Anywhere.fm

Maybe I am, as usual, the last person to this party. But there is a website called (and located at) anywhere.fm. It is basically an iTunes-style music player that is online. Not only that, but you upload your music (mp3s only), and you can listen to them anywhere you have an internet connection.

Not only that, but you can listen to other people's music collections on a streaming basis (at least, you can fire up their playlists). There are over 10,000,000 songs uploaded and counting.

Is this legal? They seem to think so. They chose to be basically a web radio station and pay the ASCAP and BMI fees for public performance. They don't allow you to download anyone's songs. Depending on how you use the site, you might not have to.

How do they make money? When you hear a song on somebody else's playlist, you see a little shopping cart "buy this song" link. Apparently they get finders' fees when someone does that.

A downer is that there appears to be no search engine, so you can't just get a big list of Beatles songs and just listen to those. Instead, you depend on the other users to organize things for you, as if they were the DJ of their own little radio station. You also don't appear to be able to skip... yes, I just tried it. If you start on a playlist you don't own, you can't randomly skip to the ones you like... you can only skip so many per hour. Of course, you could put every song you own in a separate playlist, exposing them all, but that's no fun.

The last caveat is that the uploading process goes at about 30 K per second at best (I left it on all night, and I've got about 60 songs out of 800-some).

My music is going up at anywhere.fm/mineshaftgap. I'll warn you that there are some isolated swears, and you should probably skip the Green Day and Ozomatli albums if you care about such things. But there's a lot of Radiohead and Beck and Beatles, and all the Switchfoot studio albums and all the Nickel Creek, plus their side projects (except the 1997 Here To There rarity and a lot of Chris Thile's solo stuff). I'll try and get things organized.

Go check it out.

Caption of the day; irony of ironies and all is irony

The White House said that President Bush will veto a bill that would ban the use of waterboarding by the CIA. The president claims such a prohibition will inhibit the collection of information.

Under the headline of the day:

Bush Will Veto Ban On Torture
McCain, Once Tortured Himself, Joins White House To Oppose Bill Prohibiting Waterboarding

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/14/national/main3830691.shtml

This is one of the most editorial articles I have ever read from the AP. An excerpt:

Although President Bush has stated that the United States has not and will not torture people, it has been learned that Mr. Bush himself has authorized the use of waterboarding on detainees (a practice previously prosecuted by the United States as a war crime), and has claimed the authority to do so again in certain circumstances.

Despite military interrogators' assertions that waterboarding and other brands of torture do not produce reliable intelligence, the Bush administration continues to argue that it needs the option of waterboarding when seeking information from recalcitrant prisoners.

Attorney General Mike Mukasey has declined to declare that waterboarding is torture, despite congressional demands during and after his Senate confirmation process, fueling the administration critics' assumption that admitting such would expose administration figures who authorized the practice to criminal prosecution.

The AP newswire called Bush a liar, a torturer, and a criminal, implying that the fact that he's not in jail for a war crime hangs on a technicality (and an Attorney General in his pocket). And that's in a straight news article.

The other day Scalia said that we have to have the debate over torture vs. intelligence, because the terrorists could have a ticking time bomb, etc. It's a huge grey area to him.

This is total crap. I explored it earlier and elsewhere. So I'll turn the mike over to a prominent critic of our torture policies.

Those who argue the necessity of some abuses raise an important dilemma as their most compelling rationale: the ticking-time-bomb scenario. What do we do if we capture a terrorist who we have sound reasons to believe possesses specific knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack?

In such an urgent and rare instance, an interrogator might well try extreme measures to extract information that could save lives. Should he do so, and thereby save an American city or prevent another 9/11, authorities and the public would surely take this into account when judging his actions and recognize the extremely dire situation which he confronted. But I don't believe this scenario requires us to write into law an exception to our treaty and moral obligations that would permit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. To carve out legal exemptions to this basic principle of human rights risks opening the door to abuse as a matter of course, rather than a standard violated truly in extremis. It is far better to embrace a standard that might be violated in extraordinary circumstances than to lower our standards to accommodate a remote contingency, confusing personnel in the field and sending precisely the wrong message abroad about America's purposes and practices.

That sounds pretty convincing, critic of torture. Say, what's your position on waterboarding, while we're at it?

Now, in this war, our liberal notions are put to the test. Americans of good will, all patriots, argue about what is appropriate and necessary to combat this unconventional enemy. Those of us who feel that in this war, as in past wars, Americans should not compromise our values must answer those Americans who believe that a less rigorous application of those values is regrettably necessary to prevail over a uniquely abhorrent and dangerous enemy. Part of our disagreement is definitional. Some view more coercive interrogation tactics as something short of torture but worry that they might be subject to challenge under the "no cruel, inhumane or degrading" standard. Others, including me, believe that both the prohibition on torture and the cruel, inhumane and degrading standard must remain intact. When we relax that standard, it is nearly unavoidable that some objectionable practices will be allowed as something less than torture because they do not risk life and limb or do not cause very serious physical pain.

For instance, there has been considerable press attention to a tactic called "waterboarding," where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth-causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned. He isn't, of course; there is no intention to injure him physically. But if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.

Any last thoughts?

The enemies we fight today hold our liberal values in contempt, as they hold in contempt the international conventions that enshrine them. I know that. But we are better than them, and we are stronger for our faith. And we will prevail. It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others--even our enemies.

Those who return to us and those who give their lives for us are entitled to that honor. And those of us who have given them this onerous duty are obliged by our history, and the many terrible sacrifices that have been made in our defense, to make clear to them that they need not risk their or their country's honor to prevail; that they are always--through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss--they are always, always, Americans, and different, better and stronger than those who would destroy us.

And now, the punchline:

Torture's Terrible Toll
By Senator John McCain
Newsweek
25 November 2005 issue

Godel, Escher, Bach (major geek alert)

This reminds me of that classic Johnny Carson bit, Carnac the Magnificent. The swami, bejeweled and enturbaned, holds up the envelope to his forehead and closes his eyes: "Godel, Escher, Bach". "Girdle Esher Bock" echoes Ed McMahon. He reads the card: "Instructions for a German wedding."

(I tried desperately to come up with a better one than that. It's the Escher that kept getting in the way.)

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. This is actually a book about self-reference, about logic and metalogic, about patterns and fugues, about artificial intelligence, about symbols and interpretations. I haven't read very far yet, but it is already pretty mindblowing. It won a Pulitzer and it hasn't changed since 1979.

Plus this guy told me to read it. About halfway through the blog post, he veers off into stuff about being a programmer and making software that may or may not interest you.

In the preface to the 20th anniversary edition, Hofstadter explains the main idea: things that refer to themselves in some sense examine their own state and are conscious. This self reference, he calls a "strange loop", and suggests that there may be a scale of consciousness based on the amount of introspection that a thing or system does. It's basically a goofy, insightful, jarring 800 page book. With bonus dialogues between Lewis Carroll's Tortoise and Achilles. With digressions on Bach canons. With pictures. Only 100 pages in; I'll tell you how it goes.

I've also been reading lately that the Internet is like a brain. See, for instance, Dimensions of the One Machine. I've read many similar such arguments that seem to conflate hardware density and speed with intelligence, then claim that in the year 2040, due to the consistent doubling of computer power due to Moore's law, we'll have computers with brains that surpass the human mind.

I think these arguments ignore the complex structural differences between the network of neurons and synapses that we have, which are stuporously interconnected, and the logic gates on a computer, which are not. While we're stuck on the x86 architecture (like most home computers nowadays), we will not stumble onto artificial brains.

One thing the Internet does not seem to do much is introspect. The closest thing we have at the moment is probably search. Google is not really the Internet. It is really about the Internet. However, introspection seems to imply a greater sense of feedback and control than Google really does... Google holds up the mirror to the Internet, but then what happens? Really, Google just builds a better mirror.

The feedback at the moment is all coming from the human users.

If the Internet were a giant brain, how could we even interpret its thoughts?

In vaguely related news, Will Wright's intelligent design simulator, Spore, is coming out in September. From cell to civilization to spaceship, the player evolves their creations, then sets out to explore a vast universe. Here is a cool interview with the latest. For earlier posts, see here and here. I've been waiting for this one for a long time.

