seems to be used primarily for official purposes and high-cultural demonstrations of linguistic virtue.

Really, if I had to deal with the Irish political culture on a day-to-day basis, I might find myself searching for a new Empire, a new Imperium, to sweep away the petty cultural fascisms. I might find myself jumping at the chance to drown the Irish state in the post-national universality of the European Union, no matter how idiotic or obnoxious d'Estang's phonebook of a constitutional draft might be.

Sigh. Much better discussion of Steven Gould's Jumper and Reflex than my lame and halting blather. I suppose it might help if I would actually go and read the Count of Monte Cristo one of these days...

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED.

Sadly, the actual post links seem to be dead. Where is my fix of Robert McElwaine madness?

Damn your criminal Armenian grandparents! Now I have to go look up Hasan B. Mutlu/Achmed Cosar/Serdar Argic.

Steve Gould is a SF author with a fairly low output - he's only published five or six books in the last fifteen years. However, there are some really excellent juveniles in that meagre collection - specifically, the Wild Side and his first novel, Jumper. the Wild Side is definitively a juvenile - the feel is sort of like H. Beam Piper writing from a Heinlein juvenile-novel outline - but I might have mis-characterized Jumper. At the time, the wish-fulfillment aspects of the plot - victim of child abuse develops a near-godlike ability to teleport, remakes his life as he grows into adulthood - led me to think of the novel as a really, really excellent young-adult novel. The fact that he followed it up with the equally excellent the Wild Side cemented it in my imagination as such. When he started writing adult-themed novels like Blind Waves, I was a bit disappointed - while fine books, Blind Waves and Helm didn't have the spark of his earlier work, and I was afraid that he was "growing out of" his talents.

This is why I was less than enthused when I saw that he had written a sequel to Jumper, more than a decade after the publishing of the first book. Jumper had not really cried out for a sequel - the character-arc was complete, the protagonist's power was such that the real conflicts of the book wasn't between him and the various terrorists, government spooks, and father-figures, but rather within his own skull - his emotional development. That emotional arc was pretty much complete by the end of the book, with him happily married, secure, and well-employed as a freelance spook for the NSA. (Why the NSA? For some reason, the CIA doesn't exist in Gould's Jumper world, or at least, is never seen on stage or mentioned. Peculiar. I'll get back to that in a bit.)

The new novel, Reflex is being advertised primarily with a description of the plot, so I won't be spoiling anyone any further by saying that it begins with the clever kidnapping of the superpowered hero, Davy, and offers an elaborate imprisonment "A story" of operant conditioning, alternating with a "B story" of his wife's quest to find her missing husband.

As a plot-description, it sounded idiotic, a total hash of the original novel, and I had initial qualms. The way Gould moves forward with the story redeems the pulp outline, however, and I found myself tearing through the book in a single sitting. Gould definitely shows himself to be a disciple of Lois McMaster Bujold's "what's the worst thing we could do to this character" school of action-novel plotting, and it's vital to maintaining interest in such an excessively powerful personage as Davy the multilingual, unstoppable, uncontainable supernatural god-of-spies. The villains are terribly, terribly careful in their construction of constraints for the man who can disappear from any pen, any cell, any jail. They're fighting with the basic impossibility of bending to their will a man who can jump to the other side of the world from any given situation, or, even worse, the other side of the wall - right in your face. The fact that the villains make a good show of it makes that part of the novel compelling.

The other half is problematic, in a self-respect sort of way. It's unapologetically pulp, one-half authorial special-pleading, one-half wish-fulfillment, and way more fun than it ought to be. In short, Davy's wife, Millie, ends up inheriting his ability to flick back and forth through space. She "jumps". This is a violation of the premise of the original novel, in which Davy is unique, and unreplicable. There were suggestions that the talent might be genetic, or some sort of mutational freak. Nevertheless, after her husband disappears, leaving her stranded in their insanely-remote West Texas mountain place - called "the Aerie" and inaccessible except via Davy's talent - she discovers that riding along on thousands of "jumps" has somehow taught her the reflex that allows "jumping". Of course, she learns this by nearly falling to her death in an accident while trying to get back to civilization, so it's not nearly as lame as it sounds, but still - comic-booky as hell.

Gould makes some genuflections towards literary and thematic merit by tying together the "reflex" goals of the harsh, ugly operant conditioning at the centre of Davy's story, and Millie's learned reflexes as she develops the family power in her search for the villains. Gould almost pulls it off, but in the end, it's just really brilliant pulp. It isn't juvenile, however - not with all of the torture and sexuality and violent grotesqueries - and I'm not sure if I've mis-categorized the original novel, or if Gould has jumped sub-genres. The wrap-up at the end of Reflex leaves the door open for a trilogy-finale, and I suppose Gould has earned the right to a pulp-trilogy trifecta.

Gould does his best to keep the book moored in a semblance of reality. Davy does chores for the NSA in retrieving North Korean nuclear scientists, and inserting agents all over the world. Real mercenary groups are mentioned, and real situations are cited. Back when Jumper first came out, the novel's fixation on Middle Eastern terrorists seemed somewhat archaic - dated Eighties attitudes towards terrorism. You know, it was the Nineties. We were watching the end of history, and that sort of thing was old-fashioned. Now, more than a dozen years later, it makes a heck of a lot more sense. Strangely, Gould drops that line, and takes an even more old-fashioned attitude which I won't get too heavily into to avoid spoilers. Let's just say that I find his sudden anti-capitalist line a bit peculiar.

Oh, yes - the supplanting of the NSA for the CIA. Most if not all of the work Davy does for the government is through the National Security Agency - the good old "No Such Agency". The strangeness here is that the real-world NSA isn't exactly a two-fisted HUMINT-and-counterintelligence-cowboys outfit. They're wire-spooks, crypto types and electronic surveillance boffins. Instead, they're shown doing stake-outs, running security perimeters, and quarrelling with the FBI. What does this mean? Damned if I know, but it's really odd. Does Gould have a day-job at the CIA or something?

Mmm. Brilliant morning. Yellow and gold and orange with the purple-gray-green mountains in the distance.

We watched the first two episodes of Gallery Fake last night. It's this Seventies-TV-flavored, cool-jazz anime about a rogue art-dealer who specializes in authentication and counterfeiting scams. He runs a small gallery in Tokyo that specializes in really, really good fakes - the eponymous "Gallery Fake" - along with his Arabic-princess little matchstick girl of an assistant. It sounds exactly like my sort of thing, but the writer or writers just couldn't pay off on the premise. None of the scams really make sense, and you leave the episodes more confused than enlightened. He produces "real" versions of fake paintings straight from the deus ex machina, which is annoying in a narrative sense.

Furthermore, I still don't get how the deauthentication scam of the first episode works internally - the conspirators falsely label authentic paintings as fake, passing them out of the museum's collection at fire-sale prices through the suborned dealer. But how do they get back on the market as "real"? I thought the whole point of authentication was that the trail of ownership was known - the provenance of the painting, from painter to dealer to owner and so on. How do they "wash clean" the false accusation? The writers of Gallery Fake don't bother to tell us, don't fill in the gaps. Villains just look shifty and get shafted by the brilliant protagonist, and we're supposed to applaud his brilliance. Except the shafting seems to consist of the protagonist paying three times as much as he was supposed to for the Monet in question. Presumably the conspirators were the ones putting the painting up for auction, through some series of cut-outs or fronts. Didn't he just overpay the villains for their work?

