biology is geek-stiny

My recent self-diagnosed Central Auditory Processing Disorder (i.e. difficulty hearing people above background noise) has got me thinking about how one's physical/mental strengths and weaknesses affect the sort of person one becomes.

I feel like I was pretty much channeled into a path by the way my brain works. I can't hear people in noisy places, so I was never good at parties or bars, meaning I tend to socialize one-on-one and have poor group socializing skills. My problems remembering faces and names makes getting to know people I run into here and there more difficult. (Oddly enough, these problems were far less evident when I was young - in school you talk to people in fairly low-noise environments and see the same people day after day, making it easier to remember who is who).

On the other hand, I have one of these brains that instantly understood how computers worked; it all made sense to me. I am the guy friends call when their computer isn't working or when they need to hook up their new DVR.

And my analytic tendency and strong reading and writing skills made it relatively easy to wind up doing what I'm doing now; writing reviews.

And so, because my brain is the way it is, I don't go to clubs, I tend to be low key and sometimes overwhelmed in group social situations and, because I'm always introducing myself to people who already know me, probably seem like a bit of a doofus.

And so, instead of becoming an international spy or a CEO, I became a nerdy, geeky computer programmer turned videogame reviewer.

Is it possible to overcome a geeky destiny? What if when I was young I had pushed myself out of my comfort zone? What if someone had actually recognized that I had what are essentially social disabilities and I had received some sort of social training to overcome them? What if, what if, what if.

I do believe that biology is to a great extent destiny, but that there is some wiggle room. After all, in spite of my geekiness, I never became a Trekkie, or joined the SCA or played Dungeons and Dragons. I didn't wind up a 40-year-old virgin or, as a movie version of the awkward, four-eyed, violin-playing kid I was would have, as a humorless bureaucrat. Instead, I moved to Manhattan on a whim, became a street performer and a songwriter and now dance the blues until 3 in the morning. Which doesn't mean I'm not still a nerd, but simply that I'm my own unique version of a nerd.

Honestly though, I would trade 20 IQ points for better social skills. But considering the oddities of the brain resting in my skull, I think I've done pretty well for myself.

huh?

I've always had trouble making out what people are saying in noisy places. I've taken hearing tests over the years, and according to them my hearing is fine, and yet, I can be with a group of people in a restaurant, and they're all having a conversation and seem to be hearing each other just fine, and I have no idea what anyone is saying, except, if I'm lucky, the person right next to me.

I finally got around to googling the problem, and found a discussion of it that proves I am not alone. From reading what people say it seems I may have Central Auditory Processing Disorder. This makes sense; my theory was, since my hearing is fine that the problem must be the way my brain was dealing with the information.

It looks like there are some treatments for CAPD, all of which seem to involve listening to something or other many many times for weeks or months. Unfortunately these seem to be treatments for children; I haven't come across anything on treatment for adults. Some people just learn to lip read, which is something I've considered. It's just a matter of forcing myself to work on it.

This is the second problem I have that almost no one else has, the other being my difficulty remembering faces. It just seems that there's something off with my brain. Unfortunately, both of these issues make socializing more difficult, which may be why I was always a bit of a loner: perhaps biology is destiny.

Bye bye, piece of my past!

What I have learned from watching the TV series Hoarders is that I'm a bit of a hoarder. So I'm trying to get rid of stuff I have no good reason to keep, like my "button vest," a jeans vest covered with buttons that I wore when I was young enough to think something like this was a good idea. I'm so fond of this vest that before I toss it out, I wanted to take a picture and write down what all the buttons are.

Two batman logo buttons. A "Let the rabbit eat Trix" button. A "flower power" button. A carved wooden button that says "Love" (one of my favorites). A guitar shaped button that says "U2". A picture of Leadbelly. A psychedelic "WHO" button (I'm not even particularly a fan of the band, actually). "Why Be Normal" (one of my all-time favorite expressions). Three buttons by my friend, the artist Ron English. Some little star with a "1" on it that I think is from my boyscout uniform, or maybe cubscouts). A lady's broach, gold, with a face and a fake jewel in the forehead. "Viva Nicaragua Libre". "No Nukes in N.Y.C." A butterfly stickpin. "Shirley Chilsholm for President." "Get Out of Viet Nam." A button for the movie "Slacker." "Fuck the New World Order." A plastic box with a little plastic Pegasus flying across a painted backdrop (another favorite of mine). And a few others that aren't that interesting and are just there because I put every button I found on there.