Caedmon's Call concert last night

Most contemporary Christian music (CCM, a genre with its own magazine) is sour, at least to my uneducated tastebuds. The exceptions are few: Jars of Clay, still rockin it; Switchfoot, world famous, but it's obviously still a Christian band; Jennifer Knapp, before she stopped making music; Ginny Owens, the blind pop pianist; Leigh Nash from Sixpence None The Richer... I'm just about petered out there.

And then there's Caedmon's Call, a group of singer-songwriters with world-music percussion. They've been around for over a decade, and they have a lot of strong music.

The show started with founding member Derek Webb, who went solo a few years ago, but came back recently for the latest Caedmon's Call album and tour, Overdressed. He makes great music about religion, love, politics... His latest album, The Ringing Bell, is not to be missed. He did an hour of music, then a few minutes later the whole band was on stage.

There are eight people in Caedmon's Call now: lead singers Cliff and Danielle Young, singer/songwriters Derek Webb (twelve string) and Andrew Osenga (guitars), drums and percussion by Todd Bragg and Garett Buell, Jeff Miller on bass, and Josh Moore on keyboards etc. They had garbage cans, riffs, organs, big thumpy drums, three and four part harmonies... they've really got it all, this band.

By the end of the three-hour concert, my ears were stuffed, but it was a great time. For some reason, I have a need to write down the setlist... they did something like 34 songs.

One thing Sarah noticed was that nobody would stand up. For the vast majority of the concert, we were sitting down. Once in a while, they'd bang the drums really loud and people would stand and clap and sing along, but not that often. Maybe that's what you get when you do a concert in a church.

Finished Quicksilver; McCain

So, I've been way off the map, stuck in the 17th century with Neal Stephenson. But I finally finished Quicksilver after weeks of reading (maybe more than a month, an eon in my reading life). The phrase "tour de force" gets thrown around a lot these days... "Entertaining"... "Thought provoking..." "Hilarious..." "Absorbing..." "Tales of the ruling class intersect with the exploits of Vagabonds. Lofty science turns into slapstick on a dime. Depressing realism gives way to explosive alchemical experiments." I don't know how to blurb this book. It would probably be rated R or worse as a movie, with sometimes graphic violence and sex. It's everything from beautiful to vulgar. But it's amazing.

Here's McCain vs. McCain, an editorial in a flagship conservative newspaper that came out a few weeks ago. It was a somewhat transparent attempt to prevent McCain from gaining the Republican nomination, in the runup to Super Tuesday. It didn't work, because the Republican field was not strong this time around.

Vince gave a pretty backhanded description of McCain on those lines:

McCain walks a line somewhere between pandering and probity. I actually find this a welcome difference from the complete groveling of the other Republican candidates toward the pop conservative issue of the day.

McCain also contrasts well with President Bush, who shamelessly colors all history and lies profusely without any apparent guilt.

Of the Republicans, McCain is definitely the statesman of the bunch.

This is a dictionary-worthy example of damning with faint praise.

To understand how I feel about McCain, you'll have to take a trip back in time to the 2000 campaign. Ron Suskind, profiling Rove in 2003, puts it about as succinctly as anyone could:

As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are well-known, and among this group of Republicans, what happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot handouts and telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby might influence their vote. Now here’s the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing. Years back they’d adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious . . . and onward he marched.

McCain, having endured these attacks on his family and his reputation, turned around and made common cause with these people, going so far as to say he'd accept campaign advice from Rove this time around... hugging President Bush while hating his guts...

It is only the most personal example of many sellouts by McCain. He is a media darling and is portrayed as a moderate, and he's the Republican nominee. I wonder, though, since we essentially have 3 moderates left in the race, whether people will not vote for the real liberals and moderates instead of the somewhat clouded record of McCain.

New song in the bar to the left

This is a depressing song by Radiohead called "No Surprises". It is about sleepily, sheepily letting the man walk all over you until you die. The lyrics can be found here.

I figured it would be fun to put my vocal microphone through the effects pedal and see what I could do. Mostly I am playing with vibrato and fiddling with the delay with one hand while holding the mike with the other. I recorded two vocal tracks.

I am also messing with a pitch shifter, which is a cheap way to turn a six-string guitar into something that plays two octaves at once, a poor man's twelve-string.

By the way, it's on OK Computer, a no-brainer way to buy one of the best albums of the 1990s.

I would be failing you if I didn't post the real version as well. The video features the lead singer of Radiohead, who is, or was, claustrophobic and afraid of drowning.

Record 1, McCain 0

I have been hearing about John McCain, so a quick reminder. Far from being a maverick, he has pandered relentlessly in his quest for the presidency. However, the popular press has a short attention span. I direct you to Exhibit A and Exhibit B.

Exhibit C:


And just for fun:

I used to like John McCain
But now he gives me a pain.
He was a Bush critic
But it seems to this cynic
He’s switched his positions for gain.

His opposition to torture
Is open to forfeiture
For embracing Gitmo George.

He’ll reform campaign finance
Unless if by some chance
There’s a banquet at which he can gorge.

And suddenly the religious right
Is dandy in his new light
Of forgetting when they were his scourge.

Nobody should misconstrue
His new affection for W.
John’s running for president,
Meaning values once resident
Have all been flushed down the loo.

--Lee Wochner

http://socalgrassroots.blogspot.com/2006/03/poem-for-john-mcgain.html

Life 1, Dan 0.

Well, it's been a while again.

My mother-in-law came to visit. Alex had really been missing his Mimi. It made all of us miss Sarah's family in Utah. Everyone wanted to be back together again. We took a nice trip downtown to The Tattered Cover (one of the better bookstores in the state, so I'm told).

Alex is enjoying a lot of Sesame Street characters now, especially Elmo. We've been getting him books and watching the show more. He's learning to count from them. In one particular show, The Count is out, so Ernie fills in for him. However, after Ernie finishes counting, there's no melodramatic thunder or lightning flash, so Ernie has to do his own effects. "Eight... Nine... Ten! Ah ah ah! ... Uh... THUNDER! LIGHTNING!" Now when Alex counts, he says it and we say it. It really cracks him up.

He can also do most of his alphabet, and he's up to subject-verb-object syntax. Of course, it's stuff like "I love Elmo" and "I play soap", but it's been a marked improvement.

Sarah and I have been pleased to find a church. Check it out at www.missionhills.org. Personally, they had me at Caedmon's Call concert (a Christian band, that plays acoustic and world music). One of Alex's classmates goes there with his family, and after the mom found out from Sarah that we were still church-hunting, we figured we'd give it a try. For the past couple of weeks, we've enjoyed their service. There is a young married people-type sunday school class during the second service, so we'll try that next time.

It has been a bit exhausting trying to live without that kind of community, without meeting people regularly. The best I have done is bonding with the guys at work. Our families and faraway friends have been valuable in this respect.

My dad turned 49 yesterday, and we spent a very pleasant conversation on DDR, memory and the neural networks of the brain, his new classroom, and such. I gave my DDR setup to my mom. It turned out I couldn't play it after Alex went to bed because it was too noisy, so there was no good time to work out. Mom is going to town on it, getting Bs on songs. My cousins Riley and Shay come to stay with my parents, and it turns out that the best babysitter is DDR. They're about... I want to say 10 and 8, but that might be wrong. Anyhow, Dad reports that tiring them out has become very easy because they play the dance game 3 hours a day during their visits... this boggles my mind.

Dad always wants us to come back to Seattle. He hasn't had a crack at his grandson yet, but they miss us too. I suppose if I got the right offer, I could see it... Sarah wants to get settled here so Alex can go to school and life stays a little predictable, though, so it would have to be a pretty big improvement on the status quo.

I finished another Discworld book by Terry Pratchett. This was #2, The Light Fantastic. It is almost pointless to tell you the plot. However, it's just great for what it is, which is humorous fantasy satire with a playful philosophical nugget at the core.

I also ripped through V for Vendetta the comic, once again. I basically read it all in one sitting. It is hard to read the glib protestations of V now that he was 'liberating' Evey without a bit of a chill. The point of the story in general is that the proper answer to tyranny is violence, that violence can be a tool of the liberator who the government calls the terrorist, and that destruction, not conciliation, is the proper response to this. Along the way, V kills instruments of the state, but also causes, directly or indirectly, the deaths of many more people. His motives are also very murky, in that he is not just carrying out a program of asymmetric insurgency, but also prosecuting a vendetta. He is a serial killer, but he is the hero of the story. The story in the comic books is violent, but not very gory. Aside from the somewhat goofy storyline where the AI computer controls the country, it is very powerful. So, once again, I strongly recommend you read it.

