Generally, And By Choice, Slept Upon The Open Field, Although The
The Other Way.Yet Smoot Accepted The Consequence Entailed In Part By
That We Are Soon To Be Regaled With Memoirs Of The Emperor
Added,The Outstanding Features Of Which Were Simplicity,
Inconsiderable Quantity Of Air, Brought From Other Levels,
My Father Was Very Fond Of Defining What Was His Own Attitude At
O, Thou Who From The Temple Scourged The Sin,
We Waked Next Morning Above The Clouds, With One Vast Floor Of White
If Greatness Means To Anticipate The Problems Of The Future Before
Mountainous In Far North And Northwest
Successive Regress, Cannot Overtake The Whole Eternity That Has
Held Me By The Leg.  This Was Too Much For My Nerves, So I Just Packed
Yet Should Some Sudden Theme Intrude
Cunning Awgwas Had Hidden The Toys In A Deep Cave And Covered
Is Best That We Should Be Friends.  I Will Not Speak Any More.
Sermons Which Neither Gods Nor Men Will Care About Digesting

Hey, How you doing this kind of some power is 208. I'm getting ready to head down that way, but I'm a hero. Mclawson Blvd at grateful, so it'd probably be half hour 45 minutes. Thank you, but i'm me.

It's going on with wondering if you can get goodbye and then I found. If you could bring up with some sparkling water my own mind, not, and the glitzy consultants cucumber and drawing really cool, and although not together move so quickly. Alright.

What's up. Yeah this option. We're wait until tomorrow morning. Saturday morning. You can use this talk tonight, cooper street. So, but those stores. I have some shelf Michigan fun. Okay, bye presentation of cable. Talk to you later. Bye.

Hey, it's me. I touch a child of it, but the commitment think I just got your voicemail. I head out like that. I just got a thing in treatment of the country. Okay bye.

Hey, it's me. I was contemplating buying a Lasix play well not the hardware store for the of strength. I'm proud about the states really know what the body. I'm gonna try our best to spaces, so I'm call me back okay.

Hi mister the well on this is norm.

I'm sure there was a time of linguistic logic, (Latin?), but ever since it's gotten muddled with slang and euphemism and colloqualisms. And that's actually fine. You could define slang and colloqualisms as a sort of shorthand for linguistic logic. It's when the shorthand forms get reinterpreted as statements on their own, and then those get colloquialized, and that process repeats itself over and over through history that you get to the point that we're at with a million different arbitrary exceptions to learn how to speak.  

Ideally, we would all be switching to a well-tempered language, like Lojban, a Ro, an Esperanto, or even just a modified Globish. Or even more ideally, we would all speak Prolog through lasers from our mouths and be so much more efficient.   But we're still dwindling in the metric system over here so I don't have high hopes that ideal linguistic change will come anytime soon.

Unions are the death of progress.  They prevent companies from firing the incompetent, and everybody just looks out for their pensions.

Unions are necessary. See: early industrial American history and slave labor capitalism for a refresher.

Really though, here's an example of [inherently stupid/evil person/company failing preposterously] and they can't be fired/fixed.  And it's solely because of the practice of the Unions.  Maybe they were good at a time, but we're past all of that now.

Not really past all that yet.  See: [various slave-labor like practices in current companies (Wal-Mart tends to come up a lot)]

Well, when China owns our currency outright, then we'll know who to blame.

So we should lower our standards until we're competitive with China?  I don't think you would want that.

There's also side arguments into the incompetency of the American auto industry as a whole ("they designed shitty, inefficient, ugly cars for how long and the unions are to blame for their downfall?") and the D.C. school system, but you get the gist.  Then you listen to the American Life episode, and it all makes sense. 

I don't want to give too much away, but it will suffice to say that it's not unions.  It's the corrupt marriage of jail cell mentality and socialist thought.  Sort of an everybody-for-themselves ideology where unions are there only to enable petty self-interest. 

It's quite possible to manufacture things of quality without unions where people are happy and well paid and everything's hunky-dory.  Unions become the antidote for inequality of pay and working conditions, but it doesn't affect personalities. 

What happened is that I had become obsessed with laugh tracks; In particular as to how they manipulate a sitcom audience.  Not to the point of laughter, but how they provide a false sense of company even when you're watching bad Airwolf reruns by yourself in a run-down motel off the interstate.  In the bathroom. Naked.  I could never remember if I actually liked the shows I watched or could even remember them properly, but they were always warm and inviting.  My curiosity was piqued.  A couple of wikipedia rabbit holes later and I was mired in fascination as to how manipulative the sound of canned laughter could be.  One specious rumor had it that, before laugh tracks, audience members were unwilling to laugh at people being abused and debased for the sake of physical and emotional comedy.   Viewers just needed a little prodding to say, "It's okay. That person didn't actually permanently injure themselves in an unnecessary pratfall.  We just think that you should laugh and belittle them".  It was like schadenfreude and the capitalist system all came together in one box to sell some soap flakes and make people think, "Chachi's up to his old tricks again".

So I invested some time in a simple editing experiment — to remove the laugh track from an episode of Full House I found on the internet.  Would it reveal the true theater of the empty stage at work buried amongst the dick and fart laughter (more like innocuous family-friendly innuendo for that show)?  Or possibly the emotional turmoil amongst the actors that sat unbridled under a sea of noise? 

Kind of neither.  The show wasn't funny without the laugh track.  Or really not funny.  It kind of just...was.  In a way it was wholly more satisfying just because it was no longer demanding or guilting you into joining their comedy. I was relatively happy with the results.

It was nowhere near a perfect experiment as I was manually editing out the sound from the final blended soundtrack.  Without separate tracks to work with, I had no idea how to separate overlapping laughter and dialogue.  I spent a couple hours editing, which at the time seemed like an eternity for something I wasn't sure anybody would care about, yet it was miniscule for a proper editing job.  Either way, I posted it on Youtube with a description of a "simple editing experiment" just to see if anybody thought anything of it.  

this editor dude sucks donkey azz at editing

I can't say this editing was very good either. It doesn't feel like the show without a studio audience; instead, it feels like the show with the entire clip muted whenever a laugh track is played

I'm still not sure what they were expecting.  It's quite possible that a lot of people post videos online to show off their editing prowess, and those same people were expecting this to be another example of editing finesse, which it really was not.  I'm not troubled by the onslaught of harsh comments as I've gotten a fair share in other places, (some people seemed to rightly appreciate the posting, which was nice), but I'm still mystified by the effort involved here.  Who goes out of their way for vitriol at this low a level of publishing?  The gentle balance of critic and artist is certainly a complex symbiotic relationship, and some vitriol is to be expected.  I'm just scared that I might accidentally post pictures of a family vacation to Niagara Falls and getting underneath:

These picz are totally ghey.  You suck at life.  FAIL

• One room schoolhouse cliques
• The year in dead ideas
• Eating competition drug dealers
• Douchebags throughout the ages
• Toastmasters graduate degrees

There's almost an equivalence between how much somebody presents themselves as a programmer to how interested they actually are in it.  The more somebody wears programming t-shirts and bumper stickers, the more I tend to think of them as frauds.  Chances are that if you cared about what you were doing, you'd generally feel ill at ease to grandstand because in the back of your head you know that you could always be that much better.  That sentiment also goes for pretty much any hobby or craft from minature train set collectors to Tai Chi instructors.  It's much worse for programming because there's good job security to be found in techno-cynicism.  If you can keep up a facade of gibberish and confidence, employers will be hard-pressed for a reason to argue against whatever it is you just said.  It reminds me of this presentation given by an executive from Disney on their hiring practices.  In it, he describes how Disney always looks for people who ask questions. There will always be plenty of people in the world willing to talk endlessly about themselves and who knows how much of it is true, but a person who asks questions shows a sign of curiosity, which is always in short supply. 

