Sarah and I are in the middle of watching Buffy Season 3.
We've seen two lately that were just hilarious: the Christmas episode and the one with Xander's wild night in the 57 Chevy. We laughed helplessly.
You're really missing out, folks. Buffy is one of the best shows I have ever seen.
I'm now on my second time through the 700 Hobo Names. I always feel like the last person to get around to these things.
For the uninitiated, 700 Hobo Names is John Hodgman (the PC in those too-clever Mac commercials) reading a numbered list of 700 hobo names while Jonathan Coulton plays an acoustic guitar to ambient noise.
It's about an hour long.
Second time through.
So, the day after I post a musical version of a poem that I wrote several years ago, called "The Quiet", I see a trailer for The Quiet, alternately described as a "dank and rhythmless 'psychological' potboiler" and a "Lifetime movie on crack", where "what should have been heavily emotional material careens instead quite quickly into high camp" and Edie Falco "does an impressive nude scene!" The movie is called The Quiet because the main character is a deaf mute.
All that stuff I said the other day about my cross-promotional media empire? Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Someone searched in here for a Charles Williams book. It turns out that five of his novels are in the public domain in Australia.
For very little reason at all, this reminded me that a poetry collection I read in high school is also in the public domain: Rivers to the Sea, by Sara Teasdale. I had forgotten how many little gems there are. Maybe they're a little hokey now, but I thought I'd share a few.
THE ANSWER
WHEN I go back to earth
And all my joyous body
Puts off the red and white
That once had been so proud,
If men should pass above
With false and feeble pity,
My dust will find a voice
To answer them aloud:
"Be still, I am content,
Take back your poor compassion,
Joy was a flame in me
Too steady to destroy;
Lithe as a bending reed
Loving the storm that sways her--
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy."
SPRING
IN Central Park the lovers sit,
On every hilly path they stroll,
Each thinks his love is infinite,
And crowns his soul.
But we are cynical and wise,
We walk a careful foot apart,
You make a little joke that tries
To hide your heart.
Give over, we have laughed enough;
Oh dearest and most foolish friend,
Why do you wage a war with love
To lose your battle in the end?
SWANS
NIGHT is over the park, and a few brave stars
Look on the lights that link it with chains of gold,
The lake bears up their reflection in broken bars
That seem too heavy for tremulous water to hold.
We watch the swans that sleep in a shadowy place,
And now and again one wakes and uplifts its head;
How still you are--your gaze is on my face--
We watch the swans and never a word is said.
The Quiet
Whispering gowns
The gentleman drowns
Her pendant is limned in the dimmed evening light
Of a Saturday park and a long-ago dream
Swallowed up by the night at the seam
Shimmering stars
The city light mars
But cannot deny the untying of bonds
To the whole human race, the galactic undone
In the ponds of the night they are one
Similar answers
From long-ago dancers
Who walked by the by in the sky and the dark
Who stretched at the quiet and serene
Of a Saturday park all the world passed unseen
Come to the dark
Lay back your head
I will embrace you where no words are said
The shadow surrounds
But we will be free
When you come to the quiet with me
Hi everyone. I've been gone for a week for my yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. I mean Seattle. Sarah, Alex, and I had a great trip with my relatives. We had some great days in the city and some good unwinding time. I was email incognito, blog independent, and poker free (except for the mini-tournament on Wednesday). I bought extra light acoustic guitar strings at Guitar Center and squid jerky at Uwajimaya, finally finished Stardust, and got beaten a lot at Settlers of Catan.
The one regret I have in all this is that I was unable to make it to the Friday showing of Snakes On A Plane with the Bad Movie Club. It was the last night before our flight home, scheduled to depart at 745 AM. I hemmed and hawed about going, but I finally decided it was too crammed to leave my wife to pack and worry about me driving home from the city at midnight. Plus, wasn't there a Simpsons-are-going-to episode (or maybe it was Marge's fear of flying) where the in-flight movie is about famous plane crashes?
Today is the first day of the second year of my graduate degree. I'm looking forward to the challenges. I hope I can get that thesis done.
I'll be back to regular blogging. As far as attendance goes, this semester I meet three days a week at 4:30 PM. I'll be busy for classes and projects, but I should be able to keep up. Just got to finish the last few library books. I am also thinking about writing a series on Anna Karenina as I reread it for the nth time.
Stay sane, and good luck for a productive school/work year to all.
We saw The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and A Day Without a Mexican this weekend. They were both pretty good. Coincidentally, they both had intrusive narration breaking the fourth wall. Prize Winner is about a woman who supported her family in the 50s by entering ad copy contests, trying to hold it together despite her husband's budget-breaking alcoholism. The soundtrack has soloists from the best band, Nickel Creek. A Day Without a Mexican is about a mysterious fog that encases the state of California, preventing entry or exit, and makes all the Mexicans (and other Hispanics? the movie was not totally clear on this point) disappear in the middle of the night. With hilarious consequences.
I've been spending a lot of time at a site for writers: Evil Editor. The Evil Editor runs two contests, Guess the Plot and New Beginnings, by requesting actual queries and story openings from novelists. In the former, readers are invited to invent fake plots for the queries based only on the title. In the latter, readers are invited to read the first 150 words of the novel and write the next 75. Hilarity ensues, and so do some interesting critiques of the queries and openings that come over the transom.
I've been thinking about recording some of my songs onto the computer and putting them on Myspace, but just as I worked up the courage to do it, my sound card appears to have busted. Stupid Dell. Don't buy a Dell.
I found out there's a poker club at USU with fun prizes and no entry fees, so maybe I'll play more this year.
I got Cobra II from the library after returning some books. I guess it's the insider's look at the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I haven't even gotten to the text yet, just looked at the maps. There is a pretty funny one that says "Suspected Iraqi WMD sites". There are about 100 dots all over the country. I looked with interest to see the actual locations of cities around Baghdad that I hear so much about: Fallujah, Najaf, Tikrit. And there is a very interesting map showing where the major oil fields are. There are only two clusters. One is down south near the Kuwait border. The other is centered on the Kurdish city of Kirkuk. The same map also shows the Kurdish area, which starts in northern Iraq and extends into Iran and Turkey. This really showed me how volatile the political situation is in Iraq. The Kurds want a decentralized government and their hands on all that oil money, the Shiites want a strong government for the opposite reason, and the Sunnis are disaffected, and in the middle of a shooting war with the Shiites.
What a nightmare.
Well, it's been a while. Our family made a few trips to the hospital this week. We are all exhausted, but ok or recovering. Feel free to email me for the details, but I won't be talking about it on the blog.