Quicksilver, a historickal tale of science and piracy set at the dawn of the Age of Newton, has been going really well. It is insightful, and big somehow, and rollicking hilarious. It shines a light from a very interesting angle on our contemporary situation. It came from an unexpected quarter, written by a science-fiction author of high distinction. It's bawdy and violent and ludicrous, but also amazing.

I finally got started learning GNU Emacs. World beware.

Also, Arc, a new programming language has hit the web. I am following this development with great interest. This is the goal: http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html

Music thingy

As you may not be aware if you don't actually visit the front page of the blog (seriously, people, RSS; feed readers; look it up), I stuck an mp3 player on the top, to the left. I figured out that as a dude with a Google email address, I have 100 MB of free space available for me to upload files or make web pages at pages.google.com. I don't know if there's a bandwidth cap, but the way these things work is, if enough people start hammering your website to download your music, the website can become profitable through text ads. So I'm not worried for the time being.

Don't Need Anything is the first song in there right now. It's the finale of an anarchist musical, or so I hear, by the lead singer from Toad the Wet Sprocket, but it has also made a great lullaby for Alex that I've sung many a time. Please forgive my nonexistent mixing ability, as well as the stray bad note here and there.

The second song is what you get when you stick a drum machine with a looping chord progression on one track, and then a guitarist comes back from the dead and plays the guitar like a zombie and clicks through the presets on the pedal while recording on the other track. It's also what you get when you hand a crappy lead guitar player a multi-effects pedal. If we shadows have offended, etc., etc.

I often record random noodling onto the computer, just like writers will warm up by writing random stuff. Most writers, however, have the good sense not to publish theirs. I am also listening for sweet music in the middle of noise, and once in a while a riff will be useful to me later.

All the sounds on both songs come out of the one pedal, which may be of some interest to you if you've never thought about how guitar effects work. What the pedal does is simulate more complicated setups where each step performs a different transformation on the audio signal coming through. You can get almost anything out of your guitar if you can come up with the recipe. I haven't even experimented with creating my own effects yet, so stay tuned.

I finished a few books. It's pretty hard to talk about Spook Country, the latest novel by William Gibson. His previous novel was one of the best books I've read in a long time, so that bar was set pretty high. Gibson's book was a very interesting take on what kind of world we are living in. The various characters move in and out of worlds that are invisible to common perception. The idea is that these things are in their infancy, though, and might become just as real, if not more real, than our quotidian existence. So there are spies and surveillance as well as virtual reality and real world articles tagged with metadata (spimes). The funny thing about this kind of book is that it's not exactly extrapolative science fiction any more. To get the sf thrills and sensawunda, you have to think about where all this is going. In a more traditional sf book, the author would just show you. I thought it was thought-provoking and entertaining, but I don't think I would call it moving, like I would some of his other work.

I also read Dies the Fire by SM Stirling. Dad bought it for me while he was here. This is a story of America (really, Oregon) after an apocalypse: in a flash, causes TBD, electricity and gunpowder stop working for good. Then, tons of people die because they don't know how to survive (and they're stuck in urban areas). The book tells the story of the survivors, who get medieval and communal in a hurry. It was a very interesting idea, and was pretty well thought out. One thing I always wondered about The Stand was what would happen when the food ran out (years after the end of the story). Which it would. This book goes there. It revolves around food in a way that really surprised me. Change of subject, one of the main characters is a Wiccan. I didn't know much about their religion (except the really basic stuff you pick up here and there), so I was interested in the window on that culture. It's not a classic book, but it's fun (if at times a bit gory and sweary).

And I finished another one by the master, Philip K. Dick. What's he the master of? Well, writing like Philip K. Dick, for one, that's why they named an award after him. I guess he's the master of mind-bending, of reality confusion, of paranoia, of the low and untidy corners of society. This one was called Lies, Inc. (originally, The Unteleported Man). Dick wrote this in a fertile period, when he wrote ten novels in two years.

In the story, a dystopian Earth is overpopulated, and attempts at colonizing the solar system have essentially failed. Light-speed ships exist, but only one habitable planet has been found. Then comes the invention of instant teleportation. A channel from Earth to the colony planet opens, and people start going to the colony planet. The only catch is that it's a one way trip. There's no way back to Earth.

A neurotic man who owns a light-speed ship starts to suspect that something is rotten in the colony, that a powerful conspiracy is controlling the colony for its own purposes, and decides to spend 18 years traveling to the colony in his ship, so he can return and report on its true nature. Even before he leaves, he is essentially hallucinating. And when he gets there... well, you'd just have to read it. I haven't taken acid but I feel confident that the experience was set down in print in this book. And it only gets weirder from there.

The setting, the characters, the language were top-notch, and I found the resolution very well done, very fair. It cleared up the book a lot, but I have a lot more to reconstruct as far as what was actually going on while I was reading the craziness. I even started rereading it from the beginning. I don't know if I'll go all the way again, but it certainly commanded my attention. Nothing very graphic, except for the drug trips, call it adult themes and disturbing images. Definitely worth your time, if you turn pro when the going gets weird.

Up next, an sf parody by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #2, The Light Fantastic), Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe, and Mt. Baroque Cycle. Oh, and Lord of the Rings. I'll be busy.

Last Christmas gift

Between a couple of parents and parents in law, I got my hands on a multi-effects guitar pedal. For poor people like me without enough $ for an amplifier, distortion pedal, flanger, chorus, etc. etc., this is the best imitator I could find. I can record it into the computer, so now my recordings can get a little more interesting. So far, I've found something that sounds kind of like a twelve-string, something that adds a couple of octaves and another thing that takes me down a couple of octaves (it is hard to hear the low note on that one), stuff that sounds like alien noises and blips and U2, and all kinds of fuzzy stuff to rock out to. Needless to say, when I start actually editing the presets, there are going to be fireworks.

I will try to add something soon. I am looking at hosting mp3s on our Comcast account, then putting a little player in the blog so you can hear them.

And now, because I just can't go another day without unleashing more Radiohead on you, here's the amazing video for "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". They recently played this in their studio with helmet cams that were pointed directly at their faces. This looks pretty normal until they start moving their heads.



For a more low-key two-person version, a study in contrast, check out this one with lead singer Thom Yorke, and lead wizard Jonny Greenwood on the Ondes Martenot.

It's been a busy couple of weeks

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! My family has been visiting in Denver: Mom, Dad, and Rachel. We have been busy not being busy: going to the bookstore, playing Nintendo together, going to movies, eating my dad's cooking, and generally having a great holiday.

I read The Hobbit, which you should also read, and I got some great book recommendations for my dad. I'm ready to scale Mt. Baroque Cycle soon, and some more Gene Wolfe, Lord of the Rings, and more!

The most interesting part of the week has been family devotional time. Mom came up with it. All of us will have taken a night, through tomorrow. We've talked about whether God is fair, how we should worship a child-God, about the difficulty of prayer and church discipline. I will try to get to these in blog posts.

Dad wants me to create a book-group-creating/management web site. My cursory investigations have not yielded a similar service on the internet.

Cheers to all of you!

A Christmas Story

We live in a strange world. I was looking for Christmas music to play while we clean and cook... I found the entire A Christmas Story (you'll shoot your eye out!).



And here's Good King Kong, by PDQ Bach, Peter Schickele.

Events

I hope your celebration of Beethoven's birthday was as awesome as mine: shopping madness for Christmas. It is hard to find time to get away. I stole a parking spot from a big truck (not altogether intentionally) and, in one line, sang four Radiohead songs to myself.

Sarah and I went out in the cold to see the lights in downtown Denver. It was kind of fun, kind of chilly. I miss the shopping district in Seattle for that kind of expedition. And the steel drum band. There was a dude on a recorder, though.

Where we were, there's just an outdoor mall. We had thought they lit the state capitol, but we didn't see anything when we went by. The US Mint was just red in the top tower. They were showing Miracle on 34th Street, the original, on a big screen in a park.

I've been enjoying a set of computer programming problems called Project Euler. Basically, they are math problems that would not be easy to solve without a computer. We the people can solve problems that were beyond the world's mathematicians for centuries. They are not that easy to solve with a computer either, as the design of the program is the key, but every solution program should end in under one minute.

I've been taking the opportunity to learn a programming language new to me, Python. I learned Common Lisp in grad school, so a lot of the concepts are familiar to me. Still, it's been fun to make functional little programs that can run on basically any computer. I haven't been doing math problems just for fun since high school, basically, so it's been neat to get back to those roots. I could reflect on the circle of life, the more things change, nothing new under the sun...