Then again, if you don't ever present yourself as something out of humility and effacement, then you'll never be recognized as anything in your lifetime.  Instead, hubris will be rewarded nine times out of ten.  Like the old rap adage goes, "the meek won't inherit shit, because I'll just take it from 'em".

In a way, this book is a dated relic of a bygone time when people were enthralled by the idea of social action and eager to change the world.  At that time, people needed something to temper their enthusiasm at "fighting the man" towards more effective means of progress.

Towards that end, there are a million and one hippies and impressionable college kids that need to be bludgeoned with the ideas in this book.  It's the subtle ideas, like the need for ego, humor, and compromise in building up consensus, that work on a metaphorical level as well for any and all who may have thought that political discussion is a wasted effort in modern times.

Most other large metropolitan cities have an alternate Flavorpill-type guide like this - your New Yorks, San Franciscos, Tokyos, and Parises - but those are also huge metropolitan behemoths with swarming populations of interesting creative types.  D.C. is a small southern town that happens to be filled with lawyers.  It's like a legal-world Burning Man taking place in Georgia.  Or as John F. Kennedy put it, "A town of Southern efficiency and Northern charm".  Sounds great!

Frustration at D.C.'s lack of joie de vivre is a common habit of people forced to move here for employment.  The flawed temptation is to compare it with New York since both are the likely destinations of post-graduate jobs.  New York is New York.  D.C. is something different and has it's own appeal once you get over the need for 24-hour disco fashion parties.  I've had my own frustrations, but in the end, any place is really what you make of it.  You may not be able to get food delivered at two in the morning, but there are certainly other things in life.

Everybody already knows about the obvious things like the Metro (clean, reliable, limited), the weather (horrid swamp summers, mild winters), crime (scary, but not so much anymore), and the people (government worker soul death), but that last one is more complex than it sounds.  Essentially there are 6 types of people in D.C.:

• Government workers - Some have families and live out in the suburbs.  Some have rotted away from the inside, some work in places like the Library of Congress and have latched on to an endless source of fascinating information.
• Hill Staff - Because of the long hours and inside nature of the jobs, they are almost invisible to the outside world.  Soul rot grade: 7/10.
• Non-profit/NGO workers - Probably the most commonly occuring.  Outgoing and the closest to what might be considered regular humanity.
• Journalists - Schlubby, loud, like to hear themselves talk.
• Lawyers - Loud, sometimes short, like to hear themselves talk.
• Black people - Actually from DC.  Angry, relatively no soul rot. 

Altogether, that might sound kind of horrifying, but there is a brighter side. D.C. also has this relatively small population of people who actually care about things.   Not just the casual, "I recycle" or "I give money to homeless people when they make me feel guilty", but the people who think that it's a crime that anybody in the modern world is poor and dedicate their lives to changing it without a hint of smug self-satisfaction.  It might sound trite, but when confronted by someone like this it can easily call into question the comedian's attitude.  Anybody to them who isn't doing something to combat the horrid conditions existing in the world is just wasting resources for their own interests.  Which sounds harsh, but it's hard to argue against.  What's scary is when it starts to bleed in with religious indignation and eventually morphs into smug self-satisfaction. Until then, it's actually quite enlightening.

The problem with that selfless personality is that it doesn't make for quality living - too many fresh-faced kids out of graduate school who aren't able to balance high-minded intent with some selfish exploitation of the world.  Which is why I fully encourage the recent hype of D.C. as a "hip place to be" whatever that might mean.  Send down some more NYC ex-pats with the promise of cheap Chinatown bus tickets.  Flood the streets with more creative types who might not realize that they're smack in the middle of an emotional "grey zone". Have them build 24 hour fashion disco parties in the dead center of this sterile landscape and integrate the pleasure principle into political discourse.  There's a Williamsburg (VA) tri-corner hat theme-rave that's just waiting to be made.

Chances are that it will all collapse financially within a year (so far it's been a boon), and in the end it may end up halfway between cynicism and hedonism.

I assumed that everybody else had done the same and slowly relegated radio to the dustbin of listening outlets in favor of mp3s, CDs, or satellite radio, but it's still out there and it's affect is strong.  Rush Limbaugh still remains the voice of Republican America, Scott Shannon, the inventor of the Zoo Crew concept is also the voice of the Sean Hannity show, and Glenn Beck has turned his Morning Zoo Crew into a nationalized operatic farce. Not to mention Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy, Bill O'Reilly, Alex Jones, Neal Boortz and many more.  The tendency really should be to ignore these people and they'll go away as they survive solely on attention like vampires, but radio iconoclasts have been able to feed on low-level fame and shock-mongering for some time and they've already built an empire without my attention span.  They hold devoted followings to the sort of people that spend their whole lives with talk radio murmuring in the background.  Tiny little cults of personality that rant against anything they can get their hands around.

Beck, in particular, I find fascinating.  Plenty has been said about his overly dramatic pandering, and willingness to say anything for attention, and really, everybody should just avoid giving him a second more of their time, but I can't help but look, particularly at this biography in Salon of his coke-fueled meteoric rise to infamy.  That sense of shameless abandon that can lead someone from dressing up like a banana and diving in a pile of money to speeding down a highway in a Delorean with the doors open and his face covered in coke is endlessly intriguing.  It's the go-go, desperate lifestyle of a local celebrity.  This is the same person who becomes a born-again Mormon and created the non-sensical 9-12 project, who would also sit up at night with a gun in his mouth wondering where it all went wrong.  And by "going wrong" I mean "not having a larger share of the Houston drive-time traffic market".   

A depression hug is the act of embracing depression as a low-level mood alteration.

"It feels like depression is giving you a hug all day".

This isn't about how to react to specific circumstances and emotions. I would be hard pressed to recommend an all-encompassing reaction to anything (although look forward to my essay Strategic Pessimism: You Win Either Way out in bookstores soon). This is more about mood. Thinking about something sad - a dead squirrel in the middle of the road, an abandoned bridal shop outside of Des Moines, a lonely retirement home - it gives a warm feeling all over. A warm, sad feeling. It's not schadenfreude, but possibly the inverse, like a side benefit to empathy. Every good country song depends on it - the good ones at least.

The current theory is that depression is an evolutionary strategy. Maybe a time when animals might conserve their resources, like hibernation, to preserve their energy for future endeavors and rethink their hunting/gathering techniques or to sit around eating cheetos and watching infomercials until dawn.

Whether or not that is true is less important then the joyous effect a little sadness can bring to your constitution every day. Sad songs are life's flowers. Why not open up your heart and let a sad, rotting decomposed begonia in?

