*

Wait -- who's the antagonist?

2011-10-20T15:27:00.002-06:00

Every now and then, something completely blows my mind. Remember in school, when your teacher taught you how stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, with a climax, and a protagonist and an antagonist? Good guy versus bad guy, right?

I just listened to a Writing Excuses podcast (published and award-winning authors, including a New York Times bestseller, discuss the craft and business of writing fiction) where their guest talked about the Hollywood structure; ie, the formula they use for almost all successful Hollywood movies.

There are always three characters: a protagonist, a relationship character, and an antagonist. The protagonist is the main person with a concrete objective. The antagonist prevents the protagonist from fulfilling that objective. The relationship character is there to quote truth, deliver the theme of the story, and help the protagonist have a big realizational/emotional moment at the end.

There are three parts: the first part has a fateful decision that spurs the rest of the story, the second part puts the protagonist as far away from his goal as possible, and the third part is getting the protagonist from that low point to either achieving or finally dismissing his goal.

So, of all the Good Hollywood Movies, let's take the Goodest: Casablanca.

Who's the protagonist? Well, obviously Rick, the Humphrey Bogart character. The relationship character? Well, the one he wants to have a relationship with, right? Elsa? NO. It's actually the corrupt policeman, who tells Rick that there's actually a bit of a patriot inside of him (which Rick ignores until the end), and who's there at the end to start a long and beautiful friendship with him. Well, the antagonist, that's got to be easy, right? That dirty Nazi guy duh.

NO. Remember, what's Humphrey Bogart's primary objective here? It's Elsa, his long-lost love. Who is the person opposing Rick here, preventing him from achieving his goal? It's Elsa's husband, hero of Europe and escapee from multiple concentration camps, Victor Lazslow.

At the end of the movie, Rick "achieves" his goal, but then dismisses it because he realizes what the corrupt policeman had told him earlier -- he is a patriot, and he does care about the war effort over his selfish romance. So he's reconciled with the antagonist AND the relationship character in the end.

Then they explain The Dark Knight. Should be pretty easy. Protagonist? Batman. Obviously. Who's the antagonist? Well, the insane clown who's burning down the entire city and terrorizing everyone and cutting their mouths open and exploding hospitals and people's girlfriends. WRONG.

What's Batman's concrete goal? Saving Gotham City, obv. NO. Um, doing his duty?? NO. His goal, as stated to Rachel, is actually to give up this whole Batman thing and get with the love of his life, Rachel. The Joker does not actually oppose this concrete goal at all. You know who does? Harvey Dent. Not only is he dating Rachel and will probably marry her, but he's in a position to become the leader of Gotham City (in Batman's place, allowing him to retire) and constantly disappoints, forcing Batman to stay in action. The guy goes crazy, torturing people for info (which Batman rebukes him for), and then going completely crazy and gunning people down randomly. All of this opposes Batman's concrete goal.

I figured the relationship character would have to be Alfred, because he's the one who delivers all these wise lines about people just wanting to watch the world burn, and how you can only catch these people by burning down the entire forest/city. But again, I was wrong. The relationship character is the Joker. (Think about having a relationship with that guy. Ugh!)

The Joker is the one who tells Batman that he's not normal and should quit trying to be a normal citizen -- he's a freak! And that's actually the theme of the movie, and the essence of Batman's conflict. He doesn't want to be a freak in a bat costume. He wants Harvey Dent to save the city so Bruce Wayne can just be a happy millionaire with his childhood sweetheart. This all comes full circle near the end of the movie, when Batman fights the Joker. The Joker says, "Did I ever tell you how I got these scars?" Batman says, "No, but I know how you got these ones!" Batman told the Joker a joke as he defeated him. He's become like the Joker in a small way. The reason the Joker laughs at the end of all this, is that he knows Batman has realized that the Joker was right -- Batman is a freak, just like the Joker, and they're going to be butting heads for eternity.

The movie doesn't end here because he still has to deal with the antagonist, Harvey Dent. After making it clear how much Dent has screwed up Batman's whole plan of having somebody else save the city, he kills him and tells Gordon that he'll take the blame. He's given up on retiring and living a happy life -- now he's resolved to being called a bad guy, being treated as a freak, even as he fights to save the city. He's dealt with and dismissed his concrete goal from the beginning of the movie: wanting to give up on the Batman gig, becoming a more normal dude. (As normal as eccentric billionaires can be, I suppose.)

If stuff like this interests you and blows your mind, you should check out the podcast, here.

Republican Debate #3

2011-09-08T18:24:00.004-06:00

The Third Republican Debate

It's time for a re-rematch! The venue is the Reagan Library, apparently in the Aviation section, as there's an enormous airplane hanging from the ceiling. Not a celebration of 9/11, right? The players:

Mitt Romney: The Romneybot plugs along, focusing on its protocol to become the President of the United States. (I'm still not sure if he's the prequel to Terminator: Salvation, or to The Matrix.)

Newt Gingrich: Still the parent chaperon of these candidates. While the other candidates keep talking about Reagan's days like it was King Arthur's Camelot, Gingrich is like Merlin--the only surviving guy who actually worked with Reagan on anything.

Herman Cain: Absolutely not a politician yet, and proud of it. Not sure if this is good or bad.

Rick Santorum: I won't back off my earlier theory that Rick Santorum is simply a Tim Pawlenty sock puppet. You never see the guy's legs. Everytime the camera goes to him, he's behind the podium! They'll show Romney walking around, or Huntsman, but not Santorum! This theory also explains why Tim Pawlenty was so eager to leave the race. It was getting awkward having to debate while he also worked the Santorum puppet. Your minds are blown.

You see any human legs here? Me, either.

Michelle Bachmann: Okay, let's get this straight: the Tea Party is not an actual political party. On your ballot this year, there's not going to be: Republican / Democrat / Tea. She's just gone to a bunch of Tea Parties. By that logic, calling her the Tea Party candidate would be kind of like calling Jon Hunstman the Tanning Salon candidate, or calling Rick Santorum the Muppet Show candidate.

Jon Huntsman: He's got oily, slicked-back gray hair, a smile that makes you want to take a shower, and his skin looks like a dish you could order at Red Lobster. I'd expect this guy to show up at my door trying to sell me a home security system, or worse. He's the Uncle Rico of these candidates. Liberals love him, but something makes me guess that they probably wouldn't love him as much as they love Obama.

Rick Perry: New to this Republican primary: the governor of Texas! There's no way the media would portray him as the new Bush in the general election!

Ron Paul: So here's a genuine question: who is the more popular old person, Ron Paul, or Betty White? He's no longer the most popular Texan in this race, and it obviously irks him quite a bit, and I'd like for him to at least win something.

I missed the first 35 minutes or so of the debate; my wife said it was simply everybody making fun of Ron Paul, which frankly was probably a lot like the other twelve hours of my day.

But from what I saw, it was a fair and unbiased debate. The topics ranged from immigration, to the death penalty, to why everyone should hate Rick Perry.

Immigration

Everyone got their shot at solving immigration, with the apparent provision that it only takes three steps.

The MSNBC moderators pulled out all the stops here, nailing Michelle Bachmann with the reasonable, reality-based smoking-gun inquiry: “When the border is absolutely secure and the immigration system is no longer corrupt and gas is $2 a gallon, what THEN, Ms. Bachmann? What do you do with all the illegal immigrants over here?” She answered that it probably depends, case-by-case, on things like family, employment, and criminal history, to which the moderator repeated the question. BAM! Smoking gun TIMES TWO. You got 'er, MSNBC! You killed Michelle Bachmann with your tough, truth-finding questions!

The Death Penalty
I got shivers down my spine when Rick Perry explained that, in Texas, if you kill a cop, a child, or a regular person (along with some other crimes thrown in), you will face the ultimate judgment: execution. It was said with such conviction and finality that I didn't know whether to cheer or be terrified. Make sure to throw out your cop-and-baby-killing Halloween costumes, folks.

Why Everyone Should Hate Rick Perry

This moderation topic was headed by a very creepy looking bald guy with a morbid fascination for asking questions (ex-Gitmo?). He had candidates answer varied questions such as “Why do you hate Rick Perry,” “Why does Rick Perry hate old people,” “Exactly how much does Rick Perry hate science,” and “Why did Rick Perry turn Texas into an uneducated, citizen-slaying, freedom-hating dystopia.” The two people most excited about this topic, other than Varys the Eunuch, were Ron Paul and the Rick Santorum Sock Puppet. Perry just seemed confused.

The ancestor of Politico's Brian Williams. From a fictional universe.

DEBATE WINNERS:

Mitt Romney: Never seemed flustered or out of his element. More importantly, when everyone was ganging up on Rick Perry, he basically said “give the guy a break, he's learned his lesson,” immediately making him look 1) gracious, and 2) ahead of Perry.

Rick Perry: He definitely got flustered by finding himself as the focus of an irrational hate-fest, and he had a real hard time answering questions with his prepared stock answers. But I almost feel like he came out the better for it, because all fake niceness left him and he was left with nothing but conviction for all the stances he had to defend, and he backed them all up, even going further on some things, like calling social security a “ponzi scheme.” (Which, when you look at the SEC's definition of a ponzi scheme, is actually pretty tough to argue with.)

Newt Gingrich: Anytime he answered a question, I got the feeling that the moderator had just interrupted him from reading his newspaper. Gingrich threw in historical political details like it was nothing, answered eloquently and intelligently, and then went back to his crossword puzzle. I'd say that he won the debate, except that it looked like he didn't even care.

Herman Cain: When Romney and Perry were arguing abstractly about exactly how broken or unbroken social security is, Herman Cain interrupted and presented a concrete solution to social security that was broken down simply and backed up by history (the Chile solution). I never get the feeling that Herman Cain is short on ideas (hullo, Rick Santorum Sock Puppet).

DEBATE LOSERS:
Jon Huntsman: I knew it was over for him as soon as they asked him a policy question, and his answer had nothing to do with his actual policy, but with his ability to not be conservative and therefore get more independent votes in a general election. I don't know that anybody can smugly brag that they're less conservative than everyone else in a Republican primary and end up winning.

My wife compared him to a slimy cheeto. (Dis-favorably, to be clear. We're not college students anymore.)

Ron Paul: Let's be fair—this guy was a loser before the debate even started.

Rick Santorum Sock Puppet: You know how, in football, there's that guy who's always the last one to jump on the pile? It took Rick Santorum Sock Puppet about ten minutes late to realize that hating Perry was cool. But he sure did it. And how! Awkward!

STILL A CHICK

Michelle Bachmann: Now that Rick Perry's in the race, Tea Partiers who are also sexist no longer have to vote for Michelle Bachmann. She's lost some of her novelty, but her answers were more intelligent this time around. I'd say she lost some ground from Rick Perry, but picked up some ground with consistency.

In the end, let's just say that when Republicans debate, America wins.

Baby D Goes to Planet Earth

2011-07-17T17:34:00.005-06:00

So last Tuesday, my wife and I went into the hospital to induce labor. I have a few scattered thoughts right now, that I'll surely add to later:

* When Allie was getting ready to push, the nurse on call clicked her little radio and tried to get the Labor and Delivery nurses to show up. Unfortunately, she had a thick Asian accent that prevented her from successfully pronouncing her 'L's and 'R's. So over and over again, into this little microphone hanging off her neck, she tried to say "Call Labor and Delivery." When it doesn't work, she just says it louder. And this is while all the other nurses and midwives are getting all their tools together and giving Allie final instructions. The baby's about to come, and it's going to come to the chorus of "Caw Waboa and Edewyvewee!" It took almost a dozen tries. I'm amazed it worked at all.

* All babies are born with blue eyes, apparently. Baby D looked like a Fremen. Should we read him Goodnight Dune? Now his eyes are closer to some kind of green or brown. At least we know he wasn't born with a spice addiction.

* My favorite face that Baby D makes is when he's utterly flummoxed. He furrows his brow at his surroundings, summoning their meanings. It is more than simple confusion. It is the sweet, innocent bewilderment that belongs solely to the fresh offspring of this world. It's really cute.

* Baby D was born at 10 pounds and 6 ounces. "He's really big!" one midwife pronounced. "He's leveled up!" I exclaimed. My wife laughed, dutifully.

* Baby D is the Justin Bieber of his peers. He had a full head of hair before he was even born; we could tell he was crowning because his hair was poking out. His hair hangs over his ears.

Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel

2011-07-08T19:58:00.002-06:00

After reviewing the novelettes for this year's Hugo Awards, I've moved onto another kind of category altogether--Best Graphic Story.

Don't fret, dear readers—-Graphic Story is not referring to stuff like Saw IV, nor to bodice-ripping romance novels. Apparently someone decided that the label “comic book” died in the '90s, along with pogs and grunge music. Then they did a synonym search, and came up with “Graphic Story.” It's real easy; you can also go with Graphic Novels, Visual Adventures, Illustrated Narratives, or Series of Boxes With Pictures and Words in Them (not to be confused with Powerpoint presentations). But whatever you end up calling it, they're all glorified Peanuts strips.

After reading the majority of the graphic stories nominated for this year's Hugo, I've found that the above statement is probably a little harsh. (And not just harsh to Charles Schultz.) Several of these stories were compelling and interesting. Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel was one of them, in fact.

However, the “Massively Parallel” thing always throws me for a loop. How can something be any more parallel than it already is? That's like saying “really 100%” or “especially exact” or “uglier than Michael Jackson.”

The phrase gets thrown in three or four times throughout the story, often in a joking reference to serial killing (comedy gold, obviously), but in a general sense, referencing the fact that the main cast of characters for this long-running graphic space adventure comedy is split into four different groups.

For being someone who has made no effort at all to keep up with this webcomic adventure, I found it surprisingly easy to sit down and read strip after strip until I found myself at the end of the adventure. You figure out the gist of the characters pretty quickly, even if all the guys wear the exact same uniforms and all the girls are identical save for hair color.

There's a lot of sarcasm and wittiness, the kind of stuff you'd expect from a daily serial webcomic, but the story itself actually stands up on its own, after a fashion. The characters seem pretty strong for a webcomic (maybe it's just my imagination), and there's a lot of mystery involved with the story, too.

In the end, I enjoyed reading this serial, but probably would not have enjoyed reading one strip of the story per day. BO-RING.

But you know what this story really has going for it?

Robots.

Lots and lots of robots.

There are dancing robots. Singing robots. Sarcastic robots. Warship robots. A bunch of robots who get together to form a rock band. And the finest robot of all: a megalomaniacal dystopia-ruling dictator robot with a big gun for destroying planets. (And his name doesn't rhyme with Varth Dader.)

Robot Rating: Over 2,000 robots

On Counting Robots

2011-06-19T17:31:00.005-06:00

As you may have noticed, dear reader, I've been using my blog to review this year's Hugo Nominations and choose my votes. To best reward the greatest writing and the most daring imagination, I'm counting the number of robots in each story. Moar robots > no robots.

Obviously this is genius. Counting robots is a noble task that requires incisive thinking, reading between the lines, and randomly making up numbers off the top of my head.

Unfortunately, my rating system has been met with controversy. Apparently counting is subjective in these parts.

My own father was the first critic, pointing out that my Zero Robots review of "The Emperor of Mars" was "wrong." The Phoenix lander should count as a robot because "it flew billions of miles all by itself just so it could exercise its robotic arm to scoop up a little red dirt." Well if flying billions of miles by yourself makes you a robot, then what do you call George Clooney?

My Dad even concedes that the Phoenix lander's behavior wasn't very robot-like:
"Granted, it doesn't walk around muttering the 3 laws of Robotics, or defy you and lie to you before sabotaging your pod and killing you..." Um, that sounds like the very definition of a robot to me.

Not to throw you under the bus on my blog, Dad. Happy Father's Day!

Trolls even take issue with my lots of spiffy nanobots review of "The Jaguar House, in Shadow." (And by "trolls," I mean my mother-in-law.) Apparently a nanobot is only one-billionth of a robot. So my review should've been "3.5 x 10^-16 Robots" or something, which makes me want to tape my glasses and put on a pocket protector.

Even the writers are complaining. Eric James Stone, who wrote the Nebula-award-winning novelette "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made," argued that a shuttle on autopilot and an automated radiation treatment machine count as robots, and that my Zero Robots review should be bumped up to Two Robots.

Well, because you made an argument for it, Mr. Stone, I suppose I'll have to officially change my rating. I give you a Full Apology from the Depths of My Heart, and I Officially Retract my previous rating. But for the future, let's consider what the actual definition of a robot is according to www.merriam-webster.com:

EDIT: My wife points out that even the way I capitalize my ratings is incorrect. "lots of spiffy nanobots" should be capitalized to "match the other ones." Apparently everyone is an expert at the Duzett-Decimal Robot Rating Hugo-voting system.

EDIT(2): My wife points out that there are no decimals in the Duzett-Decimal Robot Rating Hugo-voting system.

On the Republican Debate

2011-06-16T17:39:00.003-06:00

The players:

Hermain Cain: As everyone's introducing themselves, Hermain Cain is proud to be the only candidate who is “NOT a politician.” Which means he has no idea what's going on. Godspeed, Herman.

Ron Paul: I don't really have much to say here, because the real joke is on the other side of the colon.

Michelle Bachmann: Surprising everyone, Ms. Bachmann anounces during the debate that she's – get this – running for president. I think everyone expected her to come to a presidential debate and not run for president. This is a twist of Shyamalanian proportions.

Tim Pawlenty: I guess this guy governed Minnesota. Now he's running for president. Too bad his name is Tim.

Mitt Romney: The supposed frontrunner. Mormon who likes Boston. Also, his first name is “Ttim” backwards. There are no coincidences in this primary.

Newt Gingrich: The adult chaperon of the candidates. Fresh off a relaxing vacation and the consequent quitting of his campaign staff, he's ready to drop some knowledge on these hooligan youngsters.

Rick Santorum: I literally had to google this guy's name because every time he talked I thought he was a Tim Pawlenty sock puppet. Mini-Tim, which, as we all know, is Mit-Inim backwards. What does it mean? (And yes, that's all the thought I was willing to spend on Rick Santorum.)

The debate opens with everyone arguing over who can refer to their spouse by first name most casually, who has the most kids, and who irrationally loves New Hampshire the most.

The moderator is Michael King, who works for CNN. Let's just say that he puts the “moderate” into “moderator,” and then some. His questions seemed a little charged at times. Are we sure he's not also running for president? His job apparently entails interrupting the candidates' every other words with “um” “ah” or “okay,” and poking them with sticks and trying to get them to fight each other. It felt as if he gets paid by the number of questions he asks.

The debate was pretty tame, with most of the argument being about who could create the most elaborate analogy for how Obama's destroyed the economy. (Cain won with a train analogy which involved the engine, fuel, caboose, and some chairs on top with your grandchildren in them that get tipped over into a river.) They also fought over who could thank the military and their families the most.

This debate did teach us a lot, though, such as the fact that Republican candidates prefer spicy and/or deep dish food while they watch American Idol on their Blackberries, as opposed to mild and/or thin crust food while watching Dancing With The Stars on iPads. The candidates were very wishy-washy on the Elvis vs. Johnny Cash issue, however, and failed to make any stance at all on Leno vs. Conan. Obviously a weak field, amirite?

WINNERS:
Mitt Romney. Lead the field going into the debate and didn't manage to lose any ground by preferring spicy wings to mild. It also didn't hurt that all seven candidates generally agreed that they were all awesome, refused to disagree with each other, and were ordering a printing of “Republican Candidates Class of '11” tee shirts afterwards so they could all sign each other's backs.

Newt Gingrich. Showed everyone that you don't need a campaign staff to be smart. It almost makes me think that going on week-long vacations could increase your intellect, if it weren't for some rather presidential evidence to the contrary.

Ron Paul: If the Republican nomination were up to the Internet, Ron Paul would win hands down. You can't google anything about this debate without reading a zillion thumbsed-up comments about how awesome Old Man Paul is. But if everyone on the Internet loves Ron Paul, why don't they ever show up to the polls and vote for him? They get too sucked into facebook on voting day?

LOSERS:

Tim Pawlenty. Was given several chances to try to close his gap on Romney but didn't go for it. It ended up making him look a little spineless.

Rick Santorum. Boring guy with fake voice intonation who looks and sounds like Tim Pawlenty, which is not as helpful as it sounds. Oh wait, that didn't sound very helpful at all.

Herman Cain. Sounds good on domestic policy issues, thanks to sayings from his grandmother and oddly elaborate analogies. His two-pronged foreign policy strategy, however, is apparently “problem solving” and “not being Barack Obama.” And I thought those were the same prong.

ENIGMAS:

Michelle Bauchmann. Everything she said sounded a little rehearsed, and I got the feeling that she didn't get the memo that this was actually a presidential debate, not a Tea Party rally. But it's not like she said anything wrong or stupid. I mean, she can't pick between Elvis and Johnny Cash – but can you, dear reader? Please note the beam in your own eye before you throw the first stone. (The answer is Cash, btw. That first stone is mine.)

That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made: Best Novelette?

2011-06-13T18:00:00.004-06:00

This is a story about mormon space whales who live in the middle of the sun. It's clearly either a big winner or a big loser. And by “space whales,” I mean “swales,” which is the actual, incredibly creative term for these alien beings.

A human congregational leader moves to this base in the center of the sun (not my ideal prowling grounds, but whatever), where he has to get to know this new congregation that's about 33% alien space whale. He has to reconcile his understanding of Mormon doctrine with the reality of an alien species that has three different genders instead of two, and basically has its own millenia-old God that created them all – who's actually physically there, bossing all the swales around. This enormous alien space whale is creatively named Leviathan.

The branch president, the main character, goes to confront Leviathan and tell him to keep the swales from raping his congregation (which is apparently “totally cool, brah” in swale culture). Scriptural comparisons abound, skeptical characters skepticize (skepticulate?), space whales wave tendrils of light – all essential elements of a successful novelette, I suppose.

It's a fairly non-invasive primer of some basic Mormon beliefs, but this story is less about Mormonism and a lot more about having faith in an all-powerful God in the face of an all-powerful alien space whale.

I find that science fiction is actually more likely to deal with the concepts of faith and God than most other genres, despite the fact that it's got the word “science” right there in its title. It's probably because faith and science are kind of locked in a relationship (whatever you believe that relationship to be), whereas you're not very likely to have your heroine considering the implications of faith while heaving her bosom into her time-travelling caveman lover's embrace.

I'm all about stories that deal with issues of faith, doubt, religion, science, and space whale reproduction. This is probably why I enjoyed the TV series Lost so much. These stories start off with science, and end up pointing to or looking at God, with the optional detour down Space Whale Avenue. “Leviathan” takes that detour, and we are all the better for it.

(Oh, yeah. ZERO ROBOTS.)

Read Eric James Stone's novelette online here.

"The Jaguar House, in Shadow": Best Novelette?

2011-06-01T20:08:00.000-06:00

“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” takes place in a future where Mexico, blessed by a Grandmother Earth who grants them maize, cotton, and nanomachines, has become the world-leading Mexica Empire. Their lead in technology, however, apparently doesn't prevent them from dressing themselves in feathers and giant animal heads and running around with obsidian daggers. I feel like there's a 2,000 year jump between ritual sacrifice and using nanobots to transform yourself into a super ninja. “Jaguar” straddles that small gap, feet firmly planted on either side.