I finally finished The One Percent Doctrine. There is a lot of insight to take away from it. It picks up where The Price of Loyalty left off in one respect. The President continues to ignore the deliberative policy process in favor of gut feelings, with a tight circle around him and honest brokers treated as outsiders. But the shift from economic policy to foreign policy makes this book even more compelling than the first one.
Unlikely doomsday scenarios, one percent risks (Bruce Schneier has called them movie-plot threats) came to overwhelm our strategic thinking about terrorism and threats to our country, much as the possibility of liquid explosive detonations on aircraft is dominating the headlines this week. Because Cheney's one percent doctrine mandates that we consider threats not in terms of their likelihood, but that we consider threats as certainties and respond accordingly, analysts became inferior to operators as questions about why we should have a certain policy (such as the inevitable invasion of Iraq) yielded to questions about how we should implement the policy. In the war on terror, all our thinking is now tactical.
The President himself became tactical about our shadow war with al Qaeda. He got daily updates on CIA field work, about hunts for individual terrorists. He loved them; he wanted successes, results. You can see the attraction if you read the book. The story about the CIA setting up shop in an Arab bank is way cool. But I think the real reason he wanted these low-to-the-ground reports is that success stories are few and far between in this life-and-death game of Whack-a-Mole. If you lower your eyes to the 1 percent threats, pretty soon the ghosts start to crowd out the victories. One particularly grisly episode concerned a terrorist's head in a tin box. So you become hungry for victory.
And then, when we began to capture terrorists (or approximations to the term) and stuff them down our oubliettes, again the President wanted results. The FBI's proposed method, using unexpected acts of kindness and grants of privilege to prisoners, was seen as too slow for the new kind of war. One also suspects the process lacked a certain machismo. The CIA provided Plan B.
At one point, we captured a schizophrenic with multiple personalities. When we tortured him, he told us about all kinds of threats al Qaeda was making. Ghosts. But we believed him. Then there was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an important figure in al Qaeda, who was ready to die, as in V for Vendetta. He wouldn't give anything up. Frustrated, the CIA captured his family and threatened to hurt his children. This is what Dostoyevsky was getting at when he said, "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." Postscript: Khalid Sheik Mohammed still didn't break.
One ghost-hunting expedition in particular makes me cringe. The CIA had some people studying steganography, which I'm doing some research in right now. Steganography is the study of altering a cover medium, like a picture, or a movie, in a principled way to conceal the existence of a message. It's not exactly a code, like the Enigma machine in World War II or the encryption that keeps your credit card information secret when you send it over the internet to buy something on Amazon. Instead, steganography is how you make your secret messages look innocent, say by hiding them in an 800 by 600 graphic. Someone trying to read your secret messages then has two problems: first, knowing whether your messages even exist, and second, decoding your strongly encrypted messages, which look like nothing but random noise, once they're found.
And here's the thing: the state of the art of steganography for practical applications is undetectable, at least in the published literature. There is no analysis algorithm that can detect the use of steganography, used judiciously, with a low enough false-positive rate to effectively separate JPEG pictures with secret embedded data from JPEG pictures that are innocent. If you embed a low enough amount of data, say 1 KB in a 43 KB picture, no one will ever know it was there. 1 KB is 1000 characters, maybe 150 words. And that's just one picture. Then all you have to do is put the picture on the internet.
Remember in A Beautiful Mind, where mathematician Nash believes he can use his genius to discover hidden messages in random letters from popular magazines, and save the country from Soviet suitcase nukes? How it turns out to be the delusions of a lunatic? In late 2003, the CIA steganography team believed it was reading messages for an impending terrorist attack in the al Jazeera news ticker.
What CIA, using the technical services of a private company, served up to the President was astonishing in its specificity and its sweep. Some numbers indicated more than two dozen flights and flight times. Other hidden compressed numbers showed the coordinates for targeting--the unfortunate places where international flights, loaded with passengers, fuel, and, possibly, chemical or biological agents, would be bound once they entered U.S. airspace from less carefully controlled foreign airports. The targets ran from ocean to ocean, Los Angeles to New York. There were coordinates for the White House, the Space Needle in Seattle, and the tiny, rural Virginia town of Tappahannock.
But the problem was much broader. It had to do with the wages of fear; a situation in which right-minded people, en masse, all deviate downward toward a state of panic.
"No one says, 'There's no proof!'" the CIA manager exhorted, his voice rising. "We've reached the point where no one is willing to not report something because they feel it's nuts. There is no threshold. Everything is reported, everywhere. There is no judgment in the system. No one is saying, 'Based on my experience, this person is a lying dog.' No one is saying, 'These reports are completely without any foundation.'"
You know those shivers you get up your spine when something is scary? Or awful? I am having them right now. I feel like my body is blushing. It's because I'm remembering V for Vendetta, and how good it was.
Here's a good spoiler-free review by James Wolcott of Vanity Fair. I've wanted to see the movie badly ever since he wrote this, and boy, was he right on the money. The movie is so well made, and so rewatchable. I actually want to see it again right now, but we rented it for a dollar at the Redbox and it has to go back today, and I have to work. I told Sarah we have to buy it. I want to be spoiler-free too, so that review is the closest I will come to summarizing the action. I went into it fresh! like Frank Costanza. And I was glad to be fresh, in hindsight.
The guys who wrote the screenplay, the Wachowski brothers, are the same guys who did The Matrix. V for Vendetta is magnificent like the original, instead of goofy like the sequels.
(Tell the truth, I haven't seen the third Matrix movie yet, like the Star Wars prequels. I held out for a long time before watching Episode III because Episode II was so very bad. Recall that episode in the Holy Grail where the Prince of Swamp Castle just wants... to... SING... and then the father comes into the shot and says "Stop that! You're not going into a song while I'm 'ere!" Anyway, there is this scene in Episode II when Anakin and Padme are about to kiss and the music swells up, melodramatically, and then... they don't kiss. And the music cuts off immediately, just like in Holy Grail. I was rolling. Not Natalie Portman's finest hour. However, she gives a really solid performance in this movie, very believable.)
This movie got panned by some critics, like David Denby of the New Yorker, for its politics. In this case, I think they got what they brought, and saw what they wanted to see. The parallels between the totalitarian government in the film and America's secret prisons struck a nerve with those folks.
I also think they boinked on the film's central contradiction: terrorism restores democracy in the film's dystopian England. You could argue about whether V, the terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask, is a terrorist or a revolutionary, an insurgent, a freedom-fighter. In fact, we've all had that conversation before, in a slightly different setting.
I also find it funny that the neocons advocated a violent invasion and occupation to promote the flowering of democracy, but recoil from the same violence when it is a Western government, however fictional and oppressive, that is destroyed. Once again, the global war on terror is not about the high moral ground. Instead, it's about "when smart bombs fall, better thee than me" rationalizations about the existential threat posed by people who read the Qur'an.
