The Penitent Fool

Madness

2011-03-22T22:54:00.005-06:00

They play basketball all over the world, and there was an unusual ending to one in Italy. Thanks to MJ for the link.

Video and article

The most remarkable thing about this isn't the play, unusual as those events may be - nor is it the histrionics of the announcer, who is after all paid to be enthusiastic. It is this from the end of the article describing the action:

In a perfect world, all basketball games would end like this, and all announcers would repeat lines like "Tell me I'm not dreaming!" (translated) and laugh maniacally after every game-winning shot.

We all know the precious feeling that comes from being part of something special, so the enthusiasm is understandable. And who hasn't had a wonderful dream about watching some guy you didn't know throw a ball through a metal ring?

At the very height of its decadence, Rome had professional chariot racing where the different racers would group in teams, and all the fans and partisans would wear the colors of "their" teams.

Chariot Racing

They took it surprisingly seriously. Romans obsessed over the sport, made celebrities out of the participants, and wagered enthusiastically on the outcomes. So prominent were the organized teams that their leaders, spokesmen, and athletes were able to parley athletic success into tremendous influence in political, social, fashion, and even religious areas.

It seems so quaint how quickly they threw themselves over for this artificial and pointless closed-system conflict.

Stone, tile, carpet, or gingerbread?

2011-01-07T00:20:00.014-07:00

Homes should be designed for children – they are the only ones that get any joy out of them. Grownups fluster very properly about all that stuff that’s modern and updated and has been timeless for eleven years and will maximize resale value. To children that’s all boring. I think they can see the soul of a home better than we grownups. If my childish recollections mean anything, every part of the house is fair game for an adventure, and kids are not choosy about materials or fashion. In fact, the weirder the better – children don’t find joy in uniformity.

Adults don’t really occupy their homes the way children do. Well they do, in the most clinical sense they do occupy space somewhere inside the structure. But their movements are circumscribed and usually follow an established pattern. Much of their activity in the house involves outside stimulation displayed on devices that are either very small or very large. Other than the sofa cushion, their surroundings are only able to affect them via peripheral vision.

Adults can also be adventure-resistant. My brother once bought an old home with a long, narrow crawlspace under the porch. A flashlight shone down to its end revealed a lidded urn, inviting great speculation as to its contents. Surely someone should crawl down there and retrieve the object? No no, my brother said. Too dirty in there.

A child would have known better.*

To say homes aren’t for children suggests they ARE tailored for adult tastes, but that isn’t really true either. At least it’s not for any adult in particular – instead it’s for some ur-adult, that great denominator at the bottom of society that craves granite countertops, neutral tones and the rest. I have never met that adult, but I have met plenty who want those things just because they think he wants them.

Are people still trying to please that adult? Because like you he’s probably broke, over-leveraged and has been near bankrupt since 2008 and he won’t be buying your house no matter what the bathroom tile looks like.

Wealth is supposed to free us from material concerns, and allow us to fill our lives with beauty and peace. Instead the opposite happened – prosperity made us risk-averse. When your house was a commodity to be bought, bartered, and readily exchanged for something grander, you weren’t going to settle in and you weren’t going to personalize and you definitely weren’t going to leave any trace that you were ever there.

Even new houses that were built to the buyer’s specifications weren’t actually built for their own satisfaction. This was a distressing discovery in 2010 when looking for a new home. It didn’t take long to realize that of the millions of homes built in the past ten years, very few were suitable for a middle class family. They were too big or too fancy, too far away, too closely packed, too poorly constructed, and situated in some spot that, in all of world history, no one had previously wanted to live.

Oh no, you protest. Maybe others were following the herd but we built what WE wanted.

Then why does it look like everyone else’s? Nobody can agree on what restaurant to go to but our houses still all look the same. Just like most people you played it safe and didn’t do anything risky, because you were concerned that someday you might have to convince a new buyer that the house was worth the top-dollar price you would be asking.

When we were househunting, we walked into many houses that were cautiously calculated to offend no one. All were utterly forgettable. However, months later I still remember the risk takers. I remember the purple carpets, the hanging buttresses, the wood-paneled basements, the stairway that ends at the ceiling, the too-big pine right in front of the picture windows – any sure evidence that some brave soul was enjoying themselves. It made me want to live there. In fact, that too-big pine is right outside the window where I type this.

There was one house with a mechanized roll-up metal sheet that would cover the windows (the wrong windows, if the goal was shelter from the sun). I wanted to live there so bad. Anyone activating the device would be required to say, “Lowering blast shields!”

One of my religion’s doctrines is that we as God’s children participated in the creation of the earth. A rather breathtaking privilege, probably undeserved, and I’m sure we needed lots of help drawing up the plans with our Crayons of Life. However, from my observations of the planet, it appears we tried very hard to create things that please us and inspire joy. And we succeeded marvelously! God was well-rewarded for the trust He put in us.

We were the richest nation in the history of the world. Why did we labor so hard to undo all that grand effort and cover pretty land with ugly houses?

*Good news – eventually my brother's curiosity overcame him. Rather like the Poe story, only instead of a beating heart the urn contained ordinary dirt.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

2010-12-23T11:41:00.005-07:00

Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein famously said that, far from being dangerous and corrupt, his firm was doing "God's work". I was delighted to read that Jeffrey Skilling once said his own company Enron was doing "the Lord's work".

I read it in The Smartest Guys in the Room; a very interesting read about the fall of Enron (and the baleful effects of securitization).

Saw the movie of the same title but hadn't read the book; if anything this 400 page book is even more accesible than the film - almost to a fault. The authors are excessively conversational, and don't show much faith in their reader's understanding. I wonder if they imagined their words being read aloud at a Wal-Mart and wrote accordingly.

Even the jacket design gets the spirit of it. This blurb from Jim Cramer is at the top on the back cover:

"...those who want to learn what happened here, you don't have to read anything but this."

Now, I appreciate being able to learn something quickly, which is why I appreciate this TV-investing-infotainer's ability to capture the essence of the anti-intellectualism at root of modern culture and learning. When did we lose the idea that learning something has a price?

When was the last time you re-read a book, just to appreciate what you may have missed or forgotten the first time?

That's what I thought.

Everyone - go out and read Oedipus Rex, then read it again two weeks later. It will be a totally different experience the second time.

Or Androcles and the Lion, though to my shame I haven't actually finished my second reading.

Enjoy the Sun While You Still Can

2010-12-06T23:38:00.002-07:00

This lady claims that she owns it. Check out the article, it also has a very helpful photo of the sun in question.

You may think she's crazy, but consider this. From the article:

Duran, who lives in the [Spanish] town of Salvaterra do Mino, said she now wants to slap a fee on everyone who uses the sun and give half of the proceeds to the Spanish government and 20 percent to the nation's pension fund.

She would dedicate another 10 percent to research, another 10 percent to ending world hunger -- and would keep the remaining 10 percent herself.

"It is time to start doing things the right way, if there is an idea for how to generate income and improve the economy and people's wellbeing, why not do it?" she asked.

Did you get that? She is shrewdly proposing a new income stream to the government of her nation. That's a lot of things, but crazy it isn't. Governments like tax money a lot, and like this lady they are willing to pretend that it is good for the economy.

As for me, with the down economy and all I don't think I'll be paying her sun tax. She'll have to turn off my service.

Politics + Reality TV Continued

2010-12-06T08:54:00.003-07:00

Here is the state of politics in the US today:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tv_kate_meets_sarah_palin

The wiser and wordier than I have talked about what this means so I shouldn't expend too many words on this, but: TV allows us to have relationships with people we don't know. Sarah Palin will be a test case for politicians' abilities to form those relationships and get elected. If it works, then the producers for reality shows and the networks that host them will be the new political power brokers in America.

And what a world that will be!

Politics + Reality TV = this guy

2010-10-20T11:10:00.006-06:00

I think this sort of thing is the present and future of politics:

Link

His non-sequiter was delightful:

“As a karate expert, I will not talk about anybody up here. Because our children have nowhere to go.”

Why the bizarre and irrelevant claim of karate ability in the middle of impassioned pleas for the children? Well, he's a smart guy who knows what will get the public's attention. From the Yahoo Buzz Log:

No sooner had McMillan finished listing his credentials as a karate expert (who knows that the rent is too damn high), then his searches started to soar (kind of like the rent). Online lookups for "the rent is too damn high" jumped from nil into breakout status, quickly becoming one of Yahoo's top searched terms.

Don't be surprised to see this guy get his own show in the near future.

More Poetry

2010-04-26T23:13:00.002-06:00

Wendell Berry is about as radical as John Beecher, though not nearly as angry. Here is probably his best-known work. As it has been posted in hundreds of places all over then internet, perhaps I can get away with sharing it with you:

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

We Don't Handle Obsolescence Very Well

2010-04-25T22:16:00.002-06:00

Dead Carriers

This commentator points out very convincingly why the US Navy can never expose its main carrier groups in a conflict with nations like China or Iran, because it means they'll all lose their jobs.

Which means they can't be used the way they're intended. Which means they are enormous, expensive floating boondoggles that keep no one safe and will win no wars.

It isn't until engagement with the enemy that you find out whether your plans and technology really work. By avoiding that crucial confrontation we don't validate our strategies and tactics, and refine them for future conflicts.

Not that THAT is such a bad thing; it would definitely suit me if we never find out whether the carrier groups still have legitimate military value. But you could get rid of them entirely and still know just as much about their usefulness...

Careful Choice of Words

2010-04-17T08:00:00.002-06:00

Okay, think of a bad word. One that you definitely wouldn't say to your grandmother. Pretty bad, isn't it? Perhaps unambiguously so. It may have something to do with bodily functions, excretions, or reproductive activities - or perhaps it is an ethnic slur.

Now, say what that word is in a way that's not offensive, to your grandma or most anybody else. It's not very difficult - there are plenty of substitutes at hand for even some very vile words and concepts. Sometimes those substitutes were developed specifically for use in polite company in the place of their vulgar counterparts.

What is this? Every offensive idea has a non-offensive way of expressing it? Believe it or not, in our society we don't take hardly anything itself as offensive. Rather we have duplicate terminologies - one for polite use, and one for when we intend to be offensive.

Thus to us it is the word and not the thing that is bad, and we inoculate ourselves against the sin of profanity or vulgarity by a careful choice of words. Is this proper? If we angrily and vehemently hector another driver who makes an incautious error on the road, does it matter whether we use good words or bad ones? Arthur Henry King once pointed out that it makes little difference whether he gives voice to his frustrations with "fiddlesticks" or something worse. What matters is the thought and sentiment that gives wings to the word. What matters is what's in his soul. If THAT is vulgar, then so is anything he says, no matter how polite.

Fearful Bargain

2010-04-12T20:58:00.008-06:00

"The bond salesmen from the forty-first floor who spoke to us were by definition leaders in the firm, and they might have provided me with a role model, but their smooth metal surfaces offered nothing to cling to. They expressed no interests outside selling bonds, and they rarely referred to life outside Salomon Brothers. Their lives seemed to begin and end on the forty-first floor; and I began to wonder if I wasn't about to enter the Twilight Zone.

More different types of people succeeded on the trading floor than I initially supposed. Some of the men who spoke to us were truly awful human beings. They sacked others to promote themselves. They harrassed women. They humiliated trainees. They didn't have customers. They had victims. Others were naturally extremely admirable characters. They inspired those around them. They treated their customers almost fairly. They were kind to trainees. The point is not that a [aggressive, ambitious trader] was intrinsically evil. The point is that it didn't matter one bit whether he was good or evil as long as he continued to swing that big bat of his. Bad guys did not suffer their comeuppance in Act V on the forty-first floor. They flourished (though whether they succeeded because they were bad people, whether there was something about the business that naturally favored them over the virtuous are separate questions). Goodness was not taken into account on the trading floor. It was neither rewarded nor punished. It just was. Or it wasn't."

-Michael Lewis in "Liar's Poker", describing the sorts of people he encountered on the trading floor at Salomon Brothers in 1985.

It's no surprise to us that sometimes the bad guys win in life. What's startling is to realize that the so many of these systems we humans organize our efforts around are structured in such a way as to make virtue and kindness superfluous, because other qualities matter more to the goals of the individual and the goals of the group. We promote values that don't make people better people.

Rather reminiscent of a military band whose members honor and respect the most fearsome warrior of their number even though he is a bad man. His skill and energy strengthen them as a group, and hopefully make it more likely that they all get home.

Get home you may - perhaps even weighted down with riches and glory. But what sort of person will you be when you get there? That matters far more than most people seem to realize.

Silent Angry Poets

2010-04-09T07:09:00.003-06:00

I read an interesting work in an anthology of poems by ever-angry poet John Beecher:

"No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher."

Well, that's from the copyright page. I don't think Beecher wrote it. Unfortunately, that sentence is probably the only thing in the book I am allowed to quote fully.

However, according to my understanding of fair use I can noncommercially quote a small fraction of the work I really am interested in without exposing myself to prosecution for copyright infringement. Since poems are pretty short to begin with, here is a single word from Beecher's poem, "Homage to a Subversive":

peoples'

It's not much, but hopefully enough to help you grasp the essence of the work. As you can maybe tell from the excerpt, Beecher has a rich and pungent descriptive language, and bundles out the word-bombs as fast as a B-52 on a mission of metaphor. But don't be fooled - this poem is the best of the best. He worked really hard on this one I think. Most everything else is overdone and trite, 2-D cliches about the suffering of the working man or the myopia of the self-righteous hypocrite. (The latter is particularly cloying and annoying, stuff along the lines of "I hit a black dude for looking me in the eye and now I'm going to church because I'm SO RIGHTEOUS!")