In a way, it reminds me of steampunk, in that it's a completely irrational marriage of a specific culture and a specific technology to produce a fantastical setting. It's a very creative setting, though, especially in a genre where Earth's future options are usually limited to:

1) Robot Rule
2) Scorched Earth
3) Warmed Globe

The novelette's names themselves are exciting. The three principal characters are named Onalli, Xochitl, and Tecipiani. I know what I'm going to name my baby boy! (Actually, those are all girl names. But I'm sure you knew that.)

The real main conflict in this story is between that of activism and preservation. (This is also the real main conflict when I leave my left-overs in the fridge for weeks at a time.) The Jaguar House has killed all resistance from the other animal houses (insert Marx brothers joke here) and emerged as the main power in Mexica after a bloody civil war. Are all of House Jaguar's despicable acts justified by its desire to preserve itself for the future?

Let's just say the story doesn't leave much of a blank for you to fill in. I find it odd that of all the horrible things that are apparently going oin this setting -– human sacrifice, burning enemies alive and suffocating them, and so on, the most outrageously evil things are interrogation and compromise.

They don't even call it torture; it's just interrogation that's bad. What would you say if I told you, dear reader, that I've interrogated you while you read this? No less than two times, in fact. (I suppose you could argue that I've tortured you, too.) Hopefully a Jaguar Knight doesn't climb up the side of my house tonight with her nano-enhanced fingernails and cut my gullet with a knife for it.

If we're going to get all political up in our noveletteteering, I say we use correct semantics. Interrogation is the act of asking questions. Torture is torture. /englishmajor

As far as robots are concerned, I'm not quite sure how to score this one. Nanotechnology technically involves robots, but they're such itty-bitty robots, and how am I supposed to count them? They are pretty spiffy, though. So I'm going to settle with the ultra-specific Robot Rating of lots of spiffy nanobots.

You can read Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow" here.

"The Emperor of Mars": Best Novelette?

2011-05-31T20:12:00.001-06:00

“The Emperor of Mars” is the third of five novelettes up for a Hugo. It's about a guy who reads a lot of science fiction and then goes insane. (Unlike me, who has gone insane and begun to read science fiction.)

That's not a joke. (Other than the part in parentheses. Probably.) This Martian colonist reads old scifi stories about Mars and begins to think it's real, eventually believing himself to be the Emperor of Mars. It was weird to read a science fiction story that takes place on Mars about a guy who reads science fiction stories that take place on Mars. If you really want your mind to be blown, consider this: what are you reading right now?

But enough about the stories that this story isn't. “Mars” begins with a horrible tragedy and ends with a surprisingly uplifting and emotional conclusion. It's kind of like reading Romeo and Juliet backwards.
Additionally, the story makes you want to go google NASA's Mars Lander missions. I'd say it's a good mark of success for a science fiction story when it makes you curious about science fact.

“Mars” has the curious position of being able to address its own genre within itself, asking some interesting questions. Did we lose something when our views of Mars became less fantastical and more scientific? Is science fiction a harmful escape from life, or a helpful one? And why hasn't anybody found Marvin the Martian? Did Bugs Bunny ever really land on Mars, or was that a Loony Toons conspiracy?

I'm generally not a fan of meta-things: news stories about journalists, fiction about fiction writers, plays about putting on plays, and so forth. It just always seems a little incestuous to me. But it didn't feel gimmicky at all in this case. Because of how tragic the character was, you're not distracted by references to classic science fiction stories – you're too busy wondering with all your might what's going to happen to this guy.

There's an interesting moment as you're reading where you think, “That poor guy. Doesn't he know that science fiction is just a story?” And then you realize what you're reading. What's your response at this point? It's not very many novelettes that successfully ask the reader to confront the fact that they're reading. I should know; I've read a lot of novelettes. Multiples of three of them.

Unfortunately, this story has one enormous flaw, and that is a lack of robots. This was deliberate – you might even say that this is a story about its own lack of robots. However, that is little excuse, and I have to give this story a Robot Rating of zero robots.

Read the first portion of Allen Steele's novelette, "The Emperor of Mars," here, and listen to an entire audio narration here.

"Plus or Minus": Best Novelette?

2011-05-27T13:05:00.001-06:00

The second Hugo nominee for Best Novelette is "Plus or Minus." This one weighs in at 11,000 words, which implies that most novelettes are around 10,000 words or so based on my enormous sample size of two (2) novelettes.

A thirteen year old girl who hates her mother (big shocker, I know) decides to become a ship maintenance worker so as to spite her. While out on her first yearlong trip, she realizes that working sucks and is awful, while also still hating her mom. Then a big emergency happens that I'm not going to spoil because I'm not a heartless jerk.

THEY START RUNNING OUT OF OXYGEN.

"Plus or Minus" is very well-written, but is mostly interesting because of how detailed its setting is, especially for something as small/almost-medium as a novelette. A lot of details seemed to have little importance to the plot, yet enveloped you more snugly into the realism of what is technically a fantastical setting.

In the future:

- Muscles are pointless because on the Moon and in space they don't help
- Nobody reproduces naturally anymore because of radiation poisoning
- You can hook up with dream feeds that are like intense virtual reality
- You can essentially IM your thoughts into other people's heads (Could you imagine the horror if teenage girls could do that today?)

Combining the virtual reality and social media with the lack of muscles or sexual reproduction, it appears that World of Warcraft players are going to do just fine in the future.

So what you basically get is a survival thriller that takes place in an amazingly detailed sci-fi setting. The whole running-out-of-air shtick applies a clear story arc to an awkwardly defined medium, such that you're never going "Hmm, this short story has been going on for awhile now," or "This novella sure does feel short," or even "what the heck kind of a poem is this."

My only qualm is that I get a little too invested in the main character. Allusions to her past and her issues with her mom are flying around everywhere, and yet I don't think that any of that gets resolved, or hardly even addressed by the end of the story, even though you get the sense that it's her main conflict in life right now (apart from, you know, breathing.) It feels as if this is merely a single episode of a larger story, kind of like Ender in Exile or The Berenstain Bears Visit The Dentist.

But if we're going to decide whether to give it a Hugo, we need to count the robots. There were technically three robots here, but they lacked any AI and were controlled directly by humans, which doesn't make them much different from RC cars, or voters in Montgomery County. Also, these robots are named after fruit, and the only things that should be named after fruit are probably, well, fruit.

So the Robot Rating for "Plus or Minus" is Three Stupid Fruity Robots. (I mean no offense, of course, to fruit.)

You can read "Plus or Minus" by James Patrick Kelly here. The novelette I reviewed yesterday, "Eight Miles" by Sean McMullen, is available here.

"Eight Miles": Best Novelette?

2011-05-26T13:43:00.000-06:00

I'm dutifully reading the material in my Hugo voter's packet, and I decided to start with one of the smaller categories, Best Novelette.

As you are probably already aware, a novelette is a novel that is fancy. Adding "-ette" to the end of things makes them fancier. Take, for example, the Corvette. Do you think anyone is going to go around bragging about their fancy new Corv? I don't think so. Thus, Corvette, pirouette, ninjaette, novelette.

Novelettes began when one author thought to himself, "Self, I think that I can write a story that is just as good as a novel, but significantly smaller in size!" He was like the Intel of authors. Then he realized that they already had that, and that it was called a Novella. So he decided to go even smaller. Unfortunately, that put him too far into Short Story territory, and we all know how they are.

Much like how netbooks are below desktops and normal laptops but still above tablets, novelettes settled two steps below a novel and one step above a short story. QED

The first novelette I read, "Eight Miles," is about a troubled white young man in Detroit who must battle his nerves, upbringing, and surroundings in order to escape his environment and one day become the world's greatest rapper.

Actually, sorry, that's the Hollywood version. The novelette "Eight Miles" rings in at around 10,000 words and takes place in 1840's London. A hot air balloon pilot receives a strange request from a rich man: to take his young furry female friend up to eight miles of elevation.

It turns out that this creature is an alien from another planet, and is, in fact, her race's Napoleon, exiled to a low-elevation planet with thicker air that will render her stupid. The higher she gets, the more lucid she becomes. (Note that the opposite is true of America's college students.)

The 1840's voice is probably the most interesting aspect of this story. It not only feels like something set within that time, but written within that time. The narrator's voice feels very honest to the era, and provides a very refreshing perspective on a typical sci-fi plot.

I have two grudges with this story. Like the Ursas, one is minor, and the other is major. Several instances of dialogue involve a character simply introducing themselves, their background, and motivations within several lines. It seems a little Hollywoody. I wonder if part of this is the constraints of this made-up medium -- with only so much space, maybe this is just an inescapable necessity in order for the story to move at the correct pace. And because it's longer than short stories, there has to be a complicated enough plot that involves enough moving parts -- so you can't just cut out some of these characters. I'll have to wait and see how the four other novelettes approach this same issue.

But my major concern is about what's missing: robots. I combed through the story to make certain, but there are exactly zero robots in this story. There is a foxy alien girl, but here I mean foxy in the literal sense, not the figurative one. A poor substitute for a robot in either case.

Final rating? Zero robots.

Hugo Nominees Beware!

2011-05-26T13:40:00.000-06:00

As of yesterday, I, Carl, am a voter for the 2011 Hugo Awards. This means that I will provide critical opinions as to which works of science fiction from 2010 are the best.

Don't panic. (Nominated authors can make their checks out to my name. I also accept PayPal.)

Two men dressed in business suits, sunglasses, and Bluetooths, one of which was probably a cyborg (the man, not the Bluetooth, although that is also very possible), came to my door yesterday and told me that my reading expertise was needed. (They may or may not have dropped the name “SHIELD.”) This request made immediate and perfect sense, as my insight into good writing is incisive and sublime. I naturally agreed, and the men left... but not before they left a tracking device in my house.

Actually, I just paid to be a Supporting Member/voter for Worldcon.

As you probably already know, the Hugo award is named for Victor Hugo, who wrote the first great work of science fiction, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Tales of a deformed monster named Quasimodo and the enormous spaceship he took sanctuary in on the alien planet of France captured the imagination of bajillions of readers.

The important thing here is that I get access to the electronic versions of all the nominations. And this isn't just like four books. They're also the books for Best New Author, Graphic Novel, Art, Other Medium, et cetera. It comes out to probably thirty or so of last year's most highly recognized sci-fi products. So, basically, I don't have to go around asking everybody what the latest and greatest in science fiction is. I just decide what it is, because I'm a freaking Hugo voter, baby!

Obviously, my first plan was to vote for all of the half-written, unpublished sci-fi documents on my computer. (I think this was everyone else's idea, too.) (To vote for my unpublished fiction, I mean.) Unfortunately, they were never nominated, which was a gross oversight. So I'll have to stick to voting for the actual nominees, of which I know absolutely nothing.

Those authors whose works have been nominated probably want to know by what criteria I will be basing my vote. Now, dear reader, you may be wondering, “Why, Mr. Duzett, not to impose upon your blog, but I do believe that their works are already completed! However would knowing your criteria assist them in the slightest at this point in time?”

The answer, of course, involves wormholes. Or black holes. Or possibly both at the same time. These are science fiction writers we're talking about. They have every ability to go back in time and correct their manuscripts so that I'll like them.

But I want to see robots. That's criterion numero uno. I'm pretty sure that it's not sci-fi if there are no robots. Laser beams that come from their eyes would be nice, too. Or a dirigible. (Although a non-shot-from-robot-eyes dirigible would also be acceptable.)

Criterion number dos is more robots. None of this “one robot character thrown in just to satisfy criterion number uno” stuff. You know what they say: two killer robots is better than one. Oh, yeah -- I almost forgot. The robots have to be killer robots.

I'll let you guess what criterion number three is. Here's a hint: it's not less robots.

Family Blog

2011-03-25T15:37:00.002-06:00

We have a family blog now, over at doozits.blogspot.com. The following is my first post over there. I figured I would also post it here, because, why not?

While my wife has been thinking about the scriptures, I've been considering the mathematics of competition. In America, this subject is also called March Madness.

1. My office does a March Madness pool every year. I decided to enter (with no money, so I'm not gambling) in order to perform an experiment. Instead of basing my selections on research or any understanding of basketball, I made most of my selections by flipping a coin.

Most of them.

I gave the #1 and #2 seeds byes for the first round, meaning that they were picked without a coin being tossed. Anytime that two seeds played each other who were within 2 seeds (like a #7 playing a #9, for instance) I would flip a coin. Heads, the higher seed wins (#7). Tails, the low seed.

For everything else, I gave the higher seed a 5/8 chance of winning (which involved rigging a gimmicky coin-flip combination scheme, but never took more than 3 flips per prediction.)

It wasn't nearly enough.

My bracket is demolished. Washington (a 7 seed) made it all the way to the championship game in my bracket, and they've been gone for a while. I only have 1 team left in my Final Four and only 2 of my Elite Eight.

What can we learn here? (Other than the fact that I probably should have given the higher seeds a 3/4 chance to win instead of 5/8.) People who know almost nothing about basketball (i.e., my coworkers) are destroying me in this competition based on knowing about basketball. Because I relied on numbers and probabilities instead. And it turns out that probability doesn't know that much about basketball, either.

2. If someone were to enter a rock-paper-scissors tournament that had a $20 entry fee, would that count as gambling?

3. I read about a computer programming competition that took place at one of those computer programming colleges. (Funny venue, I know.) Each contestant had to create a program that would play Mancala. The programs would face off in a single-elimination bracket, producing one winning program. Two programs made it to the finals.

Program A was designed such that every turn, it calculated every possible move that it could make and would make the move that gave it the most stones, every time. The program had enough data and was smart enough about its analysis that it absolutely destroyed every program it went up against by enormous margins.

Program B also made it to the finals, but it seemed to just barely scrape its wins together. It never blew out any opponents, often winning with only a differential of a stone or two. Nobody thought it had a chance against Program A.

But Program B won--by merely a few stones. How did it eke out a victory against its incredibly dominant competition? While Program A was designed to get the most stones per turn, Program B was designed to get at least 1 more stone per cycle of turns than its opponent. It didn't just optimize the number of stones it could get, but also ran that against what its opponent would then be able to do based on that move, and made sure that whatever move it decided to do, its opponent would not be able to match it--even if the difference were just a stone or two.

Much like David from Survivor, all Program B cared about was winning. Program A looked at the symptoms of winning and mistook them for winning itself.

In short, Program A was winning, but Program B was bi-winning.

4. I play Starcraft 2 online. The game is so competitive at its higher levels that someone has created a program, called Evolution Chamber, that optimizes the decisions you make in-game so as to produce a certain result at a benchmark time. It's supposed to turn you into a robot programmed to, basically, get the most number of stones per turn (although instead of stones we're talking about mutant alien beasts). It's led to a number of creative, optimized build orders that produce surprising results when your opponent isn't ready.

And no professional Starcraft 2 player uses any of those builds, because there's a lot more to winning than having a build perfectly optimized for only one moment of the game. Again, you can use numbers and mathematics to produce the symptoms of winning, but the actual act of winning requires something extra. Tiger blood, perhaps? (Maybe simple human blood is sufficient.)

5. Ken Jennings and some other smarties battled in the bloodied colliseum of Jeapordy against mankind's most hated rival: a personal computer. But this computer was programmed specifically to win at Jeapordy. After the first day of competition, this computer and Ken Jennings were tied. After a week, the computer was ridiculously ahead. Why? Because the silly humans couldn't hit the darn button fast enough. Not because of any actual lack of knowledge.

In our future dystopia, we won't need to fear computers knowing more than us. We'll just have to worry about how fast they hit buttons. Computers don't have to make decisions, because they have no choices of their own. Drastic decisions for them aren't drastic, or even decisions--just a couple lines of code being carried out. Does that make them subservient to us, or simply terrifying? At the very least, it apparently makes them way good at Jeapordy.

6. Sports, and other competitions, are exciting precisely because you cannot know the outcome ahead of time. If I begin a mathematical exercise, like 2+2, the result (SPOILER ALERT) is oftentimes 4. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. If I try to guess who is better between two teams, the only way to really know is for them to play each other. That exercise doesn't happen in our heads or on paper, but in real life.

There's a lot in life that is probably unfair. Good competitions with solid rulesets can make some things fair, at least fair enough for people to throw their all into doing their best. I think that's noble. I think that may be why I like games in general.

Baseball metrics, Hollinger PER, and David Stern are all in place to determine the winners, but the best proof of all is, as they say, in the pudding. And who doesn't like pudding?

Twenty-ten

2010-12-31T19:16:00.002-07:00

Top 5 Books I Read (Or Re-Read) This Year
5. Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time #2,025)
4. The Way of Kings
3. A Game of Thrones (and the rest of A Song of Ice and Fire)
2. Dune
1. Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies really wowed me. As grim as the book gets, the writing is, well, awesome. I can't believe that they have kids read this in middle and high school, because I feel like I can barely appreciate how excellent the writing is--otherwise it's just a morbid story about crazy kids on an island.

Top 5 TV Shows I Saw This Year
5. Make It Or Break It (the writing on this show is secretly great)
4. Lost Season Six (a letdown in the end, but still good)
3. The Sing-Off (American Idol + talent - (everything we hate about Idol))
2. Survivor Heroes and Villains (best strategic reality show season ever)
1. The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is gory. Definitely gory. If that bothers you (and I'm still trying to decide if that should bother me more than it does), skip this. Otherwise, this show is brilliant. Good writing, good characters, excellent production values, and some very memorable moments in just six episodes. The pilot was especially enthralling.

Top 5 Movies I Saw This Year
5. Tangled
4. How To Train Your Dragon
3. Despicable Me
2. Toy Story 3
1. Inception

Inception is brilliant on three or four different levels. I have a lot more to say about that later. The other four were all just good, in pretty much all senses of that over-generalizing word. (I still haven't seen Social Network or The Town.)

Top 5 Twitter Feeds
5. day9tv (I follow him for Starcraft news, but he is reliable for funny quips)
4. VeryShortStory (good idea, done well enough consistently enough to be interesting)
3. FakeAPStylebook (genuine humor thick with irony)
2. jimmykimmel (funny, usually supplies excellent links)
1. RandyTayler

RandyTayler is the brother of a webcomic author that I don't read but know about because he's on a podcast I listen to about writing. This guy is way, way out of the way. But he is hilarious. Frequent tweets, all worth reading, self-defacing humor and, well, he's bald. If you use twitter, follow RandyTayler. If you only have a twitter account that you never use or access, follow RandyTayler--he'll give you a reason to. If you don't have twitter, get it and follow RandyTayler. He's the first guy to make my twitter feed worth refreshing.

Top 5 Videos I Saw This Year
5. “Just A Dream” cover by youtube singers
4. Doodling in Math Class - Infinity Elephants
3. The World's Reaction to Landon Donovan's Game-Winning Goal
2. Noteworthy - How Great Thou Art
1. My Life of Starcraft - Day[9] Daily #100

Sean "Day[9]" Plott uploads videos of himself commentating on the strategy behind professional competitive games of Starcraft. This video, however, talks about his life as a professional Starcraft player--how he grew to like video games, his relationship with his brother, the love and support of his family, the roller-coaster ride of the tournaments he played in, and how the whole experience has affected him as a person. Intriguing, hilarious, sincere, and at times emotional, the length of the video is totally worth it if you're mildly curious about pro gaming at all.

The Tea Partiers Are Going To Hell

2010-12-16T19:12:00.002-07:00

I came upon this essay I wrote a year ago. Before anybody asks, yes, I was being totally serious as I wrote this.

I visited Hell recently—-for purely journalistic purposes—-and was struck by a perplexing oddity. Everyone there was conservative. There in the outer circles of the Inferno itself were throngs of conservatives waving tea bags around, their arms wreathed in the eternal flames of damnation. In fact, the entire road I took to get there, the road to Hell, was paved with conservatives and tax breaks.

I mentioned that this was a perplexing oddity. This was a mistake, because anyone with half a brain would see this coming from a mile. Can there be any wonder as to why a collection of people as deranged, hateful, and wicked as conservatives has reservations in the Underworld? No. That was the answer to my question. The answer is no, there cannot be any wonder.

It is only fitting that anyone willing to protest things like justice, happiness and joy be condemned to an eternity of skinny-dipping sessions in the lake of fire and brimstone. Coincidentally, those are the very things that swelled within my breast upon being blessed with that sight: justice, happiness, and joy.

This message of happiness and joy is what I wish to take from this experience and then give to you. The knowledge gleaned from the sight of conservative flesh writhing in infinite agony can bring peace to us all. Unless you are conservative.

It is easy to become emotionally overcome by the sheer wickedness of these political sinners. It is easy to entertain the dark, hopeless thought of God reaching out and smiting the world with slightly warmer temperatures because of the actions of these devilspawn. But after fact-checking with the PR guy in outer darkness, I am here to tell you that your thirst for justice will be sated and all those obnoxious tea partiers are going to Hell.

All that is wrong in the universe, including pride, avarice, tea partiers, gluttony, and Alaska, will be set aright in the last days.

So when you see the craven mobs of depraved souls stirring not just their tea but hate and dissent, find comfort in the knowledge that at the end of this mortal sojourn, those losers are going to burn in Hell.

Carl Duzett is also the author of “Conservatives are Evil,” “Satan has Private Health Insurance,” and “Joe the Plumber: Horseman of the Apocalypse.”

Book(s) Review: A Song of Ice and Fire

2010-09-13T17:48:00.002-06:00

Epic fantasy is a whole 'nother animal when it comes to fiction. It's usually only good if it's super long, complicated, and the series still isn't done yet. (See: Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, those Kvothe books, The Stormlight Archive, etc.) I came late to the "A Song of Ice and Fire is the Greatest Latest Epic Fantasy" party, which is fine, because the writer's been stalled on the last book for approximately 2000 years. Or, y'know, days.

There are four books out, they're all great, and I'm going to do individual reviews here. But first, some generalities about the entire series:

GENERALITIES ABOUT THE ENTIRE SERIES:
As a reader, you're frequently surprised. Anytime you think the story is going to go a certain way, A MAIN CHARACTER DIES. It's insane. I've honestly never read anything quite like it. All the pieces finally get placed for a great story, and then SOMEONE DIES and it gets even better. It's frustrating, but you get over it because it makes you actually wonder where the story's taking you. You can't really predict anything. There are no tropes at work here, because THE TROPES DIE.
Additionally, the actual writing itself is excellent -- far and above the prose of almost all other fantasy writers I've come across (except our good friend Patrick Rothfuss, possibly.) There are a lot of characters, and a lot of viewpoints, which can become a problem when you dislike at least a third of those viewpoints (read: Wheel of Time, Super Girls), but these characters are incredibly interesting. It's not just good prose at work here, but good characters, and excellent storytelling.