The vest is tossed, but I still have the buttons. I feel I should see if anyone wants them before I toss them out. Perhaps I'll put an ad on craigslist: "button collection to good home."

ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?

When I saw the email subject "ARE YOU STILL ALIVE," I assumed it was from my friend Suzanne, who writes all in caps (in a 20 point font) and will title emails things like "WHERE ARE YOU?" if I don't reply within a few hours. But it was not. It was what is now my favorite Nigerian scam letter, which tells me that a man has reported me dead in order to claim 2.5 million dollars owed me by the Nigerian government. I like this one a lot. It's got a clever hook and a detailed story that not only makes you think you have money coming, but that someone is trying to steal it from you. I liked it so much, I even emailed back a reply: " No, I am dead, and Mr. Johnson is welcome to the money, as I have no use for it in heaven. Thank you for your kind attention." Here's the letter:

Attention Beneficiary, We write to confirm if there will be any response from any of your relations concerning what we just heard from a man named Mr. Paul Johnson about yourself. He came to our office today and informed us that you are dead and during your illness you willed him to claim your us$2.5m compensation that the Federal Government mapped out to compensate those that were defrauded by the impostors in the local banks here in Nigeria. This was in line with an agreement reached between this Ministry, The President of Nigeria, ALH. UMARU YAR’ADUA, The National Assembly, The World Bank, The Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FINCEN), The United Nation (UN), The Economic & Financial Crime commission (EFCC) and The International Monetary Fund (IMF). These organizations has agreed to compensate you with the above mentioned fund. Consequently an order of payment has been given to us via approval order No: PRES/CONT/101/2009/A. With Ref No: BN/OHG/OXD1/2009 and Your payment file number is: BN/BEN/09 to release your ATM Card to you and also inform you about the payment. But very surprisingly to us Mr. Paul Johnson made things very clear to us that you are dead and he is the only person you disclosed this matter with and you have instructed him to come and claim the money if you did not make it which he came for. We hereby decided to officially send this massage to your mail box in order to deliver this message in case if anyone has access to your mail box so that they will know about this development and to find out if the information we received from the above named man is truth and to confirm if you are truly dead or still alive. Failure to reply back in the next 24hrs simply means that what Mr. Paul Johnson said is truth that you are dead. Mr. Paul Johnson has even ordered us to release your ATM card that contains $753, 000.00 to Mr. David Anderson from the United States of America. He want us to sign all the approval documents in his favour and urged us to tell him what it will cost him to complete the process of delivering the ATM card to Mr. David Anderson home address which he provides us with. He has agreed to pay the mailing fee for delivering the ATM card to Mr. David Anderson address in the next 48 hours. Meanwhile, if the information we receive about you is false, kindly indicate to us because your ATM card is still intact with us as we have not changed any information in favour of Mr. Paul Johnson. We have finalize arrangement concerning delivery of your ATM card pending when we hear from you and also receive the delivery fee to deliver your ATM card to your home address. And you can start withdrawal of US$5,000.00 per day immediately you receive the ATM Card. With this you are required to send to us the delivery fee of your ATM card to us so that we can deliver the card your address through Federal Diplomatic delivery within the next 48 hours. You are advised in your own interest to reply back so we can stop further communication with Mr. Paul Johnson and Mr. David Anderson. In view of this development, you are requested to contact the Director Foreign Operations (ATM) Department, Mr. Francis Michael who is going to sign the final release documents before your ATM card will be dispatched to your address. Contact him on the following E-mail address: francis.m1@aliceadsl.fr Be informed that delivery will be made to your address within 48 hours and the delivery receipt and the Airway Bill number will be included to enable you track it yourself. Call Mr. Francis Michael immediately you receive this message on the following telephone number: +234170-2319-1188 Yours truly, MR. VICTOR PETERSON Manager (ATM) Department Payment Center.