But good or bad, no one reads them. That's because about the only John Beecher book in the valley is the one sitting next to me right now. I got it from the library. The book is 35 years old, and does not look heavily used. And I can't quote anything from it for you because of the beautiful poem on the copyright page.

You'd think an angry idealist like John Beecher would have wanted as many people as possible to see his work - read it, memorize it, ponder it. Instead his commercial interests pretty much guarantee that as few as possible read it. Funny how that works.

Every author balances the desire of having people read what he has to say with his desire to get paid for it and not have to do a real job.

Not White

2010-04-07T00:54:00.004-06:00

"...reliefs and statues were always painted; the ideal of ancient sculpture was the painted plaster statue of France's village churches. Ancient cities were never white. In Pompeii the columns of one temple were painted yellow and white, the capitals red, white, and blue. The Parthenon was painted to cover the marble sheen, and what we now call the Pont du Gard was painted red."
From "A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium"

What a startling thing to read. How can we imagine Roman cities in anything but white? I have walked the streets of Pompeii, and it will be difficult to think of it as anything other that what it appeared. Over centuries we have slavishly imitated the Romans and Greeks by planting forests of unadorned columns throughout our finest mansions, churches, and capitals. Trying to match our architecture to ruins rather than any genuine article has certainly led us astray. Turns out a bucket of paint was also needed.

What would an ancient Greek have thought of the US Capitol building or the White House? "Look at this terrific building we built! It's just like the Parthenon!"

Real American Heroes

2010-04-05T22:12:00.010-06:00

A video of several Iraqi citizens and two Reuters correspondents being murdered by American soldiers was released to the public today:

http://www.collateralmurder.com/

There's no gore but it's difficult to watch.

We haven't heard as much about American war crimes and atrocities lately. Such things have seemed less relevant because a Democrat's in the White House (And he even has a Nobel Peace Prize - hope he doesn't just settle for one!). In our peculiar sliding scale of modern values, the military isn't evil so long as it's led by compassionate progressives.

Still, this video is pretty bad and will probably get a lot of attention. It's from an engagement in Baghdad back in 2007, evidence of which had been surpressed by the military. The video was leaked out despite the military's efforts to prevent it, and you can see why it was surpressed. The video paints a much different picture of the event than does the official version.

What's fascinating about the lead up to the attack is how the soldiers in the two attack helicopters feed off each other's nerves and perceptions, turning an innocent gaggle of chatting guys into a band of heavily armed insurgents. Remember that two of the victims worked for the Reuters news service. One was carrying a camera and was actually doing his job at the time of the attack. But the US soldiers could only see enemies. One soldier thinks he sees a gun, then another sees one, then all of a sudden there's five or six gunmen, next a soldier thinks someone's got a rocket-propelled-grenade, next another soldier is sure of it, and now they're pointing their launcher at the helicopter and now the soldiers are asking base for permission to blow them up. Permission is granted, and as soon as there's a clear shot, the helicopter opens up with a powerful 30-mm cannon that tears the bodies of these men apart.

One of the victims survived the initial attack, but was badly wounded and couldn't get up. A passing motorist saw him at the side of the road and, being a good samaritan, stopped to help. He and another man got out and lifted the wounded man up to take him to the hospital. At that point the helicopter gunship opened up again, and blew up the vehicle, killing the good samaritan, the wounded man, and injuring two children in the van.

Our military papered this event over with lies, one representative saying "There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force." This sort of thing makes it difficult to accept "official" versions of stories without corroborating evidence.

I have a lot of strong thoughts and emotions about this. Like who are the good guys here? I have a much higher regard for the fellow who sealed his doom by stopping to help than I do for the GIs who begged their base for permission to shoot and laughed and celebrated their kills. Which of these people was making the world a better place? More to the point, what kind of soldiers would you prefer to see in the military - the kind that are regretful and reluctant to use their deadly force, or the kind that treat combat like a video game?

Speaking of how soldiers are, the military wants a soldier who obeys orders unquestioningly - kills whom he is told to kill, and spares whom he is told to spare. Such a man has given over his humanity to his leaders - his moral sense is subsumed into theirs.

So that's what the military wants. Is that what God wants? What can we say about a machine that functions best when its participants play the parts of unthinking cogs? It is hard to respect any soldier who could not disobey an order he knew was morally wrong.

I feel bad for the kids in those helicopters. The Iraqis may have left their body parts strewn around that scene, but the soldiers left parts of their own souls.

War is hell for making enemies out of decent men.

What Should Have Happened With the Bailouts and All That

2010-04-04T23:17:00.003-06:00

What should have happened?

I have written before about our government’s foolish, wrongheaded and sometimes corrupt responses to our ongoing economic crisis. I have described how I think their measures have actually made things worse, not better.

So far it’s been a difficult year for us Cassandras. Nowadays people seem somewhat pleased, if not downright optimistic, about business and economic news. Hiring is up (even if unemployment is unchanged). The Dow Jones is creeping towards 11,000. Large and influential companies declared substantial profits for all of 2009. Housing prices are holding steady and inflation doesn’t seem to be eating anyone alive. Could we have turned the corner?

I do not disown my previous pessimism. I’d rather double down at this point. I think it beneficial to also take a little time to describe what our government was actually trying to do to revive the economy, and whether those efforts have paid off. This will help me illustrate for you all my belief that we are actually in worse shape now than we were during the dark times of 2008 and 2009.

If you recall those dangerous days in the summer of 2008, there was a great deal of fear and insecurity surrounding the collapse of one of the world’s most powerful investment banks. Lehman Brothers (which had existed since 1850 and had almost $20 billion in net revenue in 2007) went from hale & hearty to bankrupt & broke in just a few months. Lehman’s problem wasn’t that they were evil or that they were greedy, but rather that they were stupid. The bank’s assets were not worth anywhere near what they (and everyone else) had thought they were worth when they bought them. With worthless and nonproductive assets Lehman would not be able to meet their obligations to creditors and shareholders, and the company had to declare bankruptcy.

This collapse was a frightening event, and affected a lot more than just Lehman’s shareholders, because people knew that the sorts of things that Lehman owned a lot of (complex instruments known as Credit Default Swaps, or CDS’s) were also owned by the other big investment banks on Wall Street. Investors realized that Lehman’s demise prefigured the rapid demise of EVERY SINGLE OTHER BANK on Wall Street, organizations such as JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and pretty much any other big bank you have heard of. In September 2008 all of these banks were technically insolvent, their assets absurdly worthless.

This was the situation facing our leaders in Washington. They decided that these banks were too important to the economy to be allowed to fail (thus they received the moniker “Too Big to Fail”), and that those banks should receive all the support that our government had the ability to give them. This support came in two crucial ways:

1. First, our government gave trillions of dollars to these various banks to plug the gaping holes in their balance sheets. They did this through methods that you have probably heard of such as the enormous TARP bailout, and also through methods that are more obscure, like comparatively enormous interest-free loans from the Fed, government guarantees of bank liabilities, and even some peculiar backdoor bailouts that were disguised as other things so as to not upset the public.

2. By the spring of 2009 it was clear that our trillions of $$$ were not enough to fill the hole created by the banks’ foolish incompetence. Therefore the US Financial Accounting Board (called FASB) was pressured into changing one of the accounting rules that corporations are bound by. Banks would now be allowed to pretend that their assets were actually worth what they paid for them, rather than recognize that they were now almost worthless. This was intended so that the banks would have time to sell off these bad assets, or recognize the loss in value, over a longer period of time rather than all at once.

So that’s what our government did. Here is what was SUPPOSED to happen as a result:

Since they were allowed to make-believe that their assets had value, the banks didn’t have to be in a huge hurry to solve the problem. They could take all the free money from the government and strengthen their operations, and use the cash to cover the losses from their bad assets, and progressively return their companies to good health. Their stock value would go up, they’d be able to issue more stock, and get even more money to smooth their path.

(Incidentally, one of the most crucial things these banks were also supposed to do was lend their money. This is the main reason they were allowed the tag of “Too Big to Fail” – because people believed that, once rescued from the brink of disaster, these companies would lend or invest their money to homeowners, small businesses, other banks, and anyone else that was a good risk. This free flow of credit is viewed by many influential economists as being very, very important for a healthy economy; and the banks were viewed as being crucial for that flow of credit.)

That’s what was supposed to happen, but that isn’t what actually happened.

What actually happened is that the investment banks took all the free money from the government and became giant casinos. They never lent the money (except back to the government, which is worth a blog post in itself). They made risky investments, played the stock market, and declared enormous profits. They took these profits and, rather than sell or write down the bad assets on their balance sheets, they pretended that those things weren’t even there and instead gave themselves really big bonuses. Goldman Sachs, for instance, gave its employees over $15 billion in bonuses.

So here we are, coming up on two years later. These Too Big To Fails are in exactly the same boat they were in September 2008. Nothing has changed, except now we’ve churned through trillions in public $$$ with nothing to show for it – money we may wish we had when the next inevitable crisis hits. The banks’ ability to pretend that they are viable institutions is not infinite. The only thing keeping them in business from day to day is our government’s implicit promise to protect them no matter how stupid or wasteful they are. As soon as that guarantee is ever in doubt, there will be a painful day of reckoning.

Father or Rich Neighbor?

2010-03-18T21:35:00.002-06:00

“With liberal grace and serene naiveté, the pagans modeled relations with the gods on political and social relations among themselves. It was the Christians who substituted the paternal model, basing relations with God on relations within the family, which is why Christianity, unlike paganism, would be a religion of obedience and love.
…
If God is a father, there is little to do but pray to him. But if the gods are patrons, one can offer them gifts and receive gifts in return, symbolizing a friendship between unequal partners, each with a life of his own; indeed, there would be no reason for men and gods to enter into relations at all were such relations not in the interest of both parties. If the human partner behaved any more humbly, he would not be acting like a free man. People smiled when women went to temple and told the goddess Isis their troubles. Such intimacy with the gods was plebian. A free man knew how to maintain a proper distance between himself and other men and between himself and the gods. He did not abase himself before his deity. Leave it to the common people to spend all day in the temples waiting on their gods like slaves, behaving like valets and hairdressers before the statues of their deities.”
From “A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium”, chapter Tranquilizers in the section on Pagan Rome.

Such a temptation to think that everyone is like us, only (in this case) they wore togas and liked fighting Gauls. This is why period pieces in film and literature are so convincing, when they should really be anything but. To interact with such people would probably be a disorienting experience.

These two worldviews, Christian and pagan, would seem virtually irreconcilable, and yet a couple hundred years later they ended up in a rather peculiar forced marriage!

You need a happy family, or an example of one, to formulate a positive image of God. Otherwise Heaven is as frightening as a drunken parent. No problem for the Roman, reconciling earthly disfunction with heavenly perfection - heaven was as dysfunctional as Roman society!

Through a Glass Darkly

2010-03-03T23:35:00.001-07:00

“Meanwhile, the disciples had returned from the city, and wondered to find Him talking with a woman [the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s Well]. The relations of the sexes, even in common life, were very narrow and suspicious among the Jews. That a woman should allow herself to be seen unveiled was held immodest, and for any woman to let herself be heard singing a song was almost unchaste. In Judea a bridegroom might be along with his bride, for the first time, an hour before marriage, but in Galilee even this was thought unbecoming. Trades which brought the two sexes in any measure into contact were regarded with suspicion, and no unmarried person of either sex could be a teacher, lest the parents of the children might visit the school. In Rabbis especially, even to speak with a woman in public was held indecorous in the highest degree. “No one” (that is, no Rabbi) says the Talmud, “is to speak with a woman, even if she be his wife, in the public street.” It was forbidden to greet a woman, or take any notice of her. “Six things,” we are told, “are to be shunned by a Rabbi. He must not be seen in the street dripping with oil (which would imply vanity); he must not go out at night alone; he is not to wear patched shoes (which in certain cases would be carrying a burden, when it was unlawful to do so); he must not speak with a woman in a public place; he must shun all intercourse with common people (for, not knowing the Law, they might be ‘unclean’); he must not take any long steps (for that would show that he was not sunk in the study of the Law); and he must not walk erect (for that would display pride).” Though higher in position and respect among the Jews than in other Eastern nations, woman, at the time of Christ, was treated as wholly inferior to man. “Let the words of the Law be burned,” says Rabbi Eleazer, “rather than committed to women.” “He who instructs his daughter in the Law,” says the Talmud, “instructs her in folly.”
- The Life and Words of Christ, by John Cunningham Geikie

After typing that I looked at the yahoo homepage and saw an advertisement for sexy underwear with seven mostly naked, heavily photoshopped ladies standing in a row. Treating the models so overtly as sex objects, the image is pornographic even if it is not explicit. Extra credit for the banner’s title: “I love my body” – astonishing that the examples they show us are of women who didn’t like the bodies God gave them and got new ones through fanatical activity and elective surgery. Look how different our cultures are. How can I relate to their world and experience across such an expanse? They, narrowly channeled through life by stultifying rules and laws – hedges and walls that divide humans and prevent closeness. Too many of us, imagining we have full liberty of action and interaction between the sexes, instead reduce those around us to mere objects, fulfillers of cultivated fantasies, and set up elaborate fashion systems that are so rigorous that no more than a handful can fulfill them. Giving and receiving of love between the sexes is only on the most physical and superficial level.