BOOK ONE: A GAME OF THRONES
Everything seems to be set up for a nice, heart-warming "young hero and family/friends do what's right and beat the bad guys" story at the very beginning, until A MAIN CHARACTER BREAKS HIS SPINE. They go off on an adventure into a very dangerous political arena, where the main guy, Eddard Stark, acts honorably and stoically to the end, despite being in a world where everyone is selfish and corruptible. The whole book reminds me of the first half of Dune, which is one of my favorite stories in sci-fi. It's a fantastic story that really should be read by anyone who's ever liked a fantasy book. 3/4 stars

BOOK TWO: A CLASH OF KINGS
So at the end of book 1, you have two different people claiming kingship over the land. The whole country's stewed in craziness. What to do, if you're writing the sequel? DOUBLE IT, SIR. Now there are FOUR different kings claiming kingship over the land, which leads to various big epic battles taking place at various big epic locations. In the end, I feel like the double-or-nothing conflict ploy was kind of a frustrating waste of book space, but it's not like anything's resolved and swept under the rug for future books. Also, there's a lot of gratuitous sexual detail in this one. This book complicates the plot far more than the other books do, and I found myself liking it the least...except for maybe the 4th one. 2.5/4 stars

BOOK THREE: A STORM OF SWORDS
The last book's climaxes were two different enormous battles on two different fronts. The two biggest events in book 3 are both...weddings. George R. R. Martin is great at involving the reader in political story arcs, and this book is probably his best of the series. Lots of great conflict, lots of surprising turns, and a great coming-of-age story takes place in the North, with Jon Snow helping defend against an enormous army. 3/4 stars

BOOK FOUR: A FEAST FOR CROWS
This book was also a feast for critics, because it wasn't as good as the other ones. This was originally supposed to be half of a book, but it was getting so huge and complicated that RR Martin (what kind of middle initials are those? Roger Rabbit?) cut the book in two and said he'd release it in two installments, where each book followed different viewpoints of the same time period. So, for this book, he decided to follow all the boring people, plus Jaime Lannister, and it feels as if literally nothing is resolved by the end of the story because the book was cut in half. 2.5/4 stars

We all eagerly await book 5 of this series. Luckily, George R.R. Martin (I'm going to call him "RR" for short because I feel like Tolkien rolls in his grave every time I type out the guy's entire name) has a blog. And he's been working diligently on book 5 (he said it was almost done anyway when book 4 came out) since 2005. His website has an update on the book's status, which says he'll probably be done by the end of 2008. Hooray! Isn't that soon?

Wait a minute...

Book Review: Starship Troopers

2010-08-25T19:56:00.002-06:00

Starship Troopers was a fantastic book. It's considered one of the foundational works of military scifi, and with good reason. It's pretty much the definition of the genre: a completely military perspective of future warfare, with the scifi elements mostly serving to support the military adventure. It makes for a little bit harder scifi, which is never a horrible thing in my book (or this one).

But with that being said, this book isn't good simply because it's got lots of military stuff, and guns and spaceships. It's great because it asks really thought-provoking social questions, such as: what is the cost of having a military? What does it do to the people in the military, and what kinds of things does a society have to do in order to support one? Probably the headlining question for this book is this: What if, in order to be a citizen and vote, you had to serve in the military? In order to vote, you'd have to put your life on the line for your country.

Then people have to really ask themselves: do I care about my vote? Do I really care about what my country does to me, or for me, or to others? Or is it just a spectator sport?

The Teddy Roosevelt gladiator quote certainly comes to mind as I'm trying to articulate that theme.

Very little of the book, in the end, actually has any action or battle sequences. Most of it is just the main character's military life, from enlistment to boot camp to his first outfit to his last. And the fact that Heinlein could make one man's military career a compelling, thought-provoking drama with actually very few action chapters holding it together is a huge testament to this work's worth.

Yes, I just called it a work. You're darn right I went there.

Lots of the book is taken up by his boot camp and what he remembers from a cultural history teacher in high school, which is to say that a lot of the book is taken up by the process of becoming a soldier-—what's asked of you, what you must learn and who you become as a person and whether that's worth it or important-—and by Heinlein's social grandstanding.

Yes, grandstanding. I don't think Heinlein means for us to look at this uniquely crafted society and think “Wow, this raises all kinds of questions!” There's a little bit of a sense of “Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if everything were like this?” It's not as ambiguous as I'd like, there, because it's kind of unfair to climb aboard the soap box and talk about politics and social issues within a fictional world that you've completely made up from your own head. It's unfair ground—-you can be like, “Hey, the proof is right here in the story! See what happens?” Because the story is, actually, not real.

But for as emphatic as that last paragraph looks, with all the exclamation points and italics, I'm really just venting about a general practice that isn't really that big of a deal in Troopers. I still think Heinlein's grandstanding, but I will say that it's slight grandstanding, or small grandstanding, or whatever adjective you use to mitigate the weight of that particular noun.

What keeps this book from 3.5 range, in my opinion, is a kind of lackluster plot. I just said that the character's military adventures are incredibly compelling, but I don't think that's plot so much as just darn good writing. My problem comes from when every single character that the main guy meets or likes or looks up to ends up all coming back into his life at the end of the book, all working on the same team together. It feels like the beginning of a TV series, honestly. And for such classy writing and such interesting, probing ideas, that strikes me as particularly campy.

So, Troopers is still a classic book (even after I read it!), and the stereotypes that come to mind when you think about a book called Starship Troopers do total and complete injustice to it. It's got real literary worth. Unfortunately, its somewhat mediocre plotting keeps it from being one of my all-time favorites.

3/4 stars

Book Review: The Best American Short Stories 2009

2010-08-10T18:35:00.003-06:00

This edition's guest editor was Salman Rushdie, who pared down the top 120 or so stories selected by Heidi Pitlor into just 20 stories. Unfortunately, that didn't make those 20 stories any better. Especially after a 2008 edition that had five or six truly amazing stories, with almost all the others impressing in one way or another, this one was pretty disappointing. There were several stories that definitely classified as “good”, but the majority of the collection was pretty head-scratch-inducing. “Missionaries” was stuffed full of awkward dialogue, unreasonable motives, and clumsy anti-religious sentiment, particularly against a specific religion. “The King of Sentences” was a horribly abstract mess with insane characters with no way for any normal reader to identify with them. Then there were the topical stories involving grad students, professors, poets, etc.--the typical incestuous nonsense that's killing the modern short story.

“The Year of Silence” was an interesting, albeit gimmicky story that was at least risky and entertaining. Another story was fairly ho-hum until a crazy twist ending occurred, which is not usually the stuff of High Literary Shorts. Alice Munro had a typically strong story in there, because, y'know, it wouldn't be the Best American Short Stories without throwing a Munro into it. Surprisingly, her story took place in Canada, and she used a first-person female narrator! Sarcasm aside, it also displayed some of her superb command of story, where things that don't seem to make much sense all come together in the end, making it a pretty strong, tight story. I also marked the anthology's final story as one worth re-reading, something by Tobias Wolff that read really well despite there being nothing really radical or noteworthy about it. I'm still trying to pinpoint why I liked that story, and it may just be that it was written really well.

The two stories that I was most impressed by, though, and make this anthology at least worth picking up off the shelf to read a select couple stories in your bookstore, were “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” and “Buying Lenin.” I was initially wary of “Vampires” because it seemed to be a gimmicky reincarnation of “St. Lucy's Home For Wolves,” which I wasn't a huge fan of. But the main character's dilemma was not only intriguing, but very humanizing and reflective of some of this life's most important conflicts—family, and death. You feel very powerfully for the guy and for his centuries' old relationship, and while it's no cut-and-dry parable of any sort, you get the feeling that you can learn a lot from the story, in a very odd, angular way.

“Buying Lenin” was, though, easily my favorite of the collection. Honest and humorous, and very tight. The characters felt very real, importantly so, and the structure of the story was brilliant. And not brilliant in a rocket-scientist-with-a-chalkboard way: brilliant in a “this is the only way this line should be written, and the only place it belongs is right here in this part of the story” way. Emotional intuition as a form of brilliance? I dunno. I just know that this story felt less pompous than anything else in the book, and more right.

In the end, this was a lackluster collection of short stories, and either Rushdie has vastly different aesthetics than I do, or he was wildly unambitious in selecting these stories.

2/4 stars

Review: Dune

2010-08-07T15:20:00.001-06:00

Dune is a cut above other fiction--so much so, that it's insane.

For a story that takes place in a fully-created, fully-realized universe, it's incredibly intimate. The characters are intriguing. The dialogue is fantastic! I even used an exclamation mark, I was so sincere! The politics are not just...tricky, feints-within-feints, as Paul would say, but to an extent that the reader can understand. The politics are part of the story, and as such, Herbert took great care in easing the reader through that story, showing what is important, what may be important, and so on.

The fall of Duke Leto Atreides will forever be one of science fiction's greatest stories. I say the fall, because everything following that first act arc was a little bit...less exciting. Still awesome, but not as driven, not as intriguing, not as...dangerous. As soon as the act is over, you know that Paul will have his revenge, and the rest of the book is simply that happening.

One thing I have always remembered about this book is how little I enjoyed Paul once he becomes Muad'Dib. He is constantly talking about seeing the future, how special he is, how horrible that all is and so on. Whiny whine whine. This is where Herbert pulls terms out of his butt and we have to subscribe to a fictional religion where Paul is the savior. Very trippy stuff that shouldn't happen with other normal characters—huge swings in character from between the first act and the second, where Paul suddenly sees all kinds of things and becomes this hardened wise Jedi guy.
And yet this kind of pays off in the end. When Paul pulls everything off, his great victory is at hand, he's done the impossible, this is when the Chosen One should get everything he wants, right? The girl, the friends, the adoration, the power, the happiness, etc.? WRONG. This may be the second-greatest genius of Dune—Paul as a tragic figure. The final scene, where Paul pulls everything together, is the culmination of all of Paul's problems, as well as the resolution of all the story's conflicts. His mother can't hardly empathize with him anymore. He can't even feel grief at the death of his son, a son named Leto who was named after his father Leto, another man he didn't allow himself to feel grief for, and yet the reader loved him.

I think this disconnect I've always felt with Paul is intentional, that Herbert WANTS us to feel disconnected from him. We were meant to love Leto, the man who trusted, who did what was right no matter what and fought as hard as he could against impossible odds—and he dies. We were meant to agree with Gurney as he points out to Paul that an Atreides should value lives over equipment, over political power, unlike this new Paul Maul'Dib. We were meant to see with Gurney's eyes how Paul becomes something quite less than ideal in order to accomplish the epic achievements that were set before him.

Paul isn't the hero of this book—Duke Leto is. Paul isn't the hero, he's the one who must do what needs to be done, much like Batman in the Dark Knight. (Somewhat like him.) You can't root for him, you can only empathize for him—more like Oedipus, I'd imagine. Leto is the hero, Paul's the tragic hero.

That move is what makes this a 3.5 instead of just a 3. I'm not diggin' the mysticism, but I can see why it's in there. But that twist, that driving question of “What really makes a hero? Do we really need heroes? Can we always be heroic?” apparently turns into those three questions. It's subtle, I think—I like to think—subtle enough that I never got it in my previous reads of Dune, but it really hit me this time.

The amazing world that Herbert created, the memorable characters, and the fantastic writing—not to mention those classy epigraphs—all combine with that heroic questioning to make Dune a cut above the rest, a classic story with weight and power, and most importantly, a 3.5/4 on my scale.

Book Reviews... Because You Care

2010-08-02T20:13:00.003-06:00

I often can't even remember the books I read, so this year I made a goal of not only reading lots of books, but putting them on a list, and then giving them a grade so I remember what I thought of them. (This is, incidentally, an exact replica of my daddy's system. I'm just trying to finish my daddy's war. You know, against books.)

I want to post my thoughts on my blog in case of the odd converging matrix of coincidences that could lead to somebody else actually wanting to read them.

I thought about a lot of different ways to think about books, and I think trying to create some sort of objective rating for your appreciation of a book is a great idea. Also, it makes me think about what makes different writing good or bad as I weigh the scales.

There are lots of rating systems. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings seem a little too Dewey-Decimal for my tastes, relying on awkwardly exact formulas and creating inexplicably specific percentage scores. The Siskel and Ebert Communal Analog Thumb System (SECATS), on the other hand, strikes me as incredibly knee-jerky and arbitrary.

When I came up with my rating system for these books that I'm reading, I wanted to be able to delineate clear levels of storytelling and writing without so much of the “this book is exactly 2 points better than this book” nit-picking, and the contrived schemes and regulations that must follow such a system.

So, like unto the manner of grading generals, I am going with a four star system.

In my mind, there are theoretically 8 levels of writing (excluding the zero star rating, which I have both logical and mathematical issues with). I've read many books at the 2.5, 3 star level. These are the books that I like to think I read most often—they are certainly the books that I remember best, and enjoy reading.

I can't tell you whether a certain book at the 3 star level is superior to another book at that level, and you'll find that that's often a useless pursuit, anyway. Can one story be better than another, at some point? Can the writing really be that much better when so much of what we humans are concerned with is so different? There's also the function of genre, of course. Can a classic science fiction book really measure against an emotionally rich new literary fiction?

What I didn't want my ratings system to turn into was a top-heavy parade-fest for any book I enjoyed enough to read through. Being excellent “for what it does” isn't enough for a top rating. 4/4 is 100%, which means that it's the best story that I think I'll ever read, or the best writing I think I'll ever read. And frankly, I dunno if I'll ever be qualified to say something like that. I like to think that the best story is still out there, and that the best writing lurks in similar corners. In a way, my reluctance to four-out-of-four these books is a product of my own awareness as an imperfect reader.

I'm likewise wary about the 3.5 rating. After describing the sanctity of the Four, I'm worried that it'll become so untouchable that I simply stuff the 3.5 level with everything I like, and then my ratings become just as meaningless. Three-point-fives are NOT the best stories I'll ever read. However, they are absolutely a cut above the rest.

I've already written a handful of reviews for the books I've read so far, and I'll start posting those every few days (or so). Here's a list of the books whose reviews you can look forward to (or shield your eyes from):

Dune, Starship Troopers, White Sand, Foundation, The Lonely Polygamist, Lord of the Flies, Drown, The Fob Bible, Best American Short Stories of 2009, Watchmen, the A Song of Ice and Fire series, the Graveyard book...and much, much more!

Feel free to chime in with sarcastic remarks, droll comments, timely zingers or blithe cynicisms. Or, y'know, regular thoughts.

The blogs are all a-twitter

2010-06-18T10:54:00.002-06:00

So I have a twitter now. The world will never be the same. http://twitter.com/cduzett. Or, y'know, here. Just for YOU, my faithful blog-reading followers, I will make a new tweet after posting this.

Also, Allie and I are going to Monterrey, CA for a week in early July for some family-reunionation. Awesome sauce.

- Carl

Blazers Chat Recap -- The Carl Edition

2010-04-19T21:53:00.003-06:00

So I stayed up late last night to watch the Blazers play their first playoff game this season, and it was a real corker. Because there aren't as many fans here in Maryland, I chatted with Digital Blazer Fans in the Oregonlive.com Blazer chat room! A good time was had by all, and because so many blazer fans come regularly to my blog (one, I think), I just knew you'd all want to read my real-time reactions to the game!

My avatar was zarepath, and due to weird copy/paste mechanics, every moniker is listed twice. So, weird.

[Comment From JudithJudith: ]
Where is Bayless? Is he on the bench? I do not see him on the floor.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
bayless is currently practicing recklessly driving into his locker and throwing the ball at the ceiling

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
I wonder if a marcus camby bobblehead could rebound falling office supplies off of my desk before they hit the floor

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
welcome to the playoffs, cute ol' cunningham

Joel Odom:
Halftime. Barbosa's 3 makes it 44-43. He torched Blazers in that first half.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
isn't he, like, a pirate or something?

[Comment From blazerduckblazerduck: ]
Pryz, Oden and LA all got called for defensive-3 a lot

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
the refs just get mad that portlanders are invading Dwight's and Shaq's summer homes

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
I think if my last name were Barbosa, I could dominate, too. Egads, what a great name.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
I think we've shot a good many more FTs than they have, but we're actually driving the ball instead of acting like the three point line is an invisible shield.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
The officials were just tuning their whistles. The second half will have more stops than a broken subway

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
rudy had some good drives in the 1st quarter. Then again, so did my '94 chevy corsica.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
McMillan says their offense is fine, while Gentry says their defense is fine. Should we just play the one half of the floor?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
they let stoudemire shoot the ball. We win this game; I'm calling it now.

[Comment From DennyhilDennyhil: ]
GET RUDY OUT - HES LOST!!!!

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
I think rudy is lost, but will find himself. You know, like in an Avril Lavigne song. Finding the basket, though...

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Camby gets three rebounds just getting dressed each morning.

The Oregonian:
Stoudemire bangs down the lane, he and Camby tangle, basket's good and crowd goes nuts. Chants of "MVP" and he misses the FT.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
can a crowd chant "MVP" for two different players on the same team? Do they know what the word "Most" means in Phoenix?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
ball don't lie. It just sends mixed signals.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
So which TNT commercial is the most obnoxious--the rapping McDonald's commercial, or the Leverage advertisements? Close call.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
the phoenix fans should shout "MVP" for Rudy. Might as well add a third, y'know?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Webster's been wearing Camby's lucky underwear today, obviously

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
the officials are doing a finger puppet show for a nice little break

Joel Odom:
zare, I hope you're with us the whole series.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
I just hope that Rudy's with us the whole series...I think he might wander off the court, foul the entire Phoenix arena, and get lost in a back-alley

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
okay, I found the winner. It's the Wear No Pants commercial.

[Comment From augiedog34augiedog34: ]
bayless also had 2 really bad shots in a row

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Bayless just silenced Blazers livestreams and forums all over the universe.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
how many points does Stoudemire have in binary? 10? 110?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
phx4life...are you a phoenix fan? Because I can't tell, otherwise.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
if I were a stripper, I'd want Howard as my bouncer.

The Oregonian:
OK, now people are standing in front of me and I can't see.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
so when everybody stands at remote viewing parties in the rose garden, do they chant "defense?"

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
"Dragic" should be the name of a brand of back-scratchers

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
so, I guess charges are out of the game now.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Phoenix needs to put Rudy back into the game.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Camby is like a mix of Mr. Fantastic, Inspector Gadget, and, like, uh, a really good shot-blocker/rebounder.

[Comment From MatthewMatthew: ]
oh i know, my wife is yelling at me now to come to bed....NEVER! playoff time baby!

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
I just gently explained to my wife that the Blazers are more important than she is. No problems here.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
SOMEBODY WENT TO THE CEMETERY AND DUG UP ALDRIDGE

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Batum's answering machine goes something like this: "I just put three points on your face. Leave me a message. BEEEEEEEP."

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
wait, phx4life...are you a phoenix fan?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
stoudemire has more fouls now than changes of underwear

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
so does Canzano only hang out here when people complain about him?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
SOMEBODY GO BACK TO THE CEMETERY AND BURY ALDRIDGE AGAIN

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Inspector Gadget misses the dunk. That's cool, Bayless is a cold-blooded killer. I expect to see him in a TNT ad soon for a new drama called "Cold-blooded."

0

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
these NBA Cares commercials only make me think that those kids must feel real awkward with those cameras following them around.

[Comment From Blazer in PABlazer in PA: ]
WHEELS is getting hoarse lol

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
if Wheels and the sound barrier were to meet in a dark alley, who would win?

[Comment From wilsgrantwilsgrant: ]
This chat has way too much lag. Agreed?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
yeah, fix the stream so my droll remarks don't lose their timeliness.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
so, phx4life...how long are you planning on being a phoenix fan? Any specific amount of time you have in mind?

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Official Recipients of Zarepoints this game: Miller, Camby, Webster, Bayless. Redeem your Zarepoints up front for cheap rubber bracelets or a nerf ball

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Nash heaved that one all the way from Canada.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Hey Barkley, you've got some black stuff on your face. Look like feathers, hanging from your lips. Oh, what's that? Oh, right--YOU'RE EATING CROW

[Comment From malicemalice: ]
you all are lucky, Amare was off. and the refs didn't have a clue. Bayless and Miller should have fouled out in the third and Camby, that chep ass. you all play that grind it out crap.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
malice, trust me. I will take your words to heart. Especially from someone with such a kind moniker.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
Webster's D was AWESOME. They're going to start calling him the Spider. Get it? Because, he like, spins webs? For defense? I expect it to catch on in about 20 minutes.

[Comment From malicemalice: ]
Thats because they understand that the Jail Blazers are a flash in the pan

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
malice, I wish you'd come by more often. You're charming.

[Comment From zarepathzarepath: ]
it's almost 2 AM here. I'll see you guys tuesday for Aldridge's exhumation and, hopefully, ability to MAKE A FRIGGIN OPEN SHOT.

The Trouble With Stories

2010-04-07T21:37:00.001-06:00

(Note: I totally posted this two or three days ago, but it was a rework of an old post I never finished, and so it only ended up posting in the November part of my blog, which is when I first started it. So, that's that.)

Is there a negative psychological effect to fiction?

Ian McEwan's Atonement does a pretty good job of dealing with this issue. No amount of clever writing can change the difficulties of real life.

Stories exist as a medium, as a form, because they are notable. In order to be told, something must be worth telling. Good stories are hard to forget because they're notable - of interest.

That same feature so intrinsic to the definition of stories is what makes them so incongruous to reality. Because stories are notable, that means that similar things don't happen very much in reality. It's true that they happen - but usually only enough to be noticed, not enough to be counted on.

But what happens when our real lives consist mostly of us hearing, seeing, or reading stories? We're artificially injecting swashbuckling, heart-wrenching "notability" into our lives when it's not really there. While books are not being read as voraciously as late, fiction is well-represented in the many movies and TV shows that we watch. People's minds are constantly running through 30-minute story arcs, scenes of pre-constructed, zippy dialogue, and considering severe character development over the course of a two-hour movie.

Maybe we don't consider the possible bridges between our obsession with stories and our own reality because we consciously know that these stories are fiction. If we know it's not real, how could it possibly affect our own realities?

The problem is that we want them to be real. These stories are notable, remember - they're exciting, they're different, and there's a reason we watch/listen/read them in the first place. If we can find excuses to somehow incorporate the thrill or excitement of a fictional story into our own life, we are likely to do so. Even if we are not watching movies or TV shows all day, the ideas of popular narrative still follow us around. Movie quotes, anyone?

When I find myself frustrated with someone or something, I find myself constructing a heated, back-and-forth scene of dialogue in my head. I imagine that the full drama of my emotions will best be resolved the way they are in stories - in these smashmouth verbal interactions where every line is a carefully crafted zinger that heightens the stakes. When there is a slight possibility of danger in some situation, I imagine the most dramatic, heroic way that I might react. When someone is angry with me, I imagine their anger to be like that of hate-filled antagonists from action movies. When you see anything in your relationships to be like those of fictional relationships, it's easy to assume that they'll turn out the same. Some of this is very subconscious, but pay attention to how you view your reality based on the stories you've seen/heard/read.

What is the problem with this?

While stories are reflections on real life, and are at least inspired by ideas of real life even in the cases of fantasy and science fiction, they are not just passive reflections. Their narrative commentary, because of its high concentration in our society, turns and affects reality.

Fictional characters such as Mickey Mouse, Superman and Santa Claus are better known and hold more sway in popular culture and conversation than actual people with real positions of power, such as your state's Senators.

Obviously, I'm a big fan of the reading and writing of stories, and I have a lot of thoughts as to why human peoples have always liked telling them, and why we should. Maybe that's a post for another day. But is there a point of diminishing returns when it comes to stories? A point where reading another novel, watching another movie or following another TV show just screws with your life?