Start of book reviews

I was going over my reading record in the blog, and I think I must've either missed tagging some things with "books" or not talked about all that I did read. For instance, The Stand isn't on there. There are only 34 books! On the positive side, only four were rereads, so I tried to spread my wings a little this year. If you want to go back and check them, just click on the "books" tag at the bottom of this post.

There's a lot of science fiction and fantasy, some classics, some religious stuff, some Stephen King, and other miscellany from databases to math to poker.

It should go without saying that I'm soliciting reading suggestions. And I really should get a reading group.

This probably interests about two people in the entire world, but here's the list I found for 2007 blog-posted books, earliest to latest:

Left Hand of Darkness
Bujold: Brothers in Arms, Memory, Mirror Dance
The Shining
How Much for Just the Planet?
The Knight, The Wizard
V for Vendetta
The Biggest Game in Town
Understanding Comics
From Hell
Database in Depth
Freakonomics
How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
Aspects of the Novel
Walking On Water
Girl Meets God
A Sort of Life
What's So Amazing About Grace
Audible Neil Gaiman
Cujo
Charmed Life
The Power and the Glory
Night Shift
The Gunslinger
Till We Have Faces
The Color of Magic
Starship Troopers
The Language of the Night
The Man in the High Castle
Lord of the Flies
Journey Through Genius
Fragile Things

Allergy

I forgot to put in the last post that I've noticed myself doing something funny lately. Sarah and I go out shopping, and around the second store I start to get really exhausted by the crowds, the lights, the aggressive product placements and advertising. I hate the experience of being bought and sold in those environments. For some reason, I just cannot handle it anymore.

So I take out the iPod that is always in my coat now, and start listening to Radiohead. I've even started putting on the tunes in the grocery store.

It is like a histamine blocker.

Checking in

My reading of Lord of the Flies was somewhat tainted by knowing how it ends. It's the model UN episode of The Simpsons, so I knew the plot from start to finish. It was still a very impressive book. I had to take several breaks from reading it because it was just too depressing, but it was very good.

One thing I wondered as I read it was whether this thing was written deliberately to provide fodder for critics of various schools. It is almost impossible to avoid reading it as an allegory; I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I used to think that true understanding of a work of fiction involved teasing out the allegory. Now, not so much.

In between Lord of the Flies sessions, I finally found Neil Gaiman's short story collection Fragile Things under a car seat and finished it off. The end of the book is a kind of post-quel to American Gods, another book I recommend highly. A story about The Matrix that was written when the movie came out. One about a society of gourmands that has eaten absolutely everything under the sun. A touching one called "How To Talk To Girls At Parties" about a shy kid who meets some very strange girls. A very funny one about a writer who lives in a gothic Halloween world who tries to overcome the stigma of writing contemporary literary fiction. All of them start out normal enough, then go a little bit crazy, magical-realism style.

I also finished Charmed Life, which was very entertaining. Today, I dove into the next one in the series, The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant.

Somehow I worked in time to "finish" Super Mario Galaxy. This is a charming game, a flagship for Nintendo. They hit every note just right. Mario is running around in the stars, visiting all kinds of planets. Some have normal gravity, some are very very strange. They have themes, like "" The plot is the Mario plot (Bowser kidnaps the princess, you go save her), but everything else was fresh and exciting. There was some great camera trickery involved, with Mario walking around on the ceiling a lot. The music was brilliant. Bee Mario is probably the cutest thing they have ever done. And beating the Robot Bowser level in Toyland felt like a real accomplishment. The first half of the game was easy enough, but the second half, which I am just starting, looks to be pretty hardcore. I say "finish" because even over the course of my rental, which was most of three evenings, I only got through half of the levels.

I got a wireless keyboard and mouse at Target this weekend. I hope to use it in conjunction with the Wii to surf the web from my couch. Stay tuned.

I've got that William Gibson book to read, and I have that end-of-year book sum-up to get to. I hope the early December days are treating you well. Sarah should have some exciting pictures up of the house decorated for Christmas soon...

Happy Thanksgiving

I hadn't looked at my Amazon recommendations in a while, so I was a little unprepared to find that many of the book recommendations it found for me were things I had recently checked out from the library or read using the reference libraries available through work. The tool basically predicted the future based on my past reading events. The one that was the weirdest was that it recommended The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, and that was the first Dick novel I've ever read. A little spooky.

My first turkey: Alton Brown's roast turkey recipe was idiot-proof and amazing. You brine the turkey overnight and then roast with apples, onions, and herbs stuck in the cavity. It was moist and delicious, mission accomplished. The only thing that went wrong was that I bought too small a turkey. I won't make that mistake again.

I finally finished Charmed Life, (Diana Wynne Jones) which was quite good. The eerie similarities to Harry Potter continued to the end of the novel, which cements my opinion that it is basically source material for the series. I mean, two thirds of the way through, someone starts insisting that they not call the enchanter Chrestomanci by his name, to avoid summoning him, but instead call him... wait for it... You Know Who. Capital letters and all.

We had a nice Thanksgiving cooking together. Sarah's sweet potatoes were just divine, and even though the turkey was small, our little family of 3 barely got through a quarter of it. We have lots of leftovers. We did the wishbone, said what we were thankful for, and watched football while peeling potatoes. These were practically my only requirements for a successful day. Then we all fell asleep at 4:00. It was our first Thanksgiving away from everyone's relatives, but Sarah and Alex did videoconferencing with the Utah fam (with iChat; we are also set up to do it over Skype, but other programs are possible) so they got their fix.

There are some great poems about being thankful, so I will just let one take over. But first, I am thankful for life and love, for wife and son, for food and song, for walks and books, for every short, eternal day.

Welcome Morning

Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

If you're like me

You got temporarily distracted from Lord of the Flies by Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics. Along the way, you learned about transfinite numbers and how they used to have math-offs in the Italian Renaissance. You also picked up a new book by one of your favorite authors: Spook Country, by William Gibson. As the jacket says,

Spook: Specter, ghost, revenant. Slang for "intelligence agent."

Country: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind.

Spook Country: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place where we are learning to live.

Last, but certainly not least, a desire to deepen your professional awareness led you to begin a thousand page journey through a computer science textbook: Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools.

You have over twenty things checked out of the library. Five of them are the first season of Stargate SG-1, which you were surprised to learn is a true sequel to the movie. You have about fifteen CDs checked out, and today you heard Born To Run for the first time. You also listened to more Talking Heads songs than ever, a new Ozomatli album, and the latest Decemberists.

You took your first turkey out of the freezer on Sunday night and stuck it in a mixing bowl to thaw. Tomorrow, you will be dunking it in a five-gallon bucket filled with saltwater. Thursday, you will have your first Thanksgiving away from your parents and your in-laws.

Friday, you plan to laugh at insane shopping from the comfort of your living room, enjoying hot cider.

You've been playing the drums with your son lately. He likes rocking out on the xylophone. You have been listening to the drummer from Radiohead a lot. You also have been trying out guitar effects on the computer. You even played for half an hour straight at the guitar store, on your knees, with headphones with a short cord, just messing with one low-end effects pedal.

You brought homemade banana bread with chocolate chips inside to a Thanksgiving potluck at work, and every single person who tried it essentially asked you, "Chocolate in banana bread? Can you do that?" in between bites.

Yes. Yes, you can do that.

If you're like me.

Lazy

I've been posting less. I'm not sure if this is because I've run out of long thoughts for now (which is certainly true, except for an ongoing conversation I've been having with my mom about the erosion of privacy and the demonizing of dissent in the post-9/11 America. I've written about this before, but we're all adults here and this is not the year PNE 6. For better or worse it's 2007 and we deserve a post-post-9/11 America.). It could be that my mind is more or less exhausted by work and home life, which is another half truth. Work is exhilarating, and for the most part I don't bring it home, which is good.

I never got around to Lord of the Flies in high school. I mentioned to my mom that we skipped a lot of the British white guys in IB. Sure, we had to have our Shakespeare and Dickens, but it was very international overall. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Sound of Waves, Things Fall Apart, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (what's the name of that one? I can't remember... oh, it's Chronicle of a Death Foretold), and so on. So I somehow missed this book about the savagery of school kids, about the apocalypse, about the heart of darkness, about everything under the sun, according to the jacket cover.