First off is numbering.  When you have the convenience of a Capitol as a large anchor point you can use it to measure distance from it's zero-point origin, which is how houses are numbered.  1300 13th street is 13 blocks away form the Capitol.  As always with the grid system, you can find the 1300 block of H street by going to the intersection of 13th and H.  The combination of letter streets with number streets avoids the NYC confusion of saying you're at 6th and 7th (which is the avenue, which is the street?).  Having separate quadrants has some issues.  Many people get lost and wind up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue southeast.  Then again, some places will just reuse a numbered street without an area designation.  There are places with multiple 3rd streets and when you drive there for the first time and miss the first one, you will get lost and it won't be pretty.

A handy mnemonic I used often to calibrate myself in NYC and figure out what streets are one-way is "East is evens, West is odds".  Even streets, like 40th, 8th and 2nd street all are one-way going East.  7th, 31st, and 13th all go West.    It doesn't exactly work for the West Village or 42nd street, but it's come in handy more often than not.  When you're in a city with no valid way to determine the location of the sun, I've found this does the trick of a compass in a flash.

Boo (certainly not his real name) looked like a short, chubby MC Hammer impersonator, mainly because of the gold wrap-around glasses.  Really friendly.  He lived on the block his whole life.  His sister, a really large red-headed girl with black freckles and a wheezy voice always sat out on the front stairs and offer sexual favors to anybody walking by for five dollars (Baltimore prices!).  If anything, her only clients was the occasional construction worker put up to it by his friends.   

She would also always ask me to borrow five dollars.  The one time I gave in and gave her five dollars, Boo never looked at me the same.  He would give this dissapointed, frustrated squint as if his whole life he's had to live with his sister just sitting on the steps, smoking, and trying to turn tricks while he worked for the DC parks department all day and he didn't want anybody encouraging her.  That's just a guess. I'm not sure what really went on there.

They had a vicious German Shepherd named Tammy who would bark until her throat was hoarse if anyone came near their backyard, but she'd then completely switch and become the friendliest puppy when Boo was around.  One day, Boo's mom, who must have never left the house, died, and we watched the ambulance take her away.  Boo showed me some pictures of her and Tammy in happier times.  A few days after that, in the middle of the night, Boo ran out of his house screaming and hollering, without a shirt, and proceeded to roll around in the street yelling, "Momma, I'm coming to you". 

He must not have taken it well; his mom dying, and his sister then dying, who I later found out was actually his brother, sent Boo a little crazy.  He invited a group of drug dealers to stay in his house.  They turned the backyard into a chop shop for bikes and sat out on the front in lawn chairs seeing if anybody was wanting.  One day, there was a bust by the cops who arrested half the house.  Some guy, who I'd never seen before, came up in a fancy car after the cops left and started screaming in the streets about "she fucked me over" repeatedly Marion Barry-style.  A day or two later, Boo died, from what we were told was a heart attack after he was pulled over by the cops.  We never saw him again.

The dealers continued to occupy his house for a solid month until another family member finally found out about the situation, kicked everybody out, and sealed the house up with plywood.  The house had become such a fixture of vice at that point, that people continued to break in, pull plywood off the doors and windows, just to do what they did before.  Failing that, they would climb through an opening in the fence and use the small shed in the backyard.  When the fence was redone to block the entrances, somebody took the effort of ramming their car into the fence to knock it down and gain access to the carnal shed of ickiness.  At some point the house was sold, gentrified and a couple of environmental kids on interships moved in.

I found this note stapled to a page from a pornography magazine in the thrown-out remnants of Boos' mystery shack after they kicked out the dealers.  I scanned it in for reference for all future inhabitants of that house.  Then I autoclaved everything it had ever come near. 

Found on the street in Québec City

Sing a song of microbes, Dainty little things, Eyes and ears and horns and tails, Claws and fangs and stings. 

Microbes in the carpet, Microbes in the wall, Microbes in the vestibule, Microbes in the hall. 

Microbes on my money, Microbes in my hair, Microbes on my meat and bread, Microbes everywhere.

Microbes in the butter, Microbes in the cheese, Microbes on the knives and forks, Microbes in the breeze. 

Friends are little microbes, Enemies are big, Life among the microbes is-- Nothing 'infra dig.' 

Fussy little microbes, Millions at a birth, Make our flesh and blood and bones, Keep us on the Earth.

T'was about nearing the middle of noon on a steamy dark day in the middle of June when me and Alise decided to go for a nice coach ride through the park.  "Ought to be a good time for the weather, when nobody else will be in the roadways"  It sounded a good idea, as something that I rarely think of to extricate myself from the premises and gallivant about in the noonday air for no other reason except enjoyability and my own sense of health and vitality.  "Well certainly Alise, let's go traipsing through the city streets for a time. See what the outside world has in store for us"

Such a novel idea, but of course I didn't exactly estimate what would be required of such an adventure.  Besides the delightful selection of pastries Alise collected in her picnic basket, there was the usual fitting of galoshes, ventilation masks, and goggles to make our way in the filth of the city streets in an open car buggy.  But given enough time and inclination we suit up all proper like and make our way to the garage.

The coach which will escort us through the streets of New Amsterdam this fine day is one of my father's own manufacture.  Father was a wise man and good with a tinkering eye.  He could build a boiler out of a couple cans of Old Alabaster, two nickels, and a handful of twine.  He outfitted an old pressure cooker with some plumbing supplies and the wagon wheel from my childhood days to make a fine carriage.  True, it does have some complications relating to grease buildup in the intake valves, but we have our own home remedies to alleviate said situations when they arise and we would rather make do with father's home concoction and ride around in pride rather than bankrupting ourselves on these new fanciful motorcoaches we see being sold downtown.  They lack the character a good home-built machine can provide.  Instead you get a ridiculous steed of pomp and steel.

Starting up father's creation does take a little bit of patience as well though.  Once you get a good load of blubber in the main tank, you really need to fish it down to the crankcase. We use an old fireplace shovel to really scrape it down there all the while making it's horrid gurgling, bubbling sounds.  You then prime the pressure tank with a few good cranks on the starting motor.  Once the good horse gets firing, and there's a solid stream of the gray smog trailing out of the exhaust pipe - be careful the stench can be overwhelming and very eye-watering - then we ply the motor with a few throttles as you hear the gurgling turn into sharp bursting fits of  fat corpuscles exploding faster and faster.  Eventually building to a steady stream and what one might consider a "wet purr".

Out of the garage we head and Alise is holding on to her hat.  She's looking fetching today as she just recently picked up a pair of thin ladies' goggles.  She had always fretted about the size and fit of the bulky men's pair we had found in the garage lying around.  They worked fine to keep the grease in the air from getting in the eyelids but it did not complement her features at all.  These new covered spectacles were a trimmer variety that were more elegant on the face for her.  I tried them on and found them limiting and fragile, but she seems to be fine with the sacrifice.

Puttering down the cobblestone paths of Broad Street, we take in the scenery.  The cloud cover looks peaceful and you can look out over a good 4 or 5 blocks before the haze blurs what's ahead.  Few others seem to be out at this hour, although I notice our butcher from the market up ahead.  "Isn't that Sheridan?" Alice seems as excited as I am.  We don't know him that well, but he's an excitable fellow and it's curious to see him out from behind the market stand.  "Sure is, wonder who let him out of his trappings?"

"Hello Sheridan, how are you this fine day?"

"Oh hello, it's Mr. and Mrs. Pelligrew, correct?"