Deep Inside of a Parallel Universe

2010-02-27T10:52:00.002-07:00

Parallel universes are on the rise, as you can see from that line graph.

In the TV show Lost, the characters detonated a hydrogen bomb in an electromagnetic pocket so as to change the past and create an alternate timeline wherein the first five seasons of Lost never happened. (Obviously, fans of Lost loved this idea.)

In the TV show Fringe, there's a parallel universe where 9/11 never happened and Spock is human. Naturally, this universe has declared war on the normal one, 'cause nobody but nobody messes with Spock's ears.

This guy claims to have actually come into contact with agents from a parallel universe where the Beatles never broke up (and cover bands are killed on sight). Luckily, this agent had a tape of the Beatles' heavily-edited new album which, uh, harks to all their solo work.

If Spock wasn't having a hard enough time already, he fell victim again to the new Star Trek movie's alternate timelines, thanks to those meddlesome black holes of scifi yore. (Who knew that black holes could either destroy planets or spew people into different universes depending on your plot's need?)

Obviously, we need to sit down and listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Parallel Universe" on repeat and consider this trend. Why the crap do we like thinking about parallel universes so much?

You could say it's a very human concern. Our good friend Bobby Frost wrote a whole poem about the irrevocable nature of decisions, the tragedy of only being able to take one path when presented with two.

I also think that we enjoy seeing "What if?" scenarios played out as a way of measuring the worth of our decisions. Whatever difference it was that Bobby was talking about, we want to measure it. It's isolating the variables in our lives so as to solve the equation, to know exactly what values X and Y should be.

I posit that life isn't an equation to be solved, an experiment to carry out or any kind of surgical process. The reason that our choices and decisions are so important to us is because they can't be isolated, and that we can only make every decision exactly once. There's no rewind on reality.

The idea that blowing up a hydrogen bomb or vaulting through a black hole can change a whole lifetime of decisions is the stuff of scifi, and I love it. But I wonder if maybe we focus too much on big decisions that spin lives and universes one way or the other, and not enough on small decisions that build up over time to make us who we are: stuff like what we watch, comments we make, who we talk to. Maybe we focus too much on decisions we already made a long time ago.

A parallel universe based on whether or not I say "hey" to a guy may not be that interesting, but that's the kind of decision we all make every day that builds our characters. Just food for thought.

The State of Maryland vs. Duzett, Carl Robert -- Continued

2010-01-12T16:12:00.003-07:00

So one business day after receiving my court summons, I received over a dozen letters from local attorneys. By the end of the week, I had about 20. They all wanted to represent me in my Big Showdown with the state of Maryland. Now, if this were the Napoleonic Era I might let one of them act as my second, but I had my manhood to consider. No sir, Carl Duzett was going to do this mano-a-mano.

And so I did. The State of Maryland vs. Duzett, Carl took place yesterday, and I emerged $50 worse off for it. Mark my words, Maryland, I won't let you off so easily next time.

Next time, Maryland. Next time.

Avatar as a Dream - My Lengthy Thoughts

2009-12-26T22:03:00.009-07:00

When I first saw the trailer for Avatar, I just looked over at my wife and said: "That looks really good."
"Yeah," she responded, "it does."

I spent the next morning doing my standard procedure for things I discover to like: visiting the official website and gobbling up all the propaganda, over and over again. After another day spent away from anything Avatar, I regained some perspective. I wondered what the chances were of this movie garnering reviews with the following sentence: "The visuals are breathtaking, but the plot is cliched." Eighty percent? Ninety percent? I mean, 2012 came out just before that, and the only two things that anybody could say about that was "The plot was terrible, but the effects were amazing!" (I think that if Hollywood were to have a funeral, that would be its eulogy: "The plot was terrible, but the effects were amazing." And while we're on the topic, its tombstone would read, "The book was better.") But something about how James Cameron described his world, his Pandora, planted a seed of cautious optimism. Anybody who cares about his setting so badly that he'll pump $300 million into it must know what he's doing, right? (Wrong.)

He said the movie is based on a dream he had, which actually kind of pissed me off. Really? A dream? I've had dreams that felt like the most epic things in the universe that were actually about Bill Cosby and Jello monsters, but that wouldn't make for a movie. Frankly, it pissed me off because George Lucas said something similar about Star Wars Crime One: The Phantom Menace. There's this whole underwater adventure scene with giant fish and these weird frog people who sound like babies mocking Jamaicans, and guess where it came from? Lucas' little kid wanted them to go underwater. So he did it. Creativity is not just randomly putting crap into a story, and if that's the way that millions of dollars are going to be spent telling stories...well, that sucks, is my point. Ubersweet dreamz aren't reasons to make million dollar stories.

Or so I thought.

I intentionally avoided all reviews of Avatar the days leading up to my own viewing. I've found that reviews just ruin movies for me. As my wife and I walked into Star Trek, Allie mentioned that one reviewer had said: "This movie goes boldly where every other movie has gone before." And then for the rest of the movie, that's all I could see--the predictable plot, the standard jokes, the nice CGI. It's reviews that kept me from movies that I really wanted to see, like 9, and Where the Wild Things Are, etc. If I were to go see them afterward, I would only see those movies from the lens of these criticisms that I'd originally hoped wouldn't exist. I can't root for a movie if I read the review, because too often I'm forced to agree with the reviews after seeing the movie because I was looking for the flaw. And then movies that critics love, like Whale Rider, I loathe. It's like reviewers and I never match up. And you know why? Because entertainment doesn't exist so that other people can watch things for you. The best reviewer, for me, is me.

So now I'm trying a new policy of refusing to read reviews, and simply seeing movies that I want to see. (I guess that I'm a hypocrite because I'm kind of writing a review right now, presumably so that somebody else reads it.)

Okay, so far we've covered CGI splurge movies, basing movies on dreams, why we shouldn't read reviews, and how much I hate George Lucas. I swear, this all ties in. (All you clever kids who clicked the hyperlink will realize that I've already pulled the Star Wars card and come back to it again. This post will be one giant "The Circle is Now Complete" Darth Vader line, I swear.)

The movie itself. We saw it in 3D, which really, everybody should, even if they wear glasses like myself and are constantly readjusting their facewear for the first thirty minutes of the movie. Don't be put off by the 3D. I know that most movies that tag "3D!" to its title are complete losers, but the rule is not fast, my friends. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs was fantastic even though they advertised its three-dee-ness, and usually my rule is that any movie with "In 3D!!!" on its poster is a waste of life. The previews in Avatar smacked of movies who coalesce to make that rule necessary. Piranha started out as a Spring Break movie with three dee hotties in bikinis, and ended with a guy sticking a chainsaw into my very face. The three dee in Avatar itself was...subtle. Artistic, even. It's as if James Cameron cared so much about his setting that he wanted his audience to be in it as much as possible. (Wait, maybe he does care.) And the typical punch-in-your-face tactics weren't enough: he wanted full and total immersion. The three dee is careful, and even beautiful.

The entire concept behind Avatar is that of entering another world, both physically and culturally. The hero dreams of flight once he loses movement of his legs, and he refers to his Avatar adventures as a kind of dream. Eventually that place becomes real to him while his human life seems a dream. This isn't just Dances With Wolves meets Starship Troopers meets 300 million dollars. The romance is the best romance I can remember seeing in a movie for a long time, and that's not just some added bonus to the movie, I think. The romance, the Avatar concept, the 3D, the elaborate CGI, the dreaming--it's all about leaving one world and entering another, and isn't that a big part of what love is all about? Isn't that a big part of what story is all about?

I loved Avatar--I don't think that the visuals outshone the story, or overwhelmed it, or anything. To sound cool, I might even say that the visuals are the story. Cinema is not a form where Story and Visuals are forever damned to battle each other, mythological nemeses whose sparks of conflict power the very universes they embody. Movies don't have to be either story dominant or visually dominant. They're both essential, defining parts of the same medium. But we've reached that rotten state in Denmark where things must be diametrically opposed, and we've already been conned by too many million dollar CGI fests.

So the twitchular reaction to Avatar is naturally going to be that its visuals are too good. For that very reason, I myself was suspicious and had to make jokes about what all the reviews were destined to say before I ever even saw the thing. I'm just getting slogged by all these movies whose stories merely serve to prop up the visuals or the action or the fact that they got these two big-name actors into the same movie. I mean, text is the cheapest commodity in the world right now; you'd think Hollywood could find people who write compelling screenplays.

But Avatar is not that movie. Everybody who leaves that movie is smiling and happy, and it's not just because of some visuals. It's because it's a darn good movie. You just can't grade this stuff. James Cameron himself pointed out that Star Wars didn't win Best Picture; some movie called Annie Hall did. What is really the best movie of those two? That's what happens when you try to grade great movies.

The buzz and critical responses that surround movies have almost become more entertaining than the movies themselves. Half the time I only go to see movies so that I can make sarcastic comments and show how witty I am, and I know I'm not the only obnoxious guy you know who does that. Spitting out criticisms afterward is a traditional process that's almost become more satisfying and enjoyable than the movies we watch.

For example, my wife and I found a bunch of criticisms of Avatar online, all along the lines of it being a liberal tree-hugging fest. Even my dad admits, after seeing it, that the writers had a tree to hug. (The phrase "axe to grind" doesn't work quite so well for these people, I think.) In a string of comments I read six or seven different readings of how ridiculously liberal Avatar was.

Let me say that we're both conservative. In fact, my wife is the kind of person who wouldn't be offended if you called her a radical conservative. She'd only be offended if you had to ask. And she didn't get any of that when she saw Avatar. (And if anybody were to reasonably catch liberal bias in anything, it would be her; trust me.) Sure, nature = good and corporate greed = bad. I'd be agreeing with everybody if this were Hellboy II, WALL-E, or The Day The Earth Stood Still (which I have). But Avatar is just too good.

So all my ridiculous movie-watching rules, like "Let's make sarcastic comments about predictability," "3D movies are bad," and "any plot with nature is contrived liberal dogma"--they go out the window, because Avatar isn't one of those things we go watch so we can tell other people we saw it and we can then share our witty criticisms.
Let's quit swishing Avatar around in our mouths and measuring the aftertaste as if it's some kind of wine-tasting. It's one of those movies that remind us all why we love movies in the first place, why we even care about stories, about other people and other universes that don't really exist. It's an adventure worth having, a dream that sticks with you much longer than an episode of Bill Cosby and the Jello monsters.

So to check--I talked about reviews being lame in the beginning, and at the end. I mentioned Star Wars a bunch in the beginning and again at the end. Same thing with visuals, CGI, and dreaming. I even mentioned my wife at the beginning and again at the end. And did you notice that zinger about the Jello dream? Am I awesome or what? All that's left is a conclusion.

Avatar is a great story and a great movie, because it knows that the visuals are part of the story. It knows that a great story is a kind of dream, an other-world worth visiting that makes us feel stronger in this one. You know how when you wake up from a dream and try to describe it to somebody, you go through narrating what happened and it sounds like the lamest thing ever, and all you can say is stuff like "While I was dreaming, it felt really, really scary/exciting/amazing/important"? That elusive element, whatever it is, that makes dreams awesome and after-dream explanations comical, is exactly what Avatar is. It's dreamlike in its amazing visuals, its emotions, its romance and adventure--things that, in the end, are exactly what make for an amazing story.

Children's Show Connossieur? Yes.

2009-11-15T17:30:00.004-07:00

Due to a complicated set of circumstances, I watch roughly three hours per day of children's television. The result? This blog post.

There exists a formula for children's show success. I don't know that it's a successful formula, but it obviously exists. Here it is: Get something that normally shouldn't speak, such as animals, inanimate objects, vehicles, or the British, and make a show based around it. Examples:

Choo Choo Express: Talking animals, Vehicle
Pooh and Friends: Talking animals, British
Lola and Charlie: British
Handy Manny: Talking tools
Dinosaur Train: Talking animals, Vehicle
Jungle Junction: British talking animals that are also vehicles (not even kidding)

A few shows of note:

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
Clubhouse is one of Disney's many Pimp-The-Franchise shows, where they make a show just because the characters are already famous. (Pooh and Friends is another such crime.) Probably only ten minutes of every 30 minute episode is original material; they rehash the same animated songs and dances every time. But is it educational? Let's put it this way--any show where every episode's climax is something called "the Hot Dog dance" isn't gonna bump your kid's IQ.

Little Einsteins
Of all the children's shows I've seen, this is probably the most educational one. It's also the only show whose DVDs were recalled because they're "not actually educational." This is a show where every episode features a classical composer or artist. For Halloween, they trick-or-treated in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. Disney sticks this show next to regular brain stimulants like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and then goes out on a limb and calls the show "educational." Apparently, when they tested Little Einstein watchers against non-TV-watching children, the Little Einsteiners weren't smarter. Well, duh. What do they expect non-TV-watchers to do when they're not watching TV? Tag buildings? Sell drugs? So while cinematic masterpieces like Dinosaur Train and Handy Manny run and sell like mad (all while insulting your kid's intelligence), shows that feature guest stars such as Mozart and Tchaikovsky get their wrists slapped. I mean, a recall? Really? Aren't those usually reserved for cases like when your faulty tires will lead to potentially fatal accidents?

Imagination Movers
This is one of those creepy kid shows where all the characters are adults. If you were to take the Wiggles and All-Americanize them, you'd get the Imagination Movers. They're a band of warehouse workers (band in both the musical sense as well as the camaraderie one) who solve incidental problems within fifteen minutes, finding excuses to play original music along the way. In short: some garage band tried to make it big, didn't, and opted instead to do a children's show. The result is an eerie sense of pedophilia:

I don't think any parent really wants Mr. Goatee prancing around in front of their children every day. But apparently, they do.

It Begins

2009-11-11T11:06:00.004-07:00

It's on.

Atlas Shrugged

2009-11-01T15:59:00.004-07:00

Atlas Shrugged is not a small book in any way. It's hefty. It's a veritable tome. My version has nearly 1100 pages, and each page is packed with chunky paragraphs in 8 point font. Additionally, the themes of Shrugged are pretty weighty themselves. It took me the better part of a year to get through this volume, and that's more because of the second fact than it is the first. The book's messages about free will and independence are delved into with incredible depth, and nearly every page demands that the reader sit back and reflect on its contents. At its base, though, lies a simple Good Vs. Evil conflict, where the heroes overcome enormous obstacles to save the world from disaster. There is mystery, intrigue, and foreshadowing. But the good guys are industrialists and the bad guys are lazy freeloaders and bureaucrats. It's an economics epic where the author pushes its philosophical message so far that it cannot be received as Just A Story. The book centers around its title metaphor, that of the great minds of the country going on strike and shrugging off the weight of a world that takes advantage of their successes and punishes them for their virtues. It's heady stuff, and it demands a heady response. While Shrugged's metaphor is poignant, especially during a time when the government is bailing out banks, owning car companies and firing executives, I still have some problems with how it's used in this book. Examples follow.

Atlas Skipped Sunday School
Rand goes out of her way to denounce the "mystics" of religion. Sharing, giving, and charity are all denounced strongly, on any level of interaction. But it goes further than that. Some basic immoral acts such as adultery are lifted up as triumphs of Rand's philosophy. The man who commits it feels guilt, and that guilt is considered, by the text, to be his great flaw. The woman he commits adultery with, Dagny Taggart, the main character of the book, has sexual relations with three different men--all considered to be exemplars of Rand's philosophy. Examples of sexual promiscuity and infidelity are tied uncomfortably to the rest of Rand's philosophy, and she goes out of her way to make those connections, and to justify them.

Atlas Didn't Know When To Shut Up
A lot of this book is abstraction. Probably 1247 pages of this 1100 page book are devoted to describing every philosophical nuance of a look or a stance or a thought. Adjectives aren't good enough for Rand. People look like extensive metaphors and feelings--everybody embodies some kind of philosophy, whether it's the way they drink their coffee or the way they cook food. It adds depth. It can also grate my freaking nerves after awhile. Like after an entire page. The worst, though, is a 60 page monologue given by the fictional champion of Rand's philosophy. This is given near the 900 page mark, after all of the events of the plot have illustrated Rand's theme. But that's not enough. She needs 60 pages straight of dialogue, all from one single character, to punctuate it. It's the single greatest example of breaking the Show versus Tell rule I've encountered. Not only does this guy outright state what's already been shown, he's also outright stating what many characters have already outright stated. Even worse, he outright repeats himself nearly the entirety of the monologue. We get it. The book's long enough already.

Atlas Ruled Candyland
One of the reasons that Rand's philosophy comes forward so strongly and clearly in Shrugged is the fact that the entire setting is devised to do so. The antagonists of the novel, the bureaucrats, politicians, and lazy people, are clumsily crafted caricatures. While it's true that the things they do and the things they believe are all too often represented in our real world, these characters are almost insultingly flat. They are better suited to warding off fowl than they are to representing human beings.

Rand works hard to condemn the existence of gray in her black-and-white view of life, but she does so through a novel which presents a black-and-white reality. Obviously, this is a problem intrinsic to her medium--we cannot comprehensively prove anything about reality through fiction, but that is especially true when that fiction is pointed towards proving a specific thing. So while Rand's allegory is intelligent and poignant, it still suffers from the fact that it is, after all, just an allegory.

Final Thoughts
In the end, this is a must-read. The only reason that I needed to summarize my criticisms of the book is because the book forced me to. Shrugged is so well thought out that, in order to really read the book, you have to digest what it's saying, page by page, and look at what you really think. I don't agree with it all. But the victory of Shrugged is that I have to make that decision. The book takes itself so seriously that you have to, too. You have to decide when it takes itself too seriously, and when it's speaking truth. By the end, I found myself considering a lot of my own philosophies. I didn't buy it all, and while Rand may say that I failed her book, I still think that Atlas Shrugged wins a victory.

Science joke

2009-10-08T16:04:00.006-06:00

Okay, so I just came up with this, and I'm really proud of it. That will probably only continue for the next five minutes, so I'll hurry up and tell it:

So Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr all end up in this weird alternate universe where famous people (dead and living) get together for the sake of being material for great jokes. After years of walking into different bars and crossing that famous road, they finally all run into each other.

Upon meeting each other, they are all suddenly beset by an impulsive urge to engage in a footrace. For the sake of impartiality, they enlist Sir Isaac Newton as the official. Sir Newton spends two minutes jamming ball and powder into his 1700s pistol, and then he fires it in the air, signaling the beginning of the race.

Stephen Hawking wheels into a black hole and pops out at the finish line.

Albert Einstein grabs an anvil and yells that because E=Mc^2, he just performed the equivalent of beating everybody in the footrace.

Niels Bohr...it's hard to tell what happened with Bohr. Witnesses of the race say that he lost by a mile, but Bohr contends that he won while nobody was watching.

In order to settle the dispute, the three famous physicists all come up to Sir Newton to see what he says, being the father of physics and everything.

Sir Newton opens his mouth to answer, but only blood comes out. He had been suddenly struck by the ball he had fired into the air minutes earlier, because as we all know, what goes up must come down.

Everything You Need To Know

2009-09-01T16:07:00.002-06:00

Over the last eight months, I’ve seen a...healthy amount of teenage chick flicks. They are...thoughtful, inspired, intelligent exposés of teenage life, and, obviously, of life in general. Here is the wisdom I’ve been taught:

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED BY WATCHING TONS OF TEENAGE CHICK FLICKS:

1. It’s not your looks that are important, but who you are on the inside, especially when you’re being played by Lindsey Lohan, Amanda Bynes, Anne Hathaway, Hilary Duff, or Mandi Moore.

2. When life gets hard, you just need to power on through it by having a fairy godmother/rich royal relative/understanding father/presidential father/sensitive boyfriend.

3. The best way to resolve every complication in your life at once is by making a heartfelt speech in a large public setting, to everyone, including random strangers who have no idea who you are but who will still nod their heads in understanding as you talk vainly about yourself.

4. Popularity doesn’t mean anything—except that you’re a jerk.

5. Never feel like you need to change yourself. Unless you do. In that case, a radical wardrobe switch will do the trick (see number 2).

6. Someone always has a crush on you.

7. While looks aren’t important (see number 1), your true love will always be good-looking, anyway. Not that that’s important.

8. You shouldn’t judge others and fit them into stereotypes.

9. Cheerleaders are always freaking jerks, unless you’re a cheerleader.

10. When you make a mistake, everyone will eventually forgive you and you’ll come to a greater understanding of your true self (which was pretty awesome in the first place, anyway). This will all happen at the same time (see number 3).

Well, I have to go now. I’m off to find a fairy godmother/rich royal relative who’s willing to buy me a new wardrobe so that I can better understand that it’s my inside which is important, giving me enough maturity to have a sexy significant other.

New Blog

2009-04-27T14:11:00.004-06:00

I've always been wary of "second blogs." I'm more especially wary of third and fourth blogs, but they don't have the same ominous slippery-slope feeling of the second. I feel like the division of people's online personalities into several different blogs does not translate very well to real life. You don't have a political self, a casual social self, a religious self, and a funny-comics-that-I-happen-to-like self that you direct your friends to in real life. They're all the same self.

I think this is why people don't have more than one facebook page. (Well, most people don't.) So, I hope that my desire to start a second blog doesn't irreversibly fracture some vital part of my Actual Personality. I feel like there are now Two Of Me online, involved in some kind of less antagonistic Gollum/Smeagol relationship. I don't know why I don't just merge all of this hypothetical content I suddenly aspire to write with the content of this blog. Either way, for now I have two blogs, and the Gollum to my * is Short Stories That Don't Suck.

Short Stories That Don't Suck is inspired by my curiosity with the short story genre as a writer. I love to write short stories, and from what I can tell, a lot of writers do. But according to a lot of people, the genre's passed the point of no return, received orange pips in the mail, forgot to wipe the blood of a lamb on their doorpost, etc. But I hypothesize that during such a period of history when all we want are shorter and quicker things (see: text messaging, Twitter, commercials), short stories should not be sucking. If anything, there should already be some kind of iTunes-like service where you can purchase a single short story for 99 cents instead of having to buy the entire collection from a bookstore.

Stephen King suggested that short stories are becoming a little too elitist and literary. He might have a point, though I love my literary fiction. I want to find the stories that are good whether you're an English major or not, the kind of story you'd recommend to both Uncle Archibald and Uncle Bill. What I've opted to do with SSTDS is post, three times a week, a different short story you can read for free online. (Not the same story three times.) They'll be, in my estimation, short stories worth reading and worth remembering. I hope the blog turns out to simultaneously be some form of defense for the genre as well as a successful exercise in articulating my aesthetics.

Meanwhile, * will probably remain a forum for me posting short, random crap with intermittent and inconsistent intervals. Meanwhile, go read a good short story every now and then. Email me (cduzett@gmail.com) a list of what you think some of the best short stories you've ever read are; that'd be enormously helpful.

Papers

2009-04-20T09:41:00.006-06:00

In a period of seven days, running from Monday, April 6 through Monday, April 13, I wrote five papers, including and limited to:

- A paper on how Agamben's critique of Heidegger's "animal" and Bill Brown's thing theory relates to Heidegger's "things," and then how that applies to the Scottish crime fiction novel Laidlaw. One full page, single-spaced.

- A paper on how Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Maynard Dixon's Depression-era painting "Forgotten Man" both exhibit Existential alienation and isolation. Three pages, double-spaced.