I read an essay recently that said that nerds were doomed to be cynical about high school because it is your whole world for a while, but it doesn't mean anything in the long run. He had read Lord of the Flies, and he said that he wished someone had made the connection between the book and the environment it was being taught in.

iPod madness

I finally figured out how to get my music collection onto my brand old iPod. It was a gift from my father in law quite a while ago. It had all his old music, and I didn't have cords to get my music from the PC onto the iPod, and I didn't have the wherewithal to laboriously burn several gigabytes of music onto several more 800 MB CDs, so it became this amazing jukebox that I took, especially on flights and mowing the lawn.

It turns out all we had to do was set up a network between the Mac and the PC, start a new Mac account for my music, share a few folders, then copy several gigabytes over the air. It still takes a while, but you don't have to keep switching out physical media, so you can get up and go to Home Depot to buy your first rake while Beck, Radiohead, the Beatles, Nickel Creek, and a motley crew of others worm their electronic ways into your heart.

I am quite excited. For the first time, I will have better music on the iPod than I can find on the internet, and thus, a reason to take the iPod in to work.

I also watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior. I was going to, well, not pan it, but at least compare it to its superior predecessors, Drunken Master 2 and Fist of Legend until I read on the internet, just now, that there were no wires, CGI or camera tricks in this movie. Wow. It's just the brutal ballet, if the ballerinas all ganged up on the one little ballerina... and then the crunching started. And I thought all the elbow and knee strikes were getting a little repetitive. I actually might have to watch this thing again. Its plot is virtually nonexistent, but this is one of those movies where it would just get in the way.

Still more entertainment

I read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick this week. He's the (departed) guy maybe most broadly known for writing the stories that got made into Blade Runner, Total Recall, Paycheck, and Minority Report, and more recently, you probably didn't see A Scanner Darkly and Next.

This book came out in 1962. It's the alternate present of America in 1962, 15 years after the Allies lost World War II (owing to, among other things, the assassination of FDR). The west coast is run by the Japanese, the east coast is run by the Germans, and the middle of the country has become a shadow of its former self. It's well-depicted and eerie. More than that, it's a novel about the Tao and about living inside and outside the flow of the world. It's also a novel about art, where the characters all seem to be reading an alternate history bestseller, banned in the Nazi countries, called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts the Allied victory in World War II. It's also a stylistic tour-de-force, with each focus character narrated and talking in their own dialect and from their own peculiar points of view.

This truly appears to be my year of the novel. I also picked up a novel omnibus by Ursula K. LeGuin. If anybody has some more recommendations, I am all ears.

Vince brought up recently that our reading lists do not intersect much because I read a lot of fiction and he reads a lot of non-fiction. I love stories. I don't necessarily learn facts from them, but consider this: facts are true, but often irrelevant; theories are relevant, but often untrue. That is my philosophy of science, cribbed from a linguistics professor in undergrad. One day he was trying to explain a fundamental problem with Chomsky's linguistics and he put it this way: they keep trying to extend the theory to cover more and more cases, but by doing that, they lose the power of their original generalizations.

This appears to be a fundamental problem of the pursuit of knowledge: knowing how important the details are. This is so important that researchers routinely eliminate as many details as possible, by controlling the environment. To find important implications, you have to match valuable behavior with significant control.

Living as a human being, perhaps fortunately, does not provide us with similar control of our environment, with similar eliminations of variables, except perhaps to the insane, the Wall Street executive, the alienated... but I repeat myself. Instead of tearing our lives into constituent parts, I am convinced we try to tell ourselves a story with some integrity, some unity of action. And reading fiction, or even non-fiction stories, I think, gives us a chance to respond to our world, to another human being, not with a little part of ourselves, but with our hearts in our teeth, our minds engaged, our blood pumping through the pages. I have rarely been shaken or moved by non-fiction, or rather, by arguments. But I want to be moved when I read. I want to be someone else when I'm done.

Madeleine L'Engle said recently about Harry Potter that there's no underneath to the stories, and I think there is something to this. The Harry Potter books are interesting depictions of flawed heroes, and they are epic and fun, grand and entertaining, but ultimately, they are not meant to shake you up the way I'm talking about. They do not point to deeper meanings, do not exploit the power of ambiguity. They are safe. Impotent. Sterile. I hope for JK Rowling's sake that instead of writing the Harry Potter encyclopedia (she is currently suing a website that plans to make a similar product with her characters) and getting stuck in the safe world, she sits down with her pen and her knife, and creates a new story with a few more razorblades sticking out of it.

If you watch TV, point yourself toward the other best show on television. Yes, yes, there's Heroes, which you should still be watching (first season on DVD, quite poignant and epic, dangerous and potent), but the antics of the cheerleader have gotten boring, and the dead hand of the painter that depicts the future is choking the plot. All in all, things are a bit tedious at the moment. So why not watch a show about a dude who brings people back from the dead.

It's Pushing Daisies. In Pushing Daisies, Ned, a pie-maker in his mid-twenties, has been living with a strange power for more than a decade: touch a dead thing (animal, person) once, and it comes back to life. But touch it again and it's dead forever. Also, the catch, if the reanimated thing is not returned to death within a minute, something else dies in its place.

The backstory: when the guy was ten, he discovered his power when his mom died by accident, he brought her back to life. His girl-next-door's father died when, 60 seconds later, he hadn't returned his mom to death. Then his mom touched him anyway, and she died again, this time permanently. Afterwards, Ned's dad sent him to boarding school, but he never forgot Charlotte Charles, nicknamed Chuck, the childhood sweetheart whose father he had inadvertently killed.

The front story: Ned, now a full-time pie maker, falls in with a private investigator. The PI solves mysteries by talking to the dead for 60 seconds, using Ned's ability. Charlotte (Chuck) gets killed on a cruise and Ned goes in, ostensibly to touch her and solve the mystery of her death. But when she comes back to life, he is unwilling to see her dead again. So, 60 seconds go by and a grave-robbing funeral director nearby dies in her place.

Charlotte (Chuck) and Ned fall for each other instantly, but they cannot touch, or Charlotte will die. Nevertheless, they make the most of their second chance together, and therein lies the story. It is completely spell-binding. It's an urban fairy tale, still more evidence that the geeks have won. It is by turns surreal and kooky in the extreme, darling, hilarious, philosophical and heavy, and heartbreakingly romantic and beautiful. And, I just saw the episode where they do a They Might Be Giants song, which, unexpectedly, is germane to the content.

You can watch the show online if you like. ABC's player contains all the episodes to date; just click on the link that says "Watch Online Now."

Last off, here's a Radiohead concert in two acts. If you want to hear what they're all about, get it while it's hot. It's from Berkeley in 2006, so they play stuff from most of their catalog, including their newest album, excluding their first album. One thing that might impress you is how different the songs sound, even though it's always and only been the same five guys. They are a bit paranoid about contemporary Western society, but I for one am glad that someone is. It's dense, poetic, symphonic music.

Kefi's wedding video

More books

Last week I had a lot of reading to do, in between the pastry making, visiting, cribbage (Rachel kicked my butt), backgammon (I played my brother to 32-32. We kept score on the cribbage board), shopping, etc. I read a very clever book called The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. This book, first in a 434 part series, is set on a world that is actually a disk, called Discworld. Its sun orbits around it. It sits atop A'Tuin, the great turtle, who sits in turn on top of four elephants (or maybe it's the other way around). It's not just great fantasy parody (the sections on Cthulhu and Pern seemed particularly well-done to me), it's at times thought-provoking. With jokes.

I also read an old classic, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Unless you have a specific need, like the need to read lots and lots of science fiction, I will actually suggest that you avoid this book. There is basically no story, the character arc is unconvincing, and there are endless info-dumps, and endless sermons on the value of serving in the armed forces. It's important to view it in its context, of course, (1959) but it suffers from Heroic Spaceman Syndrome along with a lot a lot of the fiction that was being done then. It won the Hugo, so if you are trying to read the Hugos, that might be another reason to read it.

I didn't have time to get to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night, which is a first collection of her essays and articles on science fiction and fantasy. So I stole it from my dad.

I have plugged Le Guin here before, for The Left Hand of Darkness. I should mention that she also wrote (and is still writing) a terrific fantasy series called Earthsea that was recently made into a movie (not very faithful, if I remember the hearsay correctly). The first book is The Wizard of Earthsea. I still remember most of the second book too, The Tombs of Atuan. I tried to read the third book, The Farthest Shore, but I didn't really understand it at the time. She has written a ton of great stuff, though.