But the real threat to the neocon agenda is not from without; it's from within, when people in America stand up for democracy and reject the easy Manichaeism of cowboy diplomacy, of Christian versus Muslim, of the fear of faceless enemies, and of the sacrifice of essential liberty for temporary security. God knows I hope they do stand up this November, and use the ballot box as the weapon of destruction. After all, who wouldn't want to destroy this?
While the select few on the House or Senate Intelligence oversight committees could review this raging river of classified information, the most sensitive materials were shown only to the two ranking members -- one from each party -- on each committee. Yet there was much that even they did not see.
In short, 9/11 allowed for preparation to meet opportunity. The result: potent, wartime authority was granted to those guiding the ship of state. A final, customary check in wartime -- demonstrable evidence of troop movements or casualties, of divisions on the move, with correspondents filing dispatches -- was also missing once the Afghanistan engagement ended. In the wide, diffuse "war on terror," so much of it occurring in the shadows -- with no transparency and only perfunctory oversight -- the administration could say anything it wanted to say. That was a blazing insight of this period. The administration could create whatever reality was convenient.
Messages, of all kinds, could finally stand unfettered and unchallenged -- a kind of triumph, a wish fulfillment, that could easily overwhlem principles of informed consent and accountability.
Accountability, in fact, was shrunk to a single standard: prevent attacks on the U.S. mainland. As long as there were no such attacks, little else mattered.
-- Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
I finally saw V for Vendetta.
I'm feeling pretty raw right now.
Read The One Percent Doctrine.
Then watch V for Vendetta.
I've been busy with my research job. Our steganography algorithm is now at least a little better than the best thing we've found. I am starting to feel a little responsible; after all, if this kind of technique is successful, the NSA won't know we're sending encrypted messages in our JPEGs anymore. And God knows, with the war on terror and all, the government needs to be reading my private email.
I can safely recommend The One Percent Doctrine from the first 100 pages alone. The attitudes our government took toward our rights and privacy, justified as necessary to prevent another 9/11, are appalling. Reminds me of that guy in one of the Kerry-Bush debates, who asked President Bush about the PATRIOT Act:
"With expansions to the Patriot and Patriot Act II, my question to you is, why are my rights being watered down and my citizens' around me? And what are the specific justifications for these reforms?"
President Bush responded: "I appreciate that. I really don't think your rights are being watered down. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't support it if I thought that. Every action being taken against terrorists requires court order, requires scrutiny."
When you read The One Percent Doctrine, you will find out what a bald-faced lie that was. Our President has lied over and over again about just these kinds of accountability issues. Why is he still in office?
I got to play some poker with my brother-in-law Brian this weekend. We had a good time. Next time a tournament rolls around at USU, I think I'll enter, just for fun.
If these songs had existed when I got married, I would have put them in there.
I Still Love You and True by Glen Phillips (these from a show on June 29)
Sugar by Dan Wilson, We Got Married in My Head by Sean Watkins, and Same Mistakes by Jon Brion (these from a Watkins Family Hour show in January 2005)
Toxic by Britney Spears, covered by Nickel Creek (ok, that one's a joke, but seriously watch the videos)
Laura wonders idly whether the love of Anna Karenina (trans. David Magarshack, other translations are inferior and not really useful) is, well, reality-based, or whether those of us who call it a favorite have no deeper reasons than the love of Mr. Willems and IB English. I'm not going to recapitulate everything she wrote, but that's the gist of it.
My short answer is that it's really that good. It's held up through several rereadings. Did I ever reread Hard Times? Ummm, no.
(Digression: on my shelf are a couple of other translations by the same guy: The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. So you might try those. I too feel lost when trying to choose one out of several translations of a foreign author.)
As I glance at my favorite books (in the profile; when I moved to Utah, I brought my top 100), I notice a couple of newer ones that I've only read once, by Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke. All the rest are things I've picked up again and again over the years. I haven't read Anna Karenina for a couple of years, but I picked it up again the other day and it seemed really fresh to me, a cut above even the great stuff I've been reading lately. I have ten library books to read, and then I'll do it. That's a broad clue, this great staying power over almost a decade.
Anna Karenina affected me a lot personally. In 1995, when Chris Tyni killed himself, life got very weird for me. I mean, in one sense I forgot quickly, or submerged my grief beneath school and activities and instantly falling in love with every girl I met (and that particular compass swung around so much, you would've thought I was at the North Pole). In another sense it was time to be an adolescent and feel out of place. But it was also time to go home at night and stay up late writing unhappily, to lose my religion, to really bang my head against life and death and "Vanity of vanities and all is vanity."
Those are basically Levin's questions, too: "He saw death and the approach of death in everything." We read a lot of great stuff in that IB English class, but this was the one that really spoke to me: a white guy whining about how life has no meaning. I wrote confused essays about how Anna lived in a deterministic universe and she couldn't move outside the box of her inclinations because the author was controlling her (obviously, way off). I projected all of my outside concerns into that sprawling novel, and it was big enough to hold them.
I didn't understand exactly why Levin changed, why he became satisfied in Part VIII. I felt like his last epiphany was not good enough. The meaning of life was inculcated from childhood and he might as well continue in what he'd heard first? "He lived (without realizing it) by those spiritual truths that he had imbibed with his mother's milk... Now it was clear to him that he could live only thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up." I call BS on this total cop-out. But I think I did come to understand that these questions were worth wrestling down, and I understood with Levin that I shouldn't just give up on them.
I also think the book grows as you grow. Like I said, the story's big enough for a teenage boy, but it becomes a behemoth in the hands of an awake, adult reader. To take a bald-faced example, I haven't reread it as a married father of one. All that life has given me a whole new perspective on the Oblonsky crisis that begins the book, on the sacrifices and compromises anyone makes for the sake of a marriage. And what I saw fresh in those first ten chapters or so was Tolstoy nailing it, over and over.
Anyway, I say read it again.
You achieve a new personal best which is almost ten seconds below your previous best:
Then you go to Minesweepers.org and find out that you have the sixth best time this month.
It's been a pretty wild week and a half. Here are some highlights.
A few days ago we were watching TV upstairs when the channel started changing inexplicably. We assumed it must be a problem with our remote, old batteries maybe, so we changed to the channel we wanted, then set the remote to control a nonexistent VCR, and the changing stopped. We thought nothing of it until last night, when we started fighting to watch first Everybody Loves Raymond, then The Golden Girls, while someone... or something?... kept trying to change the channel to South Park and ESPN.