- A paper on how Samuel Beckett's play Endgame demolishes traditional narratives, especially Aristotelian beginning-middle-end constructs. Seven full pages, double-spaced.

- A paper on how Nuyorican poetry now ironically has a set of rules that its poets must conform to despite how the genre was originally formed around the idea of resisting rules and creating raw, new expression. Six full pages, single-spaced.

- A paper on how, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael's quest to understand the whale bears many similarities to Kant's sublime (as outlined by Paul De Man), while Ahab and the Pequod's quest to kill the whale bears many similarities to Wordsworth's sublime. Nine full pages, single-spaced.

This was all accomplished within that seven day period, i.e., I idiotically didn't even start any of them beforehand.

It's finishing weeks like that that make me A) grateful for the interesting things I get to write about, while also B) glad that Spring term will be my last in the English major.

Truth.

2009-03-11T10:41:00.002-06:00

This comes from Bill Simmons, heralded sports columnist for ESPN:

"The more interesting angle for me is how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, "Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?" (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter."

What say ye?

Happy Threeday

2009-03-02T13:42:00.002-07:00

We should celebrate March 3rd as a national holiday - national Threeday. The number three plays a large number of significant roles in our society.

3:33 is the only number on a digital clock where every single digit is the same, and the number of occurring digits is that digit itself. (There are three threes.)

The triangle, the only shape with three corners and three sides, is known as the strongest shape for supporting weight.

Meanwhile, the tripod is considered the weakest structure in politics.

But the love triangle is one of the most intriguing interactions because of its imbalance.

This is the same with its opposite, the hate triangle, best observed in the dramatic performances of the artists Curly, Moe and Larry.

In religion: Christianity has spent hundreds of years trying to nail down the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The Wise Men brought Christ three different gifts at his birth, he ministered publically for three separate years, was resurrected on the third day, and Peter confessed and denied Christ three times.

According to both School House Rock and Jack Black in the critically-acclaimed film School of Rock, three is a magic number.

In early counting systems, they could articulate the numbers one and two, but three proved too elusive and mysterious.

Our very DNA and RNA are structured in triplet codon systems.

Many concepts in science are divided into three separate parts: ie, Freud's id, ego, and super-ego, the Three laws of Thermodynamics, Newton's Three Laws, Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, etc.

According to the Pythagoreans, 3 was the noblest of all digits.

Have you ever heard of a 2- or 4- ring binder or notebook?

When trying to organize a synchronized action, people often count to three.

Three is considered a "good number" in Chinese culture because it sounds like the word "alive."

Bad luck comes in threes. In Vietnam, it's bad luck to take a picture with three people in it. Meanwhile, third time's the charm.

Three is the closest integer to both pi (3.14...) and e (2.71...)

There are three notes in a triad, the most basic and important form of any chord.

The highest personal distinction in a hockey game is scoring three goals, or a hat trick.

The Divine Comedy is made up of 3 parts of 33 cantos each, and was written in terza rima (a poetic structure that relies on groups of three-line structures).

Famous collections of fictional characters: The Three Musketeers, the Three Amigos, Three Blind Mice, the Three Sisters, etc.

In the Lord of the Rings, the Three Rings of Power are given to the elves.

The standard number of lives given in most video and arcade games is three.

Earth is the third rock from the sun.

Help celebrate National Threeday by thinking of more ways that the number three is personally significant to you and your life, and post them here.

Yes, that is the only way that you can celebrate National Threeday.

For more information on the number three, go here.

Recent Quotations

2009-02-24T14:06:00.002-07:00

Allie and I have been watching a lot of movies. Actually, we've been watching a lot of Lost, mostly. Some excellent quotations from our experiences:

From Lost
KATE: What are you up to?
KATE'S NEWLYWED HUSBAND: Oh, just finishing this report on a fugitive down in Tampa. Just paperwork.
KATE (EARNEST): What if I were a fugitive? What if I were a fugitive and I blew up my Dad?
KATE'S NEWLYWED HUSBAND: Uhhh...

From Labyrinth

CRAZY ORANGE PUPPET THAT LOOKS LIKE WILY COYOTE, IN THE MIDST OF SONG: I have an idea! Let's take our heads off! (they take off their heads)

From American Dreamz

SHOW HOST: Now, don't be stupid.
HEARTBROKEN BOYFRIEND OF CONTESTANT: I'll show you how stupid I am by blowing myself up with this bomb I found!

From Mean Girls

(bus crashes into Lindsey Lohan's girl-nemesis)
LINDSEY LOHAN (NARRATING): And that is the day that Regina George died.
CARL (AT THE TV): Are you serious??
LINDSEY LOHAN (NARRATING): Actually, I'm just kidding.
ALLIE laughs histerically, without ceasing.

From Mean Girls, again

GIRL: Looks like the juniors have a new set of plastics.
(THREE CLIQUE-Y GIRLS SAUNTER INTO THE STREET)
(BUS SMASHES RIGHT THROUGH THEM)
CARL: WHAT??
LINDSEY LOHAN: Just kidding.

May you rot in the ninth circle of Hell, Lindsey Lohan - rot right next to Brutus.

Imagined Adventures at the ROTC Building

2009-01-27T14:19:00.002-07:00

So yesterday at Olive Garden, our server was named Hutch. Afterward, we watched (as originally planned) Hitch. Coincidence?

Yes.

In addition, I'm now working early-morning custodial in the Law building. Even though we start at 4:30 in the morning, we can't get everything done by the time students start showing up at 6:45. They all hunker down into their personal study carrels and decipher arcane texts. The building's usually pretty clean by itself without us. I suppose that law students are more responsible and clean.

I also help clean the ROTC building. By all that is good and worthwhile, I exclaim EGADS! What a study in contrasts! They've got airsoft pellets all over the hall floors, and they're astoundingly impressive at tracking outdoor elements into every nook of the building. Additionally, taking out the garbage is always an adventure. You would be amazed at what goes into America's finest: yogurt, McDonald's, popcorn, cereal, Chinese (the food, not the people), candy bars, donuts -- and that's just one little garbage can in one little personal office.

Because we clean the building from 4:30 to 7 and don't really see anybody come in, I have this visual expectation of all these Corporals and Lieutenants being giant stuffed slugs, not unlike military versions of Jabba the Hutt. This would explain the slime dragged up and down the stairs.

They've got all kinds of interesting things in that building. The basement has racks upon racks of airsoft weaponry. One guy has a TV and XBox set up in his office with stacks of video games nearby. Several guys have swords sittin' on their desks. Uh, good. It's a good thing they've always got one close by in case they get annoyed at the guy playing his XBox and they need to challenge him to a duel. Perhaps the swords are for picking orange chicken out of their teeth?

This morning one of these officers finally came in while I was still working. Extreme exclamations, Batman! I think the man was carved out of stone. He was tall, intimidating, and I'm pretty sure he could kill me by just winking at me if he wanted. I don't believe that he actually ate the things that ended up in his garbage. (Well, I guess that's why they're in the garbage.) You know what I mean. (Sure we do.) They must manhandle their underlings into devouring disgusting foods and putting the trash into their garbage cans. You know, to show up the guy in the office next door.

"Hey, so I see your garbage is only half-empty. You're probably only half of a man. What does that make you, huh? A 'ma?' An 'an?'"

And then they do battle, with swords. No wonder the place is so messy.

This Post Created Automatically

2009-01-20T14:15:00.002-07:00

In the bathroom today...

Okay, so most blogs that begin with "In the bathroom today" probably are to be avoided. Don't worry.

In the bathroom today, I pulled some toilet paper out of the dispenser and ripped it off. And then it kept coming. I couldn't figure out how it kept coming down until I saw the label "automatic" on the thing. I thought I'd just pulled really hard on the roll or something.

I didn't need to flush when I got out, because the toilet had an automatic flusher. I washed my hands under an automatic faucet and dried them in an automatic hand dryer. As I left, I noticed an automatic hand sanitizer next to the door. I felt kind of insulted by the end of all this.

Questions:

Are there not other human operations that better deserve automatic services? And -

Were we not warned by Dav Pilkey about our future after giving intelligence to our baser appliances?

Laser Beams

2008-12-26T15:00:00.005-07:00

I was going to present this entry as a drive-by blogging complete with bullets, but I'm now aware that I don't know how to create bullets in this text box. So I'm going to use dashes, which look more like laser beams.

- Environmental pendulum-swinging at the expense of entertainment. How did a "Humans are destroying the earth" message get into Hellboy II, of all movies? The same overt didacticism makes its way into WALL-E, marring what is otherwise this year's most charming romance (albeit between two computer-animated robots). I tried to overlook this artistic failing, but it really became something worth complaining about after seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still. They took one of the most classic science fiction movies of all time and injected the latest Hollywood agenda into it. You don't deface classics with your modern agenda. You're tampering with the sentiments and ideas of another time and era, and prostituting them out in order to push a simplistic liberal lesson. Al Gorax, who speaks for the trees, must be delighted. Interestingly enough, these shameless parables are all science fiction/fantasy.

- Old things found while cleaning out my drawers: a voodoo doll. My wisdom teeth. Two broken watches. A die. A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles playing card. A broken spacebar. A 2005 Boy Scout National Jamboree shot glass. It's not only interesting to ponder what these trinkets represent, but also to see what I'd decided was worth keeping around. These trinkets are things that have no use except for being kept. Why do we keep what we keep?

- I took the GRE last week. I was hoping for at least a 600 on the verbal such that I'd have a good shot at the MFA programs I'm applying to. I did...alright. I obviously did okay enough that I'm willing to talk about it online - I got a 580 on the verbal and a 750 on the Quantitative. So while I did mediocre on the section that counted, I almost scored perfectly on the section that didn't. This created a unique frustration - doing poorly in what I'm supposed to be excellent at while doing excellently in what I'm supposed to be poor at. The frustration becomes not just a matter of performance but of identity. I wonder if I've inaccurately assumed certain labels of strength while ignoring my real ones. The idea that I'm not really playing to my strengths in chasing my writing dream is a little haunting.

- Christmas season is an interesting time of self-analysis, specifically while buying presents. What are your relationships with people? Have you known what to get them for months, or are they the kind of people you walk into Fred Meyer's for with a $10 budget and no idea what to get them? Why don't you know? And then there are all the people that you do admittedly like and admire but don't get them any gifts. Why do people end up in these categories?

- A couple weeks ago it finally snowed in Provo. Last year it started snowing in October and didn't let up until April. I kept expecting the snow to fall all semester but eventually let down my guard and assumed it wouldn't happen. When it finally fell, it was cold and miserable and perhaps even moreso for the fact that I'd forgotten it was coming. In Portland it snowed over a foot in a week, trashing roads in cities with no snowplows. People couldn't figure out how and where to put their chains on, and barreled into snow banks. It hadn't snowed that thickly that time of year for decades. When it came, no one was prepared, and it came with the harsh presence and finality of Judgment. What habits do we have? What decisions are we making? Are we happy with ourselves? The snow reminded me of the final accountings that all come so suddenly. I'm getting married and my single life is over. The snow will fall on graduation as my schooling finishes. The snow will fall when we have kids, when our kids leave, on my deathbed, while I'm near someone else's deathbed. We can't let ourselves forget about the coming of things we know are coming.

The Trouble With Stories

2008-11-28T23:32:00.003-07:00

Is there a negative psychological effect to fiction?

Ian McEwan's Atonement does a pretty good job of dealing with this issue. No amount of clever writing can change the difficulties of real life.

Stories exist as a medium, as a form, because they are notable. In order to be told, something must be worth telling. Good stories are hard to forget because they're notable - of interest.

That same feature so intrinsic to the definition of stories is what makes them so incongruous to reality. Because stories are notable, that means that similar things don't happen very much in reality. It's true that they happen - but usually only enough to be noticed, not enough to be counted on.

But what happens when our real lives consist mostly of us hearing, seeing, or reading stories? We're artificially injecting swashbuckling, heart-wrenching "notability" into our lives when it's not really there. While books are not being read as voraciously as late, fiction is well-represented in the many movies and TV shows that we watch. People's minds are constantly running through 30-minute story arcs, scenes of pre-constructed, zippy dialogue, and considering severe character development over the course of a two-hour movie.

Maybe we don't consider the possible bridges between our obsession with stories and our own reality because we consciously know that these stories are fiction. If we know it's not real, how could it possibly affect our own realities?

The problem is that we want them to be real. These stories are notable, remember - they're exciting, they're different, and there's a reason we watch/listen/read them in the first place. If we can find excuses to somehow incorporate the thrill or excitement of a fictional story into our own life, we are likely to do so. Even if we are not watching movies or TV shows all day, the ideas of popular narrative still follow us around. Movie quotes, anyone?

When I find myself frustrated with someone or something, I find myself constructing a heated, back-and-forth scene of dialogue in my head. I imagine that the full drama of my emotions will best be resolved the way they are in stories - in these smashmouth verbal interactions where every line is a carefully crafted zinger that heightens the stakes. When there is a slight possibility of danger in some situation, I imagine the most dramatic, heroic way that I might react. When someone is angry with me, I imagine their anger to be like that of hate-filled antagonists from action movies. When you see anything in your relationships to be like those of fictional relationships, it's easy to assume that they'll turn out the same. Some of this is very subconscious, but pay attention to how you view your reality based on the stories you've seen/heard/read.

What is the problem with this?

While stories are reflections on real life, and are at least inspired by ideas of real life even in the cases of fantasy and science fiction, they are not just passive reflections. Their narrative commentary, because of its high concentration in our society, turns and affects reality.

Fictional characters such as Mickey Mouse, Superman and Santa Claus are better known and hold more sway in popular culture and conversation than actual people with real positions of power, such as your state's Senators.

Obviously, I'm a big fan of the reading and writing of stories, and I have a lot of thoughts as to why human peoples have always liked telling them, and why we should. Maybe that's a post for another day. But is there a point of diminishing returns when it comes to stories? A point where reading another novel, watching another movie or following another TV show just screws with your life?

Key indicators

2008-10-10T17:35:00.006-06:00

On my mission, in order to indicate how effective we were for the week, we were required to report our efforts via a set of "key indicators." I feel that the success of my trip may likewise be "indicated" by a rubric of numerical statistics. (Man, I hate those non-numerical statistics.)

TRAINS MISSED: 0
Okay, good.

TRAINS THAT ARRIVED ON TIME: 0
DamTrak.

CRAZY POET LADIES ENCOUNTERED: 1
True story. She also knew all about 9/11 before it happened - her ex-boyfriend was involved in its coordination, using walkie-talkies. And roughly twice an hour, she would randomly yell, to nobody in particular, "You're FIRED, Mister." She recited some of her poetry - it was amazing.

RAINY DAYS: 2
It rained during my visit to DC, which was decidedly lame, and in the middle of listening to Stevie Wonder at Jazzfest in New Orleans. Otherwise, the weather pretty much rocked.

AMAZING FOOD ITEMS CONSUMED: 5
Gumbo, Jambalaya, binons, New York pizza, chocolate-and-banana crepes.

PEOPLE WHO ASKED ME FOR MONEY IN CHICAGO IN A 2 HOUR PERIOD: 7
And they were good at it.

MENNONITES: 1

MUSEUMS VISITED: 8
Three in Charlotte, the Natural History Museum in DC, the Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian, and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and the Museum of Modern Art.

DAYS: 25

SACRAMENT MEETINGS: 2

COST OF THE 30 DAY PASS: $650

EXPECTED ROAMING CHARGES IN CANADA: $0

ACTUAL ROAMING CHARGES IN CANADA: Mere numbers cannot adequately describe this higher plane of financial destruction.

POEMS WRITTEN: 6

HOSTELS STAYED IN: 3

NIAGARA FALLS: Not that cool.

(Darn those non-numerical statistics.)

AMBITIOUS "WORLD-CHANGING" COLLEGE KIDS MET - 2. From Chicago.

GAMES OF CHESS WON IN NEW YORK CITY PARKS: 0. I didn't have the $5 necessary to throw down.

BOOKS READ: 5

STREET MUSICIANS PLAYED WITH: 1. I met this skinny bearded guy off of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I accompanied his broken guitar with my harmonica, and a good time was had by all, excepting those who heard us.

Other statistics currently escape me. Ask me any other questions you want about my trip, and I'll respond accordingly.

Tacoma

2008-10-10T16:35:00.002-06:00

(May 20-21)

My cousin of yore picked me up in Seattle. This was incredibly nice of him, because I only asked him if I could stay there like the night before, and also because I didn't know that he actually lived in Tacoma, at least an hour's drive away from where my train pulled in. So while I was originally planning on roaming the streets of Seattle and getting all "with" the groovy culture there, I ended up staying with my cousin in a less exciting place - his apartment.

Brian, my cousin, is in the Navy, and was on leave because his wife was ready to pop Kid #2 and having complications. Little did I know that she was one week away giving birth.

Brian and I caught up in the car - it was eerie to be doing so with Demetrius in a car seat, his two year old kid, because last time I saw Brian he wasn't even married. (Demetrius is surely the product of too much faith placed in a baby book.) I asked him about the Navy and stuff, and about marriage.

Basically, he told me to not get married quick because it can occasionally be a pain in the aft.

There really wasn't anything exciting in Tacoma. That's probably why it's taken me 43 months to get around to writing this blog entry. Honestly, we just sat around and watched TV with Brian's pregnant wife, Stephanie, and her friend, Stephanie. Demetrius would take our dishes to the kitchen for us, when he wasn't intentionally hitting himself in the face for amusement.

We watched Jeepers Creepers 2, American Idol, some soap opera, Hell's Kitchen, some other stuff...it was really mind-numbing, and in a very cramped apartment. Another problem was that they had a dog, which they kept inside. That's a recipe.

You know, for disaster.

I barely made my train the next day, but I definitely did make it. I was excited to finally be heading home. It was very weird when I began to hear where people were from, to hear a (503) area code again. People mentioned being from these familiar places such as "Hillsboro," "Beaverton," and "Bangladesh." A couple of Indian guys sat behind me and talked really loudly on their cell phones.

Oh, so we're not allowed to smoke on these trains, right? They catch somebody smoking in the bathroom (I don't know how they do this - frankly I'm kind of disturbed) and so they make an announcement reiterating that if anybody's caught smoking the bathroom, they'll kick 'em off the train at the next stop with police escort. So five minutes later, somebody else decides to smoke in the bathroom, and he's caught, and gets kicked off the train. Good work, son.

I made it home with my red backpack and all, ready to finally live in one place and have someone, like a Mom or something, give me food every day. And thus, my trip ended.

Vancouver, B.C.

2008-08-10T17:45:00.003-06:00

(May 18-19)

My pockets jingling with Loonies and Toonies, I taxied over to my hostel in downtown Vancouver. The hostel itself was very hip - there was a bar on the bottom floor, pool tables and computers and TVs on the second, and colorful posters on all the walls of all the halls.

I was pretty tired and planned on napping, but my room wasn't going to be ready for me until several hours later. So I stashed my backpack and just took with me my camera, notebook, and Book of Mormon and started walking around downtown Vancouver, looking for something to eat and a place to sit down and eat it. Pizza joints were in bounteous supply.

Downtown Vancouver was really interesting. I've never been so overtly petitioned for "money for drugs" so often, in so short a period. (Did you know that Cubans are legal in Canada?)

(Cuban cigars are, too.)

I sat down on a park bench in a small little park, reading my little pocket Book of Mormon. The book itself was covered up - something I did in Texas in order to protect it from sweat - but clipped on the front cover is my black missionary tag. I guess I never wanted to lose my tag, and clipping it onto my Book of Mormon seemed like a way to remind me of my two years in Texas, and the people there.

This guy on the park bench across from me asked me what I was reading, and I told him "the scriptures." He smiled and we got to talking - he found out I was Mormon, and he told me he was "almost Mormon once." He asked what I was doing in Vancouver, and I told him about my trip and everything. Then Benny (that was his name) offered to drive me around the city and show me the sights. I said "Sure, why not?" and we started walking to his car.

This seemed incredibly unsafe.

As we walked, he talked about how the mormon missionaries used to come by for two or three years, until he backed out of his baptism. He described some of the pictures in the Book of Mormon, referred to Joseph Smith and some other things. We started walking off to an obscure back parking lot, where there wasn't anybody else around. At this point, I started imagining myself waking up in an alley eight hours later with a headache and without a spleen.

But all my worries were for naught. He drove me around the city, while explaining how Vancouver was ranked "the number one city in the world." He bragged about how health care is free, how you can just go to the emergency room whenever you want to. He talked about his family, how he and his ex-wife moved from the Phillipines to Canada, and then she left him with his three children to raise on his own. After they've all moved out, he volunteers doing social work for a bank as well as some other part-time work.

He took me to Stanley Park, which is a ginormous outdoor wonderland which eats Central Parks for breakfast. It has its own bay, with boats in it. I began to realize how truly awesome Vancouver is. It's got beaches (Benny pointed out to me where the nude beaches were), parks, mountains, woods, and a river. He bought me lunch and forced me to eat some Italian ice cream afterward, and basically was my personal tour guide, for free, just because he had some time on his hands and knew that I didn't know anything about Vancouver.

We talked more about his experience with the missionaries. I think that might've been the real reason he picked me up, a need to air out his previous experiences, and seeing my missionary tag pricked his curiosity enough to do so. (Also, he was just a genuinely nice guy.) I felt like, for the first time since my mission, a missionary. From all of his life that he shared with me, I genuinely cared about this guy, especially because of his continual acts of kindness towards me. He decided to read again in his Book of Mormon, and we were both glad we'd met. We exchanged emails and phone numbers and have been in intermittent contact since.

It was a great Sunday. It's interesting how, after traveling through the continent in a counter-clockwise movement, I end up in a place where a) someone was totally willing to make my day, and b) I could talk with someone who wanted to know about the gospel.

This was definitely the highlight of my time in Vancouver. I think that's probably what life should be like, actually. The highlights of life probably won't be amusement parks or monuments, but meaningful interactions with people.

It did help, though, that also in Vancouver, I ate the Second Best Thing In The World: a chocolate and banana crepe.

By the way, make that plural. I ate several of them. Those Loonies and Toonies ended up being good for something after all.

Canada - On The Train

2008-07-13T21:13:00.003-06:00

(May 15-17)

I spent three days, straight, on a crowded Canadian train, traveling through the Canadian wilderness (pictured above). For clarification's sake - yes, three days is actually a very long time to be on a train without getting off. I figured that I would be fine, well-armed with my random used book purchases from New York City (I pulled four books off the 50 cent rack). Unfortunately, the first book I read, and the most well-recommended on its cover, was "Say Nothing" by James Hanley.

"Masterly," boasts Times Literary Supplement, "...generates power." (Hydroelectric power? Nuclear power?) "Brilliant...a future classic" predicts The New York Times Book Review. (I guess the book still has thousands of years of the future to become a classic, so I can't yet argue with this one. But "brilliant" is kind of pushing it.)

But what of the author? "Hanley has an extraordinary talent for evoking powerful emotions," observes Newsweek. (Does disgust count as a powerful emotion? And what happens when he goes to a party? Does everyone get really angry or depressed, and the whole party becomes wildly menopausal until someone remarks "Oh, that's Jim's fault. He has an extraordinary talent for evoking powerful emotions. Read it in Newsweek"?) The New York Times is equally ambiguous in their overt praise for Jim - "There is no novelist working today to compare to James Hanley." (Once we discard all of the novelists who are actually employed from our reasoning, we're left to wonder what kind of comparison they intended.)