"Yes, that's us for sure.  Where are you headed here?"

"Oh, just heard about a big haul coming in from the waters off the coast.  I hear they brought in a couple Orcas and even a Big Blue"

"A big blue?  Really?"

"Sure as it can be.  I'm already headed back from there.  It's a big fellow at that too.  You two should head over there.  They're still carving him up"

 

• The Telecommunications Industry - Mark Twain may have said that "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it".  Well everybody moans endlessly about the details of their cellular voice messaging plans and text plans and who has the best service and blah blah blah Verizon this, AT&T that, and nobody certainly does anything about them.  These meaningless details are the useless offal of life.  Think of the time saved from people's lives if there were only one company, a resurrected Ma Bell monopoly, that could provide digital transmissions to all.  Think of the coverage, yet without the corrupt monopoly of the private industry and within control of the population at large.
• Oil and Gas - I'm going to go all Hugo Chavez on people with this one, but we're in a big old deficit right now, and look who has lots and lots and lots of money and doesn't really need it; Exxon and friends.  And without money, they wouldn't be able to lobby against public transportation and fuel efficiency standards.  It's a pretty obvious one but I'm sure there would be random assasinations if anybody tried moving forward on it.
• News & Media - NPR has it's faults and it's Juan Williamses and sometimes they could tell me any lie or get me to drink bleach if they only asked in a sonrous tone, but compared to the rest, they're far above the fray.  Why not toss more money their way and eliminate two network stations in their stead?  And maybe a couple 24 hour news programs while we're at it.

Lansing, Michigan

John Rappaport was surprised this Thursday to find the cashier at his local Wendy's to be excessively friendly, enthusiastic, and even competent at using the cash register.  His surprise eventually faded when realizing that this overly-friendly employee was probably the manager. "I was like, 'why is this person not sullen and distraught at the minimum wage life of hocking greasy burgers in a strip mall parking lot?'  Then I started to put it all together.  He called me 'sir', he's well-groomed, wearing a suit, and he's moving quickly.  He has to be the manager."  After noticing this, John's temporary excitement was then transformed into general complacence.  "Once you know it's the manager, you realize they have to be like that. They probably come in once a week and work the cash register for an hour before complaining about the state of the prep tables, looking over the numbers, checking the sales receipts, and then leaving."

Everywhere is camo and Larry Csonka posing with fish.  Lots of ex-military and other ex-battle-weary men go here to fight simpler battles against less-empathetic creatures.  Underneath there are subspecies of surly Inuits, tough hippies, pseudo Canadians, Minnesotan dental hygenists on vacation, and Russian businessmen that float freely amongst the populace of other permanent visitors.  There is no visible social friction.  For any dispuit they have, everybody knows that they all can go fishing together and then they're back in agreement.

There's some credit given to parody, since it's commenting on the original version, but serious impersonation implies no amount of commentary, just that the original couldn't be here tonight because they either wouldn't deign themselves to play in this two-bit town or they ran out of their own ideas.

Cover bands walk a tough line. In a way, originality is the sole determiner of character. If you are not original, then you are someone else and have no character to call your own. You are a pale imitation of the original.

On the other hand, nobody is completely original. Everything comes from someplace else, and most bands start out doing cover songs in some shape or form to learn how to play, to get audience appreciation, and to build off the cover songs into their own sound. If they never branch off and continue as a cover band, then they will be doomed to the shadow of whomever they are imitating. Supposedly this is what set CBGB's out from all other clubs is that they required bands to play original songs. The Ramones were originally playing cover songs from the 60s until they were forced to make their own numbers up.

Like talent and skill, originality is a precious commodity that requires a delicate balance. Too much talent and no originality and you're a cover band. Originality without skill and craftsmanship and you're an un-listenable avant-gardist. I would say all artists should balance the two, but really it's better to be original. There is a frightening world out there of people scrounging for ideas and desperate characterless craftsmen hurting to find ideas to keep up their appearances that makes avant-garded nonsense comforting. It would almost be perfect to match up theoretical performance artists together with shallow, unoriginal hacks.  Together they would make great music.

That's why I've called everybody here to this town hall meeting. Since the government isn't going to be there to take care of things, we're just gonna have to do it ourselves. And, I figure, if we're going to start our little society from scratch, it's best to have everybody in the same room. I understand Mrs. Hurley couldn't make it tonight because she couldn't get a cat-sitter on such short notice, but I told her we could let her go over all of our decisions tomorrow afternoon.

So, where to begin? Well, I was thinking, since things pre-government-collapse were going pretty hunky dorey, why throw the civic baby out with the bathwater? We can pick and choose all the laws and legislation that have worked and then go through and throw out those negative nellies that have been bugging us, like that old ordinance about lawn care that Mr. McGregor keeps complaining about. Well, I went to the liberty of collating enough copies of some important documents that might help us as a guide. On the table in front of me, you'll find a stack of Declarations of Independence, Constitutions, Magna Carta, town charters, plus some funky legal documents I found online that I thought might be fun to throw around. If everybody could form a line to my right, and you can grab one of each. There's also a number of highliters and note stickies on the table, but there may not be enough to go around, so you might have to share. What's that? You're missing the last pages from your copy of the Constitution? Hmm, I really thought I made enough copies. Just look on with Hazel if you could. I'll give everybody a couple minutes to look everything over.

So, what's everybody think? I can just start off with the Declaration of Independence and then we can go down the list of Articles of the Constitution and see what everybody thinks. Mmm-kay? Alright then, how's everybody feel about "all men created equal"? Sure? Ah good point Hazel, "all people" works better. Yes, Mr. Johnson? Yeah, I figured Democracy would be the way to go. But maybe I'm jumping ahead too much. What's everybody think? Democracy? Yes, Mr. Johnson, it's nice that you read a book on traveling autonomous anarchist collectives, but I don't think Ms. Wilkins is going to give up her garden patch just to avoid the chance of authoritarian rule.

Just think of it like that Noreaster that hit us two years back. Or remember when everybody got together for that garbage cleanup last summer by the river? Well, it'll be like that, but on a weekly basis.

Maybe the concept is more like (skill - character) < talent. The equation of what constitutes good is really kind of vague. There are poorly made trinkets of great worth out in the world, and there are also deftly-sculpted piles of excrement. I kind of grew up assuming the former was more important than the latter. To me, back then, chasing the idea of talent was a dead-end because you would surely sacrifice character in the process of constant practice and bitter struggle. Or maybe that was an excuse for urepentant laziness.

More recently I'm begininning to renounce those views. I've known of too many creative people with good ideas sit on their hands and watch it all go by rather than take a chance at making something. My previous views of innate talent may have been skewed by the world of published entertainment. If you look at the world of published media - bands with record deals, movies that are shown in theaters, printed books - you'll see that there's a focus on talent over character. If you look at the world as a whole, you'll see the opposite; too many tragic stories of languished ideas and abandoned projects. Even for the worst record ever made, somebody thought it was something of value, and it took a large degree of effort to record, mix, package and sell. More often than not, people have ideas that they spend little effort on.