Who is more restricted by rules and mores?

How foolish these old-timey Jews seem – outward signals that one is free of pride can be just as prideful as any other action that “looks” prideful. But how would they judge us? They would judge our ethic of self-worth-through-sexuality harshly.

I think their “hedge about the Law” has a lot in common with our rules of fashion. It’s a way for a self-selected elite to establish social standards of value and importance that put them at the top and others below. It is a competitive system, never about inclusion, only exclusion. One is always being judged against others, and the continual amplitude of effort and zeal leads to the most maddening and ridiculous brinkmanship.

Alternate Ending to 1984 Where Winston Becomes a God Instead of an Animal

2010-03-03T10:39:00.001-07:00

Picking up the action in Room 101. First paragraph is from the book:

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then - no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment - one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats.

He was suddenly struck with a curiosity so powerful that he nearly forgot where he was. What was Julia’s worst thing in the world? What hidden fear, known only to O’Brien, stalked her hidden thoughts? Winston remembered his love like a hazy, half-forgotten dream slipping back into memory. With ferocious affection he imagined her alone and afraid in the same chair he was now in. He imagined throwing himself between her and some huge, dark, dreadful thing.

The rats were right before his eyes. The wire pressed into his cheek, and the cage snapped into place. O’Brien had only to depress the lever. Winston saw the end. If he waited a few seconds it would all be over.

He clenched up his will and resolved to wait a few seconds. He imagined that by waiting he might somehow protect his beloved from that same dreadful thing.

A few seconds passed. The door of the cage tremored and lifted a centimeter or two, and then stopped. One rat shuffled madly trying to get through the narrow space while the old one stared at him with malevolent eyes, but to Winston the world froze in place. Moment after moment the worst thing in the world was about to happen.

O’Brien broke the impasse by casually releasing the lever, snapping the cage door back shut, as if something had occurred to him that he wanted to say before causing the dreadful thing. “You are,” he said, “perhaps -

Winston shut out the words and closed his eyes. Why wouldn’t the dreadful thing happen? Then he realized – this was the worst thing in the world! This was Big Brother’s greatest and final claim to his loyalty! If this was not enough to make him love Big Brother, nothing would be. It was a dangerous thing for his tormentors to give him this final choice, for beyond it they were powerless. This was an act of desperation on their part.

In Winston’s mind he and O’Brien switched places. They were weak and he was powerful. He was doing the worst thing in the world to O’Brien. They needed him to love Big Brother. They needed him to agree with them, while he needed nothing from them.

He opened his eyes, and everything fell away from him: the rats, the walls of Room 101, the halls of the Ministry of Love, the bunkers, buildings, guns, tanks and floating fortresses, the secret police with minds like machines, the careful beetle-like men crawling through the Ministry of Truth, and men like O’Brien with their calculated madness. Every inch of it was a cruel façade over the face of the universe, obscuring all real meaning and value. It dropped away, and he was left with himself. He was free. The fear and hatred that had animated him so long were gone.

He loved Julia.

2010-03-01T23:03:00.003-07:00

There’s a confusing and conflicting array of data and numbers being bandied around about the state of the economy. Reports on this or that new number give a wide variety of pictures about how things are going.

Oh no! Job numbers are down!
Oh yes! Manufacturing orders are up!
Oh yes! The stock market is up!
Oh no! Housing starts are down!
Wait…but home prices are up!
We’re losing our shirts!
No, the recession is actually over – everyone celebrate!

What does it all mean? It seems like the more information we have, the more confused we get.

There’s a problem with the way we are using all these numbers. Before explaining, I’d like to introduce a concept:

THE REAL ECONOMY

The economy is actually split into two different parts – factions we might describe as real and fake. The “real economy” is exactly what it purports to be – the portion of the economy that is real. The fake economy is, in certain crucial ways, artificial. What’s the difference? The real economy is what people themselves are willing to do with their time, energy, and resources. The fake one is dependant on what government does with the resources that it gets from borrowing, printing money, and confiscating from us.

I should be clear that not everything that the government does is “fake economy”. There’s nothing fake about a government takeover of health care, for example. That portion of the economy will be real regardless of who is running it. I am talking about things that, if government wasn’t doing them, they would not be done at all. That is the fake economy.

Example: Recently our leaders in Washington decided that Americans weren’t buying enough cars. American auto manufacturers were already being kept on life support by tens of billions of government largesse, but still people weren’t buying enough of their cars to make them healthy again. So, to support those companies and their unions, government pledged three billion dollars of our money to subsidize the purchase of new autos.

Predictably, auto sales during this time were extraordinary, as consumers either advanced a planned auto purchase to take advantage of the program, or were convinced to buy autos they didn’t need and couldn’t otherwise afford.

Due to the prominence and popularity of this program (which you probably remember as Cash for Clunkers), there was no risk of people thinking that improved auto sales meant the economy was recovering. But government is spending trillions of dollars every year right now to prop up the economy, and its activities are affecting things in ways that are very difficult to measure.

(This, by the way, is the role government tries to play in economic downturns. Rather than tough it out through the trough of a depression before things eventually improve, government papers things over. People are too poor and scared to buy anything right now, so government steps with loads of money, spending to make up some of the difference. Essentially, government deficit spending replaces consumer spending and investment, in hopes that this will lessen the severe parts of a depression. By providing artificial demand for cars, houses, stocks and so forth, the government hopes to gin things up until the storm is over and the real economy has recovered.)

Now we can circle back to the confusion about what’s really going on in the economy. We already know that the fake economy is doing great – free money from government for people to do things that no one else is willing to pay for. What we really want to see is an improvement in the REAL economy – people being willing and able to spend more of their OWN money and invest and work hard and so forth. Unfortunately, these two economies are very difficult to separate and the economic numbers that get reported usually include the fake numbers as well. Thus, when (for example) home sales go up, it is hard to tell how much is because people really want new houses and are willing to sacrifice to get them, or if they were just doing it because government made it practically free and riskless to buy one. It’s like holding a magnet next to a compass and then trying to point which way is north.

This is something people have a hard time perceiving. We are very used to relying on certain measures to describe economic progress. Numbers that describe unemployment, real estate, and the stock market used to give a somewhat more trustworthy indication of how things were going, but right now they are largely reflecting the effectiveness of various government programs, rather than any underlying strength and optimism. Housing and stock market numbers in particular are so heavily reliant on government money and support that they have almost no meaning right now.

So, if all the various measures of economic productivity are tainted by meddlers in Washington, what SHOULD we be paying attention to so we can understand how things are really going?

Well, one of the main causes of our ongoing depression is the over-indebtedness of the American consumer. Beguiled by easy credit and the false promises of an ownership society where everyone owns a house and gets rich, Americans have gone into debt at levels that haven’t been seen since the run-up to our last great depression. (Our government is also assuming trillions of dollars of debt every year, but here I am talking just about private non-government debt.) Over-leveraged and deeply in debt, Americans have had no stomach for the investment, indulgence and consumption that are such a large part of our economy. Certainly American debt levels will have to decrease – a lot – before the sort of recovery Wall Street and Washington are waiting for can happen. See the graph.

It shows the total debt held by Americans, in trillions of dollars. Since 1997 the amount has more than doubled, before finally leveling off at the start of the depression last fall.

So at least it isn’t going UP any more, but it’s rather distressing to see that, in more than a year, the number hasn’t moved down very much. There’s still a long way to go, and Americans, jobless and living in homes worth a fraction of their previous value, are having a hard time managing it. Until we work off a significant portion of this debt, it will be hard enough for people to pay for food and mortgages, much less the conspicuous consumption that fueled our chimerical global boom.

For all its importance, this important statistic has been largely ignored by government and the media. Instead, our leaders are wasting time and trillions of dollars trying to maintain an artificial status quo. In fact, by subsidizing and encouraging big-ticket purchases, government programs like the first-time homebuyer’s credit and Cash for Clunkers have served to INCREASE consumer debt. They are pushing us in exactly the wrong direction right now.

2009-10-17T18:58:00.004-06:00

See the attached graph. It shows the various assets currently held by our nation's Federal Reserve, compared month-to-month. The numbers are in billions, so there are approx. 2.1 trillion dollars in assets at this point. There are all sorts of things: treasury bills, ownership of troubled companies, assets bought from troubled companies that those companies could not sell to anyone else, along with other sundry things.

Notice how the total sum went from less than one trillion to over two trillion practically overnight when our ongoing depression started, and has hovered around that point since then. This means they had to come up with over a trillion dollars (either borrowed or created out of thin air) to buy those assets and augment their balance sheet.

Now notice the asset class "MBS". Know what that is? It stands for "mortgage backed securities". What happens is, a bank lends a homebuyer money to buy a home. This mortgage represents an asset - an expectation of future income for the bank as the buyer pays off the mortgage, balanced against the risk of the homeowner defaulting and not paying the mortgage back.

However, banks don't always intend to keep these mortgages. Instead, they bundle hundreds and thousands of these mortgages together into what we call MBS's, and sell them off. The buyer of these MBS's then get the revenue from the homeowners paying off their mortgages. If everyone pays off their mortgage, then the MBS is a profitable asset. If enough people default, it is not, and the buyer doesn't get back what they paid for the asset.

Notice that the Federal Reserve owned zero $ in MBS's as of February of this year. This is because it really isn't the Fed's business to invest in the real estate market (or any other non-government market, for that matter). However, starting in March they have started buying them at a consistent pace of $100 billion every month. Since the total asset level has remained relatively flat, they have sold other assets to buy these MBS's.

While I don't have an exact figure on mortgages originated every month, this $100 billion per month represents a substantial percentage of all new/refi mortgages that month. It could be 50% or more. Basically, they are buying half or more of all the mortgages formed every month. Thus the Federal Reserve "owns" millions of houses, and also owns the risk associated with all those homeowners being able to pay off our mortgages.

This is not the only way our government is meddling in the real estate market, but it is one of the largest and most significant, even though most of my readers probably haven't heard about it. Combined with the efforts of other agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the FHA mortgage relief, free $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers, et cetera, our government is influencing the real estate market, property values, and mortgage rates, to an astonishing degree. And $100 billion a month in MBS's is an enormous amount of money - $1.2 trillion a year. That is almost the amount of the entire budget deficit our government will run this year.

Questions:

1. Why would they do this?

Answer: Keeping real estate prices artificially high is one of the major priorities of our government. Buying up all these mortgages helps accomplish this in two ways:

First, mortgage rates have to stay low - very low - unprecedentedly low. If rates go up, buyers have to spend more on interest, meaning they have less money for the house itself. They'll also be less willing to buy in the first place. So prices go down. The government has tremendous power to influence the interest rates that everyone has to pay to borrow, and they've used all that power to get mortgage rates down below 5%.

The problem is, a 4.85% rate isn't very lucrative for a mortgage company, particulary in the very scary economy we've got right now. People are being laid off in droves, and mortgage defaults are a mounting tsunami. They'd rather charge way way more for a mortgage, even to a "safe" borrower. Since they can't, in many cases they'd rather just sit on the money than take on the risk of a new mortgage. So even though rates are enticingly low, lenders aren't willing to lend the money. This is one of the reasons it's been hard to get a mortgage for the past year. With fewer mortgages granted, sellers have a hard time finding buyers and prices go down.

By buying up so many MBS's, however, the Federal Reserve takes that risk right out of the lender's hands! So what if the borrower loses their job? - that's the government's problem. So what if the rate is a rinky-dink 4.7%? It doesn't affect the bank! The lenders and mortgage companies are motivated to go ahead and write whatever mortgages they want, because ultimately the risk for many of them is taken off their hands by our government.

Thus sales are up, rates are down, and real estate prices stay much higher than they would without trillions of dollars of our tax money propping the whole market up.

2. How much longer can they do it?

Answer: Take a look at the graph. Even while buying $100 billion of MBS's a month, the Federal Reserve has not increased the overall value of its portfolio. They have sold off or retired other assets, and rather than using the money to pay off debt or return it to taxpayers, they are using it to buy mortgages. The problem is, they can't do this forever because they will eventually run out of other assets to sell off. Right now MBS's constitute about 1/3 of the Fed's portfolio. Let's assume they can't sell off the US Treasury notes they continue to accumulate, so that's $700 billion they can't touch (the subject of another essay - they really can't sell those right now without some very frightening consequences). That leaves about $700 billion in other assets - seven months max, assuming they can sell EVERYTHING (which they can't). So sometime in the next six months, they will no longer be able to keep buying up MBS's the way they want to. Next year they'll have to choose one of the following:

a. borrow more - basically double the government's deficit for the year
b. create a trillion dollars out of thin air - that will dilute the value of every dollar, sabotage our savings, and make it harder for our government to borrow money
c. stop buying the MBS's

3. How much risk does this represent?

A lot. The government is stockpiling enormous risk in these mortgages. If unemployment increases unabated and mortgage defaults continue to pile up, these MBS's will have billions and billions in losses that taxpayers will have to cover. Additionally, if the market changes and real estate values go down like they really should, more and more people will be underwater on their houses, and be motivated to walk away, increasing MBS losses even more. Finally, in such a scenario the Federal Reserve will have a very rough time selling these risky assets to anyone else. "We" will be stuck with them.