I will just say that the book seemed very pointless and needlessly frustrating to read. I will not further my criticism, as I have been commanded not to, by the back of the book - "You will not be able to put it down," it claims. Unfortunately, I am forever cursed by the command that follows - "You will never forget it." Heaven help me.

Luckily, I did have other reading material, and I actually highly recommend one of the other books I read - "The Testament" by Elie Wiesel. It's the fictional autobiography of a Jewish communist poet written in a torture chamber. Inside of a circus tent.

Most of my journey was in the back of one of the cars, sitting next to this old guy. At night, his head rolled onto my shoulder, exactly how it happens in the movies for a cheap snicker. And the train people were seated across the aisle from us, leaving the light on all night and talking to each other. It didn't help that the old, bald guy was named "Carl," and people really enjoyed addressing him while I was trying to sleep. By the way, I was kidding about the circus tent.

I had a delightful conversation with this Mennonite guy in the dining car, where he explained some of the finer points of Canadian culture. Their two most common units of currency are the Loonie:

And the Toonie:

That is actually what everyone calls them, and when you realize the unfortunate pair that those words make, it becomes clear why nobody ever really takes Canada seriously.

I did survive the pocket-heavy currency, the occasional French, and lilted accents of my Canadian Train Trek and eventually made it to Vancouver. TUNE IN NEXT TIME!!!

Niagara Falls

2008-06-04T18:42:00.003-06:00

(May 14)

Yeah, that's about it.

New York City

2008-05-30T22:43:00.010-06:00

(May 12-13)

New York City is America's most populous metropolis. (Say "most populous metropolis" three times fast.) It boasts 8 million denizens, all of them taxi drivers. Clear communication can be difficult in a city with such diversity - part of being a New Yorker involves not knowing English. Because of this, New Yorkers have developed a shared language with which to articulate their feelings, known as Car Horn. (It is helpful that all New Yorkers own a taxi cab with which to communicate.)

I spent most of my time in New York visiting museums. The Moma and the Met, in particular. The Moma was, as I believe I once put it, mind-blowing. It also enlightened and inspired my mental capacities. I was amazed when, in the middle of a world-famous art museum, this one guy was walking through all the exhibits with his eyes on the floor. He didn't look up once. Fortunately, he could not have missed these fine twins of aesthetic expression:

Is that metallic poo? My dad says it's actually people on top of each other, under a blanket of putty. Who knows?

Every room/exhibit in the Moma had an exact limit, as in limiting how many people could be in it. They came up with figures, and I'm not kidding, like 572, 385, and 191. "No more than 572 PEOPLE are allowed in this room at once. - NYFD" It made me wonder - how did they figure this out? Was it Trial and Error? Is this based on how many people can physically fit inside the room while leaving space for last-minute escape? And if so, what human dimensions were used? Did they account for the effect of New York pizza?

More importantly, I wondered how this might be enforced. If a room is found to have 580 people, would they not be so physically packed that it'd be physically impossible for 8 people to squeeze themselves free? Would all this force compress everyone into some dense, shapeless mass? Is that what that iron sludge was? Or if there are already 572 people in a room, are we expected to intuitively know that we are Number 573 and not step inside? How can we know not to step in and become Number 573 if the Person Limit is posted inside the exhibit, instead of outside like a portentous ward of Doom? Should we take numbers?

Exhibit B:

This was right next to Andy Warhol's army of Campbell's. What is this? Does this evoke thought just because we assume it's in the museum for a reason?

I spent a lot of my time in a photography gallery which actually didn't contain any photography, but was designed for taking pictures. (See the upper-right of my blog.) Another example:

This was a wall made of shaped hexagons of mirrors and windows, which made for some trippy sights when you walked up to it.

Unfortunately, I spent so much time in this exhibit, as well as looking at a large painting of the word "OOF," that the museum began to close before I'd seen the top two floors (where all of the best stuff is to be found). The idea suddenly occurred to me - what if somebody just sprinted through a museum? What if people never paused when something caught their eye, and just sprinted from exhibit to exhibit and experienced the entire museum in just 20 minutes? Would the changing, peripheral Modern aesthetics have some kind of effect on us? How different would it be from staring at paintings of chicken noodle soup and the word "OOPS" for 10 minutes a piece trying to figure things out one piece at a time?

I loved the museums. The pure amount of art was staggering, and it was enough to hammer a point into my skull. This was very painful, and I was afraid that my skull would continue to split along the rupture, but a taxi driver who drove not unlike Indiana Jones got me to a hospital in time to patch things up. After this was resolved, I realized an important idea. Every piece of art was struggling to articulate something.

I thought Modern Art was kind of pompous in that it set out something ridiculous, like this -

- and then challenging the viewer, saying "Ha! Find out what this means, sucker! Try to impose your view on bones in a garbage can!" They don't allow us to decide what things really mean, and create such an odd composition that they're completely distanced from critics who are, let's just face it, neither trained or equipped to deal with bones in garbage cans.

But this is not the idea I was talking about. I came out of these museums feeling that all of this stuff, all of the man hours spent recreating soup cans and arranging bones and shaping alloy defecations must have been inspired by something. And I realized that that something was not just a desire to stick it to the viewer, or to simply create eye candy, or even to preach some message.

I think all of these odd forms of expression come from a struggle to articulate the something that pervades all of our lives but evades our understandings. They're like an army of question marks - Why did Benny's wife leave him in Winnipeg after bringing him all the way from the Philippines? Does one vote, or even one voice, really count? What spark makes a stranger into a friend? We don't just throw these questions around to show off how "deep" we are - we all have questions like these, uncertainties that seem desperately important to us that might just be swimming under the surface of our consciousness. More than anything, I'd say they show how deep humanity is.

And that, I think, is the fuel behind all the Greco-Roman statues in the Met, all of the 15th century European paintings, and the scribbles and paint splashes of modern art. The artist trying to place himself in the odd and changing stream of his reality, or at least find something solid.

I left the Moma and went directly over to St. Patrick's cathedral, the main Catholic mainstay of New York City. It is really one of the only cathedrals in the US with truly European architecture, according to my Australian hostess.

I walked up the steps into the building and sat in a back pew. The priest was singing a hymn with an organ in the background, and after he finished he gave a little message out of one of the Gospels. And then something hit me.

It was kind of odd to be suddenly hit by something in the middle of a church, so I got up and left. Then an idea occurred to me. Maybe religion is a kind of art. Maybe art is a kind of religion. Maybe they're both arms outstretched to grab hold onto some kind of Answer for all those questions that "hit" us. As a writer, I often wonder what the real role of my chosen profession is; I wonder not just what makes good art, but why we even have art in the first place, and what it does for us. I have deep suspicions, obviously, that it is very important. I wish I could explain the necessity of artists like one could explain the necessity of bridge builders. But I think one of the most important things to "hit" me on my trip was this idea in New York City that art and religion and maybe everything are symptoms of us just raising our questions and looking for answers.

I visited Central Park, walked past the Statues of Liberty sitting and standing outside the park, and actually ended up somehow in Union Square, where I watched people play chess. One guy challenged me to a 5-minute speed game with $5 on the line - I'm not going to lie, losing to that man at speed chess would have topped of my NYC experience like nothing else could've, but I had to get back to my host's apartment for babysitting.

The girls I babysat were insufferably cute and intelligent. The latter proved to be a problem as I waged the War of Getting Them To Bed On Time. Many lives were lost on the crucial battlefields of Brushing Your Teeth, dramatic attacks and counterattacks took place at the battleground of How Far To Leave The Door Open, and untold sacrifices occurred on the bloodied hills of I'm Afraid Of The Dark, Will You Sing Me A Song?

I left the next morning on an early train for Niagara Falls, which I almost missed. Luckily, I was able to grab one of the unstoppable juggernauts known as New York Taxis. As we vaulted down hills and barreled through physically impossible turns, the driver speaking in another language on his cell phone the whole time, I knew that I would be okay. And I was.

Washington DC

2008-05-26T22:24:00.005-06:00

(I was in Washington DC from May 8-11)

DC was an excellent stop on my trip for three reasons.
1) Washington DC has a lot of cool, free stuff to do.
2) I got there on my 22nd birthday
3) I stayed with Allie and her family

My meeting with Allie at the train station was a potential disaster. She knew that I'd been growing a beard:

So Allie, looking for me, sees this enormously fat bearded Michael Moore-looking man with a backpack and worries, momentarily, that I have gained half a ton of fat over a 2 week period. I am quite pleased to resolve her concerns by arriving and meeting her myself. So I hung out with her, looking conspicuously homeless with my beard and big red backpack - making for an odd couple, seeing as how she was in her fancy work clothes.

We spent my birthday visiting all of the cool monuments and memorials at night, fighting through veritable mobs of elementary school field trips. Favorites included the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and pond, the World War II Memorial and the FDR Memorial:

DC ended up being the Death of my Beard. We decided that it was too scraggly-looking and not full enough. Plus, every time I laid down on a pillow it felt like needles were being pushed back into my skin.

Being with Allie was, needless to say - well, I won't say it, because that's obviously needless.

So I was able to get to know Allie's family outside of a funeral for the first time. I am not sure that they got to know me that well, because most of them still refer to me as "Colton."

If I were to rename myself, I would rename myself "Nuff." Then, anytime I made a claim, I'd finish it with "'Nuff said."

Allie gave me Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales for my birthday. This has sentimental value, because we opened up one in California and read possibly the greatest tale ever spun: The Youth Who Could Not Shiver and Shake. It starts thusly: "A father had two sons. The elder was smart and could do anything. But the younger was so stupid that he could neither learn nor understand a thing, and people would say, 'What a burden that stupid boy must be to his father.'" The story includes this guy burning dead corpses on fire to "warm them up," playing hockey with a bunch of skulls, and the murder of a sexton who was posing as a ghost. Other stories ended kind of like this: "And then they might have gone back to the castle and gotten married, but I am not sure if they did or not. But I hope that their lives ended happily." There's something liberating and delightful about the unforgiving randomness in Grimm's fairy tales.

In DC, we also read "A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears," which is an incredibly postmodern picture book which was at once hilariously ridiculous and deep.

We spent a day in DC visiting some museums, including the Natural History Museum and the National Air and Space Museum. There were some pretty awesome sights in the National History Museum, whereas we were baffled in the National Air and Space Museum by the plane "Voyager" - we could not figure out which end was the front. Allie was convinced that it wasn't a real plane, just something the museum threw together for kicks. Apparently, it was the first plane to fly all the way around the world without refueling. It was raining really bad all day, and we'd forgotten an umbrella, though we passed about 27 of them on the way out the door.

I'd kind of like to recreate every event of that weekend here for you, just because the overall experience was incredibly pleasant and just so nice. But I guess I will just say that it was the highlight of my trip. I didn't end up really "experiencing" DC in the same way I wanted to "experience" all the other places I visited, but that's not really why I went to DC.

Not to wax too deep here, but this is a blog - when I first decided to go on this trip, I kind of envisioned it to be this kind of emotional journey where I'd be able to hook location and setting up with different human feelings, and afterwards I'd be able to map out Hope and Depression and Redemption and Angst. While I do think that different places have different "pulses," if you will, I think that that kind of human journey I was looking for is rarely tied to setting, and more often accomplished with people. Great distances are traveled by just being in someone's company.

Charlotte

2008-05-22T18:18:00.003-06:00

Okay, just kidding. This was just the first image that Google gave me for "Charlotte." Anyway -

(I was in Charlotte from May 6-7)

The thing I remember most from Charlotte was my complete frustration with the transit system. The way my tickets worked, I got in at 2 AM with nowhere to stay and ended up sleeping on the hard wooden benches at the train station 'til morning. The family I was staying with actually lived 40 minutes outside of Charlotte and couldn't pick me up until 12. So I figured I'd spend the morning traveling blissfully about the city with ease and heroic splendour. Yes, blogspot, splendour, with a u. I refuse to retype it.

Anyway, I asked the train ticket guy where the closest rail station was. He informed me that the city ran mostly on buses, and referred me to something called "CATS." CATS is short for "Charlotte's Attempt (to make) Travel Suck." "CATS" is catchier. There was a revolving display of approximately 16 jaztrialiion different packets, each including an individual map for an individual bus route for an individual bus. (There were actually just 60, but still. I'm expected to look through all that?) With no actual all-encompassing map, I had absolutely no idea where I was going, or even why. So I went to the closest bus stop and got on.

Apparently, every bus everywhere in Charlotte has one destination - this massive bus hub in the center of the city, where they supposedly came and went, but there's no way it can be reduced to that kind of simplicity. (Remember, we're throwing around figures like 16 jaztrialiion here.) I was deafened by a tinny, grating din - the droning of buses and the screeching of brakes, the chocolate lilt and rhythm of Southern voices.

It was a struggle just to buy a couple of day passes - otherwise I'd suffer some kind of DEATH at the hand of a haphazard series of $1.30 charges. No matter what bus I got on (randomly, I admit), I always ended up back in that hub. Everyone was black, which isn't really a problem, but considering where I grew up (Oregon) and have been (Utah), this was a sign of being in an alien place. Who were these people? What was this place? Why was I there? I felt like a moth in a beehive.

I got on a bus pretending to mirror everyone else's inner-city savvy and self-assurance, but it wasn't long before I understood - understood that I was headed in the completely wrong direction, out towards a local suburb, to a place and people I couldn't really know.

It was then, on that thrumming, staggering bus, that I remembered the importance of my clumsy red backpack and all it held. It was like some kind of symbol of identity for me, something tied to me that I knew and could touch.

I only got off when someone else did, keeping with my facade of belonging and understanding. I sat down at the bus stop, inhaling exhaust, and I tooted dejectedly on my harmonica.

I went on this trip with the idea that no matter where I went, I'd be able to adapt and assimilate and achieve soaring insights. It didn't feel like that on the Charlotte buses. I bemoaned the tragedy of my limp assumptions, that cultures could be crossed and languages could be learned. I bemoaned the lack of some universal, encompassing map that bridged systems of place and thought.

At that grassy, lonely suburb, I was forced to acknowledge Emerson's haunting reminder. The suburb was an unknown place, but unknown places stopped mattering because all place stopped mattering. To console myself, I didn't think fondly on the lights of Bourbon street or the skyscrapers of Chicago. I thought of having a friend among strangers, of holding her hand on the jittering bus; and then it wouldn't matter that place didn't matter.

Atlanta

2008-05-13T20:12:00.002-06:00

(I stayed in Atlanta from May 3-5)

I spent most of my time in Atlanta with a couple in their sixties who didn't actually live in Atlanta, but 30 minutes outside of it, leading to little interaction with the city of Atlanta itself. This was fine.

Sunday night we did go to Stone Mountain Park, which is essentially a Confederate shrine. It featured a single large rock that, if you were on Honey I Shrunk The Blog Reader it might resemble a bean or potato. It is, apparently, the biggest single rock in the world. Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis are all carved in its face. The park was filled with black people.

I decided to spend most of Monday dropped off in downtown Atlanta, far away from thick Confederate irony. We drove past a park where a bunch of guys were playing chess. There's something romantic to stepping into a park and playing chess with a bunch of crusty males. I mentioned the idea to Paul, my old and grumbly escort, to which he replied:

"Don't go over there. You have to remember, at all times, no matter how nice they seem or that they're your friend, that first of all, all they want is your money, and second of all, they all hate your guts."

I was stunned by the apparent avarice that these denizens all shared towards me, a bearded youth encumbered by a monstrous red backpack.

"If you go in there to play chess, they'll probably kill you and steal from you, and beat you at chess besides."

I enjoyed myself for a few moments by juggling the order of these three apparently inevitable destinies.

So instead of being robbed, killed, and defeated, I went to the CNN building. I sat myself down afterwards at the Olympic Central Park, which featured one of those big series of spurting fountains you throw your kids through for a couple of hours, shaped like the Olympic rings.

I sat in the shade and practiced the harmonica. I played random notes up and down the reed, hoping to get a feel for where the notes were. I'm beginning to realize that my chances of eventually playing a decent song on the harmonica are akin to the chances of a roomful of monkeys banging on typewriters eventually reproducing the entire works of Shakespeare. Our methodology seems eerily similar.

A sickeningly earnest teenage couple were sitting on a bench nearby. The boyfriend interrupted my harmonica tooting, which sounded not unlike a Choo Choo train sputtering awfully towards painful death, by asking if I was any good on "that thing."

Slightly miffed at such a fine instrument, a harp, being relegated to the defining status of an unknown and unimportant object, I explained that I was truly horrible.

"Oh," he said. "I was gonna ask you to play a song for me and mah girl here." That option dismissed, he instead hoisted his girlfriend and ran her through the Olympic fountain as the loudspeakers blared an obnoxious version of "Under the Sea."

I continued to play until a black man strode over and asked in a stringy and twangy voice if I "knew any songs." My expertise and experience again challenged, I summoned my courage and admitted complete and utter ineptitude at this the simplest instrument known to man. He professed to have played since he was 13 and asked to borrow it - he sat down next to me and played a few "songs," sounding more like he's played ever since he saw me sitting on the bench.

He interrupted his play by asking me if I was homeless.

Then he revealed that he didn't come over to play harmonica, but actually had a story for me. "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" screamed my soul, as I nodded my head encouragingly. He made the process painful, drawing on a sticky note pictures of lost bus cards and the terrible arithmetic that he currently faced.

"I have to get to work by 6, and I gotta buy this bus pass. Say, what time you got?"
"It's 3:30."

The whole process was awful and elongated. I gave him a dollar in change (he needed 4), wished him luck, and went back to watching the fountain. The guy just sat there, held his head thoughtfully, then said "I'm just tryin' to think, 'cause I really need to get there..." I think to myself: you got 2 hours, buddy, to just bum $3 off of the other 30 people sitting in this park. "You got a credit card? There's an ATM over there in the CNN building..." Long story short, my conscience ground my reasoning into the floor and we went and I bought a postcard and gave him $3 out of change from my $20.

There is something about me that absolutely hates giving money to people who ask it of me directly, when I don't know the motive or character of the person. You begin to see yourself as a coin cow, wandering around the city and targeted merely as an object of potential benefit. As much as anyone gets to know you or compliment you or smile at you or play crappy melodies on your harmonica, you always feel your identity and individuality compromised once you're asked for some "spare change." I felt like less of a man, for some reason.

The whole time I was with that first guy, he was playing the clown, trying to keep me pleasantly entertained. He made up stories about his 4 year old kid, who apparently had memorized his times tables and could spell the word "philosophy," and had a 7 year old girlfriend. Everything he said was the most dramatic thing possible in the moment. It makes me wonder if this kind of interaction makes us both feel like less of people in the end. Me, for knowingly allowing myself to be deceived for the sake of conscience, and him, for resorting to pithy fictions and having to play a part for whatever purpose.

I met him again later the same day. I asked him about going to work, and he said that his boss called and told him not to come for some reason. (On his imaginary cell phone.) We both walked to the train station, where he revealed that he again needed money. I gave him another $3 or so...I don't remember.

Having counted, five people approached me and asked for change using the same techniques - offering directions, being particularly amiable for strangers, one guy even trying to give me free pamphlets and brochures he'd collected from everything downtown and then asking for change.

I believe in giving money to those who need it as well as those who ask for it. I believe we shouldn't be so questioning about the people and the motives. But then why don't I feel sunshiny and positive afterwards? Why do I run over the situation again and try to decide where I made a mistake? Why am I a little embarrassed about sharing this story?

New Orleans

2008-05-06T22:39:00.003-06:00

(the following was written in New Orleans after Jazzfest on Friday, May 2)

It's raining at a Stevie Wonder concert

We groan, but nobody leaves.
Stevie switches immediately to an ad-lib rendition of
"Raindrops Are Falling On My Head,"
even though he's covered by the stage.
It's then that I Wonder:
How does Stevie know it's raining?
It must be the pattering on our umbrellas.

And magically, as the song finishes, the rain stops -
and the sun creeps sheepishly out of the clouds.
Stevie smiles, as if this had been his plan all along.
And we are fully willing to accept that idea,
at least until the dark clouds spill open again
and we are forced to redeploy our umbrella defenses.

Those without, huddling to our fringes, can't escape the drenching;
even Stevie and all his positive energy cannot control the weather.
Water courses down our staggered make-shift roofs,
drizzling and drooling on our shirt sleeves,
then stopping just long enough for us to put them away.

The rain is now a bearable, soft mist -
with the exception of those singular,
thick drops on the skull.
I now know where China got the idea for their own torture.

Back and forth, like Stevie's rhythmic side-to-side head motions,
we put away our cover and then hoist it up again.
It's all these half-betweens that are getting us,
the Almost-Rain and the Somewhat-Sunny,
the mostly-damp and the relatively-dry.

The Drenched at least know that they are The Drenched,
and sing and slide in the mud with a kind of freedom
that we Umbrella People won't really know.

I Wonder what Stevie would think if he could see us,
could throw off those dark shields and gaze at his crowd
with resurrected pupils:
A mass of people lost in the Gray,
just wanting to be either wet or dry.

And I'm glad that all Stevie can sense is
the sound of the rain, the touch of the keyboard
and the wet slap of our encouraging applause,
which makes him give us that huge smile,
as warm as a summer's day.

Chicago

2008-05-03T20:26:00.003-06:00

(written on the train from Chicago to New Orleans on Thursday, April 30)

I am leaving Chicago.

I just spent my last three hours here, and it felt a lot longer.
My first reaction was just being staggered by the height of everything. I don't think I've ever really been in the middle of a city like Chicago before. Allie told me to take a picture of the spot where I feel most unforgivingly lost, and that was it, right as I stepped outside of the massive AmTrak station.

I meandered around, feeling exactly like what I was - some weird bearded student with a cumbersome red hiking pack. I walked with a spring in my step, having no idea where I was going. There is empowerment to this. All I knew was that I wanted a harmonica.

I stopped in Waldenbooks, where I thumbed through their tiny poetry section. Nothing worth buying, I reflected, though "1001 Arabian Tales" or whatever did catch my eye. Three volumes of pure Arabian myth! Bazam! Maybe another day as a requested gift item, I decided.

I found my way to a "ROCK RECORDS" store. It looked, like a lot of Chicago, as if it was started and built 30 years ago and merely renovated today. Scandalous pictures of rock star idols in varying poses papered the walls, or hung by thread from the ceiling. A brief run through the depths of the store revealed that i had no harmonicas; nay, no instruments of any sort. I asked the man up front for help.

He was a short, overweight guy whose curly brown facial hair looked like it belonged on a leprechaun.

"There's a Harmonicas 'R' Us two blocks north," he quipped. Hah.

(SWITCH TO PRESENT TENSE)

Him, the other worker, and the customer at the front then all proceed to collaborate in assisting me on my quest, debating time costs, money costs, better stores -

"Just $4 by train," Leprechaun says suggestively. "It is rush hour right now, you'll be packed (bad word!)-to-elbow. It all depends on how much you like to grope."

"I like groping," I admit.