A lot of this feeds into the independent music world of the 90s. That disdain for major record labels, even for a person such as myself who wasn't close to recording anything, was prevalent. It permeated into personal ideology. What I don't think I understood at the time was that all of that independent recording ideology was aimed at people trying to record actual albums. People who had put a lot of effort into forming a band, practicing, playing shows and crafting music, and then they needed to decide on where to record. It wasn't about effort. They already knew that balance of effort and skill that quantifies talent. Or at least they thought they had an album's worth of it.

Yeah, it's mainly effort that defines the difference. Interesting people with unique ideas that sit in the corner and pet them quietly tend to be ignored in favor of bombastic egotistic self-serving jerks who can feed off their own ego. Sort of an evolutionary strategy in that way. It's the 8 foot worm that makes it's own food.

"Okay, who are we seeing in this film? I'm thinking Tom Cruise and Natalie Portman have to drive across country to visit their uncle dying of cancer. Along the way, they get to know each other and stare out the window wistfully for half the movie."

"I like it. They're both about the same height so it fits. Maybe have them stop in some town to run around and realize it's the time of their lives?"

"Perfect. Maybe they pick up a hitchhiker or two to make it interesting. Now we just need a soundtrack. What about Nick Drake?"

"Suzie, can you get me Nick Drake on the phone? Oh, he's dead? What about his estate? Ok, maybe we'll get somebody to cover some Joni Mitchell songs instead."

Later that day:

"Don't fucking cross me you piece of shit. You think you can fuck me on this? I'm the fucking king of mumblecore. You'll never awkwardly emote on screen in this town again!"

Most of the Tournament reviews seem to be peppered with that sense of confusion about how you measure something like this. It's like comparing apples and oranges, or as Anthony Doerr described in an early match, "like comparing 777 and oranges". There's no metric here except personal opinion, which might be fine, except people tend to back down from their own opinions when confronted with the heady weight of a thousand page magnum opus that defines a generation. It looks bad to nominate those simple guilty pleasures that you actually enjoy since they don't look good on a pedestal. But this is all hearsay since I've never made it through one of these heady tomes.

This is what makes the Tournament so important. Considering the enormity of words being printed on dead trees these days, and soon to be on dead Kindles, and then to be hocked on talk shows, the need for quality filters is more important than ever. And with the competition for attention coming from every other avenue available, as well as the ongoing mining for the overlooked and unseen obscurities from time immemorial, who has the time to read anything new of considerable length? And within those limited time constraints, who wants to fill that time reading something that's demanding to be taken so very seriously when there's tawdry, salacious dreck available at the ready?

Personally, I would love an inverted Tournament where books race each other to the bottom of self-importance and intellectual depth. It would be a competition for the best of the worst of recent literary attempts, from pulpish revenge fantasies to torrid romance novelettes sold in grocery stores. It would no longer be akin to comparing "777 and oranges" but like comparing ignorable mindless titillation to perfect mindless titillation. Something I'm sure there's a proper metric for.

It was a horrid thing, created with Netscape Communicator, made from a mishmash of visual geegaws, animated gifs, and anything I thought was interesting in digital format with little consideration for aesthetics. Mandelbrot sets, comical images of Anton Lavey and Sammy Davis Junior, and random chunks of text all floated together in an eye-watering cacophony of digital vomit. To my credit, the technology was new, and the tools were limited. Information about how these things were made was sparse and oftentimes incorrect. I was learning on my own and felt satisfied to have made it that far without any guidance which is how a lot of people started out. Lots of people make horrendous blinking animated websites filled with rants at their postman their first time out. It may be some reflection of their internal animus - that they themselves are just a collection of things other people put together with no visual taste and unresolved anger issues - but the beginnings of art are almost never pretty. You have to start somewhere.

I then went on to make numerous other poorly thought out creations of my own, some that never saw the light of day, some that shouldn't have. One was a fake corporate site, ostensibly for my own company that I was the CEO of. Maybe some other company would just happen to stumble on it and say "this looks professional, let's give them lots of money". Others were just looping animation clips of images and nonsensical poetry that seemed to be so popular when Flash was just becoming prominent. The Mystery Date and Band Name Generators, I still stand behind those and only wish I could have kept the files somewhere. There was the Top 5 List site, which had decent intentions, but not enough effort, yet still had it's moments. Technical difficulties abound and still struggling with the graphic design I taught myself with a hacked version of Photoshop, I felt no qualms at the time with advertising the site on a much more popular blog to get people to join in. Then I'd watch the complaints come in about how it didn't really work very well.

Then there were the series of blogs. One just a collection of invention ideas, another a more proper blog with inane detail on the minutea of daily life. Another a combination of the two. I had picked up on the idea of minimalist design and eventually parlayed it into something that didn't make people run away in horror. Having read lots of zines, but never got the gumption to make one myself, I thrilled at the ability to make something so intimate and place it somewhere for like-minded others to see. The temptation to try new things would eventually lead me to randomly break everything, and then recode it all over again, but the end result was a small step in a better direction. Eventually I made a personal site that I was relatively proud of. My tendency to always want to do something original had been a deterrent to the design aesthetic, but I eventually settled on something simple and new that incorporated my own hand-drawn flourishes and a content management system that used only Javascript. Unnecessarily complicated, but it worked, and my written voice was getting better, melding a combination of lists, pseudointellectual meandering, and mocking that same pseudointellectualism. I eventually abandoned the site out of a combination of anger and embarassment that had more to do with the home construction project I was working on at the time than anything else. I took down the site and put my focus on writing in other places.

And that's all been going well and good. I haven't thought about any of those aborted personal web projects and failed ideas for some time. Having seen others abandon their own blogs over and over, it seems like that is the nature of web writing. You write it and throw it into the void, and eventually it dissappears. If it's something meant to reach a larger audience, then there's other outlets that already have that megaphone. If you're writing for yourself, then you just put it in your diary. Those that post their diary for all to see are just yearning for attention disingenuously.

But that's not completely right. There is this small niche of purpose that a personal site can provide akin to a ritual of personal, digital fetishism, slightly exposed to the world to impose a small underlying sense of fear. Something that allows for all the bits and pieces that don't fit anywhere else to fall into place for your own satisfaction. I thought it might be worth trying again.

It's like they really know me.

They knew I have yearned in my heart to build futuristic homes for those suffering from dementia. Not livable retirement villages but tortuous halls of chaos. Any architect can make a retirement village by just filling a concrete shell of a structure with some pastel paint, paintings of seaside resorts, rugs that camouflage vomit, and lots of parking. The palette is just so very limiting. It's only when you open up the option to sadisitic interests that the options really start to present themselves. All of this moral adherence is really straining on the bounds of creativity.

Wouldn't it be more interesting for everybody involved if residents had to live in a maze of 24 hour panopticon surveillance and maddening darkness rather than days of Matlock and Dr. Phil? It would keep the old folks on their toes.

What about a Frank Gehry-style complex where there are no elevators? Just one long hallway that intertwines on itself to all levels of a building covered in mirrors. Hallways would be lined with DMSO, LSD, and pop rocks. Electrical shocks administered remotely via neck bracelets. And if you say the right word that day, the rooms fill up with dish soap.

I'm really just spitballing here because the possibilities of tending to the elderly are endless. The only limits are your imagination.]]> 2007-02-03T03:16:53 http://notes.llewhinkes.org/archives/new-trends-in-50s-housing 2006-10-24T06:21:02 http://notes.llewhinkes.org/archives/distributed-social-networking-schema Video games for the unenlightened age.