4. What might happen when they stop buying $100 billion every month?

Mostly the bad things I described in #3 will happen. At this point they cannot stop buying these things without a whole host of Really Bad Things. They are going along with it, hoping that the economy will heal before they run out of money. If it doesn't (which, with 10% unemployment and enormous private debt, it won't), they will probably feel forced to borrow more or turn on the printing press to keep buying MBS's, taking on more and more risk as they try to avoid the unavoidable.

5. What should they have done instead?

Good question, and one I'm not qualified to answer. But my opinion is that the problems they are trying to avoid are unavoidable, and that their efforts are essentially in vain. So they really could have done NOTHING and, I think, been better off. The way to recover from a bubble is to let the bubble pop. Unfortunately, even now our government is enthusiastically pumping air into the real estate bubble, and it's costing a lot of money to do so.

6. What should we do?

Food storage. Stay out of debt. Don't fall in love with the things of the world - reserve your love for your families, friends, and God. The prophets were really, really right about that stuff. All our idols might crumble before our eyes, but our future is bright if we remember what really matters.

2008-07-02T12:31:00.000-06:00

Search this

2007-04-05T13:46:00.000-06:00

Didja notice the WSJ article today about ask.com's new marketing campaign in the UK, and the resulting fallout? The campaign is less about them and more an attempt to play up fears of Big Brother Google controlling information channels on the internet.

Time out - right now a tall Argentinian is standing IN my cubicle, conversing loudly with his dad and brother over the cube walls. I find this rather aggressively rude, breathtakingly audacious. Who does that - like, ever? Ever, in the history of the universe, who walks into another person's workspace in such a way? In Argentina they do, I guess. He walks out, then back in, out and in again, now he's standing there and listening. My personal space is being violated. I am not a confrontational person, so haven't said anything yet. And don't know what I would - he's the son of the owner and founder. Perhaps a "no trespassing" sign. Better use the caps lock - unleash the fury!

Okay, about ask.com. I find their attempts at a sort of weird mainstream-guerilla-counterculture hybrid that doesn't build or promote or even really mention their OWN brand to be exceedingly curious, but not as curious as this:

"The online criticism (of the campaign) hasn't been the company's only problem. Soon after the ads appeared, bloggers noticed that searching for the word "Google" on ask.com pulled up this comment: "Don't be a droid - use different sources of information" next to a drawing of a man on puppet strings and a link to ask.com's anti-google web site. Mr Lanzone says the link was put up by overzealous staff, and was quickly removed to avoid any doubt about the impartiality of the site's searches."

Nothing like exploiting the channels of information you control to decry just that sort of exploitation.

More to the point, I love how they gloss over it: "oh, no big deal; some of our staffers got a little carried away and manipulated our search engine to suit their proclivities." Like it's no big deal, like it happens all the time. If quality of information is a positive good for ask.com and its users and exploitation a hiss and byword, wouldn't this bring down a sort of holocaust on the marketing hacks that tampered with search results? Instead it's a little faux-pas that's fixed and forgotten.

The subversive part of me wonders what sorts of search results I'd like to manipulate. Imagine! What would you like a searcher to see when they query Sanjaya, erectile dysfunction, or the Hawley-Smoot Tarrif?

But there are economic concerns at stake. No secret that a search engine will show results its creator designates. And this leads to a question worth pondering: what are the economic, societal, and investment consequences of the information atmosphere that is being shaped in the electronic age? Where the power to promote and restrict certain information rests in the hands of a relative few?

The utopian vision of the internet and unfettered communication offered the idea that people would be able to communicate with pretty much whomever they pleased. Are the many and various channels many and various enough to overwhelm any effort to restrict? Do people care enough to find what they WANT to find? Or are they happy with whatever pops up on their yahoo! home page? And what are the consequences of THAT? Have you noticed the rolling-up and consolidation of promotional power in the various media? Disney promotes its films on ABC. Yahoo pumps up its media partners with "news" stories on its main page. The same names are seen wherever you look, it seems. Britney, Paris, and Xtina, yay!

Birdie

2007-03-26T23:02:00.000-06:00

I am watching a nature show about winged migration. A bird with a broken wing is being stalked and attacked by sand crabs on a sea shore. Now there is a pulsating, shifting pile of crabs atop the bird, eating it. ! What a fascinating series of images! There are many archetypal rivalries in the natural world - lions and gazelles, sperm whales and giant squids, dogs and mailmen, gerbils and fax machines. I could never have imagined that birds and crabs would share a place among them. The crabs have a strange, darting attack that would be hard to take seriously - they walk sideways, so they are leading their attack not with mandibles or claws, but with their quick, slender legs. Imagine being confronted by a mugger who pranced towards you sideways, not even looking at you.

I am sad that they didn't show the takedown - the moment where the quick, darting advances of the crabs offered an opening and they pulled down their prey. How did they do it? They can't advance and attack at the same time, so they'd need a rather immobile prey, wouldn't they? I suppose the crabs have been doing such things for a long time, so they have probably figured it out.

Another bird has just speared a large fish with its sharp bill. It cannot swallow it because the fish is still impaled on its lower jaw. Now it's figured it out. I have decided that birds are cool. I have long had an affinity for penguins, but will now extend this affinity to other species as well.

Melt-Banana song on Youtube

2007-02-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

The Monkey Man.

Advisory: you'd better be open to new experiences.

Masters in History from the University of Wikipedia

2007-01-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

Its weaknesses aside, one of my favorite things to do is query wikipedia.org. I like to read about things (concepts, objects, etc) that are often used but rarely considered - the neglected patches of our mental or cultural landscapes, if you will. Like what's the difference between an assasination and a murder. We all know they're different, but how?

I also love how pages are linked to each other. Such a bother in book form, it's a breeze on the internet, and I often swing, Tarzan-like, from page to page, and end up learning something awesome about something I'd never even thought to examine when I opened my browser.

Like, when was the fairy tale Cinderella first told? I have no idea. Turns out it is a few hundred years old - IN ENGLISH. There is a Chinese tale, hundreds of years older, from which Cinderella's original teller seems to have borrowed liberally.

I strongly encourage you read about it. On wikipedia, of course!

Mice turning into footmen is strange enough, I suppose, but the olde-time Chinese take on the story is outright bizarre. The wicked stepmother eats Cinderella's mother, for example.

Wait, what?

You heard me. And the ending is breathtaking. To me the elevation of the heroine and the corresponding abasement of the wickeds is an edifying denoument. It wouldn't have struck me as karmically necessary to crush them with stones.

You choose, you lose.

2006-11-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

I am thinking if I have anything to say right now and nothing’s coming to mind. One thing: I notice that my desk is just ten or twelve feet away from the CEO’s. He has a cubicle, too. It will be HARD to convince management that I deserve an office.

Has everybody gotten over their election fever yet? Midterm cases are usually pretty mild. It is easy for the election to sneak up on Utah voters – hardly anyone advertises their candidacy on radio or TV. Contrast that to Arizona (where I spent part of last week) – yikes! A talk-radio listener gets warnings, sometimes stentorian and sometimes full of throaty passion, about all the horrible things that will happen to your beautiful state if so-and-so is elected to such-and-such. I wonder if Arizona voters’ minds are trained to take it all in – for me it all started running together in my head. Voting for whom will cause cancer? Which proposition will reverse the earth’s gravity? Which judge sets sex felons free and gives them your daughter’s cell number? These negative ads seem to cast an indiscriminate grey pall over the whole proceedings, and induce a voter to feel bad about everything.

Nothing like that in Utah! A benefit of one-party state politics is that you are never troubled to hear opposite views or dissenting opinions.

Working for a living

2006-11-15T14:53:00.000-07:00

I am writing this at work, during my lunch break of my new job at a watch merchant's corporate headquarters.

So, if anyone ever wants an answer to the question, "What time is it?" they know who to ask.

This is a funny place, since there is an office, warehouse, and watch repair place all in the same building. It's like a big garage. Small companies are funny: the HR dept is 25 feet away from me, and marketing is about 10. I tread an imaginary border between operations and finance. I have a cubicle on a concrete floor in the middle of a big garage. Three feet away from me on the other side of my cubicle wall, craftsmen are tinkering with watches, fussing at gears and springs and hitting tiny things with tiny hammers. An aircraft-carrier-grade heater whirrs intermittently above. There are no windows on the walls. If I don't go outside and get some sun, I'm going to get all pale and wretched and start saying "Gollum" a lot.

Some folks are dressed like artists, some are dressed like businessmen, and some are wearing sweats and jeans as they lift and move things around.

It's funny how well the office people dress for their job in the garage. Dark socks, nice shirts, and so on. Almost as if to say, "I'm dressed too nice to move any boxes! Find someone else to do the physical labor!" At least, that's what I'm hoping my dress says about me.

People are pretty nice. I'm still trying to get to know them. A man just came by and said hi. He introduced himself to me and I asked what he does for the company. He answered, "I am the CEO."

Whoops!

World Cup

2006-08-01T00:25:00.000-06:00

The final rounds of the World Cup of Soccer came and went last month. The football was entertaining enough, I suppose. The benefit of not having a job is being able to watch pretty much all 63 games, and after such an embarrassment of riches I became rather jaded. It was fun, however, to see how excited people got about the matches, and there is a particular thrill I get to hear a stadium full of fans scream when a goal is finally scored.

Speaking of fans and thrills, I noticed a peculiar tendency of the shot selection protocols practiced by the television cameramen that were recording the game to broadcast to us. Whenever the narrative of the game requires a crowd shot, the cameras tend to seek out the comeliest young ladies they can find for a close-up.

I’m not sure people realize it, but this phenomenon is rather commonplace at sporting events. Long have nubile coeds come early to college football games so they can stand in the front row and show off their goods to the video cameras and photographers. At the World Cup, young ladies seeking this sort of attention will hold their nation’s flag up behind them. This creates a makeshift backdrop that advertises their loyalties and indicates, perhaps, which team’s players they are most interested in fraternizing with after the game. I have posted an ensample; we can see the typical characteristics: front row, flag, half a shirt, and a surfeit of team spirit. We can also see that Argentinean ladies are more familiar with armpit hygiene than women of certain other nations.

(For some reason, three of the four gentlemen over her left shoulder are not watching the game. They seem to be distracted by something else.)

I suppose it understandable that cameramen would seek the most pleasing and positive images possible, according to their own aesthetic inclinations. And there is hopefully not too much moral danger in seeing one immodest Latina. But I find ill portentions in television viewers being fed a steady diet of beauty and only beauty.

These sporting events are a perfect example. Tens of thousands in attendance look just like regular people, but the cameras aren’t so interested in them. The young lady above doesn’t look like them. She doesn’t look like hardly anyone. She possesses a physique attainable only by a few, and even then only by dint of fanatical exercise and invasive surgery. But she is the one we see when we watch.

Television would have us believe that those bulbous bosoms, trim figures, and clear, sharp features are what people really look like. Or should, at least. The logical realization of the illusion is not enough of a defense, for as we surround ourselves with illusory beauty our attitudes and perceptions are still affected. Trips to Wal-Mart and the DMV are mildly shocking for some of us – seeing the denizens of such places is a forceful reminder of what human beings really look like: saggy, scorched, brittle, and squishy.

Figure Skating

2006-02-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

The reason for watching figure skating has always escaped me.

You might call it the gymnastics of the Winter Games: waifish girls contorting their underdeveloped, malnourished, twelve-year-old bodies into moves as athletic, graceful, and alluring as they are able.

Anyway, scads of you Americans do like it, and since American Idol wasn’t on tonight you saw some figure skating drama between West and East, the USA and Russia, Cohen and Slutskaya.

Surprise! This year both the domineering, fame-hungry parents of Western Celebrity Worship and the state-sponsored trainers of Totalitarian National Prestige Fabrication took a back seat to the nation of Japan, whose Shizuka Arakawa took top honors after lackluster performances by the Cold War powers’ leading lights.

I am not sure which motivational tools Japanese favor. Though, coming from a collectivist society, doubtless the young woman felt a great deal of pressure to not let everyone down, and was perhaps less concerned with individual fulfillment.

Unrelatedly, my right leg is twitching. It has been doing so all week. I do not understand.

I've been everywhere

2006-02-24T00:37:00.000-07:00

I have been to:

create your own visited states map

Cheney's Got a Gun

2006-02-15T01:04:00.000-07:00

What can be said about the Vice President of the United States shooting a guy? This is the first time the sitting Vice President has shot someone since Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton. In both cases, the man shot was an attorney. The attention of America’s mockerati has been focused on the story all week and I could not say anything funnier than what has already been said. Still, I AM glad to hear the Vice President is standing behind his decision to shoot his buddy; we don’t want any weak-kneed equivocating in our dangerous global climate.

And anyway, the guy he shot just had a heart attack as a result of the attack, so it’s not socially acceptable to make jokes until he’s recovered.

I have recently become aware of another un-mockable situation: The upcoming film “Date Movie”, not content with spoofing contemporary chick flicks, has decided to also spoof that recent BYU-influenced offering, Napoleon Dynamite.

This is utter foolishness, apart from the fact that Napoleon Dynamite is not much of a romantic comedy. As far as I’m concerned, ND is completely and utterly unspoofable. I mean, how can someone make fun of that film or its eponymous lead? I mean really, will you make the Napoleon imitator look like an uncultured, unpopular nerd? Will you assign all manner of human frailties and weaknesses to him? Will you make him prey to cruel pratfalls? People will simply think you are imitating him.