It drives me a little batty, because the subject is sort of interesting. I don't understand the world of high art. I'm a prints sort of guy - a believer in the mass market and art for the general crowd. The one-off painting of unsurpassing fame and vast price is a fundamental mystery to me. The basic aesthetic quality of the multi-million dollar paintings seem to be only a slight fractionate element of the auction price. More important is the uniqueness of the work, the creator's reputation, the work's reputation, and the train of ownership. The metadata about the painting seems to drive the pricing of investor-grade art more than anything intrinsic about the thing itself.

Here is where counterfeiting and fakery become interesting. They produce work which are, on an aesthetic level, no different to my philistine eyes than the true metal stamped from the original press. Even if that aesthetic value of the false work is fractionately less than the true work, since the aesthetic value is such a minor element in the pricing of the work, the metadata surrounding both works is what is important to the investors, bidders, and curators.

The protagonist of Gallery Fake holds great thematic potential here. There are slight suggestions in the narrative that might lead one to the supposition that some fakes could be better than the original work - that the counterfeit might be aesthetically superior to the true metal. Someone who deauthenticates real work exposes the art to the open air of raw criticism - strips it of all pretense and borrowed glory, and leaves it reliant on its intrinsic, aesthetic merits. Such a protagonist would be noble in the existential sense - severing art from art history, ideology from aesthetics.

I suppose I'm expecting too much from a slight bit of fluff like Gallery Fake. But these are the ideas that come roiling to the surface when someone stirs the waters, you know?

Was just talking to an agronomist about the "Asian Rust", the fungus that's been wasting its way north through the soybean growing areas of Latin America, and that made landfall in the US last autumn. Word is that it grows on kudzu as well as soybeans, which means that it's inevitably going to become endemic to the American southeast. No way they're going to gas it out of the country if it's lurking in every kudzu patch from Gainesville to Shreveport.

The question right now is if they can deal with Asian Rust with a single fungicidal spraying per season, or if it's going to take more than that. The profit margins on soybeans are low enough, and the application cost is high enough, that more than one pass per field per year would make the whole business untenable on the east coast. Luckily, our company specializes in weather prediction for agricultural spraying purposes, which means we're in a position to offer predictions as to when the new rust is going to strike in any locality, and when the wind patterns and hydrology is best in the window-period for a fungicidal spraying.

Best case, Asian Rust just becomes one more pest for agribusinessmen to factor in their cost-benefit risk analysis. Here's hoping.

Damn.

For all of y'all coming here via the Corner, I don't usually make a big deal of it, but I work for an IT company that does a lot of GIS work, which means I get to play with a lot of mapping applications and the like. I'm not so much a map geek as an assistant to mapping professionals of a sort. However, like a lot of wargaming enthusiasts, I do have that giddy fascination for a good contoured map, the representation of reality in two-dimensional color and false-perspective.

DeLorme's Topo USA 4.0 is installed on my work machine, and to be strictly honest, it's my primary tool. We've got various real GIS applications all over the place, and I do a lot of hand-editing on detailed GPS-indexed agricultural data, but that isn't the exciting stuff, is it? Topo USA 4.0 gives the pretty, pretty pictures, and it's actually a decent resource for finding locations in the continental US. Most often, I use Mapquest if Topo USA is letting me down, but in most particulars the software beats the website, especially if you've turned on the topographic features on Topo USA. For online topographic neatness, you can always go with Topozone, but that website is essentially a really comprehensive set of digitized topographic maps at various resolutions, rather than a truly interactive map webapp. Outside of the continental US, you'll be wanting Multimap, which I've found to be pretty useful for Canadian informational searches, and for following along with American blitzkrieg warfare in the Middle East.

As with most things, Google is your first stop for finding the unknown, or refreshing the half-remembered.

Real GIS professionals play with ArcView and other, better tools, I'm told. I used to use ArcView a bit, but frankly, I'm not a real GIS professional, and it's a monstrous pain in the ass. We have our in-house GIS applications which I can't show you due to it all being only for paying customers, sorry. You can contact us if you're really interested, but I doubt we're going to get many agriculture professionals looking for GIS work around these parts, no?

I've been spending time reading the Grantville Gazette, Vol. 1. It's essentially a collection of fanfic set in Eric Flint's Grantville/Ring of Fire/1632 conceit, edited and approved by said author. The irony is that the collection is more interesting than the first volume of the series, which had serious character and writing issues.

I have a weakness for these sorts of collective Robinson Crusoe stories, going right back to Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky. They're like boy's own adventures for entire communities. Steve Sterling, who's wrote a lot of 'em, seems to be saying in Conquistador that the appeal of these drop-the-home-town-in-Ancient-Rome stories is that they're imperialist fantasies, colonial playacting. Maybe so.

I learned the other day that the Bellefonte Wok had been located down on High Street before I moved up here. I had gotten so used to them being in in the Brockerhoff that it never occurred to me that they started out somewhere else. Ironically enough, I discovered this because an online reference site had retained this six-year-old phone and address for the Wok, while all of the paper phonebooks in the county have long since caught up to their new location. So much for the vaunted flexibility of the internet, yes?

Hiccups. I hate hiccups. How can something be so harmless while being at the same time the most misery-inducing condition known to otherwise-healthy man? The only cure I've found so far is to make like a jellyfish in my chair, completely limp. Otherwise, all the cures - gargling water, heavy breathing, tensioning, not breathing at all, bends, etc - seem to be bunk.

NPR was on about Sharon and Abbas looking to begin a "new age of peace talks". What an unfortunate prospect! To mangle Twain, the difference between a "new age of peace talks" and a "new age of peace" is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

OK, I'm split on the Shanley verdict. On the one hand, he sounds like a right ripe NAMBLA-founding chickenhawk. On the other hand, if there's two dozen accusers out there, how come the only one they went to court with resulted in a case built on "recovered memory" testimony? Is it some sort of statute-of-limitations bullshit? (I guess so.) As far as I can tell, "recovered memory" is nothing more than guided confabulation with an agenda; the idea that it can be used in a court of law is about as welcome to me as the prospective return of spectral evidence.

Seven in the morning is too early for "Dead Things", FX.

Well, the flu did its best to kill me dead, but I seem to still be here, so nuts to the flu. The office was a real plague ship on Thursday. I was half out of my mind with fever, and they came thisclose to renting an angel-with-burning-sword to get me to go home. The apartment is something of a mess, what with the blankets and used tissues and random crap laying about. My apartment is more a place for storing my books and crashing at night, than somewhere you'd want to be stuck in for long periods of time.

Bedding issues meant that I finally opened a Christmas gift from the relatives, and discovered that I had been gifted with a denim comforter for my bed. Denim. I guess they were out of sackcloth? Well, I suppose I exaggerate - for denim, it was remarkably soft and not-sack-cloth-ish. But it's still a coarse twillish sort of deal, where. I managed to soak the new bedsheets last night, so I suppose I'm gonna have to wash the whole load some time real soon now, anyways.

Gah! Everytime I need to go do something, I come down sick with some sort of bug. Last Friday, it was a head cold. Today, it's an incipient chest-congestion sort of thing. I *had* been planning on going to give blood this afternoon, but I can't go donate if I'm on the verge of something infectious, can I? Bah. They've been nagging me ever since I missed giving in December. Maybe it'll go away by the seventh - there's another blood drive then, over at the Elks'.