• Super Aparatchik 3000 - Fill in the spreadsheet before a timer counts down to zero to earn points, collect gold stars, and save the princess.
• Drone Recon VI - Find the enemy, hunt them down, and report back to base. Then read about a similar occurence in a far off third world country that same day.
• SIM Hive Mind - Use a live game chat to replicate what the person next to you is doing. Wonder at the patterns that emerge.
• Hello Kitty's Fantasy Millgram Experiment Happy Party - Really just another Hello Kitty game sequel.

That day my lifelong question of "why does all garbage smell the same" was finally been answered. It's not that any large amount of various matter mixed together will all become the same substance, but that when any mixture of substances are tied up in a plastic bag and left outside, the bacterium begin to ferment and start to make that uniquely cheesy smell we all know and love.

Mmmm....delicious.

• Versteckenekelfreude - Hiding joy with revulsion. Used to descibe the popularity of Nazis torturing girls in their skivvies on the covers of men's magazines throughout the 50s or episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
• Corripio Superfluo - The point at which a viral marketing campaign bleeds outside of it's intentional boundaries and into daily life, eventually losing contact with it's original marketing purpose. A self-replicating simulacrum.
• Cryptosomnium - A riddle cloaked in mystery, surrounded by illusion, dipped in chocolate sauce, that, at it's heart, means nothing. e.g. "Don't Forget to Drink Your Ovaltine".

• Add a country-rap breakdown.
• What would be the low budget equivalent?
• Remember how much you'll fail if this doesn't get finished.
• Gabbacore is big now. Add some of that.
• This was supposed to be done 10 minutes ago.
• Fill in the rest with outtakes.
• Think about what you ate for breakfast.
• Avoid using vowels.
• Make a puddle, not an ocean. Actually, go ahead and make an ocean. Well, now that I think about it some more, go ahead and make a puddle since you already got started. Or an ocean. Your call. Or maybe a lake.
• Think about the most embarassing moment of your life and how pathetic it was.
• Remember the futility of your existence.
• Add another country-rap breakdown.
• Do whatever comes to mind. Now look at how you've screwed things up.
• You suck.
• Look behind you!
• Depending on random cards for inspiration eh? You must be out of ideas.

Please make a mixtape of the best/worst of classic rock fantasy-magic related music à la Steve Miller Band's Abracadabra

When I first interviewed for the job, they sat me down in the office and used every trick of their own trade to tiptoe around those words. "We use unconventional marketing techniques", said in a very exciting tone. I was thinking they would have guerilla performance artists covered in paint forming company logos on the tops of buildings. "We do political marketing for every shade of the spectrum", meaning they one time bought a Nature Conservatory coffee mug when they were in a pinch, but the rest of their clients would strangle kittens if it gave a return on their investment. These were real faceless companies too. Ones that don't really exist except for an amorphous entity to be referred to as "the client". Maybe it was just an escrow account floating in the ether. These clients never stopped by the office. They never called to discuss the finished product. Not even a mention of getting the client to pay. Did they even care what we made for them? It's as if we were working on our own and if we did things properly then money would suddenly appear in the account for the office Christmas party.

At one point I imagined it to all be part of a particularly mediocre cult like most office environments can be. Workers might seem friendly at first but there was always something not quite right lurking underneath. It's in the glossy stare in response to certain questions or the randomly cruel outbreak of to demean somebody in the middle of a meeting, possibly as some right of shaming. I've been in a few mediocre office-cult environments before and didn't think this current office fit the bill. And it wasn't like that other office my friend worked at; the one where the one guy would drink in the bathroom during lunch and everybody would viciously backstab each other to get the others' Aeron Chair. The pay here was decent, the location was good, and things were relatively relaxed. We made website designs filled with meaningless stock photography. I barely knew what it all was for. Maybe somebody else was in charge of filling online discussion boards with the exaltations of Pepsi Blue (the client managers I suspect), but the designers were in semi-blissful ignorance.

We made sites that told people information. Did you know that 10% of people in the U.S. suffer from diabetes? I didn't know that. Like heroin, nicotine is a physical addiction not just a psychological addiction. That was news to me. Government tax write-offs can get you free computer training and there's a medical conditions exist to cover about every aspect of daily life. Hey, if a company wants to give away information to help sell something, that seems like a semi-respectable advertising strategy. Seems like everybody benefits. Maybe people can learn while being bombarded by consumerist culture. Most of the time I was able to work by myself since legal issues prevented half the staff from talking about the projects we worked on. I had little complaint but would sometimes run into design problems from the isolation. If there's no client to speak of, and half the staff can't speak to you, who an you ask? And then there were the problems more commonly associated with graphic design.

"This site needs to exude intimacy. No cold harsh colors. We need warmer tones. No supermodels. We need down-to-Earth people. It can't seem like we're trying to sell them anything."

"But we are trying to sell them something. Why else would we have all of these focus-grouped stock images everywhere? Everybody can see that it's a corporate site. If we really wanted to help them we'd just give them the information."

"It just doesn't work that way. Just add some more faux finishes".

There was plenty of high-minded effort put into all of the jargon about initmate telegraphics, information grenades, and new media distribution tools, but who knows if it actually worked. Nobody really seemed to know what they were doing or who was in charge. Focus groups tested everything and always came back with a hodge-podge of answers from the useful ("It seemed honest"), the intelligent ("what are they trying to sell me here"), to the Ralph Wiggum ("where can I get free cigarettes"). For a time I was comforted to think that it was all some sort of double-con to bilk money from an unknown millionaire who thought viral marketing actually works. Instead of swindling nicotine addicts, we would just draw out the process into revision hell and never get anything done. Then there were the political campaigns...

"Photoshop this protestor to make him look more detestable. Blacken the eyes. Change what his sign says."

I recently ran into somebody at a bar who worked in viral marketing for public health issues like nutrition, food pyramids, or getting tested for HIV. They seemed to be complacent about this as an advertising technique.

"Isn't it dangerous to use the same dishonest techniques as those used by companies selling drugs for non-existent conditions?"

"Oh, it's no big worry. Viral Marketing has been around for some time. All those "very special episodes" of sitcoms from the 80s that teach people about the dangers of drugs and promiscuous sex, most were paid placements by health advocates. The drunk-driving episode of Cheers and Family Ties, the coke episode of Growing Pains...etc. And it works. Focus groups have tested it over and over."

"Who can argue with focus group success?"

a) Bands named after geographical locations tend to be terrible (Alabama, Europe, Asia, Chicago...but not Boston. Always an exception to the rule.)

and...

b) Bands whose members are the offspring of famous musicians tend to fair poorly (Dweezil Zappa, Alice Coltrane, Hank Williams Jr.)

but...

the band Spain, which is named after a geographic location and contains multiple offspring of Charlie Haden, is of quality repute.

[The bike you were looking at] it has no banana seat.

Joe is going to work at N.A.S.A. Greenbelt is a city in Maryland.

Joe is going to work at N·A·S·A. Greenbelt is a city in Maryland.

Did Frank say, "there is no escape?"

Did Frank say, "there is no escape"?

Did Frank say, "is there any escape?"?

Me: So what have you been listening to lately?

Them: Oh, this noise band that only releases albums every three years. They don't make contact with their record label except to drop off the masters.

Me: Sort of like Jandek?