The greatest barbs of the satirist and parodist are always aimed at the self-important and self-serious, those with inflated egos and exaggerated gravity. Their main business is to make the serious unserious. There are few things less serious than Napoleon Dynamite, and he is thus immune to their ink-stained daggers.

SOTU STFU

2006-02-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

Everyone already knows about it. Mother Sheehan was arrested in the Capitol Building before the State of the Union Address for disruptive behavior.

Her words. (warning! the zealous community members of that website have filthy mouths! read the 'comments' section at your own peril)

No charges will be filed, and the US Capitol Police have apologized for arresting her.

The online Left is screaming. I am always mystified by the general outrage when someone gets hassled by the Man in a prominent way. She was in that audience for political purposes and those purposes were achieved, albeit indirectly. Rather than just being on camera a few times with her t-shirt, she gets her first amendment rights violated while the nation is watching. Things have turned out for her about as good as possible. She gets free publicity, enhances her martyr status, can engage in a very public and shameful flaunting of her victimhood, and further cement herself in the pantheon of Liberal-Left public figures.

That, and she didn’t have to sit through a scripted, ritualistic, made-for-TV snoozer.

You’d think everyone on dailykos would be cheering. This will energize the base, get out protestors, raise soft money, sell t-shirts, and generally inspire the sorts of things leftists do when they're angry.

Crazy delicious

2006-01-19T22:45:00.000-07:00

It seems that the more technology gives us ability to write or film anything and show it to the world, the more nobody seems to have anything to say.

These guys have nothing to say, but they say it with a certain perverse style:

The Chronic - WHAT? - Cles of Narnia!

That video has been viewed 3.4 million times in the past month.

Say, can you see?

2006-01-18T00:06:00.001-07:00

Technological development has improved telecommunications, travel, sanitation, computing, and most anything else you can think of. We can contemplate the atoms of the Big Bang, send complicated devices to other planets, and steal music on the internet. We can even kill lots of people much more elegantly and impressively than ever before.

But post-modern fireworks are stupid.

Has there been any change? Any innovation? Any genuinely new thing in the last thirty years of technological development? Fireworks nowadays seem shorter-lived and smaller than their grandparents were.

We set some off on December 31. Put them on the street and lit them, or flung them in the air in hopes they would ignite mid-air. The most memorable thing about the evening was finding that Sean throws – well, not like a girl, but definitely in a manner unbecoming a former marine.

We got our thrills, but purely from supercharged snark and irony. My favorite was the Twin Towers firework. No, we did not pick it up on the streets of Damascus – as well you should ask. The idea of setting fire to some representation of the World Trade Center strikes one as slightly anti-American. Not so! This is in fact a sober and wholesome commemoration of America’s darkest hour – a day stained in blood, ashes, dust, and the echoed threats of hostile zealots from halfway round the world. What better way to remember it all than with your own little conflagration, right out on your driveway?

At least, that’s what the sellers of this product are saying. Now, to me fireworks have never seemed to have much meaning. Light fuse. Watch lights. Repeat. If there is some sort of higher symbolism, it escapes me, and I will need enlightening. I think what gets me is the similarity of the firework product to the actual World Trade Center. You don’t set fire to things you love!

The makers of the Twin-Towers-in-a-box foresaw this uncomfortable interpretation to this questionable activity. Writing on the top of the box sets us straight. “When you light this firework, you are not reliving the tragedy, but remembering the sacrifice and spirit of our great nation on that terrible day.”

Just below that it solemnly intones, “Remove lid before lighting.”

So anyway, we lit the Twin Towers and saw them burn for a few seconds in an extremely modest haze of sparks. Nobody would have died in that fire. Think twin engine Cessna rather than super jumbo 747.

It lit up with red sparks, then white sparks, and then purple sparks.

It seemed fitting, somehow.

"Allegedly"

2005-12-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

A guy who used to be in the same LDS ward as me is in jail.

Story.

So odd to read about an acquaintance being tried for some heavy-duty felonies. The public record sanitizes his very identity, distilling it down to "a Salt Lake man." Strange. I'm "a Salt Lake man," too.

Bank fraud, forgery, ripping off friends and strangers alike - it's not looking good for Baylor Stevens. He could be in the hole for most of his natural life.

Of course at this point he has only been indicted, not convicted. But...let me put it this way: if most anyone else from that ward had been hauled in front of a magistrate I would be "shocked, yes, shocked." In this case it's more like, "hmm, that answers a few questions." I always thought him to be vaguely oleaginous, with the sort of reserved blandness you'll sometimes get from people who never really say what they think.

The article was still shocking, though, for it contains the appalling revelation that he is younger than me. I thought he was like 35. He has old eyes.

My mom wanted my sister to go out with him.

So, now what? Do we wait for stern and dispassionate justice to run its course, for better or worse? Or do we go ahead and make up our minds on the matter?

Free at last

2005-12-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

Finals have just ended. I don’t think finals have ever been as stressless as this iteration was. MBA students are more or less guaranteed that they will graduate; a failing student is bad for the program too. Anyone who is only moderately disruptive and merely kind of stupid will still escape with a B-.

It’s a liberating thing, knowing one does not have to worry about meeting artificial measures of achievement. The humble student focuses instead on actually learning something germane to his interests and plans.

This week’s The Coolest Thing Ever is a quote I found from a guy named Damien Counsell relating Michael Jackson to Darth Vader:

“Michael Jackson’s story is Darth Vader’s in reverse. In Star Wars, a whiny, sexually frustrated, white man-child no one trusts turns, via hideous disfigurement, into an all-conquering, super-cool black guy who first made it big in the 70s.”

This kind of idea is what makes the internet so valuable.

False Crises

2005-12-02T22:44:00.000-07:00

I remember as a child, the frightening scene in Superman where Lois Lane is trapped in a wrecked helicopter, hanging from a slender wire off the side of a building. I recall being terrified that any person would have to face such a situation. Oh, the anxiety of the fraying wire, the ugly stirrings and twistings of the wrecked machine, the gulp of horror as she falls, falls, falls only to be saved by Superman! What luck that he was there. And could fly.

My youthful mind was not sophisticated enough to anticipate this turn of events (or recognize that Margot Kidder’s striking Superman at a hundred miles an hour would hurt at least as much as pavement ever could). But now, to my mind, the hanging-from-a-helicopter-bit is a yawn-inducing cliche.

I get angry at having to sit through such scenes. Must it be so predictable! There is no anxiety, for the characters are in no danger; they will be rescued. Most every crisis is a false one, and viewers with even basic familiarity with the storytelling conventions of film can recognize it.

Do you disagree with me? Have you ever once thought, “Gosh, I wonder if Indy will get out of this one?” Or, “How can Richard Gere and Julia Roberts ever fall in love now?”

Of course Richard and Julia get together. They always do. More than that, when you go see their predictable by-the-numbers romance, you do so on the strength of a guarantee from the filmmakers of a happy and predictable ending. You don’t WANT a surprise. You want to invest emotional energy in interesting and likeable characters that end up just the way you expect them to.

And then you want to curse Hollywood for its dearth of fresh new ideas.

your new music source

2005-12-01T00:34:00.000-07:00

I didn't discover this until yesterday, but you can select from thousands of music videos at Yahoo music. For free.

http://music.yahoo.com/musicvideos/default.asp

Their marketing plan is an interesting one. In exchange for loading and running a 30-second commercial that you cannot fast-forward or skip, you get to see the video.

You may think wow what a deal, but keep in mind that back when MTV and VH1 actually played music, the ratio was three or four videos per commercial break, not one to one. So maybe a little bit of a step backwards, though at least you get to choose the video yourself, and don't have to endure gangsta misogyny or pop-tart banality before finally getting to the good stuff (unless the commercial is a promo for their latest...shudder).

So I've gone through and seen some of the old favorites. As an iPod man, Metallica is of course going around the top of the list. Some offerings have proven disappointing with more exposure. Metallica's "Fuel" is not the rush I remember, and Hole's "Celebrity Skin" is downright boring. Glad I never bought that album.

But "Head Like a Hole" surprisingly weathers the test of time. And Pearl Jam's disturbing "Do the Evolution" is fascinating in a sickening sort of way. Anything by R.E.M. is good, too.

Check out the service, but don't indulge too much. Those videos dull the mind when watched with profusion.

(Trent Reznor is an awfully good musician. I wish he would write tunes that are not so ugly and depressing.)

Context

2005-12-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

I wrote & edited a couple of posts at the start of the week, so as to parse them out and be able to post daily despite the hectic lead-up to finals and projects currently passing.

But now I find I am fresh out of ready-made scripts to paste in. Not wanting to lose the literally couples of readers that are faithfully checking back regularly, I want to post SOMETHING. Thus the final expediency, typically very worst: free-form mental vomitings.

So right now it's just me, live, writing to you. And you alone!

Tonight I was talking to a friend, and the subject of dating came up. Explaining her continuing singlehood in the face of eminent eligibility and desirability, she said there weren't any of "her type" of guys around.

Now, for a variety of reasons she can afford to be picky, but the primary things she avers she is looking for are neither exceptionally rare nor hard to identify. So I asked her how exactly local men are lacking.

She answered something like, "Well, I would like someone that shares interests. For example, I love to such and such obscure thing."

It so happens that I LOVE this too.

Does declaring so equate to saying I am interested in her? You may say no, but context context context.

So, like the tin-eared social deafie I am (wow, what an unholy combination-metaphor...and packaged inside a similie, I note), I blurted out something like, "I love that too!" then quickly reprised with "...and...I...didn't think I was out of the ordinary, so there you have it!"

I don't know about dating her. Wouldn't oppose it, I suppose, but I haven't really considered it as she does not seem the sort that would go for my sort. Now, the really interesting question is whether this raises me in her estimation (as I also meet the other criteria she mentioned), or if I still fail on the numerous secret criteria we all harbor and are ashamed to admit in polite company.

Well. This relating-to-other-people stuff is hard. Harder yet to describe in a public forum. And not really cathartic one bit. Blarg, why even discuss it? I envy friends that can extemporize on their dating futilities (you know who you are!) so effortlessly.

Genealogy, I am doing it

2005-11-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

This The Coolest Thing Ever is related to family history just like the last one, so you probably already don’t care. I have shared this and other details about our genealogy with my very own immediate relatives and haven’t elicited anything exceeding a “that’s cool” from the lot of them. How am I supposed to interest you, I wonder. You aren’t even related to me so how can you relate to this?

On a related note to this related note, I am starting to realize just how, shall we say, ”specialized” an interest in family history is. I find it endlessly fascinating but cannot seem to interest even my own flesh and blood in stories of where we came from.

I am worried that this hobby (obsession?) is akin to those with unhealthy fixations on Star Trek, Everquest, or political partisanship.

Some people are down with genealogy, but most are not. Maybe it’s just my family but I wonder if I have misjudged the potential for wide popular interest. Does that make me like those embarrassingly post-adolescent-fanboys-turned-fan-men, balding beneath their stormtrooper helmets? Am I blithely missing awkward brushoffs at parties when the topic turns toward this fascination of mine? Am I becoming “that guy”? You know, “that guy who can immediately pull out his family tree and show how he relates to Charlemagne”? Shudder. Nothing like devotion to obscure principles and practices to make a fellow insta-weird.

Are there any socially acceptable obsessions nowadays, healthy or unhealthy? I can’t think of any. In some circles, confessing a substantial interest in genealogy is rather like admitting to an awkward and embarrassing social disease.

Oh, wait – the Coolest Thing thing. To heck with it. Ask me about it at the sci-fi convention.

Old-Timey-Movie Review: The Third Man

2005-11-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

The Third Man stars Orson Welles. It is a very well-made flick, but in a way that constantly brings attention to the craft of the filmmakers, rather than allowing the viewer to lose themselves in the flick.

Welles is the “main character” – the Third Man from the title, but does not appear until more than halfway into the film. Welles later said it was the perfect role to play, despite the lack of screen time: even though he’s not ON camera, the other characters spend all their time talking about him. So when he finally does show up, with all the waiting and expecting, all Welles has to do is twitch an eyebrow and grin condescendingly and we are bowled over.

I stop short of saying it is a masterpiece, though it really is well-made, and absolutely arresting to watch. It is about friendship and betrayal, and the futility of Yankee optimism and bellicosity in healing a crushed, cynical and jaded postwar Europe. Unfortunately, while being “about” these things, I’m not sure that it ever gets around to saying anything meaningful on those subjects.

The story revolves around the postwar black market and how some smugglers have hurt hundreds of little children. The protagonist is taken to a hospital where the miserable and luckless little ones are convalescing, and is so horrified that he agrees to betray a trust – but we don’t get to see the kids! We just see him looking AT the kids. Showing wee types all dewy-eyed and pathetic is perhaps an exploitation we are glad to be spared, but it’s like the filmmakers don’t want us to be unfairly influenced to hate the villain, or to see the world a little bit differently. It does little to make me think about the nature of friendship, or betrayal, or honor, virtue, or anything else. The people in it are very real but they don’t matter.

Anyway, I keep thinking I’ll be telling people it’s a masterpiece, but then I don’t. The Cuckoo-Clock-Speech is probably worth the price of admission alone. But it’s an empty pleasure.