I suppose I should mention that I was off at a convention-meeting that is, in itself, a convention entire. The staff for said anime convention has grown so large that there are more staffers than there were attendee/members at the first convention, back in 1994. I'm theoretically more active in staffing than I have been for years, but I can't claim that I was all that active last weekend. I sat and read a book during the interminable discussions over revisions to the bylaws on membership definitions, and when I finished the book, I took off, while they were still working item e or f of sections a through, hrm, k maybe?

[The book was SM Stirling's Conquistador, his latest love-letter to colonials and imperialists. Well, that's a tad unkind, but really, I'm starting to spot a trend, here, what with the Draka, the Nantucket trilogy, the Peshawar Lancers, and so on. The gist of the story is that a Virginia vet found a way into an alternate-history dimension in post-WWII Oakland,CA, and founded a "Commonwealth of New Virginia" with his war buddies, and what seems like every displaced colonial population produced by the second half of the 20th century. Stirling seems to like to play with the tension between colonial racism and what he sees as the cultural, ecological, and economic virtues of the colonial lifestyle. Personally, I think he exaggerates the environmental wisdom of his hypothetical New Virginia, but hey, it's his soap-box. And you gotta respect a SF writer who spends his spare time baiting the tools on Democratic Underground.]

Otherwise, I mostly spent the weekend playing games with other staffers, and catching up with Todd Dissinger, who finally made it back up from Alabama for a ComCon. Everybody was going on about playing poker on the mailing lists, but I couldn't find a single game all weekend, which kind of irked me. So, instead, I found myself playing the old stand-bys - Citadel, History of the World, etc. We only got three rounds into History of the World - everybody got tired and bored, and called the game less than half-way through. Wimps.

A friend emailed me this site specializing in the history of Bellefonte. I just read this column about a Keystone Cops foot-chase that apparently did a full horseshoe loop around my block, from North Spring over to the alley across the street from the Moose Lodge down towards the elementary school, ending with the robber hiding in a tree and the cop scratching his head a half-block down the alley behind my place. Inconsequential, but amusing.

For consequential, you have a lot of blogs to choose from, no? Just don't fall for another action figure taken hostage by Islamic Farkers, OK?

Thinking over the current meme, my five favorite on-going manga series would probably be, in no particular order,

1) Hot Gimmick, due to its cast of likable characters, and an absolutely ravishing character-design style, for which my admiration only grows with time and familiarity. I just love that non-continuous, razored-line eye work. The soap-opera story is still working, too, although the author is getting very close to the end of her narrative rope on the main relationship by the end of the current volume - she needs to let it resolve, I think. It's not as if she can throw another violent sociopath or contrived recovered-memory trauma at the main couple every other volume, like the author of Mars did.

2) Bleach, which is just another disguised-sentai psychic-teen actioner, so I really ought to be ashamed of loving it as much as I do. But really - it's an *excellent* psychic-teens punch-em-up, with a fine sense of style, and some of the funniest, cleverest facial expressions in manga. It's built of nothing but cliche, situation, and stock-character - but the execution is so brilliant that I can't do anything other than gush.

3) Tramps Like Us, aka Kimi wa Pet, is a bit of a rarity in the manga released in the states, in that the characters are all actual, living, breathing adults. Nothing much ever really happens, but the nothing that happens just makes me happy.

4) Please Save My Earth just keeps cranking along, and it's definitely one of the series which I await, impatiently at best, every other month for the latest installment. I'm especially excited now that the story has gotten past the parts animated in the early-Nineties six-part OAV series. I can only hope that it's more Rin-and-Alice than Tamura and the rest of the stonefaces.

5) XXXholic, for the chill, stark black-and-white imagery, and Yuko, 'cause she's just cool. But Del Rey is *not* helping me keep to this love with the fourth volume's scanned-at-one-level-too-coarse ham-handed presentation. I don't care how expert the line-work is coming from the artists, if the production-line squiggles it all to pixelized mush. Damnit.

On the other end of the scale, I grabbed a few things from the Comic Swap's bargain-bin the other week, and found myself marching through Dark Horse's Club 9, which wasn't exactly attractive at $15.95, but was worth a whirl at half-price. I say marching, because it was something of a slog. There have been a number of folks talking up Club 9, but I can't see for the life of me why they would have done so, barring a knife at their collective throats, or some malicious urge to direct unwary readers towards experiences of pain and irritation.

Club 9 is a slice-of-life-sorta story about a north-country Japanese hick's young-adult life as she graduates from high school and goes off to college in Tokyo. Our protagonist Haruo is ugly, dim, unlucky, a klutz, and burdened with the worst accent since the days of Ma and Pa Kettle. Seriously, the translators make her sound like the sort of imaginary, stereotypical, inbred hillbilly that haunt the dreams of election-burned snobs all up and down the blue-state coasts. She uses idiot country similes too insane for Dan Rather, and drawls like a coke-addled Yazoo County beauty-pageant runner-up. It wouldn't be quite so bad if they were going the hush-mah-mauf sly-hick making fun of the snobs comedy route, but they aren't. We're supposed to find her endearingly naive and lovable in her stupidity. Hell, we don't even get to the titular Ginza hostess-bar setting until the back third of the first volume. Instead we have a tedious meander through baseball politics and the horrors of dorm-room hauntings and such.

It isn't as if the manga is particularly enjoyable to look at - the layouts are uninspired, and the character designs are like the retarded cousins of those early-Meiji woodcuts of cross-eyed, jellybean-faced galloots that get trotted out whenever an editor wants some offensive graphics to accompany something borderline racist and stereotypical about the Japanese. I could take that in a gag comic - but this is supposed to be about attractive, vivacious Ginza-bar hostesses! Bah, I say: Bah!

Ugh, wonderful. A skunk has crawled under the front of the office building, and is spraying its territory. We're debating how to deal with this infestation. Somebody suggested taking a sledgehammer to it. I said I'd like to see the person with reflexes fast enough to squish a mobile skunk. Even so, I can't imagine but smashing a skunk with a hammer would do anything other than splatter musk all over the place. Shooting it is right out, due to that pesky "100 yrds from inhabited building" law. Anybody got a terrier with more mean than sense?

Update: Well, I got tired of the kevetching, so I went out with our twenty-foot satellite-dish scraper to see if I couldn't convince it to move on. It was thoroughly dead - somebody found a blood trail leading under the porch, which suggests that it got hit by a car last night, and tried to burrow under the building for warmth. I couldn't get any leverage to pull it out from under the building with the scraper, so after I assured myself that it was pining for the fjords, I grabbed a heavy-duty iron rake and dug it out. It was something of a pain rolling the damned corpse to the trees at the back of the property, but I couldn't get it to carry on the end of the rake, and I was damned if I was going to touch a dead skunk with my bare hands.

Dave threatened to ban me from his apartment if I got sprayed, but dead skunks very rarely spray, so I suppose I'm off the hook. Don't know what the fuss is about. It only smells a little worse than Ben Hauger's catshit coffee.

Oh, that's excellent. Television Without Pity is covering Battlestar Galactica. I used to hang out at that website back when there were decent Joss Whedon shows on the air. Nice to have a reason to head on back.