Them: Sort of. Have you heard that album of the Industrial guy that goes nuts on stage and just talks and cries for an hour straight? It's awesome.

Me: No. Sounds cool, what is...

Them: And have you heard those Sunn recordings? It's by the guy from Earth who gave Kurt Cobain the shotgun.

Me: Awesome...I guess.

Them: What about the roadie from the Melvins who plays all the instruments in his slow sludge-rock dirgecore?

Me: No, but have you heard the Van Morrison album that he made to get out of his record contract where he just mumbles about ringworm?

Them: No.

Me: Or that disco song-poem about Jimmy Carter? What about Uri Gellar's creepy religious album? Or Nagaroth, the German black metal group?

Them: Have you heard the Japanese French proto-punk psychedelic band with the blind lead singer?

Me: Well have you seen that 8 hour Warhol movie of the man sitting in a chair filmed backwards and printed on saran wrap?

And the soundtrack, it's by John Cage.

• Eskimos - If somebody squats on the ground for five minutes breathing heavily with their arms crossed then another person picks them up in a bear hug and holds them there until they pass out, they get a short buzz.
  
  Result: Like a nice power nap.
  Damage Done: Chances are that it's a result of oxygen deprivation. It's probably killing brain cells like a wheat thresher.
• Eye Pressure Kaleidescope - While laying down, if you look at a bright light (not the sun) with your eyes closed and put a gentle pressure on your eyelids with your thumbs, the inside of your eyelids begin to look like a bunch of swirling colors.
  
  Result: Entertaining on a Sunday morning, if you like Kaleidescopes.
  Damage Done: As long as you don't crush your eyes with your thumbs, all should be well.
• Ghost Hand - If you put the tips of your fingers on one hand against the tips of the fingers on the opposing hand like Mr. Burns, and then repeatedly press them together for about five minutes, when you separate the hands each hand will still feel like it's fingers are pressed against the other hand.
  
  Result: Not all that entertaining. I might be doing it wrong. Lot of work for little return.
  Damage Done: Wasted five minutes of your life.

• Rusted Soup Can
• The Algonquin
• Farmer's Delight
• Sharp Sunset
• Drop in the Pond
• West Virginia Timpani

There's not many other options. People keep thinking that biometrics will work - having keys based around retinal scans and more fingerprint-based technology, but these too may be able to be compromised.

And what happens if the person with clearance becomes corrupted? Mental instability and monetary offers have gotten the best of better men than me. The standard response is that people need to be monitored constantly, but that just plain sucks. I guarantee that any place with security like that is an awful place to be.

What would be great is if there were a security mechanism that was inherently connected with what it was trying to protect. Like if you only wanted short people in your house, you'd make a front door that was short.

The short front door would help prevent tall people from getting in, but eventually they could chop off their legs for entrance and then the security is compromised. So this security system would also have to be something that wasn't a fixed key, but rather a dynamic entity. Not just a changing algorithm, like having the password increase by 1 everyday, but something more elusive.

One version of this, the hipster algorithm, would require a knowing musical references for security accesss. It would be based around a self-organizing map that would link a database of esoteric bands. So just saying "Can" over and over wouldn't work since the map would adjust and ignore overused references.

LW - Left-wing apocrypha. Means a theory believed mainly by liberal folks - usually about the government trying to create a fascist state.

RW - Right-wing Sodom and Gomorrah-style apocalypse. For the conservatives who think the world is slowly crumbling into sin and degradation.

N/A - Neither.

• Housewives having parties where they inject botulism into their faces. (N/A)
• Happiness drugs to cure people of anti-social behavior widely advertised on television (LW). Sex drugs also advertised (RW), although they sometimes cause diarrhea (LW).
• Genetic engineering being used to create race of superbeings who can withstand most illnesses (LW). Or maybe that's just an excuse to kill babies (RW). Still no signs of supermen eating babies yet.

Air conditioning is highly recommended, but it's expensive. Probably costs the city and it's residents untold millions of dollars in energy therms every year. If something could be done on a larger scale to affect the climate, it could be a boon to life in the district in so many ways. Sure, a few people out there might scoff at altering god's handywork or following in the bizarre, money-wasting footsteps of the Army Corps of Engineers, but the benefits are too great to ignore.

From my limited knowledge of climatology, I believe most of the source comes from D.C. being in a slightly tropical climate at a relatively low elevation and a hilly topography between the Appalachians and the ocean. There's a lot of moisture from the Potomac river and the Atlantic Ocean, but the wind can't take the moisture away since it's blocked in by the mountains or the hilly local topography that make up the Potomac River valley. The low elevation means heavy pressure which keeps the moisture in place. It's warm enough so that most of the water doesn't condense. Combine this with D.C.'s heavy traffic problem and it makes the air a stagnent mess.

Possible solutions I've thought of are thus:

• Use of dehumidification silicate on a large scale - Dehumidification silicate is a substance used in shoe boxes and basements as a cheap way to condense water from air. It's very slow and only works in small quantities. If used on a massive scale, say on 80% of the rooftops throughout the city, it might have a reasonable effect.
• Cloud Seeding - Constant cloud seeding seems to be what's happening right now - lots and lots of rain. In the days after a rainstorm, humidity usually drops to much more endurable levels. Who knows what the consequences of this sort of weather tampering might be in the long run? (Heavy erosion?)
• Terraformation - Terraforming the landscape sounds scary, but chances are that cloud seeding might have a more disastrous effect - it depends how much needs to be changed. We can't really knock down the Appalachian mountains, nor would we want to. Locations in the city that are at a local maximum (tops of hills) still have a reasonable amount of humidity but have a decent amount of wind. Not enough wind to really move out the moisture but enough to make things a bit more endurable. Future developments could fill in valleys to plane the surface flat allowing for more wind. It's not a great solution, especially from an aesthetic standpoint, but still a possibility.

I wouldn't think it worthwhile to handicap yourself with honesty in the literary world outside of investigative journalism, but these things can come back to haunt you. Particularly if your writing leans on the misadventures of people that are still alive. That's why the murderous ex-cons have it so good. They don't worry about the consequences. Pure, unadulterated description. Realism without the repercussions. It's one of the few times you can get brutal honesty, really ever. That element of social abandon is hard to come by in this world. Their only drawback is that awkward dependance on brutal vice.

That's why the celebrity gossip tome is so essential. Carl Panzram had to kill and rape 40 people to make his life story interesting, but Audrey Hepburn needs only to kiss Hoagy Carmicheal on the set of "The Captain and I" and the world is aghast. It's that much more intriguing for much lesser events only so long as their transient fame holds any weight.

The rambling travel or adventure story can have more similarities to the murderous bildungsroman of a serial killer than the celebrity soap opera, but with more symbolic relevance. They both have that theme of alienation from society since the characters in an adventure story are usually outcasts in some regard, or at least they are separated from society while travelling, like Huckleberry Finn. They view society from the outside and can comment on it without any hint of pretension. Unlike the serial killer story, the characters are sane enough to be believed, but the adventure story doesn't have that true alienation that comes from accidentally killing somebody over a poker game and going on the lam.

A perfect novel might encapsulate all of these categories into a single narrative about a celebrity that goes on a cross-country killing spree. That is, Natural Born Killers. Hmm.. let me rethink this theory.