We have the Dish Network and basically, the second TV in our bedroom is controlled by a remote that goes to a UHF antenna on the back of our box. Basically, our remote is like a radio station that the main receiver listens to; then it sends back the results of our choices to the screen. It turned out that some neighbor (we're not sure who) also has the Dish Network, and coincidentally, their remote broadcasts on the same frequency we do. So not only were they changing our channel, we were changing their channels.
I haven't tried it in Fedora Core yet, but I can recommend for both PC and Mac OSX the ASUS WL-167G USB wireless adapter. It's been smooth, with no problems whatsoever. I understand it will work with Linux too because it's one of the open Ralink chipsets, but I have spared myself the headache of getting it going. On the other hand, our DSL modem (an Actiontec wireless gateway, formerly standard issue for Qwest) has been a pretty wonky access point at times. If you can recommend a better one (PC/Mac/Linux friendly) please do. Our home network is all wireless, so a DSL modem without good wireless is dead to me. [/totalgeek]
I've written before about the one percent doctrine. Briefly, '[Suskind] contends, [the FBI's, CIA's, and NSA's] meticulous intelligence-sifting went unappreciated by administration policymakers, especially Dick Cheney, who formulated an overriding "one percent" doctrine: threats with even a 1% likelihood must be treated as certainties."' (Publisher's Weekly) It's pretty obvious that this kind of thinking is what made us chase the will o' the wisp into Iraq.
I've been playing some online Texas hold'em for free at Full Tilt Poker. [Digression: My handle's "mineshaftgap", as in "I mean, we must be... increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mine-shaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow... a mine-shaft gap!"] It's pretty hard to gauge how good I am, but I've been in the black since I started.
Anyhow, one of the first things you have to learn is when to give up on a hand. A relatively good starting hand that completely misses the community cards is not worth betting on. Novice players hang on to the wrong hands, say where they have three cards of a 5-card straight after the flop and need both the turn and the river to provide the remaining cards (example: holding 6-10 unsuited and seeing a flop of A-8-2, then needing both a 7 and a 9 to make a straight). Treating this kind of hand as if it were a winner is a good way to lose a lot of money. The runners come something like 2% of the time, and even then you're not guaranteed to win the hand; you could lose to a higher straight, for instance. This is the poker equivalent of the one percent doctrine: betting on a nice-looking hand that has very few outs (cards available on the turn and river to make a losing hand into a winner), or is even drawing dead.
In our foreign policy, Bush and Cheney have been playing ideological poker. "7-2 unsuited... if we fold, the terrorists will win." "If we only call this all-in, we'll be able to win future hands from the other nearby players." "Pocket aces? We have the most modernized, advanced hand around." They've been calling all the way to the river with garbage hands, and the sharks around the table have noticed. [/pokerdigression]
I have a lot of things to read, but the only one that is actually overdue (and I can't renew it because there are holds) is The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind. Since I have The One Percent Doctrine up next, I figured I should read the one that preceded it, about how the pragmatic, realistic Secretary of the Treasury fought for good policy against the ideologues and spinmeisters of the Bush White House's permanent campaign.
The Price of Loyalty is narrative nonfiction, which means it comes out as a sort of third-person limited perspective chronicling the first years of GWB's presidency through the eyes of O'Neill. It's a good move, because it turns all these political issues and headlines into very personal stories. I'm over halfway through, and it's been really eye-opening. The most creepy thing about it so far is O'Neill's weekly one-on-ones with the President. They were hourlong meetings for O'Neill and Bush to discuss the economy. But the President doesn't say anything in the meetings, doesn't ask questions or challenge O'Neill. He just stares like a buddha.
Along the same lines, here's an excerpt about a meeting spurred by Cheney's infamous energy task force, on March 19, 2001.
So, on March 19, at an hour-long meeting in the cabinet room, the President was hearing dark predictions about the economic effects of a looming energy crisis.
Everybody played their parts: literally. For this President, cabinet meetings and the many midsize to large meetings he attended were carefully scripted. Before most meetings, a cabinet secretary's chief of staff would receive a note from someone on the senior staff of the White House. The note instructed the cabinet secretary when he was supposed to speak, about what, and how long. When O'Neill had received his first such note, he was amazed. The idea of a cabinet meeting or any significant meeting between the President and his seniormost officials being scripted seemed to kill off the whole purpose of bringing people together. He had been in many White Houses. He had never heard of such a thing.
...
O'Neill was watching Bush closely. He threw out a few general phrases, a few nods, but there was virtually no engagement. These cabinet secretaries had worked for over a month on detailed reports. O'Neill had been made to understand by various colleagues in the White House that the President should not be expected to read reports. In his personal experience, the President didn't even appear to have read the short memos he sent over.
That made it especially troubling that Bush did not ask any questions. There are so many worth asking about each of these areas, O'Neill thought as he sat quietly, dozens of queries running through his head.
"This meeting was like many of the meetings I would go to over the course of two years," he recalled. "The only way I can describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection."
The new house is shaping up nicely. I have a cute little office, smaller than some people's closets, but good to go for me. The kitchen/dining room area is big. I hope that Sarah will put up some pictures once we've gotten rid of the last cardboard boxes.
After a couple of hours, I got our wireless DSL to play nice with Sarah's iMac. I also ordered a wireless USB adapter for the Windows/Linux computer. I've never had to configure wireless for Linux before and it has a nasty reputation. I read carefully and I'm pretty sure that I got a compatible piece of hardware. It'll be here in a few days.
I have about 12 library books. One of them is 3 early comedies by Shakespeare, so do I count it as 1 or 3? I'm reading Love's Labor's Lost right now, and I'm still munching my way through Quicksilver, but I'm looking forward to The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, There Are Doors by Gene Wolfe, The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson, and Sin and Syntax, which is, I think, a writing guide. I still have a few books from the university library on my thesis topics as well. If I only talked about what I read, this would become a book review blog with little time for anything else.
But here's one more. Ron Suskind is the guy who wrote a famous article on President Bush and the reality-based community. A few weeks ago, his book The One Percent Doctrine: deep inside America's pursuit of its enemies since 9/11 came out to starred reviews and is hovering at the top of sales of Books in Amazon. Its primary thesis is that VP Cheney effected a shift in our foreign policy thinking. The one percent doctrine is the idea that when a threat to US national security crosses our radar, even if it has a low possibility of actually happening, we must treat it as if it were a hundred-percent certainty. The result of internalizing this doctrine is (and has been) overreaction to the various war-on-terror bugaboos (along with the obvious one, Saddam Hussein). Should be great reading.
Anyhow, when I heard about it, I tried to get it from the local library, but they didn't have it, so I requested the library buy it. I didn't expect anything to come of it, but lo and behold, it's since appeared in the library catalog and I have the first hold on it. Democracy does work!