Meme going 'round the blogsphere - describe your favorite movies in seven words, without hinting at the title.

I'm not a one for bestest favorites, but I do have my soft spots:

Weatherman wakes repeatedly to Sonny and Cher

Minnesotan hicks find plane, cash, and tragedy

Homer mugged for Southern nostalgia, oldtimey music

Urban Phildickian amnesia experiment by hatted aliens

I am Jack's description of this movie

Parisian musical with pop lyrics and absinthe

Stolen gold and doomed Shia perplex soldiers

Gunfighter dueling competition with Oedipus and Electra

Deathrow murderesses chase fame with musicial numbers

Went out to do a sit-down lunch, the Inaugural came on NPR, and I ended up eating in my car, and then sitting in the parking lot at work until Bush finished his speech. I can be a sucker for ritual and rhetoric, in the right time and place. I wonder if that yelling you could hear behind Bush during his speech was protestors, or just random yammerers in the crowd?

The substance was unexceptional, heavier on foreign policy than I expected, given recent focus on domestic policy. He managed to get through the entire speech without a single direct reference to terrorism, managing even to cite the Koran as a source of private virtue underlying public policy. He preferred to go on about freedom, and countering tyranny. There was a line about force being only a peripheral element of the advancement of democracy - the signals in the speech were all telling against further military offensives. [Update - the line is "This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary." Transcript here.] I'm starting to think that rumblings about Syria and Iran are projections and phantoms. He didn't sound like someone getting ready to bang the war-drums.

Well, that was different. PSSFS has almost totally evolved past its GRANOP days; I was easily the least socialized individual at the meeting. Not only did they have milk and cookies (well, technically, milk and biscotti...) but they had them *nonironically*. At first, I thought it was some sort of Andy Kaufman thing, but no-body was goofing off on the ritual. It was just something they did. No fatheads, no geeking, no incoherent gibberish. Well, at least, not by my standards. I didn't recognize a single person there, which probably means that I was the only non-student in the crowd.

After the milk and biscotti and some club business about the new library (housed somewhere in the HUB, so we were told), they got down to the main attraction - an officer reading from a novelization of a Nickelodean kids' SF series called the Secret World of Alex Mack. I gathered that it was found during the move of the library holdings into its new digs. After the dramatic reading, they continued by watching some DVD episodes of Gargoyles, a show I really have no use for, sad to say. They still do the old four-column attendance sheet thing, but I didn't really have time to sit through an hour-and-a-half of American animation to stick around for the attendance sheet reading.

Nice to see that there is some generational improvement in the community of nerdom. Of course, it might be that the anime club has bled off all the sociopaths and Asoerger's Syndrome kiddies. But one must have hope.

I'm going to go parachute into a meeting of PSSFS, my old SF club. It's been years and years since I went to one, and I'm going to be passing through town for comic shop stock day, anyways.

I've been kind of hibernetical recently; there just isn't much of anything going on, and I barely have enough energy to do the nothing required of me. Got a rather astonishing credit card bill in the mail the other day - nothing I can't cover, easily, but still - the sort of thing that would have stopped my heart dead if I had gotten it back in my penurious post-college days. You know, back when I used to go to PSSFS on a weekly basis, and write their newsletters. I see that they've misplaced the old archives in the last re-design; I saved 'em myself, somewhere. I think. Looks like someone tried to start doing weekly newsletters through livejournal, although it seems to be defunct.

I got a look at the first three episodes of Ron Moore's new Battlestar Galactica last night. Satellite channel Sky 4 in the UK apparently got a hold of the new series early last fall, and has been broadcasting it all season long. Which would be all fine and good, except that Sky likes to put a station-identification logo permanently imbedded in the upper left corner of what would be the 4:3 section of the screen, if the show hadn't been filmed and broadcast in widescreen. Also, PAL material tends to come out funny when viewed on NTSC equipment, and all of the male characters had that characteristic PAL helium-whine.

All that aside, they were great episodes. It's rock-solid material, easily equal to the mini-series in all qualities. Spoiler-space for those of you not blessed with parasitic access to the gordiehoweverse:

The episodes don't have names, or at least, the versions I saw were nameless. If they had them, however, I would fully expect the first episode to be entitled "Thirty-three Minutes". We're introduced into the series in media res, as the rag-tag fleet races against an unexplained countdown. Fighters are scrambled, chaos on the communication lines as civilian ships slowly and painfully organize their planned "jumps" out of the scene to the next rendezvous point. As the count-down hits zero, the Cylons jump in, charging for the fleet. The defenses of the Galactica unload on them, as the rest of the fleet winks away, leaving the Galactica in a final rush to catch her fighters on the run, jumping away just before the first nukes pass through their position. They arrive at the rendezvous, and re-start the countdown clocks. Here we learn that this is something like the two-hundredth iteration of this particular cycle, and they've been running without rest or pause for five straight days. The episode itself is just as relentless and breathless as the fleet itself, with restless, urgent drums rushing the characters from each brief crisis to next, every face growing paler and every hand shakier as the minutes tick down on dozens of mechanical clocks and primitive digital displays.

The plot-threads started in the miniseries continue, seamlessly, through the three episodes viewed. Gaius Baltar continues to struggle against discovery, madly alternating between arguments with his ghost-Cylon haunt, and desperately "maintaining" before a bemused President Roslyn and an increasingly-skeptical Commander Adama, who insistently demands a "Cylon Detector" from the scientist, who made the mistake of claiming he could do so in the mini-series. Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama continues to serve as a bridge between his father-the-Commander and the President, and the scenes between the three are clearly being written as a sort of metaphor for a blended family, the President at one point exclaiming in frustration to Commander Adama that "he's *your* son", sounding for all the world like a step-mother arguing with her new husband over a problem-child from a previous marriage.

The episodes' context in the post-9/11 world is bleedingly obvious. Outside of the office on the Galactica which is being used for low-level fleet communications, the corridor is covered in the sort of "have you seen this person" collages which briefly dominated the streets of Downtown Manhattan in the wake of the attacks. In the place of the thankfully-declining body-counts of the 9/11 disasters, is a chillingly simple board mounted in the President's impromptu office, updated with a "survivor's count", with each loss tabulated with mournful exactitude.

To counter-act the somewhat claustrophobic prospect of a TV series set entirely in a series of corridors, barracks, flight-decks, and CGI, the writers re-introduced the character of "Helo", left behind on the nuked, wrecked planet of Caprica. I had expected this character to just drop out, slaughtered by the Cylons like the rest of those left behind on the colonies, but instead, his continued fight for survival on a planetary surface, which seems to be under a perpetual soaking down-pour, breaks up the dimly-lit ship-board scenes of the rest of the cast. They were able to use the revelation of "Boomer" as a hidden Cyclon to place her in both places at once, bear-leading "Helo" across the green wilderness of Caprica, while still playing her part in the primary plot on board Galactica. This hasn't paid off yet, but they've certainly planted enough questions about what the hell the Cylons are up to with this sort of thing. My guess is that the two of them are being used to ferret out survivors in the colonies for disposal, but it's just a guess right now.