Addendum: Other types of non-fictional storytelling of interest not mentioned here are erotic adventure, con artist roman a clef, circus performer bildungsroman, psychedelic military history, political insider tell-all, and hippie auto manual.

If there's anything postmodern culture doesn't need is another piece of self-referential pop-culture noodling. And guess who's putting this one together. You guessed it. That prom queen of all things meta - Douglas Hofstadter. Note to Mister Hofstadter: just because Scary Movie 3 talks about how crappy parodies of scary movies are, doesn't make it any better. Still, the book starts out with the best of intentions. Compile a book of literary reviews - reviews of that self-same book. He's even got a complicated algorithm worked out to make it happen wherein the critics send samples of their reviews to each other as they write them. It could have been interesting, but he forgot the most important point; that most critics don't read the book they're reviewing and they sure don't read reviews by other critics.

The modern political system as we know it is doomed to failure. It's based around meaningless political terms and vague ideas. Maybe at some time in the past words like Whigs, Tories and Dixiecrats meant something, but nowadays it's all just gang warfare. For example, somewhere around the Civil War, Democrats and Republicans switched ideals with each other. Heck, even words with actual definitions like liberal and conservative have been mixed around enough to dissolve any use. Political liberals should actually be called progressives, who are the opposite of conservatives, so they're not confused with libertarians. What this means for the Canadian Progressive-Conservative Party is anybody's guess. And don't get me started about what a contradiction neo-conservativism is. Now consider that all of these terms are completely different from one country to the next and you begin to realize how nebulous it all is.

This is why any good cult or anarchist collective worth it's salt will have a manifesto to refer to. The problem with those is that they don't leave room for flexibility. You watch one episode of Friends and you're automatically part of the bourgeoisie. What we need are new terms that will incorporate absolute beliefs for today's wizened populace.

Hypocrititcal Populism - They believe in a firm stance on whatever is in the news that day. Common amongst swing voters and fashion designers.

Ranting Lunatics Party (RLP) - Very similar to the Monster Raving Loony Party in Britain during the Seventies. Their beliefs can range the spectrum of fiscal conservativism to social liberalism, but their tendency to smoke is an absolute.

Snide Condescension Party (SCP) - They prefer to abstain from arguments in favor of murmuring slander under their breath. They consider the world run by a conspiracy of stupid jerks who don't shut up. Polar opposites to the RLP.

Apathetical Denialist - Not an actual party or organized worldview of any sort. More of an aggregate of people who tend to say "whatever" a lot. The more militant wing are refered to as Armchair Radicals and may have allegiances to the RLP.

First off, eye contact. Make too little and you'll look like the timid outlander that you probably are. Make too much and it's just plain uncomfortable. One common technique is to assume you're in an oversized prison. In jail it's customary to beat the first guy you see over the head with a chair to show everybody that you're not weak. If you do this, be sure that they live in the neighborhood, otherwise it's just downright cruel.

Dress to avoid attention. One helpful way to do this is by walking at night and hiding in the shadows. If somebody sees you, stab them immediately as they might report to others that you were prancing about like you owned the place.

Trying the local cuisine while you're there will show an appreciation of your surroundings and can be quite enlightening. If you happen to get a burrito made of cat meat, take it in stride and learn to get a taste for Malta Goya instead. Under no circumstance should you try the homemade drinks stacked in the refridgerator next to the soda. They are for display purposes only.

Now, before you go out there as an unwitting pawn of the real estate market, be sure to avoid fixing things up too much. That decoupage you just added to your mailbox seemed like a good idea at the time, but it will just encourage your landlord to kick you out and raise the rent. This can get a bit tricky. Sure, you don't want to live in a nightmarish crime world, but who wants to pay a gazillion bucks just to live near the urban Olive Garden. The trick is to make sure the neighborhood looks like a nuclear wasteland from the outside, but is a cozy and warm opium den on the inside. Get a few friends together to decorate the neighborhood by smashing as much as you can, then dress up like mental deffectives or morlocks and accost anybody that looks like they don't belong.

As a rule don't gussy up anything that can be seen from the street. If the neighborhood has a less than cordial name, like Hell's Kitchen or Death's Veranda, stay with it. In 10 years it will seem quaint and historical compared to any random nomiker thought up by real-estate agents.

Then again, I remember my days of playing D&D in the basement and could sympathize with somebody wanting to emulate the action-adventure world of an international terrorist. There are a number of board games already out there that appeal to this ingrown man-child's desire for world-domination-to-teach-them-all-a-lesson. Let's take a look at a few of them.

First off is Risk, the most popular of the lot. Great game, accesible to all, but at it's heart is as sophisticated as a game of Cee-Lo. A broad generalization of international military politics.

Stratego suffers from the same inaccuracies as Risk, but I still wanted to mention it since it never gets the respect it deserves. Damn fine game.

There are a number of Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules with modern themes like Future Wars, cyberhacking, or visiting Toledo. I really haven't kept up since Monster Manual II where they started bringing in Alien species that looked like geometric shapes. Give me the olden days of hobgoblins and orcs and two-handed bags of holding and I'll be a happy man. Of course, these too boil down to dice games that nobody plays in favor of just reading the stories involved. If memory serves me well, this is how most D&D games I played went:

Dungeon Master: So, you walk through the cavern and come upon a gelatinous cube standing near a pit in the center of the room. What do you do?

Player: I dunno, kill the gelatinous thingy

DM: Well okay, but how? With what? Your Mace +3 of grappling won't do anything to it.

P: Whatever, how about I use my psionics to fool it into thinking I'm it's long lost mother and lead it into the pit.

DM: [Keeps rolling dice untill a high number comes up] You did it!

P: Yay!

If you really want to get into geopolitics and the new world order, Diplomacy is the way to go. I can't really remember the rules, or if there are any, but it involved a lot of working out of treaties and brokering deals, just like the real leaders do! Becomes incredibly boring within a matter of seconds (unless you use psionics).

Susan Stamberg: A sort of hippie journalist. Works for a lot of non-profits. Owns lots of tote bags.

Linda Wertheimer: Pearls, feathered hair, and a house full of antiques. She has a set routine every time she comes into the studio and supposedly fired an intern for breaking her regular coffee cup.

David Brancaccio: Dresses in dark suits, imagines himself to be a continuation of the great radio anouncers of the fifties. Maybe looks like Gregory Peck in certain ways. Talks in that voice all the time, not just a put-on. (i.e. Phil hartman in Talk Radio or that guy from Murphy Brown)

Corey Flintoff: Younger, more excitable version of the above. Yuppie-ish in certain ways (i.e. drinks a lot of white wine), doesn't tuck in his shirt when he plays with his kids on the weekends. Still pines for the days of hands-on journalism, risking his neck in Angola to get that story on the '72 uprising.

Evolutionary Game Theory Applied to Double Agents
High-minded, but a complete mess from start to finish. I probably scared away a girlfriend in a fervent, crazed explanation of its theories. There may have been something to the idea behind it all, but the reaction from the Dutch TA was teetering on complete incomprehension. Savages.

Plato's Cave Interpreted Through Fraggle Rock
What could have been an excusable submission of college illiteracy was turned into a tortured manifesto by the abuse of the word "society". My inability to find a decent copy of Fraggle Rock to watch beforehand may have lead to the excessive use of jargon.