I read on Suskind's website that he's visiting the Colbert Report this Thursday, so give it a watch.
Kidney stone stuff is over. I don't want to belabor it in mixed company.
Italy was danger on wheels. I think they'll win the World Cup on Sunday.
We signed up at Dish Network for the new place. We've been moving all week and should be done by this weekend.
We have Skype now. For some reason the camera my parents sent us won't behave on Yahoo Messenger, but you can call us that way too. Skype is dan.a.lewis and Yahoo Messenger is daniel_a_lewis. I don't leave them on at present because the only people who want to use it are my parents, and they always call on the regular phone first. Email me if you want to use this amazing telephone system, and tell me your name. Anyway, the Skype videoconferencing works really simply and we have enjoyed it.
Mom is in France. Find out more at her (and Dad's, since he joins her in a bit) blog, France2006. My sister Rachel is in Croatia for World Deputation (through Seattle's University Presbyterian Church). Here's her (and her friend's) blog.
Time to make dinner.
I just saw a commercial that began "From the executive producer of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire..." I didn't see the end of the commercial, but I had a vision of another amazing TV show. This one is a reality show called Who Wants To Be A Producer. 14 people live in a house and work on teams taking turns learning to produce the next-to-final two episodes of the show. Every week the team with the worst work product has to vote someone off. It's a dazzling reality show behind the reality show. After it becomes a big hit, we can have Who Wants To Produce Who Wants To Be A Producer.
I haven't been writing much, because I have been stuck in my own reality show, Who Wants To Be The Guy With A Kidney Stone. The rules are very simple. Experience blinding abdominal pain and see the doctor. Make an appointment for a second opinion when the doctor prescribes narcotic painkillers and antibiotics. Don't take the antibiotics. Take the painkillers. Get the second opinion. Take the painkillers. Follow instructions that are too intimate for this blog. You win when the stone comes out.
I finished my first Gene Wolfe book, Castleview. I don't know how to recommend it, because it's about the intrusion of Arthurian Britain into small-town Illinois. It's been written lovingly, and it hums with life. (Whenever I say writing hums, I'm always reminded of a passage in King's On Writing.) Not really fantasy, not really normal. It ends in the right place, but it's sort of an odd place. So I know not everyone who reads this would like it. But it's two snaps and an around the world.
Ok, you know what it reminds me of, on reflection? The fiction of Charles Williams. Williams only wrote seven novels, but they might be a little hard to get your hands on. Even my dad only had six of them.
Williams wrote strange supernatural thrillers, admired by TS Eliot, and separately by CS Lewis and his crew. His novels are reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's novels, where fantasies intrude quite realistically into the workaday world, but Williams' are more (searching for a word) dense than Gaiman's, and sometimes more opaque for that reason. Many Dimensions is one of my favorites. He also wrote an often-surprising history of the Christian church, called The Descent of the Dove, and The Figure of Beatrice, a Dante interpretation of unique depth and vision.
All that digression to say I plan to go back to the library for more Gene Wolfe. And, come to think of it, for rereads of Charles Williams. And, side note, I finished the Dan Simmons short story book, and boy do I want to read more Dan Simmons. While I'm in the
Here's our next question on Who Wants To Be The Guy With A Kidney Stone?
"Who Wants To Be In Bed On Hydrocodone? Is it
a) Britney Spears and Kevin Federline
b) your mom
c) a nearby hydrocodone addict
or
d) me
Final Answer?
In preparation for our move, I worked on some more old papers. I have just about a full notebook done. It brought up a lot of memories. I stay on the lookout for memorable phrases.* I also look for memories where I've acquired some perspective, where the way things looked when I was going through them seem very different to me now. I see places where it was me who was in the wrong, and deficient in kindness and perspective. I sometimes wonder what would've happened if I'd changed just a little earlier.
I don't know who this book is for; maybe just me. It's funny to me how the other people who figure in my life and these scraps of it I've preserved would be shocked, or appalled, or bemused at the way I thought about them, or misrepresented them. Well, of course, I represented what was true to me in the moment, when I wrote it all down; but that's nothing like the truth of the matter. For that reason, I don't think I'm likely to write Dan Lewis: The Early Years ~~~ A Memoir from this stuff. But I suppose my papers will come pre-edited if I'm ever rich and famous (and my nag of a blog better giddy up if I'm ever to ride it to those happy, happy conditions).
I haven't kept up my furious pace of reading, but I have had a chance to read a book of short stories by Dan Simmons, Prayers to Broken Stones. They're good, mostly. They remind me of Stephen King a bit; not just because they both write horror stories, but also because they both know and write about how middle-class and ordinary and familiar evil can be.
We watched Mirrormask, a cool sort of Wizard of Oz movie by Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman. It's kind of bizarre if you're not ready for it to be bizarre, but I think it's very rewatchable. My one big complaint is that for such weird cityscapes and moving ideas, there aren't enough people in the background. You get no sense of huge machinery trundling along oblivious to you, of an alien culture only roughly glimpsed as it happens to impinge on the story, of people who don't give two figs about what Helena and her party are up to, or have an agenda that can't easily be separated into the opposing camps of the plot. Instead, you ride the train from one stop to the next. Thus, the world feels a little flat to me. But don't take that as a huge criticism; it is deviously original and emotionally fulfilling, and it has some very deep interconnections between its several parts. I still don't think I understood it all. Also, really neato, weird music.
And yes, the refereeing in the last two US World Cup matches was pure crap. The Onyewu foul leading to a game-deciding penalty kick in the Ghana game was particularly nonexistent. What now? When I have no personal stake in the teams, I tend to root for the team with one of two qualities: underdoginess, or unmatchable perfection. When I talk about perfection, I'm talking about '72 Dolphins perfection. They never lost a game. When a team finally loses (like the Colts did last NFL season), I lose interest. So this World Cup, it looks like I'm rooting for Germany, Portugal, Brazil, Spain, and the underdog.
* [I recall a passage in The Mind of the Maker that says "A rose-red city half as old as time" was the one good line by some author: "ten syllables which have sufficed to render their creator immortal, though nowhere else in the poem, nor (so far as I know) in the rest of his creation, did the worthy gentleman present to the world a single memorable phrase." The man's name was Dean Burgon.]
Bruce Schneier, an expert in security decisionmaking and computer security, loves to talk about movie-plot threats: we tend to spend our homeland security budget protecting against bombs that go off when our school buses dip below 50 mph, rather than guarding against more common sense vulnerabilities, like X-raying all cargo containers. Schneier recently hosted a contest to come up with the most lurid, frightening, believable terrorist threats. He got 892 comments.