The show has been extremely arc-heavy so far, to such an extent that I'm not sure if you could actually run it out-of-order without terminally disorienting all but the most fanatical viewers. It feels more like a season of the Sopranos than what I'm used to getting from broadcast or basic cable. There's very little given to the slower members of the prospective audience, which might be a ratings-issue. This isn't the tissue-paper piffle for slow-tops which characterized the original, disco-glam Battlestar Galactica, which often resembled nothing so much as Branson, Missouri in Space.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the rest of this, but I'm increasingly getting the feeling that this show isn't for the long haul - they're running through the plots at a dead run, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're intentionally writing for a one or two-season series.

Bill Whittle, whom I sometimes find a bit overbearing and didactic, has a better-than-usual take on the dearth of liberal actor-politicians. He believes that good actors are hollow people, with no real interior life or ideas of their own, and theorizes that bad actors, who have too much self to be effective in their chosen profession, have a competitive advantage in politics. I guess. Anyways, check it out - not bad.

"There are places that are below sea level."
"Luckily, most of them are under water."

-Two programmers in my office just now, discussing a possible bug with our primary GPS logging application when used at apparent below-sea-level elevations.

I'm developing Political Tourettes, and I don't know what to do about it.

Twice this weekend, I found myself bursting out into profane rants in public about irritating media-leftist-bullshit, once while eating breakfast Saturday at the Diamond Deli over the world's most worthless city newspaper, the Centre Daily Times, once again after lunch at the Mike's Video extension on the corner of Bishop and Allegheny, while browsing the new-releases racks.

I apologized at the Diamond Deli as I paid at the counter, and since they're good folk, and the outburst really had nothing to do with the help or anything in their place, things ended amicably. It was just me ranting about a Knight-Ritter syndicated account of the tsunami relief effort that dedicated paragraph after paragraph to the "UN efforts" while giving only a half-paragraph to the US and Singapore, while managing to not mention Australia *at all*. That sort of fiction passing for news coverage just enraged me beyond all control. Not a big deal - half the blogsphere consists of such media-frustration-fueled rage. But the blogsphere isn't the homey diner on the ground floor of the Crider Exchange on Allegheny; it isn't public. Luckily, the only people in the place was the proprietor and a fellow coot who was also reading the CDT, and might be expected to have some idea what I was raving like a madman about. I got a pass.

The second outburst was not so negligible. I don't go into the Mike's on Bishop all that often - I don' t know why, maybe because I tend to go out to movies more often than rent for viewing in my cramped little place. That's going to be declining as well, since the owners of the Garman Opera Theatre on High Street have recently begun playing politics heavily with their property. Last week, while going to see the Lemony Snicket kid's movie on a Sunday matinee, I discovered the big shaggy mess on the far wall of the foyer which I had thought was some kind of grade-school kids' project was actually an enormous piece of anti-war propaganda, intelligible only at a distance of four to three feet. This went only half-way towards ruining my enjoyment of a Series of Unfortunate Events, as the movie was good enough to survive my morbid sensitivity to political nuance, thus irritated and aroused by the theatre-owners' apparent need to express themselves. But now they're proudly housing an art-film hagiography of the Death-Camp Mass-Murderer as a Young Beatnik, usually identified as "the Motorcycle Diaries" in the trades. Nothing pisses me off more these days than icons of St. Che, patron saint of humorless leftism.

Which brings me to Mike's, and my early-Sunday-afternoon flameout. They had a copy of Margaret Cho's latest video, complete with Cho in drag as a Che clone on the front cover. Margaret-proud-bisexual-Cho especially pisses me off with this Che-worship. Che's third-largest set of murder-victims, after political opponents and intellectuals, was the homosexual population of Cuba. He was the ur-homophobe of the new Left. What exactly is a fag-hag, bisexual flower-of-the-Haight activist like Margaret Cho *saying* by doing cosplay as a concentration-camp commandant? It doesn't seem like a tongue-in-cheek sort of thing, a gay Mel-Brooks-in-the Producers kind of thing.

But I degress: not having really examined the new-releases closely in a while, I found that a good sixth or eighth of the titles were leftist propaganda of some stripe or the other. Copy after copy of bad "documentary", thinly-veiled agitprop fiction, and Fahrenheit 911 clones. The local Democrat I poll-watched with on Election Day was firm in her conviction that Bellefonte was a conservative town, an unenlightened town, her classes full of Neanderthal brutes and lock-step Young Republicans. If this is such a conservative town, why is the only video-shop in town full of hardcore leftist documentaries and video-rants? I had myself under control until I came to the multiple copies of Bush's Brain, after having looked at a Bush-the-coke-fiend piece called Hooves and Horns or something like that, and I snapped. Started swearing my head off, in an outside voice - I believe I said something about locking my front door and not coming out for the next ten years or so, except with a few more "fuckings" and "goddamns" garnishing the sentiment here and there. The two clerks and one young man all turned to stare, and the clerk at the desk started to inform me that this was a "family shop", and that I couldn't talk like that here. I profanely informed her that if this particular Mike's was in any way a "family" rental place, I wouldn't have known from what I routinely encounter on the shelves, and quickly left before I became any more abusive.

I'm not prepared for this politicization of my neighborhood space. It's three months after the elections, and people are still leaving their yard-signs out; I had just passed someone's set of two Kerry signs a block up Bishop, walking towards town on the way to the incident at Mikes. As I have said, I tend to be somewhat morbidly sensitive to this sort of thing; I have difficulty putting political matters out of my head once they've gotten in. One of my best methods for forgetting about politics has been film/video escapism - available locally, solely from the very places which are putting on the Che, and driving me to distraction.

Sigh. I may look into Netflix.

Reviews like this tend to get me a bit crazed. The reviewer is supposed to be reviewing Stellvia, a pretty if somewhat flawed boarding-school SF/fantasy anime from a year or two back. Fair enough. The problem comes when he confuses Stellvia's boarding-school structure for a variant on one of the sports-anime subgenres, and proceeds to simultaneously complain that the show was derivative of the sci-fi sports anime Battle Athletes Victory, and bewail its failure to be like Battle Athletes Victory. Where to start?

Stellvia is a story about a gifted young teen who ships out to a space academy training a cadre of children and teenagers who will save the battered Earth from the second bow-wave of the catastrophic supernova whose first impact smashed civilization and brought humanity to the brink of extinction. The first part of the series is quite solidly a boarding-school story, full of young people stretching their gifts out into talents in the midst of class rivalries, sempai/kouhei relationships, and constant competition. You've seen this sort of thing before, if you've read either the Harry Potter novels, or Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. As an example of the genre, Stellvia is OK. The first half of the series is lacking in serious conflict, tends to make mountains out of molehills, and requires a massive suspension of disbelief in the risks and demands placed on the children, but overall, the show doesn't suck. It sort of feels a little like where the students in Ryvius were going before the writers of that particular series flung them off into Giant Robot of the Space Flies.

Battle Athletes Victory, for those of you reading at home, was a TV remake of OAV series which, rarely enough, improved on the original. It featured a large cast of implausible, genetically engineered female athletes, competing furiously on an orbital space station for the title of "Cosmo Beauty", a planetary queen-of-the-athletic-heap sort of deal. Stick the word "hyper" in front of most of the minor sports featured in the Olympics, throw in preposterously over-powered versions of the athletic events featured in Japanese school sports festivals, and garnish heavily with microgravity or weight boots, and you've got some sort of idea what goes on in your average BAV episode. It's loads of fun, but despite the Skiffy trappings, it's a sports anime.