I want to recommend it but worry that I am pushing a hollow experience onto you, dear reader. It’s an easy movie to respect, but it affirms nothing, inspires no one, and is in no way edifying or consciousness-enhancing. Is that enough? Maybe I am unfair to accuse a film of not having the ambitions I would have wanted it to.

Back from errantry

2005-11-28T00:44:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Arizona. Light on the blogging because I have not been thinking very much lately. Or, at least not thinking about things that would make for an interesting essay or story. Storage shed unit mixes. Vertically oriented web sites. Valuations of pyramid scheme investments. Business is such utter banality sometimes, it’s a good thing there’s money involved or no one would do it.

Actually, that’s not true (about the banality, not the money…well, sometimes about the money, too). Right now I’m just in the thick of instruction that is all very well and good but not exactly voluntary. Nothing takes the fun out of learning like being forced to do it.

Normally, enterprise and economics are absolutely fascinating. I learned a funny thing while working in a bank a couple years ago. I learned that making money can be as subtle and creative as drawing a picture or writing a book. So far, I have loved finance and banking. The money and asset markets are organic computer systems that no one person can control. They represent the combined efforts, dreams, desires, abilities, and ambitions of most of earth’s population – directly or indirectly.

If you wanted to find the mind of God in earthly terms, I think you might just look for it on Wall Street.

Meanwhile, I’m out of town for a week and what have they done to my wonderful Wasatch Front? When I left it was all “crisp college football Saturday” and upon return this evening it’s a definite “early winter in Kemmerer, Wyoming” vibe. Not good at all, especially since it was 65 and sunny when I got into my car this morning.

Speaking of banality, I checked out the web site for a recent reality show that featured my cousin.

http://www.usanetwork.com/series/madeintheusa/

This show was bad. BAAAAADDDD. As in, so bad that even though my cousin was in it I couldn’t be troubled to watch anything after the first episode. The only redeeming feature (aside from my cousin), was the hosting setup where the judges all had to match American Idol Host personalities. So, going from memory, there was the roly poly nice guy, the attractive sweetheart woman, and most particularly the very elegant snarky ambiguously gay guy – you know, the sort that probably does ostentatious arm-waving finger snaps with no sense of irony at all.

Oh, he didn’t make a very good Simon Cowell at all, but it was funny that the producers thought that’s what made American Idol a success – a certain specific combination of judge personality and chemistry along with liberal dollops of snarky gayness, and nothing else to the mixture. “They’ve got an effeminate ponce? Well, so do we! Let’s get cracking on those Emmy acceptance speeches!” I really like those moments where the engineering of these “reality” shows is laid bare and you can see the machinations and manipulations—however poorly wrought—in action.

Anyway, so it turns out cuz was kicked off after a few episodes for being arrogant, I think. Since he is personable and polite, any conflict (and anything else that happened on the whole stupid show) was probably engineered by a desperate group of producers that could envision their jobs being exported abroad and done for 50% less by Indian engineers that can make reality shows that don’t stink.

By that point the show was being shown at 6 AM on Sundays on their Mexican affiliate. Or something. The sixth and last episode was never even aired. Not good enough to compete with Guadalajara’s early-morning weekend farm report? Ouch.

I love how the website turns this rather substantial liability into an asset. The unaired final episode is recapped thus: “In a result revealed exclusively on usanetwork.com, Chris and Sammy, inventors of the Hydromax System, won the coveted grand prize and had their lives changed forever!”

Nothing like declaring a defeat a victory and bugging out as quick as you can.

That’s probably how we end up getting out of Iraq.

How to Brag About Your GMAT Score

2005-11-27T23:20:00.000-07:00

When I walked out of the Testing Center on the campus of the University of Utah a few years back, I didn’t immediately realize that the events of the few hours previous would change my life. You see, I had sat in front of a terminal, clicked a few dots with my mouse, pushed a pencil across some scratch paper a bit, and had a rather unaccountable jag of giggling. The net result was pleasing as well as surprising: a General Management Administration Test score (basis for entry into an MBA program) of unusual quality.

I got my first inkling that things were to be different from there on when I talked to a fellow test-taker who finished at the same time.

“How did it go?” I believe I asked.

“Sigh, not so well. I was really hoping to top 600, and wasn’t very close.”

“Oh,” I answered. “That’s too bad.”

“So, how did you do?”

“Uh, pretty well.”

If he only knew. My score was of a sort that could transform a young man’s resume into a story of untapped genius waiting to be trained, molded, and leveraged, rather than the tale of limited achievement and similarly proportioned potential it had previously spun, inconsistent and full of sudden starts and stops, generally describing the sort of unmotivated fellow that doesn’t even bother to prepare for important standardized tests.

This lone bright spot perched at the top of the document. I did everything but draw circles, arrows, and stars all about it when I applied to the Brigham Young University MBA program. And it got me in.

It is so rare that we jump through all of the hoops with such success. Wouldn’t you expect people to be happy to hear such a happy tale of standardized brilliance?

Well, they aren’t. Those that haven’t taken the test must take my word for it that this was indeed a special feat. And many that have taken the test do not care one bit to hear me brag about taking it cold; rather, when they contrast my experience with the time, energy, and exquisite anxiety they invested in preparing for and enduring the endeavor, they don’t have anything pleasant at all to say in response. I have learned to answer little and volunteer less.

Still, as touchy as the subject appears to be, it is nonetheless easy enough to find out how classmates did – just ask them. Many are just as eager to brag if not more. Those that demonstrate embarrassed reluctance will require more subterfuge. “To what other schools did you apply?” is a good tack. If they answer with places like New Mexico State and Wyoming; well, they’ve told you all you need to know.

Unfortunately, asking other students outright how they did is not a good strategy for getting them to ask you in return. People rarely reciprocate the solicitous inquiry (being generally more content to talk about themselves), so you must either continue to keep your peace or blurt it out insistently, like the arrogant fool you are.

And what about their performance? If they did better than you there isn’t much to crow about, is there. And heaven forbid they bombed the GMAT – for then social felicity requires you to pooh-pooh the importance of the exam, it’s only a number, no reflection of your intelligence, just a big popularity contest, blah blah blah lies lies lies. How could you possibly bring up your score after that? “Sure the score means nothing. Why, my 830 has done very little to enrich my life.” Rings hollow, doesn’t it.

So really, when it comes to these tests there’s not much to talk about. Your score doesn’t make you a good person. Additionally, your efforts to weave an entertaining tale about the events and particulars of the examination sound akin to that schlubby cousin of yours that is convinced everyone else finds World of Warcraft as fascinating as he does. And, bottom line, you didn’t get it because of any extraordinary effort or feat of learning. You didn’t learn to think any more than you learned to breathe – God and your parents made you that way, and since when is that something to brag about?

So why bring it up at all? Are we so uncertain and insecure that we seek solace from a number that will tell us what we are worth? Apparently the answer is yes. But why fight it – we should enjoy it while we can for the evaluation has an expiration date. There are few things more pathetic than that overweight jock that still trades on his glories long-past. The forty-five-year-old manager that adorns his resume with the glory of a decades-old standardized test score is similarly pathetic. Has nothing valuable happened since then?

Perhaps it would be appropriate to hold a GMAT appreciation day some time at the end of the MBA program, where all graduating students wear a badge showing their score and then compliment each other on their test-taking prowess. Sure, the event may be unbalanced, with most of the recognition going to finance students (and many OB/HR’s not bothering to attend at all). But it would be grand, a general celebration of the last day of life where the GMAT score actually means something, before the big numbers that people brag about start to have dollar signs in front of them.

The Coolest Thing Ever

2005-10-14T14:08:00.000-06:00

“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage – to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.” –Alex Haley

My last name is “Pace.” This sounds very English, which makes sense as the Paces in my past came from England. But it is not from an English word. “Pace” is the Italian word for “Peace,” and actually should be pronounced “Pah-chey" or perhaps "Pacey." It was an occasional Italian surname. What happened there? Who up and left what had been their family’s sun-stained home for countless generations and went forever to a cold, lonely, rainy place where everyone talked funny and had pasty white skin?

Echoing Mr. Haley, I feel I almost need to know who left and why, though it will probably be impossible to find out, for that branch of the family tree fades into dust and obscurity around the year 1600. I have a last name that represents me and is a part of who I am. And I don’t know how I got it. I feel that my understanding of myself is incomplete.

This is all lead-in to "The Coolest Thing Ever (TM)" at least this week's The Coolest Thing Ever. I happened to be reading about the Domesday Book, which was probably the first census or survey ever conducted in the English speaking world. It catalogued thousands of towns, assets, and family names across England in the year 1085.

Well, as I happened to be reading about the Book, I also happened to notice that there are online resources cataloging its contents. I did a search for "Pace," and came up with something! In Warwickshire at the time was a town named "Newbold Pacey." Newbold apparently means new house or manor, while of course Pacey is not an English word, old or modern. It must come from the same place my name did: Italy. The town's name was "New Pace House."

As rare as my surname should have been in England back then, this is certainly a long shot. There were doubtless lots of other "Pacey" people in Italy, and nothing was keeping them from up and moving to England, too.

But it is a tantalizing clue - a whisper out of the dust of the past that might help me find out where my name came from.

Sophisticated deconstruction or noisy incoherence?

2005-10-13T23:51:00.000-06:00

Pressed for time and short on inspiration, I am pasting in something I wrote to a friend some time ago.

Hearing that a skinny Japanaman named Agata was as good a guitarist as well-known guitar "virtuosi" like Wes Boreland, Tom Morello, and Buckethead combined, I downloaded an album by a Japanese band he is a member of, named Melt Banana.

They are certainly unlike anything anybody around here listens to. "Noise rock" is a label I see attached to them. Their songs have no meaning that I can discern, and their titles and lyrics are confusing mishmashes of English phrases (the best I heard was "Chain-shot to have some fun" off the album Cell-Scape) cadged from a dictionary for suitability of sound to a Japanese ear, and then screamed by the tiny, crazy, singing chick. So even if the lyrics were deciphered they wouldn’t be intelligible; they merely play another part next to the bass, guitar and drums.

I normally can't abide songs with no meaning, but that opprobrium usually applies to songs that TRY to have meaning and clearly don't. These artists aren't cynical sell-outs foisting off pre-packaged musical pabulum designed to exploit the latest trends, they are very indie-hip, dare I say avant-garde artists. I don't think I've ever before applied the phrase "avant garde artist" to someone and meant it as a compliment.

So the music has no meaning, no function, but it has a surfeit of form. They aren't pathetic garage-band jam-session recorders. Their music is calculated, extremely so.

I am genuinely astounded that I enjoy this stuff as much as I do. The shapes and colors of the noise are basically divorced from any relevant meaning, image, or idea. It's simply fun to listen to.

It is so fast. The bass and drums set a tempo, I don't know, of 300 beats per minute? Five every second? It is something to hear.

The guitarist Agata is as good as described. Not knowing the difference between good guitar work and bad, I can merely reflect on how unlike a guitar are all the noises his instrument produces. And how consistent the iterations of very odd-sounding riffs are - I would have to imagine that the squeals and howls he has to do over and over are difficult to make with any amount of consistency.

With one or two exceptions, everyone I have played their songs for hated the experience. Give it a listen yourself, if you are brave enough. A fine example of Japanoise:

http://www.parkcity.ne.jp/~mltbanan/

Enter and then click on “Eye and Ear.”

Anger, arrogance, and creativity

2005-10-12T22:00:00.000-06:00

I have often been mystified by the poverty of good LDS fiction I see in the marketplace in my day. This has occupied my mind as I have considered writing a novel for a Mormon audience. How can a people so full of talent, creativity, and surpassing love of God and men have so little capacity in this creative genre?

It is said by thoughtful and reliable sources that within the breast of any comedian, funny man, affable joker, or inveterate prankster beats a heart full of anger and discontent. Some are crusaders and freedom fighters who fight against injustice with mockery and pith, while others find themselves unable to cope with the unpleasantness of life unless they make light of it all.

This is a common thread in many forms of creativity. For most any writer with a passion for expression and a desire to be heard, there has to be a reason to do it. Something must drive them to create. Writing is an exercise in arrogance: if I do not flatter myself with the thought that I have something to say about which others are ignorant, why should I bother with the effort?

George Orwell said this about writing: “When I sit down to write a book…I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

I feel like Mr. Orwell. I would leave the simpler faith-promoting stories for those who know how to assuage readers with pleasant and rather unenlightening affirmations – not because that isn’t difficult in its own right, but rather because if I tried to write without saying anything I wouldn’t be able to write at all.

These empty affirmers that feed the market with works that will change few hearts and enlighten few minds – they are not really writers. Orwell elsewhere says, “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.” By this measure they certainly aren’t writers and I certainly am. Their vanity does not require of them anything grand or surpassing; they do not selfishly care to be the first or best to do anything, and if they are lazy it is a beneficent, productive laziness indeed. That is far better than my dyspeptic, bilious failure.

Is there something for me to say to the LDS fiction audience? What is there to change? What is there to fight against? What challenges need issuing forth? We believe our doctrine is perfect, and the organization of our church (if not our culture) improvable only by God. There is little to establish about divine order or the nature of man, and no unrealistic hope or gloomy pessimism to rectify.