Here's the winner:
Mission: Terrorize Americans. Neutralize American economy, make America feel completely vulnerable, and all Americans unsafe.
Scene 1: A rented van drives from Spokane, WA, to a remote setting in Idaho and loads up with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and a couple of people dressed in fatigues.
Scene 2: Terrorists dressed in "delivery man" garb take over the UPS cargo depot at the Spokane, WA, airport. A van full of explosives is unloaded at the depot.
Scene 3: Terrorists dressed in "delivery man" garb take over the UPS cargo depot at the Kamloops, BC, airport. A van full of explosives is unloaded at the depot.
Scene 4: A van with mercenaries drives through the Idaho forests en route to an unknown destination. Receives cell communiqué that locations Alpha and Bravo are secured.
Scene 5: UPS cargo plane lands in Kamloops and is met at the depot by terrorists who overtake the plane and its crew. Explosives are loaded aboard the aircraft. The same scene plays out in Spokane moments later, and that plane is loaded with explosives. Two pilots board each of the cargo planes and ask for takeoff instructions as night falls across the West.
Scene 6: Two cargo jets go airborne from two separate locations. A van with four terrorists arrives at its destination, parked on an overlook ridge just after nightfall. They use infrared glasses to scope the target. The camera pans down and away from the van, exposing the target. Grand Coulee Dam. The cell phone rings and notification comes to the leader that "Nighthawks alpha and bravo have launched."
Scene 7: Two radar operators in separate locations note with alarm that UPS cargo jets they have been tracking have dropped off the radar and may have crashed. Aboard each craft the pilots have turned off navigational radios and are flying on "manual" at low altitude. One heading South, one heading North.
Scene 8: Planes are closing in on the "target" and the rocket launcher crew goes to work. With precision they strike lookout and defense positions on the dam, then target the office structures below. As they finish, a cargo jet approaches from the North at high velocity, slamming into the back side of the dam just above the waterline and exploding, shuddering the earth. A large portion of the center-top of the dam is missing. Within seconds a cargo plane coming from the South slams into the front face of the dam, closer to the base, and explodes in a blinding flash, shuddering the earth. In moments, the dam begins to fail, and a final volley from four rocket launchers on the hill above helps break open the face of the dam. The 40-mile-long Lake Roosevelt begins to pour down the Columbia River Valley, uncontrolled. No warning is given to the dams downriver, other than the generation at G.C. is now offline.
Scene 9: Through the night, the surging wall of water roars down the Columbia waterway, overtopping dam after dam and gaining momentum (and huge amounts of water) along the way. The cities of Wenatchee and Kennewick are inundated and largely swept away. A van of renegades retreats to Northern Idaho to hide.
Scene 10: As day breaks in the West, there is no power from Seattle to Los Angeles. The Western power grid has failed. Commerce has ground to a halt west of the Rocky Mountains. Water is sweeping down the Columbia River gorge, threatening to overtop Bonneville dam and wipe out the large metro area of Portland, OR.
Scene 11: Bin Laden releases a video on Al Jazeera that claims victory over the Americans.
Scene 12: Pandemonium, as water sweeps into a panicked Portland, Oregon, washing all away in its path, and surging water well up the Willamette valley.
Scene 13: Washington situation room...little input is coming in from the West. Some military bases have emergency power and sat phones, and are reporting that the devastation of the dam infrastructure is complete. Seven major and five minor dams have been destroyed. Re-powering the West coast will take months, as connections from the Eastern grid will have to be made through the New Mexico Mountains.
Scene 14: Worst U.S. market crash in history. America's GNP drops from the top of the charts to 20th worldwide. Exports and imports cease on the West coast. Martial law fails to control mass exodus from Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A. as millions flee to the east. Gas shortages and vigilante mentality take their toll on the panicked populace. The West is "wild" once more. The East is overrun with millions seeking homes and employment.
I've seen three versions of Pride and Prejudice in the last few months: the Bollywood-spawn Bride and Prejudice, the Keira Knightley one that came out last year, and the A&E/BBC version that came out in 1995 with Colin Firth. Sarah didn't understand the story of the Knightley; it turns out that the A&E version is twice as long (five hours!), which among other things makes the plot comprehensible and ten times as entertaining.
The A&E version was the bomb. Make haste to see it. I got it from the local library; maybe you can too.
[Edited to add: not really worth an extra post, but I had seen the bomb version of Pride and Prejudice when it first came out in the mid-90s, but not since. I loved it then, but it's absolute perfection now, maybe the best book adaptation I've ever seen. I just reread the first fifteen pages of the book, and the movie is practically word for word in the dialogue, although it tends to use a few quick images to show something that Austen is forced to narrate her way through.
Plus, something I never picked up from the book before (although now it looks like I'll have to read the book again) that is just hilarious in the movie. There is maybe one time that Mr Bingley's sister's husband, Mr Hurst, is shown sober. Thereafter, wherever Mrs Hurst is, Mr Hurst is shown collapsed on a couch, drunk as a skunk.]
I was just rereading that ministry post and the thought occurred to me; in the parable of the sheep and goats, Jesus says, "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me." So, keeping in the spirit of that post, we as Christians have inflicted the Four Spiritual Laws presentation on Jesus as many times as there are stars in the heavens. The mind boggles.
How about if, instead of meandering through canned presentations, we talked about how God was alive to us and real to us, and we delighted in how God was moving in our life? In my mind's eye, I can imagine Jesus enjoying hearing about those things. I can also imagine him rolling his eyes: "Law 1? God created you to know him personally and has a plan for your life? Here we go again."
We were created delightedly and personally and we witness to God earnestly and impersonally? We are magnificent individuals with unique value to God, and we all have the same schtick? Something does not add up here.
I finished the Ender's Shadow quadrilogy, the companion novels to Ender's Game. I was underwhelmed by the end of it. It all seemed very anticlimactic to me. I didn't buy the love story, didn't enjoy the geopolitical maneuvering (boring), didn't connect with the themes. But maybe it's just me. Anyhow, I won't be rereading these, with the outside exception of Ender's Shadow.
I read the first chapter of Anna Karenina again today, and I was surprised by how fresh and original it still seemed. I bring it up because I reread it once a year for a while, unlike these Ender books which will probably never get reread. I think I've read it four or five times, but I've had a break from it for the last couple of years. I bet I'll be sucked in again, though. As I grow up, I find it has more and more to say to me, especially as on this reading, for the first time I have a child of my own. I still haven't gotten to War and Peace, but I will one of these years.