Sports stories and boarding school stories share a number of characteristics - Harry Potter has Quiddich, and many sports anime have the living-in-close-quarters-with-your-peers elements central to boarding-school stories - but they're not really the same thing at all. BAV has only the slightest of interest in the hard-science details of orbital mechanics or hard-science-fiction rigor; Stellvia, while not perfectly hard science-fictional, wants very much to hold itself up as hard science fiction for the kids - in the Robert A. Heinlein tradition.

It's bad enough when otaku-come-lately stomp about and rant that a slightly-younger derivative anime is a ripoff of a slightly-older derivative anime, while displaying woeful ignorance of the actual traditions and original works which both are drawing upon; to indulge in such histrionics while mistaking the genres involved takes a special kind of negative genius.

Oh, well. It takes all kinds to make a fandom.

I'm back from Florida, but feeling deeply unambitious. I spent last night going through my manga, organizing and creating a huge pile of discards which I need to get rid of, if I'm not going to drown in a sea of pulp. I know where I can get rid of real books, at Fred Ramsey's place, even though I never actually avail myself of that opportunity. But what do you do with comics? When the last speculative bubble burst everybody remembered that mass-market printed material doesn't normally appreciate. Before then, comics shops would buy old comics; I don't think the 'Swap does that these days - at least, I don't see large shelves of used manga in the back.

Either way, my place is starting to get a bit swamped, and there's only a little space left back in the kitchen-area for another set of shelves. I suppose I could get a couple of those plastic garage-shelves and clean up the "spare" room, which is currently hip-deep in random detritus. Donate as much of my old clothes as I'll never wear, which is most of them.

Maybe it's time I actually cranked down and learned how to use E-Bay. That's how everybody else gets rid of their crap, right?

Tried to watch a DVD of the Coen Brothers' the Ladykillers this evening with my mother and grandmother, since I had remembered it as a really good movie with a good moral message when I saw it in the theatre. Bad move. I had forgotten all of the bad language and violence. Luckily, my grandmother couldn't understand one word in four of what was going on, but we quickly gave up, and put in the Sound of Music instead, until everybody fell asleep before the TV. It's been years since I last watched that movie - in fact, the last time I saw it might have been back when my mother left my sister and I in my grandmother's care way the back when. Grandma was very happy to see it again - she kept mentioning that she had seen it in the theatres. I had forgotten how beautifully shot it all was - perhaps the pan-and-scan version they showed on TV chopped a lot of it up? Had to explain to my mother why "all of these DVDs are in these narrow little boxes on the screen", and why pan-and-scan is a mutilation of films shot for the wider aspect ratios.

Ahoyhoy, camparinos. I'm down in Florida, and we got the DSL up and running yesterday. So, here I am. The drive down was mostly uneventful, except for the way the cold seemed to chase us down I-95 like a vengeful ex determined to have the last word in an argument. I had to take the dog out for a walk in a Red Roof parking lot in Fayetteville, NC at 4 in the morning, where I only discovered just how far below freezing it had gotten overnight *after* I locked myself out of the hotel, which was rather short of help. The same woman seemed to be the night bookkeeper, front-desk help, maid, janitor, and continental-breakfast caterer. I nearly froze off my unmentionables before I found the side-door with the room-key all-hours access lock. The dog didn't care - he had a coat built-in by a thoughtful if capricious nature.

I-95 is, in a certain, figurative sense, America's front driveway, which makes its reality a rather surreal let-down. The stretch between Richmond, Virginia and Jacksonville, Florida is essentially a vast swampy desert punctuated with stereotypically racist Senor Pedro billboard ads for the eastern seaboard's largest, tackiest tourist-trap, "South of the Border". Southern billboard rates must be rock-bottom cheap, because there were dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred of these billboards all along the highway throughout North Carolina - nine in the last mile leading up to the North Carolina border alone. As for the swamp, sometimes it seemed as if America was one vast marsh from the James to the St. Johns.

Florida, on the other hand, looks to be the world's largest sand bar. The part of it that my parents have picked to settle down in isn't nearly as flat as I expected, but rather is an undulating patchwork of very low, ossified sand dunes and wetlands, many of which have been drained into large ponds and lakes. It isn't as barren as it sounds, because the rain and moisture means that the sand is well-covered by lots of vegetation, but underneath it all - sand, sand, sand. This is grazing land which is quickly being overrun by the snowbird and retiree immigration. What land hasn't been built over for retirement communities is either under use by horse-breeders, or has been let go as woodlots for wandering herds of freerange cattle. This isn't orange-growing territory - that doesn't start for another county or two, southwards toward Orlando. There's a retirement community, called "the Villages", that starts a few miles to the southeast of here that is forty-five thousand souls strong, sprawling over three counties, and encompassing three dozen different golf courses within its borders. This retirement community is somewhat dwarfish by comparison, but it's still growing at the rate of one or two houses a day, every day, rain sun or showers.

The movers' truck showed up early, and they unloaded with commendable efficiency, which makes it all the more sad that they got into a serious accident not five minutes after leaving for their next stop. We passed them by on the way to lunch on Tuesday, the tractor-trailer jackedknifed across all the southbound lanes of traffic on the highway just outside of this retirement community. Some old duffer in a sedan had spun out in front of them, careening into the front of their truck, and breaking their front axle. Luckily, no-one was hurt, but the chances of them making the rest of their deliveries in time to get home for Christmas in the north is pretty slim. After that, Mom managed to start a fire in the kitchen while I was in the bathroom taking care of lunch, as it were. She had left a shipping box on the open range while she was unloading it, and had apparently spun the dials to "hot" as she set the box down. Much flame and chaos ensued, but the only damage was to Dad's nerves, as this had occurred while he was on the cel-phone with her. We wrote it all off as a decent fire-test for the many, many smoke detectors mounted way, way up the walls throughout the house. Took a while to get them all to shut off.

Dad flew in with Grandma to Orlando on Wednesday, and we drove down to meet them there. We're talking about him flying back up to drive the SUV back down here, as we couldn't find a buyer on short notice leading up to Christmas like it was. Anyone want a five-year-old Honda RAV4 with a lot of mileage, good condition?

Grandma's trying to settle in; she's 93, and she's been feeling every year the last few months or so. I've been trying to help the folks with her, but I can see it's going to be a challenge taking care of her, between the two of them. Oh, well.

My sister's going to be lapping me, coming down the afternoon of the 30th on a flight to Orlando, after I'm due to leave on a flight heading north from that same airport. She's a physical therapist, so hopefully she'll make some progress in getting Grandma situated; she's better-trained for this sort of thing than anyone currently down here, I suppose.

I'm going to be out of town for a couple weeks on family business, and probably away from the Interweb as a result. I've not been posting much, as you might have noticed. I've been writing, and tossing material recently. Mostly because what comes out is better-suited to increasing the balance of misery in the world, and I don't know that such things are worth the publishing.

I'll be helping the folks move down to Florida, to a place whose address prominiently features the phrase "nth Circle", which I figure is quite appropriate in describing a flat, hot, humid hell of a state...