So we are reduced to nit-picking. To issue forth challenges against viewing R-rated movies and the blight of internet pornography, but such is standard General-Conference-fare (and research into such stories would be uncomfortably difficult). It would be an affirmation, made better only by a rather more frank portrayal of wayward Saints than I think the marketplace is used to.

I am a Mormon, faithfully believing and perhaps slightly more devout than average. I have much I would dream of saying to the world (fantastic stories of hope and betrayal; the virtue of forgiveness in a world that cries for vengeance; the blessing of unconditional love when it is least expected; long love letters to the planet earth and its beauty being a proof of the existence of God). I would say that and more.

But I imagine I have nothing my fellow Saints should want to hear. Is it because I would be preaching to the choir? I suppose filling books with lessons from Sunday School is not a sure-fire best-seller recipe. And anyway, so many know so much more than I about unconditional love, faith, hope, reverence, or forgiveness.

I am reminded of a thought by Orson Scott Card about stories – they tell us how to be human. By this measure storytelling for the pleasure of Mormons is exceedingly difficult indeed, for we already have a surfeit of such instruction about the true nature of humanity, its origin and destiny. And I am certainly not one that could improve upon it.

I thought to write for Mormons because I fancied it an easier task taking on a provincial literary backwater than would be going up against the likes of Orwell and Card. I have had it backwards. The world, dark and ignorant and desperate to have light shine on it, could be much easier.

I have new respect for the LDS fiction “writers.”

Look at me! I made technology!

2005-10-03T00:16:00.000-06:00

I finally put my fears behind me and installed a hit counter on my blog. It was easier than I thought it would be, but involved inserting a baffling package of undecipherable code into a much larger, equally undecipherable mess of html code. Now my counter appears there at the bottom of the blog.

I feel like the doctor in the Fantastic Voyage, having to take great care to inject the miniaturized submarine into the patient properly. Get it just a bit wrong and they're stuck in the femur or nose hairs or somewhere even worse.

I flirted with the idea of setting the starting total visitor value to something like 1,000,000,000,000. Like the blog's gotten a lot of visitors but not really, for it would soon read, "1,000,000,000,213." Pretty obvious what my game is, but for added verisimilitude I could put up some some congratulatory emails from Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan, praising me having my one trillionth unique visitor before either of them even get close to a billion.

But I thought, should heaven forefend a lot of people actually visit this blog, I'd probably rather their number not be trivialized thusly. So, as in politics, every vote counts!

But, as in Illinois and Florida politics, some count more than others. If you want yours to count more, please, leave a comment if anything strikes you as thought-provoking. Or the opposite.

Esprit de "Corpse"

2005-10-02T12:25:00.000-06:00

SPOILER WARNING! I will be discussing crucial plot points of the showy mediocrity known as "Corpse Bride." If you have any desire to view this lame film, best come back after doing so.

After loving the sweet and whimsical darkness of "Nightmare Before Christmas," I was excited for the release of the new Tim Burton Clay-cgi-mation picture. Burton is not one to held prisoner by outdated notions of life and death (not the way he is to the happy, vacant conventions of American cinema anyway - but more on that later).

The movie was disappointing. Not funny, no memorable tunes, not really worth watching at all.

One of the film's main Burtonisms is that life is like a boring black-and-white film, while death is like living in New Orleans. This paradigm impressed many reviewers, though none I read thought to point out the curious, unintentional irony that hurricane Katrina brings to the matter. At one point the dead come to the world of the living, bringing the party with them and really livening the place up. This does create a bit of a poignant moment, for rather than terrorizing the living, the event joins together loved ones long separated by death and intervening years. For the dead remain quite themselves, and though their flesh has dissipated, their spirits still burn bright within the vacant confines of their skulls and they yearn for their dearly un-departed as much as they are yearned for.

And the moment provides a happy inversion for those who put their love, faith, and trust in others: The characters who suffered the harshest loss and sorrow in days past find themselves the happiest at seeing the dead, while those who have never invested any love in another soul are merely frightened.

Still, I am quite disappointed that none of these fun-loving dead thought to make a jape of shambling around moaning "brainnnnnssss." Ah, missed opportunities.

The whole thing sounds like a real flight of fancy, I am sorry to say that it wasn't. Perhaps Mormon sensibilities are a hedge against enjoyment of Burton's vision. Our own contrast of the lone and dreary world compared to the nonstop party of Celestial glory keeps a "the dead have all the fun" paradigm from seeming terribly creative.

As I am wont to do when disappointed by a film, I imagined how I might have done it better. As Victor prepares to marry the dead woman while the living fiancee prepares to marry a money-hungry killer, I thought the film's denouement would be set up with the living bride crashing the dead wedding as a newly minted corpse, murdered by her new husband on their wedding night. Wouldn't it be a pickle! And such a shift in circumstance - for then Victor would love two dead women, and would then really have to choose between the dull, comfortable familiarity of life and the women he loves. Immortality and polygamy become unerringly bound together.

That's not how it went, more's the pity. For, though the evil seldom win out in cinema, all too often do they do so in real life. In this film there was the opportunity to show that even when evil triumphs over good, they cannot do anything of lasting consequence to the good and innocent. Death would put them beyond the power of greed and avarice.

But it's not that kind of movie. Burton is not faithful to his storytelling paradigm, choosing instead for a very cheerful, very American conclusion where some eternal rule not previously mentioned allows the corpse bride to de-complicate the love triangle by changing into...butterflies...I guess, who wing off into the whiteness of elevated eternal life. We must take for granted that this is an improvement for the corpse bride, though how will she play the piano anymore?

Burton also takes for granted the rules of the world he's created. When the dead carry off the newly-deceased murderer Count, he kicks and screams in horror. Why? He's dead too, what can they do to him. A fate worse than death? It would have to be, I suppose. Or something even worse than that.

At the end, the happy couple goes back to their wretched world, to be married and mousily beholden to their wretched relatives. The whole thing's quite pointless. So much could have been said about the trials and misery of mortality, and a thin morality tale about repressed Victorians taking all the fun out of life is a rather saccharine substitute. I think Burton has it backwards. The dead have very little to worry about, being dead and all. Nothing stops them from filling their existence with carefree trivialities. It takes a particular kind of courage to live life cheerfully, risking pain and regret all the while.

(And anyway, the best statement that could ever be made about being dead was already made, by the dead man Arnold J. Rimmer on the television program Red Dwarf: "Death...is like going on holiday with a group of Germans.")

(I know "Esprit de corpse" is the most dull, unpunniest pun ever - switching the final word from one language to another isn't such a creative leap - so don't bother bringing it up.)

Wiring

2005-09-21T23:10:00.000-06:00

Have you ever experienced a mental vergence? Where two things you thought were dissimilar all of a sudden came together into one? It is a disorienting experience, one that I think results in an actual change in brain chemistry, as neurons well-established and concrete that previously never associated all of a sudden have to get together in very in intimate terms, fused together forever after.

Like when Luke found out Vader was his father.

Just now I realized that the water park to which Napoleon Bonaparte goes in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” is called “Waterloos.” This is an absolutely fabulous joke, one that would have enriched my life, and all along I missed it.

At least I learned it before I was too late.

Just as it takes some doing to fuse two well-known things together, breaking them up requires a similar effort.

How did it feel the last time you got dumped? Every time you think of the person, there is a fresh jab of mental anguish as the way you thought of them until quite recently buffets against the new way you still haven’t accepted. They are the dying throes of a mental network, now invalidated, but still not dissipated from the conscious mind.

Like the sands in an hourglass, so are the days of our lives

2005-09-06T13:02:00.000-06:00

I just got back from the beach today. I wrote this after a similar excursion a few years ago:

I have never particularly liked California beaches. Every time I say that I feel weird, I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone else who shared that sentiment. They’re boring. Mile upon mile of sandy sameness, with nothing to do but sit and bake, roll around in the cold, salty water, and so on. It’s fun to look at girls, I suppose, but for good Mormon boys it’s “look but don’t touch.” Better not look too much, either.

The family went down to a beachfront complex in Oceanside for a big reunion shindig this summer. I know, poor baby. I’m not getting any sympathy. I had fun, but family is fun anywhere, and Oregon sure would have been nice. I miss the Oregon coastline. I’ve always liked the names, too. Yachats, Devil’s Churn, Astoria, and so on. Looking at them they aren’t so impressive, but they have an evocative power in my mind. Varied and windswept, not terribly busy, the place is teeming with sea life and abounds with big rocky formations ever weathering the constant assault from the unrelenting sea.

Anyway, down in So-Cal, after I tired of rolling around in the surf (fifteen minutes), I spent much of my time meandering up and down the beaches. It gave me time to think upon the puzzling peculiarities of human behavior.

Why do we build sandcastles? Doesn’t make immediate sense, does it? Busy people, some of whom have sacrificed considerably for a few short hours at the beach, will spend a great deal of their time wrapped up in this endeavor. The effort is sometimes intense, and the castle is usually gone before the beachgoer even heads for home. No sense at all.

Or am I being uncharitable? I cast about for something to compare this phenomenon to. Didn’t van Gogh throw his work into the sea? I think so. He was also nuts.

I have heard of Buddhist monks from a certain sect that create “mandalas,” intricate, ornate, exquisite renditions of traditional designs, made of colored rice or sand, representing some tenant or cosmology of their faith. After several monks spend days and weeks upon end making sure every single grain is properly placed, the whole design is swept up and the oeuvre thrown into the river.

This seems foreign to our Western artistic values of innovation, self-expression, and self-immortalization. Buddhists believe that the drawings elicit a measure of karmic virtue from the universe just by being created, and reinforce that, as one monk I read put it, “we shouldn’t get too attached to things. We’ve got to be able to let things go. Nothing is permanent.”

There is that, and it’s valid enough I suppose, but it’s hard to view a sandcastle as a sort of unofficial celebration of the transitory nature of existence. More likely it’s the opposite. Have you seen the hard-core sandcastle builders? Not the art-eests who build big sandcastles because they’re too poor to buy paint. I’m not talking about little kids, either. I mean the weekend-warrior, tourist-class beach-ape. You know who I’m talking about, the kind who brings a big shovel to the beach and puts more effort into defending his work of art from the elements than actually making it look nice. Who is too lazy to haul water up from the tide zone to build where the thing might have a fighting chance, but will still redouble his efforts at digging, retrenching, and draining when the tide inevitably comes.

Watch them sometime. Theirs is no happy concession to the forces of entropy! Just as it was for the builders of the pyramids, the goal is creating something that will last forever. The material is even the same, once you think about it. Moderners just give a smaller effort with a smaller expectation. Instead of the supreme, monolithic guardian of the ages, they create the plucky little overachiever, doomed to failure but gamely enduring. The more flimsy and fragile the building material, and the more unfortunate the location, the more remarkable it is if it does outlast the forces of nature for a little while.

And should their work still stand when they go home, the creator can cast one final happy glance at their creation, fully believing that if it weren’t for sandcastle-wrecking teenage twits cavorting in the moonlight, the darn thing might just stand forever.

None of this answers the question, why sand? Why in the tidal zone!? I think it is to put the destructive forces of nature on an observable scale. That way the beach-goer gets to really see how well their sand mountain will hold up, and can watch if it fails.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s what I like about the Oregon coast. It has God’s sandcastles. California’s giant rocky beachside fortresses have been knocked flat already, but in Oregon the contest between the chaos of the billowing surge and the stoic order of the stony coastline is ongoing.

Brilliance

2005-08-11T20:04:00.000-06:00

I had a brilliant idea recently. Well, several actually. Good ideas are not such a rare thing for me, or anyone else for that matter. Good ideas are really a dime a dozen and not as important to success as some people think.

Look at Hollywood, for example. Many films come out, of which cannot even be said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Hollywood doesn't run on good ideas. The good ideas all got consigned to development purgatory or slush pile oblivion because the originators thereof thought that having a good idea was enough to succeed, and they wouldn't have to stab any backs, kiss any butts, or warm any beds.

The world has a way of destroying most good ideas, along with the people who came up with them.

But this brilliant idea of mine is a little different. It could get something done - not in Hollywood I think, but it might just help me and whoever else works on it achieve a measure of internet immortality - that is, we could create something that people will email to their friends endlessly.

The problem is, it is thoroughly aberrant and offensive.

Have you ever been in a conversation where someone said something and you thought of the most perfect, wonderful, hilarious riposte - except it was off-color or somehow offensive. Oh, the temptation. It is the perfect line at the perfect moment in the "Lord of the Rings" saga that is your life - only it will earn the saga an R rating.

That's how I feel now.

It would be a car commercial akin to the infamous Volkswagon Suicide Bomber ad:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/advertisements/vwpolo.asp

...and it would involve my 2003 Honda Element, a buck-toothed sniper hick in overalls scanning for a target near a gas station, a stupid-looking track suit guy getting out of a HUmmer, and me pumping gas into my Element. The sniper would be awestruck by the delightfully confusing mold-breaking lines of the Element, and would not break out of his reverie until I finish pumping gas, hop into the car, and drive away. The sniper will then look for another target, and see the twit still pumping gas into his midlife-crisis-mobile. He smiles, sights in and squeezes the trigger...

The ad's tag line would be: "Honda Element. It gets the right kind of attention."