Then it's settled. They send me off on my quest for a harmonica. I navigate my way to a rail station. The rail system in Chicago is very well-designed; everything is color-coded. So, if you want to get from point A to point B, you just hop on the Fuscia train, then switch over to the Jungle Green and then you gotta get on the Haystack one, unless you take the Salmon route and end up switching with Sky Blue or Mahogany. I'm glad that my mom got me the 128 box set of crayons in 4th grade. Once I'm on a train, it jams up quickly and efficiently. I recognize that the rocking mid-life crisis leprechaun was correct. Everyone's bad words are fully connected to each other's elbows.

I have, by this point, seen a lot of people. I'm not used to this big city collage of humanity. Old ladies on bicycles. Arabs with iPods. Thirteen year old girls dropping the F bomb as casually as pocket lint. Suits and briefcases. College chick behind me talking about "dude-boning" on her cell phone. A high school field trip. Fat beret guy. All of these, and more, crammed into each other like somebody was trying to make a fossil.

On an individual level, the people vary. I was overwhelmed by the grandness of the city, but also overwhelmed by the intense solitude that can only be felt in a dwarfing mass of people and buildings. Your only associates are your two-minute friends who give you directions, but it's just as likely to encounter two-minute enemies at Guitar Center or Cinnabon. Each stranger is a roll of the two-sided die. (Or, y'know, a flip of the coin. I don't know what I was thinking as I wrote that.)

An example: I walked into a pizza place and asked for a slice of Chicago pizza. The guy's eyeball almost popped out of his face. He looked at me like one might look at something written in a foreign language. "You mean DEEP DISH???!!!" Who knew?

I understand the preoccupation with the loss of identity that occurs in these big cities, where everyone is put through the mass systems - the transit system, the traffic lights, the 9-5 - is the city their home, or are they just part of the city? Questions like that arise while someone's bad word is rubbing against your elbow, and your own bad word is pressed against somebody else's elbow.

I get the harmonica and a book and railed my way back to the AmTrak station, just as the sun really started dropping. The skyscrapers caught this wavy, distorted reflection of the orange-lit city. Some pictures were probably in order, but I was on the tram.

Strangers were ruder to me as the sun went down, suggesting that the city was getting tired of me. Or suggesting that Chicago is really some kind of vampire city. In the end, I was well ready to say farewell to Chicago and go to New Orleans.

I am west

2008-04-25T18:55:00.002-06:00

Life is full of surprises. And it actually keeps some of them, apparently, in Idaho.
I embarked on a 13 hour trek yesterday from Provo, Utah to Hillsboro, Oregon. This meant the usual, obligatory trip through Endless Idaho. There are two things that I would never think of encountering in Idaho, and yet, did: traffic and hard rock.

Idaho is the last place in the universe I'd expect to encounter hard rock (and yes, I'm including uninhabited planets). As I went through radio stations on my clunky radio from the Cretaceous period, I expected to hear lots of country, oldies, and I dunno, the Osmonds or something. Imagine my surprise and joy to hear a hard rock station.

This realization coincided with a realization of changed landscape. I realized that the land was different than it was in Utah. The clouds had scattered. The staggering mountains were more distant, replaced by immediate mesas with abrupt tabletops.

So there I was, sitting on the duct-tape covered seat of my grimy little white pickup that shares my age, a dorm's worth of junk in the back covered by a plastic tarp with some boots poking out, Kid Rock's "Bawitdaba" blaring in my ears, when tumbleweeds bounced across the highway.

There was only one word that I could find that explained the satisfaction of this moment:

Bam.

I was West.

It's interesting to me how these moments occur. How these small, ordinary moments spark something bright deep inside you. You can't pinpoint exactly how or why they happen; they just do.

I remember some other instances. Mowing the lawn two summers ago while listening to Flogging Molly. Walking back from a sand volleyball game. Seeing a guy unicycling down the sidewalk in the dead of winter.

I was pulled out of this when I came upon the other There-Is-No-Way-In-Heck-That-This-Could-Ever-Happen-In-Idaho probability item: traffic. I didn't think there were enough vehicles in Idaho to produce traffic. Everybody had to merge into one lane because the other had been marked off by bright orange construction cones for what was, apparently, a Construction Equipment Convention. Dozens of large, impressive-looking machines were sitting all in a row. There were a good ten construction workers there; one of them got to actually sit in one of the machines and poke away at the asphalt while the others admired the other machines, most of them waving around bright orange flags (because that is a color that this scene simply did not have enough of). I think it is sad scenes like this that make people protest road construction, and probably what inspired the emphatic "END ROAD WORK" signs posted later on the road. Hear, hear!

Signs become more interesting while you're on long road trips, if only because they're more interesting than the bumper of the little Honda that you've been staring at for the past 4 hours. Some good ones I found:
"DO NOT PASS" (Feeling rebellious, I passed through a gateway of these.)
"International Museum of Carousel Art"
"NEXT RIGHT - Bridge of the Gods"

Sometimes, it almost makes you want to stop. Bridge of the Gods? Could someone knowingly pass by something that calls itself that? I guess they do it every day; I know I did.

As I descended into Oregon, into this canyon valley of greens that wound around hills and trees, I was happy to be coming home. There were seriously rows of rainbow hills. There were brown hills, light then dark green behind, these purplish rolls behind them, and these dark blue mountains in the distance that looked like someone had spilled chalk dust on their tops. Yes, I'm obnoxiously trying to paint a picture here. There was something about being surrounded by beauty and then the immediate connection to all the feelings of coming home, to where you know places and people and maybe even yourself. I tried to write this paragraph in my head as I drove through this experience, trying to figure out some way to paint those same feelings for someone else, maybe let them be surprised by sudden joy the same way I was, and all that I can give you is the image of winding around rainbow hills.

I think that as we struggle to describe feelings and ideas that seem evasively important, we're given these physical scenes and experiences to bridge the gap and make the connection. Heh. Is that the Bridge of the Gods? A God-given, mercifully physical bridge between what we can see and understand and what we desperately need to feel? And maybe that's when we have those tumbleweed moments, when everything seems designed to point us to one feeling we wouldn't experience otherwise.

I swear that wasn't contrived. Just seeing myself type the words "bridge the gap" reminded me of the Bridge of the Gods, and I reflected that maybe that's what that bridge really is. I started this lengthy entry determined to title it "I am west," but a more appropriate title is probably "Bridge of the Gods."

I had some more experiences, including an interesting pass through a desperate and small town, thoughts on journeys and solitude, clever comments about my truck's frustrating tarp, and insights into the lyrics of "Bawitdaba." (I am kidding, kind of.)

As I prepare to go on my 25 day trek this Monday, I think of Emerson's warning:
"Traveling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing."

Is place nothing?

Duzett suffers criticisms, waning support

2008-04-15T18:17:00.003-06:00

April 15, 2008
PROVO, UT (AP)- Congressman Dennis Kucinich fired heavy-handed criticism at political opponent Carl Duzett yesterday, accusing him of socialist roots.

"I ask you, what kind of man does it take to be King of the Internet?" Kucinich asked yesterday at a fundraising event on an eBay forum. "You want a man who will be fair, just, and democratic. There are certain opponents of mine who, if you look at their record, have clear socialist ties. But I will bring integrity and democracy to the Internet as your High Ruler."

The attack occurred just two weeks after Kucinich announced his candidacy for King of the Internet.

Duzett's Running Mate, college sophomore Chase Adams, claimed that the allegation was "false" and "stupid," and demanded that the Kucinich campaign retract the statement and offer a public apology.

Kucinich refused to retract the statement, and offered more details in a press conference this morning.

"Duzett has been involved with digital socialist distribution from his early youth," Kucinich explained. "From the youngest age he's been trained up in socialism. Napster, kazaa, all types of filesharing. This reminds me of the beginnings of the U.S.S.R."

The Duzett campaign declined to comment.

Two weeks after Kucinich's announcement, the public's eye has turned to comparing the two candidates.

"There is a clear fundraising issue for the Duzett campaign," ABC senior analyst Mark Halperin said. "I don't know that Duzett will be able to raise much money from his target support group, college-age adults. I don't know that he's raised any money at all, actually. Meanwhile, Kucinich has the leftover funds from his campaign for President. If it comes down to who can pay for the most pop-ups and facebook ads, Kucinich has the clear advantage."

However, Kucinich has not been able to increase his coffers significantly since his surrender from the Democratic primary. Here are the fundraising totals for major political candidates for the month of March:

Barack Obama: $30,200,000
Hillary Clinton: $19,700,000
Dennis Kucinich: $6,023
Carl Duzett: $20
John McCain: $5

Others note a waning of support in Duzett's camp. What initially seemed to be a surging campaign, gaining 37 members in its facebook group in its opening week, has fallen flat.

"Duzett's campaign has certainly peaked early," writes Washington Times columnist Stephen Dinan. "His facebook group actually dropped from 37 members to 36 the other day. That's not exactly a sign of picking up steam."

Running Mate candidate Chase Adams responded optimistically to questions about the drop.

"We're confident that Duzett will continue to gain support," Adams said. "There are actually 39 members right now, and that number will just keep getting bigger until Carl is King."

In response to questions about the identity of the member who left the group:

"We know who it is," Adams said, smiling. "We don't refer to him or her by name anymore, of course. Let's just say that it was an act of betrayal, of the likes of Judas Iscariot."

Duzett is beginning a seven-day stump through the Internet tomorrow to raise funds and support, including major battleground websites such as facebook.com and myspace.com. The trip is also said to be an effort to win support in the gamer demographic days after Kucinich's controversial comments two days ago that "gamers cling to their violent games and antipathetic views as a way to explain their social frustrations." Campaign insiders predict that Duzett will use the opportunity to showcase his international capabilities, speaking occasionally in Spanish, and showcasing his command of "leetspeak" while visiting major gaming site ign.com.

An Experiment with the Poetic Capabilities of the Letter 'Z'

2008-04-13T21:42:00.003-06:00

Upon Weztminzter Bridge
by William Wordzworth

Earth haz not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of zoul who could pazz by
A zight zo touching in itz majezty:
Thiz Zity now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; zilent, bare,
Shipz, towerz, domez, theatrez, and templez lie
Open unto the fieldz, and to the zky;
All bright and glittering in the zmokelezz air.
Never did zun more beautifully zteep
In hiz firzt zplendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er zaw I, never felt, a calm zo deep!
The river glideth at hiz own zweet will:
Dear God! the very houzez zeem azleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying ztill!

You may also try switching 'r' with 'w'...

Dungeonz and Dragonz

2008-04-10T10:36:00.005-06:00

If your morning were to be narrated by a Dungeon Master, who also happened to be Edgar Allen Poe, who happened to be on some hypnotic drug at the same time:

You rise - immediately, a dark feeling wraps around you. You feel an unfortunate truth sitting in the air. You walk, slowly, into the kitchen, the floor creaking beneath you, sending futile warnings. You must replenish your energies, quench your sudden and overpowering thirst. The pantry is bare. Bare, empty, hollow - like your fear-stricken eyes. You fill a vessel with mere water and let it slide, unsatisfyingly, down your parched throat. Yet you know that this thirst will not soon abate. How long must your soul be tortured so, you ask desperately?

You feel an ethereal pull to the core of the dwelling. Something calls to you, and you know that you must answer. You step, creak by creak, towards the damp chamber of solitude. It is small. It is cramped. You will be trapped. You cannot pause. You enter the chamber; the door is slammed shut.

Your clothes fall off of you; you understand that there is something primal about this experience. You stand in fierce, unforgiving streams, drowning, drowning and drowning, and you stand! Your unresting mind sifts through portentous thoughts as you are covered, enveloped in wet solitude. Your spirit mumbles, cries, engaging in unholy touch with the Deeper Dimension. You cannot see - you cannot see. Your eyes are closed.

As you emerge from the chamber in a misty, sinister haze, you realize that you are not the same. You are some otherworldly creature. You plod, squishing, to your room, vest yourself in new clothes. Can you ever be the same again?

Yeah, I'm done. I tried narrating my morning out loud, ominously, to Edward. He just criticized my diction, and it didn't have nearly as dramatic an effect as I hoped. I invite you all to do this. If you dare...

Art and Creative Property

2008-04-02T15:29:00.004-06:00

Charles Dickens, England's famous 19th century novelist, wrote great works such as Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist. At this time, American literature sucked (with exception to Hawthorne, who I hate anyway). A problem occured as Dickens' novels were copied and published in America for a fraction of the selling price in England, completely undercutting copyright and ownership laws. Dickens travelled to the United States to do a reading tour, and became infuriated as he realized that everybody had already read his work; it was, in fact, much more popular in America than in England, but none of the money went to him. His creative ownership had been violated and trampled upon. For writers, who earn little to nothing, that can be a crippling behavior.

But when an American is asked to name a famous, great or significant British novelist, who is the first one to come to mind? Charles Dickens. Maybe his legacy would be lessened if strict copyright and ownership laws had been upheld, if Americans did not read Dickens because the British publishers did not release the manuscript on that side of the Atlantic. Perhaps later American literary greats like Stepen Crane and Ernest Hemingway would not be as great without that Dickensian influence infused into American literary culture.

The question is this: What is more important, getting your art to the world, or being justly reimbursed for your art?

This question may also connect with the interesting trend of great artists to only become famous years after their deaths. Does the fact that they saw no recognition for their greatness lessen their greatness? Are their contributions less significant because they occurred so much later? Is art really so necessarily thankless?

The alternative band Radiohead reinvigorated their own artistic influence this last year with the free online release of their album In Rainbows. Radiohead revolutionized alternative music in the early 90s and has recently suffered a decline in popularity, at least until releasing In Rainbows. This was not your neighbor's garage band on MySpace releasing their album for free, this was Radiohead, the great forerunners of early 90s alternative. You know that everyone and their mother downloaded this album - people who would otherwise never listen to it revelled in its free, melodic glory. Radiohead was completely unafraid of risking monetary reimbursement, putting art first, simply expressing to the people for expression's sake. Is that the definition of a great artist, or at least an essential element of it?

I submit that Radiohead has forever established itself and its music as great art by championing this new distribution method. Much like how Dickens accidentally cemented his legacy in transatlantic literarature, Radiohead has likewise allowed itself to be fully appreciated. Radiohead looks past the deceptive boundaries of creative property and reminds us what art essentially is and does.

Kucinich joins the race

2008-03-25T22:58:00.003-06:00

March 25, 2008
COLUMBUS, OH (AP) – Congressman Dennis Kucinich announced his intention to run for King of the Internet last Friday. The announcement took place at a charity luncheon held in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

“I see a need in the Internet – a need for integrity, for upstanding citizenship,” Kucinich remarked in his speech. “As Supreme Authoritative Ruler of the Internet, I will restore honesty to this monarchy. I will be a King you can count on.”

Kucinich mentioned several campaign platforms in his speech, the war in Iraq and Internet welfare being the most prominent.

“I am against the war and have always been against the war, and I am the only candidate in this race who has been so,” Kucinich said to applause. “I promise that I will immediately pull all troops out of the Internet as soon as I am King.”

Kucinich also highlighted his proposed Internet welfare program, which he promised to force upon all his subjects if elected King.

“There are people out there, from Asia to Africa, from Alaska to Australia, that just do not receive the blessings of the Internet,” Kucinich said. “Is that because they are bad people? To those on the other side of the aisle that would suggest such – I shake my head.” Kucinich then shook his head. “Every man, woman, child and person on this planet deserves the Internet, and I propose a program that will give it to them.”

Kucinich is the second figure in a week to announce his candidacy for King of the Internet, college sophomore Carl Duzett entering the race last Wednesday.

Duzett has selected fellow college student Chase Adams as his Running Mate, and Sean Gustafson as candidate for Court Jester. While Kucinich is yet to announce a candidate for Court Jester, there is speculation of a Kucinich/Clinton “super ticket,” which ex-president Bill Clinton predicted to be “unstoppable.” However, many bloggers question if the Internet is ready for a woman Court Jester.

Hillary spokesperson Phil Singer denied any connection with Kucinich’s campaign.

“Congressman Kucinich has not made any contact with Senator Clinton about running as Court Jester,” Singer said this morning. “She is spending her efforts and focus right now on her campaign for President. She would, however, be the candidate with the most experience, having appeared on Saturday Night Live, unlike her current opponent. If Kucinich were to call even at three in the morning, Clinton would doubtless be the most experienced woman to answer the call.”

Education and the English Major

2008-03-25T15:03:00.002-06:00

It is hard not to get sick of school, regardless of what you're studying.

I am coming to this realization that the bundles of facts and dates and theories that I am daily memorizing and regurgitating will have little to no direct impact on my future as a human being. When you realize that everything you've written for school for the past 8 months has been nothing but a strained performance of hoop-jumping, you start to question your education.

I have no problem with the reading material. The English Major is, really, a great major. I get to read classic, canonized works. I get to read Officially Good Books while everyone else is staring into chemistry textbooks and such. And I read a lot of them. I think that the main philosophy behind the English Major is to pump as much literary text into the student as possible before they graduate. I am not kidding.

My issue is that I feel like the major is imbalanced. We spend all this time reading Great Works, but spend no time at all applying what we learn. We use literature as a way of measuring history and humanity, of taking an anthropologic view at the world. There is certainly value to that. But honestly, I don't care.

I am an English major not just because I like to read, but because I like to write - I like to express myself. I enjoy reading James Joyce not because of his commentary on Ireland and Imperialism, or for his effect on the literary world - but because I want to try to write epiphanies like he does, or try my hand at stream-of-consciousness, or take the pulse of a culture like he does. Is not that infinitely more valuable and satisfying than simply being able to say "James Joyce introduced the methods of the epiphany and stream-of-consciousness in year X with works Y and Z, influencing later artists A and B?" If all these Great Literary Works are worth studying to such depth, shouldn't it be worth it to try doing it ourselves? Does the English major really matter if nobody tries to attempt anything like everything that's studied?

Instead, I feel like this major is designed to accrue all kinds of obscure knowledge that is meant merely to be passed on to somebody else. English majors are sought in real life not because they can rattle off the effects of different authors and movements, but because they can write well. If the only things we're writing are literary analises, which frankly have no effect on a world chock-full of literary analysis, what are we doing?

I feel like we're all getting duped. The reason people become English majors, more often than not, is because they like to read. The English Major takes these people who love reading and forces them to read things from an anthropological perspective instead of just for the value of the pieces or the value of expression. It creates and perpetuates "high culture," redefining art as something that requires a certain degree of memorization and regurgitation to fully appreciate, instead of letting art just be the simple relationship between expression and enjoyment.

There is definitely value in studying things this way - much can be learned about cultures and people. But what are we learning about art, or expression, if the only reason we read it is to learn about other things? And are we really learning about art and expression if we spend all our time studying how everyone else expresses themselves and never doing it ourselves?

There are creative writing courses in the english major, but they're seen mostly as an optional off-shoot to the core curriculum. Most writing that's done in the major is analyzing literature. Is that not missing the mark? Is there not a more direct way to become better writers than simply writing about other people's writing?

I suppose that I am asking for a more subjective approach that requires more creativity and expression...but isn't that what it's all about?

Unprecedented campaign draws mixed reactions

2008-03-20T14:23:00.005-06:00

March 20, 2008
PROVO, UT (AP) - Three days after the announcement, major media is questioning BYU sophomore Carl Duzett's viability as a candidate for King of the Internet.

Columnists such as New York Time's Bob Herbert and The Washington Post's Robert D. Novak have raised concerns about the logistical controversy of someone actually running for King of the Internet.

"Duzett runs a completely unprecedented campaign," Novak writes in this morning's column. "Not only am I unsure as to who votes, but I don't even know when to vote. Are votes even involved here? And is there anyone else even running?"

There is currently no clear political opponent for Duzett's campaign for ultimate monarchy of the digital realm. Though according to prominent blogger Flyspeck, there are rumors floating through the world wide web that Dennis Kucinich will announce his candidacy for the vaunted position after his early exit from the Democratic primaries.

According to campaign insiders, Kucinich is expected to address the issue at a luncheon held Friday in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.

Meanwhile, US presidential candidates have begun to weigh in on the issue.

Margaret Spellings, Ralph Nader campaign adviser, claims that the race for King of the Internet will negatively effect the country.

"It's unfortunate that Duzett and Kucinich are doing this, intentionally drawing attention to this imaginary contest. They're essentially stealing votes from Nader's campaign. They're hurting the chances of the Green Party reclaiming the White House this year, and frankly, it's selfish."

Obama chief strategist David Axelrod lashed out at Duzett this morning for plagiarization.

"When I read the press release of Duzett's announcement, I did a double-take," Axelrod told the Associated Press. "Entire lines of Duzett's speech were copied from Senator Obama's remarks in New Hampshire. Duzett is just trying to take advantage of Obama's momentum and popularity in his own campaign, and it's unethical and incorrect, and even wrong."

Obama's speech in question recently came under attack itself for being lifted from similar speeches by Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusets.

"That is an unfair claim," Duzett said in response to Axelrod's comments. "I stole those lines from Governor Patrick months before Obama ever did."

When asked whether it was actually possible to run for King of the Internet, Duzett read from a prepared press release.

"You're going to hear a chorus of cynics," Duzett said. "And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We've been warned against offering the people of the Internet false hope for a monarchal future. But in the unlikely story that is the Internet, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can."

I Am Running for King of the Internet

2008-03-19T15:32:00.002-06:00

Two days ago, I announced my intentions to run for King of the Internet. I will update you as the mainstream media covers my campaign. In the meantime, join the facebook group and invite all of your friends.

PROVO, UT (AP) - BYU college sophomore Carl Duzett declared his candidacy yesterday for King of the Internet.

The announcement came late in the evening in the Old Mill apartment complex. The announcement was met with surprise, yet Duzett says the reaction was still overall "enthusiastic, and positive."

Duzett claimed the ability to unite the diverse and often-contentious demographics of the Internet, and to lead them to a bold new future.

"The Internet is mankind's most powerful institution, yet it remains the most unruly and least organized," Duzett said in his speech. "I offer true leadership to this digital landscape, and promise unprecedented results as the Internet leads the rest of mankind into the 21st century. This generation is a generation of digital pioneers, and it falls to us to forge the path for our descendants."

In a later interview with the Associated Press, Duzett said he is banking on college-age voters in his bid for supreme Internet rule.

"They're the hope of the future," Duzett said. "They're the ones who know this global country, know its potential, the ones who will be making a difference for years to come. Our youth are crying for change - and more importantly, hope."

CNN senior political analyst William Schneider responded incredulously to the announcement.

"I think the people of the Internet are going to see youth and energy, and they're going to like that," Schneider said. "But Duzett lacks the experience that being King of the Internet demands, and people notice that."

"Besides," Schneider added, "can you even run for King of the Internet?"

The question is mirrored by several newspaper columnists and prominent bloggers, miring Duzett's campaign in early controversy.

"The people of the Internet are watching," New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote in this morning's column. "How Duzett responds to this controversy, of whether or not somebody can actually run for King of the Internet, will set the tone for the rest of his campaign."

On Hope

2008-03-15T16:51:00.004-06:00

I think I've heard the word "hope" more in the last couple months than I ever did my whole life in Sunday School. I've heard it both romanticized and mocked. The ideas of "hope" and "change" are clearly more controversial topics right now than anything else, such as national security or immigration.