Dear commie pinko superhero-pimp:

Please do not make the assumption that the prototypical American patriot is somehow wedded to the mainstream American comic. They are not. They just don't give a half a shit about the spinal-reflexive anti-American, hardcore leftist twaddle that passes for "alternative comics". Those that can stomach the five billionth iteration of "superhero comic" will buy what DC, Image, and Marvel shit onto your metaphorical docks every month. You know, with near-mathematical exactitude, how big that fraction of a fraction is. But please, don't imagine that your shelves full of Art Spiegelman's sour crap and poorly-printed Ted Rall and Tom Tommorrow reprints are going to draw anyone inclined to list to your political right into your squalid little basement shop.

They're at the bookstore across town, buying manga from an establishment which doesn't reek of geek stink patchouli.

[Yeah, yeah - I'm aware that the Beguiling is a Canadian comics shop. Who ever let fairness stand in the way of a good rant? I'm getting eye-strain from their stupid cycling-snowflakes backgrounds, and I'm feeling mean.]

Lynn Swann is talking about running for governor of the commonwealth in 2006.

I'm amused by this because Swann used to own a house two blocks down the street from my parents' house in Ross Township. We never saw him around the neighborhood - dunno if he actually lived in the house or no. I seem to remember that his wife used the place during the season, or something like that. For some reason, I thought they moved south to Georgia or the Carolinas when he retired. But, nevertheless, if he runs for governor, he'll definitely be a homie done good from my point of view. I'm kind of afraid of what that piranha Rendell will leave of Swann when he's done with him, though.

I was watching A&E yesterday, and was amused/alarmed to see that a murder had occurred in the same neighborhood a few years ago, some yunzer beating his wife to death in the hot-tub and calling it "drowning" - he's on death row now. I didn't realize it was the old neighborhood until they pulled back on his incredibly bland house and the distinctive white-elephant bulk of Ross Park Mall appeared in the background.

Although I'm in favor of the death penalty, I'm not exactly happy with this particular example - I don't consider somebody who murdered two wives to be a fit subject for execution. Copkillers? Sure - gotta protect the civil service. Mass murderers, yes - for the outrage against civil order. Serial-killers? On the "they'll never stop" theory, and the "they had it coming", yeah, sure, liquidate 'em. But I don't quite see that a guy who kills two women for the insurance money qualifies as a serial-killer. He seems like a prime candidate for life-in-prison-without-parole. That sort of doughy-pasty-white-geek will be more miserable as a lifer than on death row, anyways. Huh. Looks like a court sort-of-half-agreed with me, because his death sentence was commuted by an appellate court due to other irregularities - mostly boot-strapping between the murders of his two wives.

They had the township police chief on the program going on about how there was only one or two murders in the township every ten years or so. If that's the case, then almost all the murders in the township occur in that neighborhood, because I remember a woman having killed her husband in the basement of one of the houses across the street from Swann's place in the late Seventies. I guess I can claim that I grew up in the most dangerous neighborhood in my hometown, can't I?

Stayed at home yesterday to try to avoid further infecting the office with my germs. Everything went to hell without me there, so I suppose I'm good for something around here... daytime TV hasn't improved much since my useless-post-college-days.

The best channel was C-SPAN. They had a high-ranking general standing in front of a busy shed full of mechanics and Humvees, as he tried to explain the esoterics behind up-armoring transport vehicles in a IED&ambush war like Iraq. Thus is the state-of-the-art of spin control in 2004. The press corps wasn't totally ignorant for a change. Everybody was bending over backwards to not look like they were going to come down like a ton of bricks on the NCO who was yelling at Rumsfeld. So what's the odds look like this week on a Rumsfeld resignation? I'm guessing one in three, up from one in twenty last week. After that, they had Gen. Brooks, Robert Kaplan, and some other guy at AEI doing a panel on, of all things, spin control and information warfare. They had a lot of interesting things to say about how the administration lost the information battle over First Fallujah, and dominated the fight over the story of Second Fallujah. Interesting point - Gen. Brooks used that exact name - "Second Fallujah". How very, very 1862, don't you think?

There was a lot of lights-flickering and tv-outage later last night. When I came in this morning, I discovered that the building-site where the Mount Nittany Inn used to be, and theoretically will-be-again, BLEW UP last night. Quite spectacularly, to judge from what our secretary, who lives over that way, had to say. Apparently there's a good deal of power infrastructure up on Centre Hall Mountain by the Inn, because last night's flickering power was the outside edges of a pretty nasty series of brown-outs that took down the power here at work, and throughout Pleasant Gap and the upper reaches of Penns Valley. That Inn is snakebit, if you ask me. Time to give upon it, bury the ruins, and replace it with a tree plantation or something.

As much of a reputation Hollywood has for progressive, liberal, and leftist politics and activism, it's quite striking that the actor-politicians who have had actual, electoral success, have been, by and large, Republicans or conservatives. Ronald Reagan, governor of California and president, is, of course, the pre-eminent example, but there are secondary examples such as Clint Eastwood, one-time mayor of Carmel, California, Governor Schwarzenegger, the late Rep. Sonny Bono, and even one-time Governor Ventura of Minnesota. The only counter-example I could find was honorary "mayor" of Malibu, Martin Sheen, and could somebody tell me why a city with an actual, elected, mayor needed an unelected "honorary mayor" best known for intentionally courting arrest and incarceration at every protest compatible with his work-schedule?

Hollywood's reputation for leftism and leftish political activism is quite well-earned, and yet almost all the politicians produced by that culture have been on the right side of the dial. Why is that? Admittedly, a lot of the activism in the modern Hollywood left is aimed at electing other people to office - look at the swarms of has-beens and almost-about-to-have-beens like Whoopi Goldberg, Jeneane Garofalo, and Ben Affleck that buzzed about the Kerry campaign in the last season. Those folks are there to boost other candidates, rather than second careers of their own.

People like Alec Baldwin and Warren Beatty are always rumored to be getting into this or that, but it never pans out. For one thing, the rumors are always on a national scale - people were talking about Beatty in 2000 for the presidency. Yes, one could complain that to run for the presidency without ever having stood for even so much as the office of town dog-catcher, is deeply egotistical, but hey - that's never stopped Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Sr., or any of the retired-military types who inevitably pop up in national election cycles. Nevertheless, the successful conservative or Republican actor-politician usually shoots for something more modest, like a house representative seat, or a governorship. The presidency awaits for those who prove themselves in a starter-seat, if the constitutional ban on immigrant presidential candidates doesn't otherwise conspire against said actor-politician.

There is the theory that a Republican or conservative bent in a denizen of a leftist utopia like Hollywood breeds practical political skills in the bearer; if the soil is deep enough and properly-fertilized with ambition, a second career as a politician can grow. The successful actor-politicians are by and large just that, politicians. Activism is often confused with politics on the left; it doesn't help that we refer to performance-artists, exhibitionist lunatics and serious party operators by that same, stupidly vague term. Though the marcher-protestor-puppeteer is an ineffectual buffoon who will never make a single change in the world worth the notice, and the party operator is making connections, quietly raising funds, organizing, building pragmatically for the long-term, both are called "activist". Not that you can't find the occasional buffoon or lunatic among the party operators - look to Kos for the refutation of that easy conclusion - but it's an essentially serious business. Meanwhile, the entertainer is naturally drawn to entertaining, if meaningless, nonsense, protest and street-theatre... I know, I know - too facile. I had this theory about Reagan's activism within the Screen Actors Guild, but look at this LA Weekly article about current SAG head Mike "B.J. Honeycutt" Ferrell's unwillingness to run for greater office... eh. That writer thinks the answer is "Democratic actors are cowards", which conflicts strangely with his touting of Ferrell's Marine service.