I'm having a why-am-I-reading-this relationship with the second of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld novels. The Riverworld is sort of like the Ringworld, large enough to house billions of people, but mysterious in its purposes and origins. In the Riverworld, everyone who ever lived on Earth is resurrected along the banks of a million-mile river which lacks most animal life, and all vestiges of culture and civilization. Historical figures mix and mingle. Book 1, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, is about Sir Richard Burton, and Book 2, The Fabulous Riverboat, is about Mark Twain. The high concept is interesting, but the action is organized around tedious summaries rather than scenes. Still I read.
I read two great novels by John Scalzi. The first, Old Man's War, was up for Best First Novel and Best Novel Hugo Awards, and the second, The Ghost Brigades, was its sequel. It posits an Earth society colonizing the nearby stellar neighborhood, hanging on for dear life in an endless war against alien races trying to colonize the same valuable planets. The recruits for this endless war are 75-year-olds. How this works and why it's so cool are left as an exercise for the reader. I don't want to spoil the surprise, so I have to leave it there. The award nominations were well-deserved. The implications of the science are well thought-out, at least to the extent that the characters, given all that is happening to them, still seem true-to-life. It's military science fiction, but I'd recommend it solidly for people who are not fans of this particular sub-genre.
I finished Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It is about the family of the trickster spider god, Anansi (last seen in human guise under the name Mr. Nancy near Miami), and what happens to them, and what they happen to, after his untimely demise. Everyone in America should read this funny, heartwarming, twisted, poignant book. I could not put it down. For what it is, it's absolutely perfect. I actually laughed out loud while I was reading it, it was just too much. Sarah asked me one of the times what was so funny. After a little thought, I came up with, "Violent flamingos."
I also have Gaiman's Stardust to get to; it's beautifully illustrated by comics artist Charles Vess, who also worked on some of the phenomenal Sandman comics by Gaiman. I recently reread that 10-book (80 or so issues) postmodern meta-story graphic novel collection, and I recommend it highly, for adults only. Consider this a nudity, violence, language, disturbing image, and adult theme warning; this might also eliminate some of you adults out there. But I hope not. I don't want to scare anyone away. It's a profound and deeply affecting story, creative in the extreme, with amazing writing and art. One of the issues won a World Fantasy Award, and the next day they changed the rules so comics couldn't win the World Fantasy Award.
Gaiman also wrote a Marvel comics series called 1602 that took some of the iconic characters in the Marvel universe (the X-Men, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, etc.) and transplanted them into late-Elizabethan Europe, with arresting results. I just finished it, along with the X-Men Ultimates books (vols. 1-5). If you like underwear pervert comics (did you hear that Marvel and DC are trying to trademark the word "Superhero"?), you'll like these. The Gaiman series is a bit deeper than the others and has more to chew on, but you might not like it much if you aren't familiar with the source material.
Just a side note; I seem to be reading and seeing a lot of fiction lately about the replacement of the human race by the next step in human evolution. The X-Men books are quite properly suffused with the theme, but it also came up in the Ender series, the Scalzi books, and the season premiere of The 4400 this evening.
And there's still Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy to get to. But 3000 pages worth of hardback is a daunting swallow when I can just snap up all these little fish instead.
God knows I need a book group.
I've posted before about how Christians end up doing thankless services for the poor, sick, and dying. My dad told me once about the sandwich-wrapped-in-a-tract philosophy of evangelism. He never said it, but in so many words it goes something like "Can't talk. Eating.", or "Interesting religion. Are you going to finish that?"
There is a brashness continuum in talking to people about religion, from "You're my best friend, so let me tell you something that means the world to me," to "You're my friend, so hold still while I talk into your ear," to "You're a perfect stranger, but you may have already won eternal life in heaven with God." Sandwich-in-a-tract has a pretty low Brashness Factor, but as a church we can go further. Why not just give the dude his sandwich and leave it at that? We could have ministries without a message, without any evangelism at all.
Now, I think this is probably nothing new. Don't Christian churches already host public programs (like the financial health seminar Sarah and I did this winter (laced, however, with Biblical teaching on money and wealth)) and do good deeds in the community (like rake old ladies' yards, and stock the soup kitchen) without any religious slant or proselytizing involved? I'm sure.
But I think it's useful to give it a name. It's useful to think that ministering to the world involves nothing more than easing lives that are too hard, and loving people who are unlovable. Our ministries should be freely given, without the implied quid pro quo where we trade in our investment of friendship or labor or sandwich fixings for X minutes of Jesus pitch. They should be graceful, without expectation of heavenly returns. I suppose this flies in the face of the shrewd manager parable, at least on first appearances, but then it is also more in line with the sheep and goats parable. A major point of the latter, after all, is that it was a surprise for the sheep that they had been tending to their shepherd all along.
Maybe we could do relationship seminars without religion (even for gasp! gay people). Maybe we could offer public services anonymously, or at least a-churchymously. We could delight in doing kindness without public acclaim. Individuals do this already, as my old post says, but why not churches?
Doesn't the world need more love-shuriken-wielding Christian kindness ninjas doing good like smoke, then vanishing into the shadow?
On the dark side, I haven't been trolling the Internet much or looking at friends' blogs much either. Mostly because I've been working in Linux without my gigantic bookmark list.
On the bright side, I've been using my Linux desktop (Fedora Core 4; I'm actually behind by a version now) for about two weeks with no apparent decrease in my productivity or inability to use my computer.
Nickel Creek has a one-hour show up from this year's Merlefest here. The only bad news is that it's one huge track. But their Britney Spears cover (here's a great video of it) is on there, plus "The Weight" and "Short People". It's pretty sweet.
Yesterday I got a telephone call from the United States Telecom Association. They wanted to enlist my help in lobbying my Congressperson (Rob Bishop, R-Utah). Apparently there is a bill in Congress right now that will allow telecom companies to provide me with more cable television competition and video options, with the potential to lower my bills. Wouldn't I like that?
I was a little annoyed that they called during Alex's nap, so I said, "What bill is that? Is it the COPE Act?"
Apparent confusion on the other end of the line. The pusher doesn't know.
A little more back-and-forth, and I finally come out with "I am extremely opposed to a tiered Internet." This gets him to hang up.
What's all this about? Under the guise of promoting competition and increasing consumer choice, as in the start of my lobbying phone call, the big telecom companies want the legal authority to discriminate between different kinds of Internet traffic and charge different amounts for different kinds of traffic. They've talked about doing this at least two ways: seeking rent from content providers like Google and asking them to bid to promote themselves against other providers in their market (like Yahoo, MSN search, etc.), and second, seeking rent from providers of certain kinds of multimedia, such as video.