This leads me to wonder - is there really something there? Can repetitive cries for "Hope" and "Change," with conviction, actually mean something? Common consensus says no.

But why are so many people flocking to these political rallies, full-well knowing that the only significant words uttered are those very two that've been echoing in their ears 24/7 already?

Let's examine hope for a second. Is there really anything negative about hope? How can anyone, ever, at any period of time, in any way insinuate that hope is a bad thing? I mean, Obama even covers his tracks here and says that if anybody warns you against false hope, "in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope." Obama has discovered the untouchable political platform.

I suggest that there is something to this. Hope is actually a very powerful thing. There are few things more inspiring than possibility. Few things get our little fire going like the spark of hope. Our imagination, a powerful conduit between reality and dreams, is a very real thing and does not present as distant a connection as we sometimes let ourselves think. Our ideal existences are really just a sliver of a plane off of reality.

But the criticism is not of hope; it's of the quality of hope. In the Book of Mormon, hope is almost never mentioned by itself; the Lord asks for hope in specific things, in the Atonement, in a resurrection, in eternal life, etc. I think of my middle-school teachers, who were bent on pounding into our skulls that the sky's the limit and that we can accomplish all of our dreams, but that didn't really do anything for anybody who didn't have a specific dream. Did that make their advice wrong? I think that for those who have specific visions of what they want to accomplish, all of these cliche phrases and trite inspirations hold completely true.

Specific plans and crisp vision focus the wavering, general, blissful hope into something more powerful. It focuses the flickering, general rays of a dying flashlight to a powerful laser beam. Hope has a purpose, and it is not just to make us feel better. It is to get us to believe enough in our dreams to follow them. Not to get us to believe in someone else's mysterious vision/dream just for hope's sake.

To be honest, I've been kind of stirred by Obama's speeches. I don't think that this is a bad thing. However, I have not been stirred to vote for him, or to agree with his policies. I've been moved to think about the possibility of my own ideas and dreams. That is a valuable thing, regardless of policy. Is that a presidential thing? That, of course, is up to debate. I think that we can all learn several important lessons from this - hope is really actually a good thing. Don't walk past that lesson. But don't let that force you into a political stance, either.

Blowing the Dust Off

2008-03-09T01:21:00.003-07:00

So my truck got booted today. I hate $50 fines. This one was particularly timely, in that it came at the most financially inconvenient time.

So I was the third wheel of the tail end of a date last night. We played Starcraft, the three of us. It was epic. Afterwards we all g-chatted to each other, all of us sitting at this little table with our laptops, all within slapping distance of each other (and yet we're chatting online). Is there something ridiculous about this, even ethically wrong? (And I don't mean playing Starcraft during a date, because that is Undisputably Awesome.)

In other news, I was a panelist for one of the sessions for the Association for Mormon Letters annual conference. The turnout was not large, so it was fairly casual. (Our session coincided with Brandon Sanderson's session, who is writing the last Wheel of Time novel. You may have heard of it.) This was a marked occasion nonetheless, as it was the first time that I ever read an excerpt from my novel out loud (or allowed anyone else to discern its text). It received an encouraging response.

The creative process is very interesting, psychologically. You create this mammoth of a thing, knowing full well its potential for greatness as well as its many flaws. And so before you Reveal It To The World, you struggle within yourself to decide if what you've written is good or bad. Was it your best? Are your expectations for yourself too high? Is it better than you think it is? Are the mistakes minor? Are they egregious? I suppose that these are all questions that an author would like to resolve for himself personally before unleashing his manuscript so that his honest, critical analysis is not too easily swayed by the potentially fickle and careless comments of the masses. (Not that I expect full masses to be poring over this stuff, but you understand my intended meaning.)

And then there's the whole idea that after spending so much effort and energy on something, you don't want anyone to tell you that it's not great (even if it isn't.) That's why, I suppose, being a writer requires you to be tenacious. You have to steel yourself against rejection and criticism (because the alternative is to ignore it and remain on the same plateau of mediocrity).

Anyway, so having finally read a bit of it to somebody somewhere, it made me rethink my novel's Back-burner Status. Maybe it would be worth it to open it out for reading as a way to motivate myself to edit it.

Well, hooray for random blog posting. I think my main point here has something to do with the creative process and feedback, and how much I hate $50 fines.

I Am Linking You to A Funny Dave Barry Column

2008-03-03T18:42:00.002-07:00

A Funny Dave Barry Column.

On Blogging

2008-03-02T17:41:00.003-07:00

I understand that I'm tackling a fairly difficult issue from a fairly ironic attack vector, but I wish to express my sentiments and philosophies concerning blogging. I would also like to say what I think about it, too.

I notice that there are approximately six bazillion blogs on the internet, which mean about two thousand blogs per living person on the planet. We, as a species, are incredibly prolific bloggers. Why "The Crap" do we like blogging so much?

It's obviously a very self-indulgent activity, because if you look at the majority of these six bazillion blogs, they each get anywhere between 0 and 1 comments, and 2 if they post at peak blogging season. We like to blog, we just don't like to comment on others' blogs. So this Insane Blogging Craze Epidemic Frenzy (IBCEF) is fueled mostly by our own egos, our desire to think that everyone all over the internet is reading our thoughts and thinking to themselves, "This guy is right about everything he says! His opinion is so spot-on! And he has a funny, colloquial voice! Wow, he is up-to-date on current events!" Others think: "I am not popular in real life. I will construct a foundation of sociality on this Great Digital Plane that is the Internet."

Is this a bad thing? Is it bad that the Internet is cluttered with these approximate six bazillion blogs? Does it say something that it's technically impossible for everybody to care about anything anybody else says when they're too busy updating their own two-thousand blogs?

Well, the alternative is that people stop writing blogs, I suppose. And if they don't write blogs, what are they doing? Blogs may, in reality, be saving our generation from its more dangerous alternatives of expression, such as violence or art.

So even as I am writing this, and I understand that very few people are going to end up reading this at all, ever, I imagine throngs of hip Digital Agers peering thoughtfully into their laptops and pondering the subtle complexities of my prose. And that exciting idea is enough to get me say something, anything at all.

Maybe it's the saying that's most important, in the end, not the hearing. Maybe our age is renovating itself not from how much people are listening to each other, but through all the self-delusional expression we are creating. If no one reads this post, at least I have expressed an idea that otherwise would've rotted in the dark corner of my spastic head.

Maybe it's no longer about one voice changing the rest of the world. Maybe it's about millions of voices changing themselves. And until we figure out that nobody's actually listening to us, this Intense Blogging Craze Epidemic Frenzy will continue and we'll all keep learning things about ourselves, becoming more honest to ourselves and becoming more human one blog post at a time.

It's hard to keep typing after a sentence like that. I really nailed that one, and I kind of feel bad having something else to say after such a potentially table-pounding resolution. Anyway, blogging my not necessarily be doomed to tons of blogs that never get read or cared about and survive only for expression's sake, as I suggested above. A potential solution would involve the production of Comments.

Now the word "comment" connotes something casual, small and probably trivial. What if we actually said significant things in our comments? What if we launched a Comment Revolution, and outright refused to say such things as "Nice post ;)"? What if we instead became engines of Criticism and Controversy, producing responses that dripped with venom and brimmed with flame, holding bloggers accountable for their scrawling on the wall? I am, indeed, suggesting that when we comment, that we actually Say Something Substantial. If a blogger says something that is Dumb, they should begin to fully expect a fleshed-out comment that illustrates such, in a humorous and demeaning way if at all possible.

I think that the self-proclaimed Intellectuals that man the good ship Blogship would actually welcome such attention. I am quite certain that they would likewise enjoy dealing this kind of thing out akin to grandmothers giving out tootsie rolls on Halloween with wild abandon.

I suppose that this ironic post ends with two (2) invitations, which are as follows:
1) Do not become disheartened that people do not comment on your blog. Keep blogging as long as blissful ignorance will allow.
2) Comment with frequency, substance and, when possible, vitriol.

Now I am done standing on my Digital Soap Box. For today, that is.

Plot of a Dance Movie

2008-02-24T23:25:00.002-07:00

So I saw Step Up 2, and quite enjoyed it. I mentioned this to my Oregonian friend Mariela, who then proceeded to claim that she, herself, right then, could write a better plot.
While I defend, quite staunchly, the quality of Step Up 2 as an excellent experience in entertainment, her improv plot bears quoting. And so here it is.

"hey, I'm tough...do you dance?"
"No, I'm shy and quiet on the outside, but inside I'm a dancing machine!"
"let's see what you got"
*busts out dancing*
"I'm also smart and witty"
"Wow. I'm steamy."
"Okay, let's make out then, and then dance in a suddenly important dance-off competition."
"where my quiet wittiness will win you over, as well as my amazing ab moves"
"wow, I love you, even though there are hundreds of other girls grinding against everything in sight"
"I want your quiet wittiness"
"fine, I'll say something witty, and the movie will end"
"okay"
and...roll credits

This is stunningly accurate in many respects. The end.

That's no moon...

2008-02-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Pentagon destroyed the Death Star yesterday.

Intoxicated by the Internet, Sleep

2008-01-23T01:57:00.000-07:00

It's 2 AM and I'm completely awake and aware and alert, along with other adjectives that begin with the letter 'a'. I stayed up far too late last night, but I slept a good 8 hours, but even then around 10 PM today I felt like 650000397 pounds of fatigue fall on me and I took a 1 hour nap. Then I realized I should go to bed, but that stopped working. So it's 2 AM and I'm full of energy and have no intention of going to bed anytime soon.
This means time wasted on the Internet. Somebody should do a study on time wasted on the Internet. I suppose the only time wasted more than time on the Internet is time studying the wasting of time on the Internet.
Anyway, so I'm watching random videos dispersed throughout the Internet; a trailer for a tongue-in-cheek gamer geek game (with other appositives that begin with the letter 'g'), poorly-recorded live a cappella performances, the likes. What's really pissing me off is this whole idea of "buffering."
The idea behind buffering, as far as I understand it, is that you download enough of the video such that you can watch the whole thing seamlessly while the last portions of the video are being downloaded in your digital background. Okay, so that makes sense. Good idea. So buffering is at 54%, and suddenly it drops...to 36%. 33%. This, to me, looks like the opposite of progress. Is the Internet stealing my download back? I think what's actually happening is that the buffering is being buffered. The percentage buffered is based on a prediction of how fast your connection is, and as that changes, they have to change their prediction. So how much buffering is really going on here? How deep is this mammoth digital construction, this Tower of Babel of buffering? How much bandwidth, worldwide, is being wasted on re-predicting the buffer rate of a youtube video at the 17th level of buffering? This is what some call a ridiculous Russian doll situation.
Another thing. I came across a video that's alleged to contain Mature Content. Thank goodness I was Warned! This warning also comes with a Security Measure. They ask you to put your birthdate in so they can tell if you're Old Enough To Watch It. Now stop me if I'm a blathering idiot, but are perverted 13 year old kids going to be stopped by something like that? "My birthday, huh? Shoot. I'm going to have to put my real birthday in and then they'll know that I'm not 21. This looks like the End Of The Line. Back to Cartoon Network." Maybe Youtube has a widespread security network that actually knows how old people are, and when they lie to see a Mature Video, SWAT teams crash into their houses and apprehend the lying sacks (also known as "terrorists of truth" ) and send them to Guantanamo. Otherwise, I don't see the point of a scroll-bar that gives you the option of saying you're anywhere between 90 and 2 years old.
I feel like some deep, significant epiphany can happen to me this late at night. Probably dangerous. It's about time to force myself to sleep.

Things

2007-12-31T20:53:00.001-07:00

I technically made some New Year's Resolutions yesterday while in church (what better time or place?), but I think that this blog is going to highlight some of the Middle 10 Things Of The Year. Yes, that's right - an awkwardly general, probably arbitrary Middle 10 List to round out the year of 2007. I say "Middle Ten" because it's unfair to order these things. They are not necessarily the top things, just significant things, or probably more appropriately, Random Things. (I wonder if humanity has this fear that if we don't make lists and reflections and goals at the end of a year, that the year never really happened...worth looking into.) In retrospect, Middle 10 doesn't even make sense now, because some of these things might possibly have a good run at the Top 10. This whole trying to sneak out of having to put these things in order isn't working too well for me. My list is now being shortened to:
TEN THINGS OF 2007 (not in any particular order, except that the numbers are decreasing for dramatic effect)
10. Radiohead offers their newest CD as a convenient download on their official website - for free. (Huh-whatzit?)
9. 200 pounds of ties. 50 gorgeous silk ones still in my possession.
8. TIME magazine's photo of Vladimir Putin. *shiver*
7. The ridiculously young Trail Blazers squad wins 13 games in a row and is in early playoff contention. Huzzah!
6. Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech, making me care about a politician for the first time in awhile.
5. I figure out What-In-The-Heck this Heroes TV show is and become, summarily, addicted.
4. Reading, at kamikaze pace, 20 works in four months, most of them being ridiculously ancient and translated, awkwardly, from foreign languages.
3. Writing a novel, and easing back into other writing endeavors after the mission as well.
2. Owning first cell phone - figuring out how to make your phone vibrate, how to craftily "miss" calls, and realizing that I'm leashed to a massive, enslaving communications network that gives no mercy.
1. Serving a mission - serving with great companions, meeting inspiring people, seeing inspiring and inspired things; the poverty of Palmview, the ruggedness of Laredo and the humility of Port Isabel, and the amazing people I met in all three places.

I think this list may be more aptly named "10 Things that Randomly Came Into My Head As I Thought For Like 30 Seconds About My Year." Now for the predictions:

10 THINGS OF 2008 (in reverse order that I came up with them)
10. Bare-minimum, three new comic book based movies will be introduced, based on characters that fewer than 15% of the population has ever heard of. 80% of the population will eventually see these movies.
9. Every season ever of every TV series ever will be available in box-sets of DVDs. Even seasons of shows that don't exist yet. (A Sub-Thing to this Thing is the incidental invention of time travel, of course.)
8. TV and Hollywood will SUCK until the writers start using physical force, launching orchestrated, dramatic offenses against main TV studios. Heroes of the battle will die in the midst of dramatic soliloquy. I am not making this up.
7. J.K. "Just Kidding" Rowling will reveal that the whole Dumbledore Being Gay Thing was really just a joke, but that Harry and Hermione have enjoyed a secret, between-the-lines-of-prose relationship over the past 7 books, unbeknown to the average reader. Oh, and that Voldemort is based on Dick Cheney.
6. Mike Huckabee, after losing the Republican primary, is going to announce that he's not going to suffer from a self-pity complex and go an a violent rampage, but he is going to pull out a gun and fire some bullets around randomly just to show us what would happen if he did.
5. Something incredibly important will happen in the Middle East, irrevocably impacting the international community for years to come. 10% of Americans will hear about it, 2% will understand what it means, and 1% will be able to pronounce the names of those involved.
4. The poor will get poorer, the rich will get richer, the super rich will get super-richer, and the middle class will get, if possible, middler.
3. China's economy becomes, suddenly, a MILLION times better than ours and they turn their factories into global weapons, raining lead poisoning down on the rest of us all and killing us slowly.
2. Britney Spears, jealous over the attention her little sister is getting, will dye her entire right arm bright orange. When that stops working, she'll get extensive plastic surgery on her face and create an eerie Everland Ranch, inviting small children over to visit.
1. The Mars Rover will find a big, black, sinister monolith. A little bit later, a big giant baby will appear in orbit of the earth, apologizing profusely for being 7 years late; Mapquest gave him a wrong turn entering the Milky Way.

Umm, also, in other news, Hamlet won the poll. Apparently, common opinion holds (out of 9 people who are actually 4 or 5) that Hamlet would beat Oedipus. They're wrong, of course. Anyway, I'll put up the new Official Poll of Awesomeness sometime soon.

Happy New Year, by the way.

Facebook Monopolizes Existence

2007-12-22T00:27:00.000-07:00

Coming back from my mission I was introduced to Facebook, and ever since I first heard about it I've had my qualms. I worried that this artificial social utility could actually replace true sociality and eventually even control reality. Not surprisingly, I was 100% dead on. Facebook now has the power to tell you whether or not you exist.

Aside from this apocalyptic, 1984-ish announcement, I also have some excellent news. The Portland Trail Blazers have won 10 games in a row! This is exciting. For those unfamiliar with the Blazers, let me give you a brief history. They're better known as the Jail Blazers. Their players, over the past 7 years, have been charged with dog fighting, marijuana possession, drunk driving, driving without a license, bar fights, drag racing, wife abuse, and eating babies alive. Paul Allen, the owner of Nike, decided to fire the general manager and clean up the team's image. The first thing they did to get rid of the "Jail Blazer" image was draft somebody named Outlaw. Oh, boy. Anyway, several years later, they've finally gotten rid of all their talented criminals and now have a bunch of untalented young folks (including that Outlaw fellow, who apparently is actually a nice kid). Since the Blazers are now a bunch of Dudley Do-Rights who have a hard time putting a ball through a hoop, everybody expected them to suck this year. A lot. But thanks to a guy named Brandon Roy, last year's rookie of the year, they're near the top of their division, on a ten game winning streak and on pace for playoffs. I love Brandon Roy. In a totally heterosexual way, of course.

Portland fans are finally coming out of the woodworks and getting together, now feeling like they can root for a team which isn't just as likely to shoot them as win a basketball game. We're going crazy. Somebody said they were actually crying at the end of tonight's game, it was so emotional for them. I won't admit to that, but the whole thing's been pretty intense. It's like a giant mob of Blazer fan happiness. (What kind of a sentence is that?) Anyway, I just wanted to say the word "mob" so that I could somehow transition into this link, which is really a keeper.

In other news, I see that six people have now voted on the poll. (Yes, six. Someone voted for Hamlet twice, dangit.) Let me remind y'all that there are only, like, four or five days left on this epic poll. It's basically a dead heat. Let all your friends know about this controversial topic. Let them express their opinions. And make them express their opinions.

Anyway, everyone enjoy the Happiest of Christmases and the Merriest of New Years.

Another World, a Second Life

2007-12-14T18:16:00.000-07:00

I have a confession. I downloaded a free ten-day trial of World of Warcraft three days ago. This is a MMORPG. (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing *breath* Game.) It costs $15 a month, so my college life has provided an excellent avenue of escape from this truly awful maw of social death. Unfortunately, this version is free, so I'm caught, so to speak. My character is an Orc Rogue named Drokthar, who goes around with daggers and stabs enemies in the back. Why is this enjoyable? I'm not really sure. I'm just certain that it's addictive. I look forward to the end of my trial period with simultaneous hope for release and fear of withdrawal.

However, there are valuable life skills learned from games like World of Warcraft. They saved this kid's life. Also, Mr. T, as well as being the dark horse in this month's Poll of Awesomeness, plays World of Warcraft. Kind of.

This whole Massively-Multiplayer Game thing is, admittedly, naturally antisocial. These games create entire worlds for people to get involved in, building off the assumption that they would prefer it to the present and real one. These worlds are pretty intense, involving entire cities, differing modes of transportation, ability to learn trades like cooking and herb gathering (don't ask what for), and currency and trade. It can be very similar, actually, to life in this world (except for herb gathering) - in the game Second Life, they even have writer strikes. There is even a special class of nerds. Yes - even in a World inhabited purely by nerds, there is an even lower social class of nerds. They're known as "newbies," or "noobs," and they're the people who have just started being Nerds.

So, I've taken a few steps into this other world, and the effects are kind of creeping me out. Finals weeks is probably not a good week to continue this exploration, so I'll have to put this newfound habit away.

Oh Sweet Irony

2007-12-07T02:36:00.000-07:00

Last week, a mafia boss was arrested in Italy while he was - get this - watching a TV mini-series about a mafia boss' arrest. There's not much more that I can say about this; the instance kind of screams for itself.
Another interesting factoid. Dante, the guy who wrote a book about Hell and called it The Inferno, actually wrote a couple of other books, too. They're called Purgatorio and Paradiso (they all end in 'o' because they're in the same trilogy! or originally italian!). Well, near the end of Purgatorio Dante predicts the Restoration of the gospel. There's this bit about a chariot (which represents the church) which gets attacked by a big giant that hurls boulders at it and chases it into the woods. The giant is hypocrisy and priestcraft in the Catholic church, and the woods are apostasy (he refers to a prophecy in Revelations about the church being lost in the wilderness for a time). The boulders are large, weighty objects that really put a hurt on people. Anyway, he prophecies that the number 535 has something important to do with the return of this chariot. Let's think about this: Purgatorio was written about 1300 AD. 1300 + 535 = Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through Joseph Smith. Woah. These are the kinds of things you only learn at BYU from your ridiculously schooled professors who also happen to be Mormon.
Speaking of Mormons, Mitt Romney spoke yesterday in Texas about the importance and power of freedom of religion in America. I honestly was impressed. Of course, I'm Mormon and a little biased in that respect, but it was an honest, powerful speech. Plus, you get to see how ridiculously old-looking George Bush Sr. is getting.
The response has been mixed. I think a few quotes ripped from the CNN article will suffice.
CNN contributor (he really just contributes quotes) Bill Bennett (and a charming name, too) says the big problem with the speech was that he didn't explain this whole Mormonism religion thing. Then he said that he didn't really have to. Then he basically said that he should've spurted out the 13 articles of faith and held a question-and-answer session about the contents of Mormon Doctrine. Then he said that 2+2=4 and then he said that 2+2=5. Man, if I had a catchy name like Bill Bennett I'd get to contribute quotes to CNN too, and I'd start telling people that winter's better than summer, but on the other hand, that summer is far better than winter. I'd be a reasonable, understanding two-sided contributor.
Well, it's 3 AM now and updating the Official Blog of Awesomeness is probably not the best thing I can be doing for my body at this time. To all a good night.

EDIT: Somebody voted for freaking Mr. T. That doesn't even make any sense. I challenge you to a duel.

Pretty Much An Amazing Beginning

2007-12-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

So I have a blog now. I feel like I should have something to say now that I have a blog, seeing as how that's the usual driving force for such an endeavor. To be honest, I really have no business beginning a blog because finals start in two weeks. I guess this is some kind of stress relief, or something.
I fully intend this to be a very random blog. I think my approach is going to be to put everything I write that's relevant to me on my blog, so anybody who remotely cares about anything remotely connected to me has to visit my blog. Then they might get caught into helping us determine who would win in an epic death match to the death: Oedipus of Oedipus Rex fame or Hamlet of Hamlet fame.
I finished writing a novel yesterday. It's part of National Novel-Writing Month, which involves sacrificing your free time on the altar of Writing A Novel In 30 Days. This writing strategy is also known as the "kamikaze approach." Considering my ambitions to become a famous, well-bearded writer one day, I figured it would be a good idea. I wrote about a town in south Texas called Alice. The story is actually thirteen different stories that all take place on the same day. The stories interweave a little bit, which is supposed to make it all one seamless, awesomely epic masterpiece. In retrospect I'm not sure if it really worked, but who cares? I wrote a novel. Right now it's called "Javelinas," after one of the stories in it. Javelinas are wild pigs, apparently also known as collared peccaries. While this website seems to think they only eat herbs, they eat a Chihuahua in my novel. Yes!
You can read a little excerpt of my novel here.