Hrm. I'm annoyed with English today. The imperative, the past tense, and the present tense of "read" are identical. This makes it difficult to use that verb in an economical fashion.

"[I] [r]ead that as a negation of his prior position." "[I] [r]ead in the paper this morning that he's thinking about a second run at the office." "Read this statement put out by his campaign office - does that look like he's withdrawing from the race?"

This ambiguity creates a need for unnecessary verbosity. How can I be properly laconic with this sort of thing dragging me down into jabber? Bah.

Yeah, I'm here. I'm just not feeling particularly verbose.

Read the fourth (actually "4.1", which is kind of lame) volume of Planetes, which is something of a tedious let-down from previous volumes. The author seems determined to present childish selfishness, wilful ignorance, and disregard for others as praiseworthy rebellion. Kind of a shame, really. It doesn't outright suck, but it's rather whiffy - like a pile of garbage in the back-alley polluting the whole neighborhood with the faint stench of rotting tubers.

Started reading Machiavelli's Florentine History. Always interesting when a four-hundred-fifty-year-dead author comes out with a new book... Not that far in, but already I've learned that as far as Niccolo is concerned, everything awful which has ever happened to the Roman Empire and Italy has been as the result of ministers, emperors, and popes inviting northern European barbarians to intervene in local political quarrels or feuds. Not that he's got an idee fixe or anything...

Michael Totten's photolog from his tour of Libya. Striking.

I've been watching this business in the Ukraine with much interest and hope. Nothing quite so exciting and hopeful as a good people's revolution, without all the bloodshed and gunfire and ugliness. People who know better than I aren't exactly sanguine, but then, they've been wrong before, so here's hoping.

But that wasn't what I was on about. What I want to know is this: when did the Ukraine become "Ukraine"? I hadn't noticed this style change until the furor over the election broke out. Some countries have always been assigned their own definite article "the", as a preservation of some archaic distinction now lost to the mists of time: the Sudan, the Ukraine, the Gambia, the Congo etc. The Gambia and the various Congos retain their definite articles, probably due to their dual-status as both countries and terrain defined by riverine geography. The commonality between these definite-article states seems to be their primary status as geographical, above national, definition. The Sudan was a territory in the geographical sense before becoming a postcolonial state in the political sense; the Ukraine was never a state in its own right, being rather a nomadic plained expanse, debated land between the Russias and the Ottomans.

Note the distinct usages of the definite-article "the" in both of those constructions, one referring to a multiplicity of states/clans/principalities "the Russias", the other to an empire defined by the overlordship of a people "the Ottomans". A fourth usage of definite article "the" is still in official usage, the multiple-entity "the", usually associated with archipelago-states. the Bahamas and St. Vincent and the Grenadines retain these islandic definite articles, although Philipines and Maldives both seem to have lost their "the"s when my back was turned, damnit.

Now that I'm looking, the CIA hasn't yet caught up to the official US recognition of Macedonia as "Macedonia" - they still have them listed as Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of. For shame, that's been in the papers for the better part of a week and a half now. You're not reinforcing defenses of the CIA's competence and efficiency with this sort of slop, Langley.

I had to throw out my old green blanket last month, when I pulled it out and discovered that the spiders had been using it as a handy matrix for their eggsacks. Yech. That blanket has been in my family almost as long as I have. I replaced it with a cheap four-dollar blanket from Walmart. Last night I discovered *why* it was marked down to four dollars. I managed to put my foot right through it, rip, just like that. Oh, well. You get what you pay for.

Not only did the Right Stuf lard my DVD order from them with extraneous printed matter, but they also shipped an unordered, unrequested, unexpected t-shirt, three sizes too small for my fat otaku frame. I found a co-worker small enough to fit into a T medium, although he was rather irate to discover that he was the smallest employee in the company, counting all the women. Waste of shipping space, and fabric. Bah!

I went looking for manga from publishers other than Viz and Tokyo Pop last week, as those two tend to be over-represented in my reading schedule. I picked up Revenge of Mouflon from Raijin and Land of the Blindfolded from CMX, which I think is Central Park Media’s manga publishing subsidiary. [Correction - CMX is actually DC Comics' manga line. Whoops!] Mark recommended Revenge of Mouflon, but I can’t say I was that impressed. It was a worksmanlike, bland thriller, flittering around the edges of a serious subject, post-9/11 hostage drama. I’m getting a little tired of the Japanese inferiority complex about the American military, but it wasn’t as bad as some treatments, I guess...

I see that the new anime Zipang is a Japanese version of that goofy old military time-travel film the Final Countdown, except that instead of sending back the nuclear aircraft carrier Nimitz, it’s a fictional Japanese Aegis cruiser named the Mirai sent back to WWII. (“Mirai”=”future”. Real subtle there, jack.) I have to wonder how the hell they’re going to approach this. Will the creators approach the subject with any sort of objectivity, or is this a Leiji Matsumoto revere-the-heroic-ancestors sort of deal? It’s easier to revere the old butchers, imperialists, and rapists when they’re safely dead and silent, isn’t it, Mr. Japanese Nationalist Historical Blinders Guy? Meh.

Speaking of blindfolding, Land of the Blindfolded is kind of neat - your typical high-school romance, with the minor twist that the minor protagonists are both minorly psychic. The female lead is a touch precog - she sees the likely future of a subject occasionally, when she physically touches said subject. These futures can be changed by intervention, but the results are often unexpected and unintentional. The male lead can only read a person’s past, in partial visions of what definitely was. He’s envious of her vision, because she can do something about what she sees - all he can do is watch. They’re sort of a demonstration of hope and experience - she sees potential, while he can only see the truth. The first volume is sort of thin, but the author doesn’t cheat, and the story is solid in a quiet sort of way. As is usual with a short first volume, the publishers fill the pages out with minor short works from the same author, and unusually for this sort of thing, the shorts are actually worth reading on their own merits. The two shorts, one about a sports-festival romance, and the other a befuddled schoolroom haunting, are affecting and well-written. The author spends her time in the usually-frivolous freetalks discussing her art in an honest and straightforward fashion that I, at least, found refreshing.

Mark Sachs was right, Planetes’ manga is pretty damned keen. I was put off by the anime, because I didn’t appreciate its Japanese-office-comedy-in-EVA-suits approach to orbital garbage collection. It’s very possible that the manga will eventually descend into that sort of cheap, lazy slap-stick, complete with a would-be Hawkeye and office toadies, but the first volume is nothing like that. Oh, there are some of the same characters - a nicotine-crazed female pilot, the headband-wearing, boy-astronaut dreamer, a sad giant of a Russian. But the author does interesting, honest, sincere drama with these characters, in a realistic fashion, and that makes all the difference. The art also seems to stand out in a way that it didn’t in the anime - possibly it’s the heightened fantastical nature of animation over comics, but things that stand out in comics often appear common-place when transcribed to the screen. Possibly it’s the highly variable viewing-space of comics as practiced in the Japanese fashion, possibly it’s just an inherent limitation of animation, I’m not sure. Either way, th splash pages and impressionistic tones of the Planetes manga give the stories so much more resonance, so much more weight, than the anime version, that I’m left wondering about the primacy of the two arts, and whether manga-based anime is ever a good idea...