I am thinking about doing a 2007 book review Retrospecticus in December.

I have been busily listening to Radiohead's studio catalog. All of it. Amnesiac, yes, is the hardest listen and OK Computer is definitely still the best. It also turns out that there are Radiohead concerts on the internet. The best way to see them is to go to video.google.com, search for your artist, then pick videos longer than 20 minutes. I tried the Beatles, and it appears to have the entire Yellow Submarine movie, the entire Help!, a 40 minute video from the Shea Stadium concert... ad infinitum. Give it a try with your favorite artist...

Sorry; wedding; ending; book

Hey Seattle people, the schedule was not permitting outside activities. If I could have called with other than bad news, I would have.

Kefi is married! It now appears that my quick thinking, aided by a peculiar set of circumstances not likely to be repeated, may have saved the wedding video for posterity as we know it.

So first off, kids, videotape your wedding. Test your equipment and your batteries, get a tripod, task one person to do that and only that. My parents have regretted not having good pictures of their wedding, down through the decades (they've been married close to 30 years now!). Until we have 3D television and can view football in the living room tank, that videotape is as close as you're going to get to a record to support your fading memory of the most important single day in your life. So the first strange circumstance was that, as the wedding was heating up, I looked around the room, and there was no camera on a tripod with a bored-looking relative. This made me nervous, but I shrugged it off for a while. Let me repeat one more time: do not let this happen to you.

The second strange circumstance was the strange beeping noise my dad's camera made as it focused. I was a brother of the groom (not in the wedding, but it's ok. Destiny obviously had another heroic feat in mind), so I was seated in the front row. Dad made some lovely remarks during the wedding, so I was tasked to take pictures with his camera. I did so assiduously until I hit some strange button and the camera stopped focusing correctly. Or maybe it was fine, we'll all find out at that great camera debriefing in the sky. Anyway, every time I tried to take a picture with autofocus thereafter, one, the camera wouldn't focus, and two, the autofocus feature would make a strange beeping sound. This sound grated on my ears so much, for so little payoff, as the pictures weren't coming out, that I decided to start flipping through the menus of the camera.

It was getting down to crunch time. Speeches were ending, the rings were coming out. I swept a look over the ballroom (pretty generous word for a multi-purpose at the community center, but there you go) and I still couldn't see a camcorder anywhere. So, after a few nerve-wracking false-starts, centered around the fact that Dad's digital camera's video mode does not use a toggle to start and stop video, but rather requires you to hold down the snap for the entire video period, I got things going and taped the last five minutes of the wedding, with rings, I dos, kiss the bride, and exeunt. And boy were my hands tired. The tape is on Dad's computer, on the camera, on a CD, and hopefully, soon, on YouTube.

One detail does not appear on the tape. About halfway through the recording, I noticed that I was watching the key moments of my sister's wedding through a tiny viewfinder in the back of a Pentax Optio camera, when the real thing was happening in living color just behind the camera. This seemed like a bit of a 21st century moment to me, and I took five seconds to think about whether I cared. Eventually, I went back to the viewfinder so they would have a good tape. The day wasn't really about me, after all... and there my tale is done.

I would like to write more about the wedding, but the whole week was so action packed that I might as well just start at the beginning. Later. Long ending short, it snowed in Denver today, and Sarah, Alex and I got to the car at about 8:30. It was close to freezing, if not freezing, and there was wind chill too.

The car wouldn't start.

I started freaking out, and Sarah started calling people. I told her to call my dad, who, fortunately, knew that we should call the jumpstarting service at the airport. I flagged down a truck, and a nice man got out and gave me the numbers to call. Then we called the service, and exactly the same truck, only with different people, came out and jumped the car. It turns out that somehow I left the lights on, even though the car boos at me when I open the car door with the lights on... I still don't know quite what happened. Sarah passed on at the last minute that I needed to tip the dudes, so I gave them the money I could find in my wallet with my frozen fingers. And we made it home, and there the end of the end of the other tale is done. The balance of the tale, TBA.

Lastly, today, for the first time, I finished Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis, his last novel. I waited a long time to read A Grief Observed, and I waited just about longest for this one. I've read them all, folks (except That Hideous Strength). It's a brilliant catalog of fiction. Narnia. Perelandra. The Great Divorce. The Pilgrim's Regress. The Screwtape Letters. Not necessarily in that order. So believe me when I tell you, this is the best CS Lewis novel in existence, except perhaps in the Sandman's library, or in heaven. It is a perfect fricking masterpiece from beginning to end. Do not hold back any longer, like I did. Buy this book tomorrow. It is tremendous, in the sense of fear and trembling. I was shaking as I read the end, tears streaming down my face.

I won't spoil it, except to say that if you look at the back of the book, carefully ignoring the ending, you will find a note explaining the myth that Till We Have Faces is a retelling of. I strongly recommend that you read this note before you read the novel, and have the background that any undergraduate reader of mythology would bring to this amazing book. That way, you will be able to see, perhaps, why Lewis wanted to tell this story and go at it a little differently.

Perfect.

Seattle tomorrow

I'm heading to Seattle tomorrow with Sarah and Alex for my sister Kefalari's wedding. I'll be seeing my North Carolina relatives for the first time in years. I'm also hoping to see friends, so call my parents' house if you want to see me, or email me at the gmail address.

I'm looking forward to the trip, but I feel less prepared than I ever have to fly.

I bought a suit jacket for the first time in a long time. Dressing up is fun!

In Rainbows

If you've already heard the Radiohead story, the short version is "Buy this album. First rate." For the rest of you,

Just a few days ago, a PR storm, or the holy grail of internet media, depending on your politics, hit the world. Experimental rock band Radiohead announced on their website that their first album in four years would be available in ten days. This alone was a bit surprising. Albums are promoted. They are talked up on Total Request Live. Songs come out early. They get stuck in heavy rotation on appropriate radio stations. Advance copies are sent to reviewers. Come in here dear boy, have a cigar, you're gonna go far. The A&R man said "I don't hear a single".

It's not just common practice, it's a complex system where a lot of middlemen take a cut along the way to a $16 CD in Target. But Radiohead has a dedicated fan base and doesn't have a recording contract, so they just decided to bugger the whole thing, at least initially.

But what happened next was even more surprising. The online store where one could pre-order this album showed only two options for acquisition. Option A, an online download, available October 10. Option B, a massive boxset with an extra album of B-sides, both albums in vinyl format, extra artwork and goodies, shipping in early December in time for Christmas, for 40 pounds sterling. The only way you can get this album right now is to download.

Oh, and I left out something. But before I get to that, let me back up for a second and give you some valuable background.

In 1999, Napster was born. A dude wanted to be able to find music on the internet, so he wrote a program that allowed people to easily share their music by registering with a central server. Not quite ten years later, the top 90% of the music in the known universe is available for free if you know where to look. Older people, as a rule, do not know, or their scruples prevent them. Younger people, as a rule, do, and it turns out they feel less scruples about doing so.

Given these facts, a debate has raged about the cause of the collapse of CD sales. In other words, how much money has the file-sharing phenomenon lost for all the middlemen? (Aside. For the record, CD sales never made much money for the artists. They get pennies on the dollar for every one sold. The iTunes music store cut out the packaging, lowering prices by about 20-30% for an album, but left all the middlemen in the loop.)

It's hard to say for sure. There is some evidence that file-sharers are music consumers and more likely to buy CDs. There is even some evidence that CD sales were trending downward prior to Napster. And there is an obvious viewpoint that CDs are just PR for the band's performance and touring, where they actually make their money. (I read somewhere that Radiohead was paid a million dollars to headline Bonnaroo in 2006. On the fair side, they played a lot of new stuff for 2.5 hours. As one reviewer put it, Radiohead is the soundtrack of the exquisite, uplifting agony that is truth in the midst of a world gone mad. The music was so flawless that I barely felt worthy to be there.)

And there is one last question, which is whether it is possible to provoke the file-sharers to come in from the cold by offering them a legal way to download music that is just as convenient as file-sharing and still makes a little money. The iTunes music store was a first draft of this. You might see Rhapsody, a monthly subscription service, as another approach to this idea. Recently, Amazon started a music store selling mp3s without copying restrictions... the trend continues.