If Yahoo outbids Google, then their site loads faster, their search responds more quickly, and their service appears to be better. Basically, at the level of the internet where data is being passed willy-nilly around the world, a telecom would examine every little chunk of data and send it on to This would provide an incentive to Yahoo to compete against Google in ways that don't enhance the quality of their tools for customers. Instead of spending bucks providing more relevant search results, they spend bucks on load times. And Google spends bucks on their load times back, until some kind of equilibrium is reached. And then those bucks go to a monopolist megacorporation. The winners are the one who gains a competitive advantage from the bidding war and the megacorporation who runs the auction.
The other half of this game is that the AT&T/SBC types want to start Internet cable companies (cf. the phone call I received), and they are in a position to prioritize Internet traffic in order to give themselves a competitive advantage against other services that serve video, notably Google Video and YouTube, and other nascent providers that haven't been invented yet. However, they need a bit of deregulation to do this re-prioritizing.
There's a name for large corporations trying to simulate a groundswell of public opinion in their favor. Punning on grassroots, it's called astroturfing. But they also lied about their real interests in the various pieces of Internet legislation making their way through Congress. So I don't hesitate to call them liars.
Learn more at Save the Internet. I note that a positive piece of legislation has made it out of committee. Hopefully the Congress can do the right thing with it.
I'm a little empty-headed right now, so some of the echoes bouncing around my brain are escaping onto the internets:
1) I finished Neil Gaiman's The Sandman graphic novel series recently. It was the second time around, much more elegiac and poignant. The Sandman is the personification of dreams, and so Gaiman tells stories that are essentially about stories. The only negative experience I had was that some jerk of the century tore out four pages of one of the ten volumes (I got them at the library). Unfortunately, these four pages were the climax of the entire series, so this time I didn't get to read it.
2) I started Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. So far, it is like fiction for scientists. Neat. I gather that there are pirates and court intrigue later as well.
3) Gaiman re-inspired me to read my Shakespeare. I've read a good number of his plays over the years, maybe 10, and the older I get the better they get. I haven't gotten around to it because I have trouble catching the allusions and deceptive vocabulary without little annotations. So I am thinking about getting the Norton Shakespeare or something for a start-of-next-semester present. Uh, to myself.
4) I can't call a post "Echoes" without mentioning Pink Floyd's opus, a song about twenty minutes long with jamming and whale song.
Cloudless every day you fall
upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the windows in the wall
come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the skies
It's on an album called Meddle, whose bluesy song "Seamus" was featured in the movie version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I've seen the play live twice, and both times were very memorable, happy days. It's one of my favorite plays. I've been meaning to reread it as an adult, but the only place I've found it so far is at a used bookstore in Logan. Unfortunately, this is the kind of bookstore that checks online and charges full price for used books by looking up ISBNs. Needless to say, I've never been back to that store.
Stupid me just looked it up in the USU library. Guess I'll check it out for a while.
Introduction: Someone searched in here with terms like "spore evolution christianity" (re: the video game) and it reminded me of some thoughts I had a little while back. Also, today I read a comment about how Harry Potter and Spore would rot children's minds. Does Spore, a game almost entirely about a fascinating naturalistic universe, shed any light on the cultural chasm between evolution and religion? Let me explain why Christians have nothing to fear from the next cultural bugaboo, Spore.
Tidbit 1 on the theology of Spore: Spore is a game about evolution. As your creatures evolve, you the player edit the beasties bit by bit, one generation at a time. Here's the thing: is that evolution? Or intelligent design?
Tidbit 2: Spore is also built around the Drake Equation, which attempts to quantify how many intelligent civilizations we might expect to be able to communicate with at any given time. So the argument goes, if we ever became sure that many other intelligent civilizations existed, we would see claims like the Christian claim that Jesus died for all people as insufferably hidebound and naive. They would be akin to the geocentrism that elevated the importance of humans not only to the center of the universe, but also to the center of God's attention.
The Spore universe is like this; there are millions of worlds to explore. Many of these have intelligent life that you can visit or alter, etc., so it seems to deny the hidebound view of the universe. But it's a single-player game; if there can be said to be a theology infusing the universe, it's monotheistic (or perhaps more accurately, mono-UFO-istic) and puts your actions at the center of attention. If anything it's more monotheistic than the real world, which does not submit so completely to revolving around you.
Tidbit 3: If you want to understand the Trinity as more than an oxymoron, I suggest you pick up The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers. I've read it several times and it doesn't get old. It draws an analogy between the Creator God and the human artistic creation (for most of the book, the practical examples use the human writer). It exploits the trinitarian idea by comparing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to Art-as-Author's-Concept, Art-as-Embodied-Text, and Art-as-Aesthetic-Response.
Spore's lifeblood is the creativity of the players who design its creatures, buildings, spaceships, flora, and so on. It was made from the beginning to be not just a game that you can finish (and with a million worlds to visit, no player could ever explore the whole universe), but a creator's tool. It was made to let players be little creators; Will Wright, the game's designer, said that he wanted people to be able to make a creature in four minutes that could take a Pixar artist several hours. From Genesis onward, the picture of God in the Bible is a portrait of the artist as a young man, a creator of high distinction, skill, and grace.
Conclusion: Although Spore is not being written with any sort of religious or anti-religious agenda (as far as I know at the moment), there are some subtle reasons for Christians to enjoy this video game.
Plus it will rock.
THE END
Just finished watching the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD with Sarah.
Why didn't anyone ever tell me I would love this? Except for the people at Making Light, of course.
I can't take my eyes off this demo. Basically, the guy who created The Sims, Will Wright, has made a new game called Spore. I think it'll be out next year. It will do for evolution what The Sims did for suburban life.
Wright originally explained Spore in an hour-long talk at the Game Developer's Conference. There's a one-minute blurb at the beginning of the video, but the high concept is pretty amazing.
The basic idea is that you begin life as a single-celled organism, then evolve to become a multi-celled creature, then an intelligent life form, then a tool user, then a city builder, then a world conqueror, and finally a star-hopping extraterrestrial wandering the planets in search of new life and new civilizations, boldly going where no one has gone before. Your evolution is not random or arbitrary: at each step of the game, you have access to an editor which changes the shape and capabilities of your creature's body. In fact, when you become a tool user and start living in a hut, you design the hut. When you make cities, you design the buildings. When you make war, you design the vehicles. Not only that, but to populate your little universe, the same way that you create content, your universe is populated with content created by other players that the game downloads from the Internet.
These other creatures evolve independently on their own little planets. There will be half a million individual stars, millions of worlds to explore, alien races to interact with and impress, or make war on. It would be virtually impossible to explore it all.
My brother and I once came up with the idea to have a game that worked on these various levels of abstraction. Say, the top level was a wargame, then the next level down was a real-time strategy, then the next down was a first-person shooter, as you take on various roles in the game, like soldier, commander, fleet admiral. But we were teenagers, not game designers, so it was sort of a fantasy idea.
Until now.