Wal-Mall

2005-08-09T22:49:00.000-06:00

Recently I went to Wal-Mart. Some of my least-delightful waits have been in the house that Sam Walton built. Perhaps there is a sort of unofficial waiting period required for the purchase of hamburger buns in Las Vegas, I know not. I ended up waiting second in a line while the cashier tried unsuccessfully to enter a gift card into the computer (the key: scan it, don’t drag it through the card machine). The line in the register next to me was short, but I had already piled all my groceries on the counter, so I waited. The cashier had flipped on the “manager assistance requested” light, but apparently this wasn’t a strong enough entreaty, for no management aid was forthcoming. Finally the cashier walked away in search of help. In frustration, I threw my items back into the cart and went over to the other register, only to be told that that register was closed. So I retook my place in line. I would not be putting my items on the counter this time, oh no. Thus I exacted a narrow moral victory out of a broad, demoralizing defeat of the soul.

The long and the short of it was I waited maybe a half hour (in the “20 items or less” lane) and ended up forgetting one of my bags and having to go back for it. All the while I indulged a thoroughly ridiculous sense of righteous outrage by thinking about lodging some sort of complaint, or writing a snarky letter to some newspaper or authority, full of pique and dark pronouncements about the unlikelihood of future patronage at their retail establishment, but I realized, “What should I have expected?” I wasn't there for superior service or a commitment to quality. I was drawn by the siren’s song of buying paper towels $0.06 cheaper than at Albertsons.

And we achieve the parallel realization, without overmuch surprise, that people are willing to sell their souls for six pennies.

Crickets

2005-08-07T20:31:00.000-06:00

Allow me to share a story of harrowing conflict, another brief chapter in the ages-old struggle between man and bug. Like most desert places in the American West, Las Vegas is lousy with crickets that chirp and hum all night during the summer months.

My house is better insulated than the one in which I grew up, and the noise is scarcely noticeable - scarcely, that is, unless there is a cricket right outside my window. Then I can hear it and it only quite plainly. Indeed, if I could speak crickitese, I would know what it was saying and probably what mood it was in.

It turns out that a single cricket is far more annoying than many. If you think about it a bit, this will make sense. With a hundred crickets giving a moonlight serenade, the separate voices blend together into a rather pleasing, even cadence. But with just one voice, a prima donna soloist, it is terribly uneven. It will go louder and softer, and stop for a few seconds every time the breeze shifts or a spider walks by. I believe the same principle is at work with snorers, though I have never tested it.

So anyway, you may have already guessed that I have been tormented by a single cricket with a curious insistence in laying forth its evening ministrations in the same place every day, about fifteen feet from where I lay. The noise would crowd out any thought, relaxed attitude, or sleepy sensation I might have held otherwise, and at that moment I would despise crickets - that cricket - above most anything else. At least the black widows are quiet! I think my annoyance has more to do with the fact that I am bothered by such a simple, small thing that nobody else hardly notices. Bothered by being bothered, as it were.

Not content to sleep with ear plugs all summer, I needed to do something about the troublesome thing. Our yard is one enormous garden of rock and gravel, and it is nigh-impossible to find an insect among the scree even though I could pinpoint its location. I poured a quart of water over it, and then tried stomping on top of the rocks, hoping to hit it with a lucky strike. Every time I did this the cricket would stop and I would wonder if I had finally taken it out, only to hear it start up again a few minutes later. I think that after a while the poor thing became rather terrorized by my attacks - before it would stop only if something was moving right next to it, but it took to stopping anytime I came within ten feet, and would not start again for some time. I wonder if some miniature Cricket News Network (CNN?) was reporting on the daily terror attacks in Las Vegas. Perhaps some far-away cricket governments were debating over what they were doing in Las Vegas anyway, and shouldn't they withdraw their forces for more worthy pursuits.

But enough about cricket culture. In despair of any other solution, I upped the technological ante by purchasing a spray can of bug killer at Wal-Mart. That evening I went out and sprayed the area the little noisemaker occupied. We must credit crickets for knowing quite well what is bad for them, for before I could do anything it hopped away from the spot in great haste, and disappeared again into the rocks a few feet away.

Hoping I had dealt it a fatal blow, I withdrew to the cool air of my house. Sadly, upon retiring I heard it again from a new spot. For all my efforts I had succeeded in moving it perhaps five feet further away.

Fall Guy

2005-08-05T15:33:00.000-06:00

The question comes to mind – when falling to one’s death from a very great height, what should one do? Not to survive, for nothing short of divine providence could do anything about that. But how should one spend that handful of seconds between the realization of one’s lamentable situation and the actual wet, sickening “thud”? There’d be a life-flashing-before-the-eyes moment, I suppose, along with a few brief but extremely heartfelt words of prayer. Some may not rise above dumbfounded horror the entire time.

But what about one’s actual comportment? The situation of free fall is not just untenable but exceedingly awkward. There’s the whole question of landing. Do you go with a belly flop? Feet first? Or do a ten-thousand-foot header? In movies the faller is always looking at earth’s inexorable approach, but I suppose one could always look up, or even do some flips and loops as they await the end.

Spreading one’s self out to generate air resistance seems like a reasonable plan. Slowing your speed could extend your time remaining by ten percent or more.

All of this is of course completely pointless as far as the final outcome and so you’d think why bother. But consider: when one is cast into the unfriendly hands of gravity, would one not cherish the few options left to them, however irrelevant? Perhaps so.

You are probably thinking, “how macabre,” and I should caution that I normally don’t indulge such issues with very much attention. The question arose in my mind as I imagined up a cool idea for a movie scene or episode in a book, where someone is cast out of an airplane, but still has the presence of mind to pull out their cell phone to make a final, desperate call – perhaps to tell the protagonist (since obviously the protagonist isn’t going to be caught in such a situation, it’s more the fate of the unlikable ally, chauvinistic bad boy friend, or forgettable extra) who it was that betrayed them to their deaths. That would be some high drama, the fumbling for the phone, trying to dial, hoping to get a signal and say something in time. Imagine the horror: “Voicemail! Noooooooooooo…”

Maybe it would be better as one of those cell phone commercials – you know, where some people are in a situation where a cell phone would be extremely useful, and even though one of them has one he won’t use it because it’s peak time or he’s out of minutes or whatever:

Diver 1: Did you try the emergency cord?
Diver 2: (holding a cell phone): Yep. Nothing. You too, huh?
(beat)
Diver 1: Why don’t you say goodbye to your mother, or talk to your kids?
Diver 2: Nope, nope. It’s end of the month.
Diver 1: We could call parachute tech support. Or even order a net or big cushion or something.
Diver 2: Sorry.

(Cut to Catherine Zeta Jones, who hands a new phone to two newly accordion-shaped skydivers, cooing in condescending sympathy.)

Copyright 2005 Garrett Pace. All rights reserved.

The Boss

2005-08-04T12:11:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I was sitting in a meeting when the president of the company burst into the room. I had never met the gentleman before for his office is in another state. He came in, exuding the sort of carefree, enthusiastic sociability perhaps stemming from his knowledge that he could fire everyone in the room if it suited him. No cautious probing or rhetorical smokescreens needed here! He, maniacally almost, shook everyone’s hand and gave his name. I bumbled out my own name in return but almost too late, he was already passing on to the next person. He then asked us what was on the schedule, and someone said, “Windows.”

“Uh oh!” he said in mock horror as he rapidly retreated to the decidedly overenthusiastic laughter of everyone in the room.

After he blew out as quickly as he had blown in, I spent a full half hour pondering the many things I could have asked or said rather than just a sheepish recitation of my name. Example: I could have asked him why he had just cashed out eighty million in company stock from his personal account, a fact I had learned but that morning.

I actually did think to ask that at the moment, but it may have been somewhat adversarial. I think you get the idea what I wanted to say. Something to set me apart, make me a little bit memorable. I realized that I could have handed him some spreadsheets of devastating effectiveness, sure-fire new things and processes that could help the company a great deal. He would have been impressed, and probably remembered who I, a lowly summer intern, was. I even happened to have a copy with me, ready for the giving.

So in an instant of wide-eyed hesitation I had clearly dropped the ball, but it is hard to wallow in self recriminations. How could one anticipate this sort of opportunity? I am not in a habit of spending time each day strategizing what I will do if our company president decides to fly hundreds of miles and waltz into a meeting I am attending. They told us in business school to prepare for this sort of thing, and that a good businessman is never flummoxed. But such heightened vigilance is too often the province of corporate whores who get an ulcer, two divorces, and a bunch of kids who hate them.

I guess I’m not that good a corporate whore and will have to practice. Or I will try to love my neighbor instead.

Through the Death Valley of the shadow of death.

2005-08-03T14:37:00.000-06:00

Woody Allen once said something like, "as I walk through the valley of...make that, as I RUN through the valley of the shadow of death..."

Saturday I went to Death Valley for the first time. This despite well-meaning admonitions to the contrary from nearly everyone to whom I revealed my plans. Apparently Death Valley suffers from intensely bad publicity, but what should we expect from having names like Death Valley, Furnace Creek, Last Chance Mountains, Badwater Spring, and Mormon Point? (that last is not as stigmatized now as it once was)

Indeed, I wondered if this were a spectacular hoax, and the valley a veritable paradise with scary names intended to frighten off the timorous and keep the place safe for those who know how good it is.

Anyway, some said I should make my trip during the winter months, but to do so would render eventual ill grace in conversation: should I ever mention in passing that I visited Death Valley, the inevitable response would be, “Was it hot?” To be able to say, “Yes, about 120” has much more cachet than a bashful, disappointing admission that it was chilly and windy, does it not?

I saw one group taking a picture of two adolescents who had wrapped up their arms and were shivering vigorously, as if it were quite cold. That was pretty funny.

In truth I was quite comfortable. The desert was as miserable as could be expected, but I avoided it entirely. I never spent longer than five minutes in the heat, preferring instead to admire the scenery from the bridge of the USS Short Bus (my 2003 Honda Element).

And the scenery was really something. Being almost devoid of plant life, all a visitor can really see of Death Valley are the shapes and hues of the very rocks themselves. One becomes quite enchanted at how many different shades of brown there are in this world. All the eye sees is brown, and yet it is still quite striking.

The place is a miner’s paradise. From the valley floor you can see the different layers of rocks all over, twisting and winding, now reddish brown, now beige brown, now chartreuish brown. The mouths of many mines have vomited out wide swaths of underlying strata, adding strange patterns and colors to the mountainsides. There is even a thick seam of good, black coal at the side of a highway. Some cubic feet of it have been taken away by passing motorists, no doubt intending it for the Christmas stockings of their offspring.

Two main attractions of Death Valley are the Devil’s Golf Course and Badwater Spring. The Devil’s Golf Course is an area where salt collected from countless gallons of now-evaporated runoff lifts itself from the desert floor and builds up into crystalline shapes. Visitors are permitted to walk among and atop the shapes for they are already doomed; they dissolve with every flood only to rebuild in a few weeks.

The action of heat, salt, water flow and evaporation somehow moves the salt ever up. In some areas gigantic mounds of salty earth rise up above the roadway. It is rotten and fragile, eroding back and collapsing, only to build up again. I think the very earth and minerals have had it with Death Valley and are trying to leave.

Badwater Spring is an otherwise unremarkable statistical extreme. It is the lowest continental point in the Western Hemisphere. There is a groundwater seep that means the low point is always covered in salty water (hence the name “Badwater”). There is a boardwalk over the pool, and one is not allowed to actually stand ON the lowest point in America, just over it. I did, however, stick my finger into the pool (it was much cooler than I thought it would be). So, as far as I know, my right index finger has gone lower than any of you ever have – 282 feet and one inch below sea level.

I took the opportunity to watch the movie “Amadeus” this week. I had seen it when much younger and less inclined to appreciate the music or be critical of the story’s flaws. What a mad, amazing, beautiful disaster that film is. Mozart and his wife jarringly act (and talk!) like petulant American teenagers, whilst everyone else more truly displays traditional European courtly behavior that one would expect in such a production.

The heart of the story is Antonio Salieri, the court composer who feels he is cursed with the love of music and the desire to make beautiful tunes, without the actual ability to produce it. Portrayed by F. Murray Abraham, Salieri is probably the evilest character in any film ever that the audience cannot help loving. With murder and hatred of God and man in his heart, he is still an intensely sympathetic character, and one hopes it ends well for him.

The film is also suffused with the love of grand music. Some of the scenes where Mozart’s character (Tom Hulce, famous for his portrayal of a drunken frat boy in “Animal House”) directs his wonderful operas with such passion and emotion, and to such a tepid response, that it is by turns enchanting and heart-breaking, and the viewer scarcely cares whether the particulars of the story were made up or not.

I also went to the Capital Grille this past week. My favorite restaurant, and the most expensive one to which I would ever willingly go, I am never disappointed by the experience. They make these things called “cottage fries,” salt-seasoned potatoes covered with spiced, fat-fried onions. To allow ketchup or mayonnaise to touch them would diminish their deliciousness.

After dinner I paid a bill of over a hundred dollars (while I was in the washroom our server asked my date if we wanted water, and she said yes. Water: seven dollars). I also realized that the bill was half of an iPod. Such is the irrationality of consumers. An iPod is an unreasonable expense, though its effects long-lasting and the good itself can be resold for a substantial amount. But an expensive dinner that ends up pretty much the same as homemade mac-and-cheese is perfectly reasonable.

(co-opted from an email to a friend)

Welcome

2005-08-03T14:17:00.000-06:00

I have put this off for far too long, and there is much that the world needs to hear. Now it begins.