Anyway, back to Radiohead, the missing piece of information. If you want to experience this for yourself, stop reading and click the following link to the store where Radiohead is selling the new album. Well, I guess you have to pre-order the download and look in your basket to really see it. You won't be forced to spend any money by doing this. When you see something verrry strange, click the question mark.

http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/Quickindex.html

I'll wait, if you want.



It's up to you. The price is blank. You, the consumer, fill it in and pay what you want for this album.

I've heard of people putting full price in this barely-organized tipjar. I've heard of people downloading the album for a British penny. There is a nominal transaction fee, but that's it.

Remember how I said that bands don't make much off of album sales because so many middlemen touch it? This is what you get when you cut out the middlemen. Naturally, the middlemen are a bit nervous about what just happened. I think they'll be even more nervous if Radiohead ever release the price distribution they got, pocketing the profit after paying the hosting service and the online store. My guess is that this deal is a bit better than the iTunes deal or the brick-and-mortar deal.

Remember how I said file-sharers might need a means to come in from the cold? Well, this might just be it. Radiohead managed to force questions of price, integrity, and the value of music into a wild free market. My feeling is that in a sense they didn't try to beat the file sharers, they just became the head file-sharer, and did it in such a way that you have to consider in your heart how much money you think is fair.

I looked at it as a way to not only purchase music, whatever that means (some record company executives are saying you can't legally rip your own CDs to mp3s, you have to buy it over and over again in different formats), but to compensate the artist for their work.

At the heart of this issue is a conflict between two great institutions: copyright and the public library. Copyright and patents were conceived as ways to encourage the useful arts and sciences, by ensuring that creators were allowed to manage their creations and not just get ripped off all the time. The library was conceived as a way to set those creations free in the community to spawn further creations and enrich life. Somewhere in there, copyright became a license for megacorporations to protect their IP by suing people left and right for absurd damage amounts (in the latest trial, $200000 for sharing 30 songs online, when the actual lost sales from this file-sharing amount to, at most, a traffic ticket).

My heart has been with the library on this issue. You guys get to hear about Radiohead and Beck and the new Andrew Bird album on this blog because I borrow CDs from the library without paying anyone a dime. That is valuable, a no-brainer. Are you cheating authors when you borrow their books?

PS Oh, the music? I downloaded it today, release day. It was not hard to get through. This morning, the servers were getting hammered by downloaders, but it seems to have cleared up.

It's actually rather accessible, for Radiohead. I think it's quite moving and beautiful, actually. Less experimental than epic, like OK Computer. I'm not going to stop listening to this thing for quite a while.

If there was ever a time to pick up a band's album for less than a pound ($2 US), now was it. Here's that link again:

http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/Quickindex.html

I hope you like it.

Me and video games

I've gone a little overboard with the Nintendo Wii. Sarah beat her first video game ever on it: MySims, a somewhat juvenile and linear version of a much more significant, quirky, funny, and emotionally engaging game, Animal Crossing. We've been trying out things at Hollywood Video to see if there's anything great out there. I have high hopes for our next one, Trauma Center, which turns the Wii remote into a variety of medical tools, with which you perform surgery in the anime version of ER. Operation, eat your heart out.

We are also fond of Rayman Raving Rabbids, where you do a variety of crazy things with and to cartoony, psychotic, screaming, hilarious bunnies. I don't know if I would buy it before it really gets to the bargain bin (it's down to $30 from $50 now) because all that's left now that we've beaten story mode is to play the mini-games repeatedly, like Olympic trials, beating records, trying to throw that cow one last meter farther or keep the teeth of the bunny clean for a fraction of a second longer. There are associated Easter eggs and rewards, but I don't think I'd pay $30 to master the game...

I've been playing the sports game that comes packaged with the system, too. The game that seems to have the greatest staying power is, surprisingly, bowling. I enjoy tennis, too, but I have it pretty well in hand by now. Baseball is too easy, boxing is pretty difficult, and golf is going the way of tennis. But bowling is fickle and realistic, curving the ball and making incredible splits, chasing that immortal 300, knocking down pins. And best, everybody already knows how to do it, even your mom and dad.

My friends at work also got me to try World of Warcraft, which is supposed to be addictive. I could see that, as it's a large system to learn and world to explore, but it's also, in the long run, ridiculously boring. One of my friends says this routinely: "As a game, it's not a very good game." As for paying $15 per month to play it as a glorified chat program, with orcs, I'll pass.

I am somewhat more interested in a sci-fi trading and piracy game called EVE Online, which has a staff economist on retainer, functional markets, and of course, spaceships. Anyone who played Drug War on their calculators in calculus class, you know what I'm talking about.

So Dan, it sounds like you've been playing lots of video games. You don't talk about this much. In fact, I've never seen this side of you before. Care to elaborate?

The story goes like this. In the beginning, there was The Legend of Zelda. And it was very good. Actually, I think the first Nintendo game I ever saw was Kid Icarus, at a birthday party. I remember very early experiences with the light gun, shooting cans up in the air in Hogan's Alley, and of course Duck Hunt. But we didn't get our Nintendo for a while. Finally, our neighbor Jimbo, who played it too much, sold us his Nintendo with 7 games. I don't remember the titles really. I probably could, with a list of NES games and a few hours to puzzle it out. I think we got Tetris then, which is still a mind-blowing game, basically perfect, to this day. I had insomnia with Tetris pieces for a while, carefully sorting them as they fell for hours into lines 9 blocks wide. I still remember playing multiplayer Gameboy Tetris in the back of the bus with Joe Pham (at some math tournament? I think?) when I was a young man (I've known Joe since the fourth grade, I think). Then there was Dragon Warrior, our first RPG, and still a soft spot (they continue on the next-gen systems as the Dragon Quest games). My first diary entry (in history!) is about beating Double Dragon II.

I beat the Legend of Zelda (first quest) more than 20 times. I called my character DANMAN__, where __ equals the number of times I beat the first quest. I still have it pretty memorized, I think. It would all come back quickly.

Eventually, the Super Nintendo came along and I stayed up all night playing SimCity and F-Zero and (of course!) Street Fighter 2 with Paul, Adrian, Ian, and who knows. Then there was Oregon Trail in school. Somewhere in there is Scorched Earth with Brian Koepke. Final Fantasy with Matt Hughes, then with my brother Aaron. Tribes 2. Tekken 3. GTA. The list just goes on and on.

It's been a lifelong love affair, and a lot of you must be thinking, how much time have you wasted with this stuff? How many chances to live an amazing human life have fallen by the wayside?

Rather than indoctrinating you all in the ways of The Next Plastic Art, Interactive Media, I'd just say that there are a lot of reasons games are fun. They are variously challenging, creative, social, exploratory, thought-provoking, emotionally engaging, and so on. Like Bruce Lee says, "Boards... don't hit back." But video games do hit back, and as time goes on, chances are that they will more and more.

A lot of interesting stuff is being done with persistent, systematic worlds that operate realistically even though they are fantasies. They serve as interesting commentary on our world and, at their best, allow us interesting choices that fold into massive systems; they allow us to pretend, not just be ourselves. There can be a power fantasy in jumping on Goombas or saving the princess, but there is also a fantasy of discovery and imagination that we may not be able to exercise otherwise. And it's all connected to the oldest profession, storytelling. Super Noah's Ark 3D, ok, that was pretty dumb (for one thing, it was just a thinly-disguised skin of a game about killing mutant Nazis), but one can imagine games that place you in the role of different people and allow you to experience the world through their eyes, even closer than reading novels...

Also, some people really need to learn how to play again.

One blog covering the ongoing saga of Video Games qua Art is called Grand Text Auto. Another one I find interesting is by Raph Koster, the guy who wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online. His blog is not strictly about video games, but it's still interesting.

I also have a PDF version of a book called Game Design: Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III that was meant to be shared, if you're interested, which takes a trip through some of the greatest games and what made them so special, along with other geeky computer game stuff.

Fixing the hole

Sorry I left a giant content hole on this cash machine of a website. It's nothing specific, unless it's this:

There's an entertaining 40th anniversary cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety over here. The guy cannot sing, but just overlook that.

I had a conversation with our friend Sarah about whether or not someone can be a Buddhist and yet be saved in some sense. This kind of thing was important in Utah; it altered my view of the Mormons. It would also be important if you were an evangelist; it would allow you to ask yourself who is lost and who needs saving in a way that has nothing to do with surface labels. We attended a church service that almost went there on Sunday. The text was Romans 2 and the passage that perked up my ears was this:

A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man's praise is not from men, but from God.

This is a remarkably forgiving view of "other" religions. To some extent, doctrines and rituals are just the trappings of religion. The outward person is deceptive and matters little. It says so right there in Romans (and elsewhere; the Sermon on the Mount goes there, as do the Proverbs and so on). Of course, if you continue on to the rest of Romans, the examination of the inward person does not fare very well either. In the rest of Romans, we are not in trouble because of what we appear to be, but what we are.

To what extent doctrines and rituals are the trappings of religion is the question I was trying to get at in the Heretics posts. I was getting ready for another post on this question. Is everything beyond the creeds garnish? To what extent is organized Christianity organized filigree? I have my own opinions, but we still return to the point that there is a limit to mere Christianity and to orthodoxy. Why we set it at the creeds and not elsewhere, where the creeds came from, why we trust ancient councils or at a minimum agree with them, are all interesting questions.

And how God may be working in and through non-Christians is another interesting question. The born-again Hindu; myth or reality?

I read "Trucks" for the first time in more than ten years. It was made into a movie called Maximum Overdrive, I think. It's about the evil day when all the semis become sentient and start killing everyone. Either the version I read in the seventh grade was heavily sanitized, or I forgot all kinds of violent things. I remembered a lot of it. It is a story that sticks with you, like "Lennington vs. the Ants", "The Most Dangerous Game", "The Lady and the Tiger". I'm reading Stephen King short stories, first collected in Night Shift. I think I've read "The Ledge" before too. It was also interesting to read forerunner stories of Salem's Lot, The Stand, and so on. A few of the stories are crap, but a lot of them are good. After this, I'll have read everything King wrote up to the first Dark Tower book, The Gunslinger, which I can thus dive into. As I understand Dark Tower, it runs in and out of the backstories and loose ends of King's fictional universe. Thus, I imagine it contains spoilers. King has already had some awesome novels, and I'm still barely up to 1982.

I've also got Neil Gaiman's latest short story collection too. The first story is worth the entire thing: "A Study In Emerald", a literary homage mashing up Sherlock Holmes with HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. It is hilarious. I am also looking forward to the novella follow-on to American Gods.

I tried sangria for the first time this weekend. I still taste the alcohol but am starting to consider it part of the experience (instead of overpowering my senses or making me crazy). I think that long ago, I must have trained my tongue to ignore spice in a similar way to ignoring alcohol. Alcohol is a once in a few months thing for me usually, but between the family visit and my birthday, we've ended up with more than normal. My parents are responsible for the sangria. They ordered it off and on at Mexican places throughout my childhood.

Speaking of my parents, those of you who know my mom as Mrs. Lewis, the French teacher, may be interested to know that my dad is now Mr. Lewis at Tyee HS in the Highline District. It's been a long life's journey for him, but he is a teacher now, working an 80% schedule with his foot in the door. Maybe it's just the sangria talking, but I am so proud I could cry. My dad followed his dream out of the book industry, into the teaching world, and I admire that immensely. I love you Dad.

I've been spinning more Radiohead and Beck from the library, along with Neil Young and John Prine, all well worth your music time. I don't know what it is about Greg Brown, but I find some of his songs kind of pretentious, so I can't recommend The Evening Call.

Work is going good. I am finding it very beneficial to go through a product delivery basically from start to finish. I am a little surprised that so much of the software engineering stuff I did in college is so applicable. I'm in an environment where we get audited regularly for conformance to the CMMI processes; we are a somewhat rapid-development/bleeding-edge environment, but the kinds of documents and goals we have are strongly in line with the project deliverables I learned about in class.

I picked up a free loop station called Mobius. It allows you to record yourself and layer on audio over and over, creating lush sonic palettes that never ever stop. (One of my favorite artists of the moment, Andrew Bird, makes killer music based on this concept, essentially playing his own continuo.) Look out world world world world...

Quick notes

I had a very happy birthday, so thank you everyone who passed along well wishes. I hadn't heard from some of you in a while, so a special thanks to you. I will be writing soon, time permitting.

By now you may have seen a picture of a happy me clutching my Nintendo Wii box. I've been pretty impressed by it so far. But Sarah is still beating me at bowling, even though I'm learning how to curve the ball. She bowled a 173 the other day. We also rented Rayman Raving Rabbids last night. The first time you pick worms out of a screaming rabbit's teeth is not to be forgotten. You get a kind of existential crisis going, like, "Is this how I want to be spending the rest of my life?" Then, thirty seconds later, the mini-game ends. Last night I threw a cow (Sarah has the best throw by far at this point), raced on a warthog, closed outhouse doors as quickly as possible, drew food with a magic marker, and shot deranged bunnies with plungers. This is one of the more hilarious games I have ever played.

Sarah's brother Brian, father Vic, and stepmother Melissa are visiting from Utah. We are going to baseball tonight and the zoo tomorrow. We're keeping it action-packed.

I finished The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene this week. The word "masterpiece" gets thrown around a lot these days... It's set in early-20th-century Mexico. Anti-clerical laws were passed and finally enforced by Calles, "outlawing religious orders, depriving the Church of property rights and depriving the clergy of civil liberties, including their right to vote." Against that backdrop is the last priest in the state (province), who wanders around avoiding the police and holding religious services. Along the way, we learn that this priest is not a shining example of faith; rather, he's an alcoholic with other sins in his past, and he hasn't been able to confess because there are no other priests. He feels like a tarnished person, useless and pointless. Battered by events, he tries to figure out what God would have him do. It's a terrific novel, fascinating and entertaining, with questions of morality and religion at the core. It's not obvious about the backstory, but you get used to that after a while. Basically perfect. Adult content, maturity, challenge to faith warnings etc.

Unhappy anniversary

Well, it's here again. Just before my last perfect cube birthday before age 64, our nation is in mourning. The President, I gather, lit a candle for the victims of 9/11. I hear that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, so I suppose I appreciate the sentiment.

I searched my blog for posts about 9/11, and a surprising number of hits came up. Some are duplicates, I'm sure, but I guess it's an event I've had on my mind. Most of the posts are about Iraqi civilians, the latest victims of 9/11.

I consume entertainments, so here is a list of the best few about 9/11.
The best comic about 9/11: In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman.
The best book about 9/11: Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson.
The best show about 9/11: Heroes (see this essay on a 9/11-based reading of Heroes by Juan Cole). Honorable mention for the ladder-to-heaven South Park episode.
The best movie about 9/11: V for Vendetta. (Okay, it's tangentially related, but it's definitely useful to think about 9/11 as you watch this movie.)
The best song about 9/11: Fiery Crash, by Andrew Bird. (Also hear it here.)

I think I've talked about all these in the past, except for Fiery Crash. It's the first song on the latest Andrew Bird album, which I finally borrowed from the library. The song is, on the surface, about a little ritual Mr. Bird does when he gets on a plane:

you were hurling through space
g-forces twisting your face
breeding superstition
a fatal premonition
you know you got to envision
the fiery crash

Get in your seat and visualize the future: if you envision the plane crash ahead of time, it won't happen. Because what are the odds that you imagine something happening and then it actually happens? Plane crashes are unlikely enough to happen as it is.

It's a cute idea, if that's all there was to it, but it's impossible to think of planes crashing now without thinking about 9/11, and Bird goes there in verse two:

beige tiles and magazines
lou dobbs and the cnn team on every monitor screen
you were caught in the crossfire
where every human face has you
reaching for your mace, so it's
kind of an imposition
a fatal premonition

This is all very dense, but I interpret it to be a reference to Dobbs' nativism, and in general our xenophobia, especially toward Muslims, since 9/11. Our problem as a nation, since 9/11, has been to turn back from envisioning another 9/11. Our country has gone haywire and paranoid trying to prevent the next 9/11. We've started spying on civilians. We've started torturing and killing innocent people. We've started wars. One thing this means

and to save our lives
you've got to envision
to save all our lives
you've got to envision
the fiery crash

is that we have to accept what happened. 9/11 is the nightmare we are not waking up from. The way to end the nightmare is not to make it so no terrorist can ever threaten us again; that's impossible. And we've spent so much energy trying not to envision the fiery crash that we have, paradoxically, become fixated on it, replaying the scenes in our minds over and over again. (Pattern Recognition brings this out especially well, too.)

Instead, we have to stare death in the face and accept it, if it comes. We have to accept the price of our liberties and of our free society. The price is our vulnerability.