Wired Comes Out in Favor of Boycotting Everyone You Disagree With

There's apparently a controversy about the game Shadow Complex because one of the writers who worked on it is open and actively anti-gay marriage. Because of this, some people have suggested boycotting the game, such as Wired writer Guy Mustapa, who writes:

Many question the efficacy of a boycott. Even Peter David, the comics writer who penned Shadow Complex’s dialogue, piped in to call the boycott “cheap and vicious and small-minded.”

He’s dead wrong there. The point of the boycott is to start the discussion and encourage people to look at the issue from a different point of view. Epic and Chair may not feel an economic sting around this boycott. Orson Scott Card may not lose an minute of sleep. But if only a handful of people notice how strongly some folks care about the issue of gay rights and take a moment to try to understand where they’re coming from then the boycott (or even the intimations of one) can be considered a success.

I disagreed strongly, and wrote a comment at the bottom of the article and then thought, hey, I haven't blogged for a while, why don't I use this comment in my blog:


The mentality behind boycotting this game is equivalent to the mentality behind the 1950s Hollywood blacklist, in which writers, actors, and directors were prevented from working because of their political opinions. True, a boycott would not have the same decimating results as a government witch hunt, but the attitude is exactly the same.

Do we really want to do this? Do we really want the left to boycott every game or movie or TV series that has connected with it anyone who is anti-gay marriage or anti-health care reform? Do we really want everyone on the right to boycott every game or movie or TV series that has connected with it anyone who is anti-war or anti-abortion?

I am no less horrified by this suggested boycott than by the concerted effort made years ago to destroy the Dixie Chicks because they said they were ashamed to have come from the same state as George W. Bush (an attempt that failed spectacularly). People actually do have a right to have their opinions, and they do have a right to employment. I'm pro gay-marriage; does that mean the anti-gay people should all refuse to read my game reviews (at, quick plug, nintendo.about.com) and encourage everyone else to follow suit? Is that really the world we want to live in, one where everyone's livelihood can be affected by every political opinion they express?

Mastrapa's statement that the point of a boycott is to "start the discussion" is ludicrous. The point of a boycott is to stop discussion; it is a way of saying "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!" It is a way to bully people who disagree with you.

It is my believe that rather than trying to shut people up, we should encourage everyone to speak their mind. It is my belief that the most effective way to counter an argument is to let that argument be expressed and then rebut it.

Frankie Manning, Inventor of Lindy Hop, Teacher of Cool

Frankie Manning, one of the originators of the dance known as Lindy Hop, or Jitterbug, or swing, or whatever you like to call it, died this morning, two months shy of his 95th birthday. And while one can't feel too sad at a good life that lasted a very long time, it is hard to imagine a world without Frankie Manning.

When Frankie taught Lindy Hop, he would pair everyone up and then tell the guys to look at the girls.

"Fellas," he would say genially, "do you see that lady before you? That lady is a princess. And what do you do when you see a princess? You bow."

This wasn't a lesson in manners, this was a lesson in leading the swingout. Frankie would take a step back as he bent at the waist, his right arm sweeping back, and look very much as though he were bowing as his partner stepped forward.

That was what was so cool about taking classes from Frankie. He didn't just teach the mechanics of dance, he taught the attitude. Frankie was all about attitude. Watch the video below. That's Frankie dancing with Dawn Hampton, another swing legend. Nothing they're doing is particularly difficult from a technical standpoint, but it takes decades to learn to be that cool. You can see they have the music deep in their bones.

Frankie was the only teacher I've ever had who really focused on attitude. One of my favorite Frankie moves begins with a traveling tuck turn, in which you lead the girl to turn while moving foward in a straight line, and all you have to do is stay even with her as she moves. There's really nothing to that, but when Frankie moved alongside the girl, he did it with this elfen charm, this light, twinkling step (Frankie always twinkled, when he spoke, when he danced, and of course when he smiled) to what was essentially just a 2 second stroll. And he emphasized that this was part of the step, that you needed to create that feeling; you couldn't just walk along as though it didn't mean anything.

I think about the way Frankie moved when I lead that step, but I don't have it yet. Hopefully I will by the time I turn 94. I wish I could take another lesson from him, and just see again exactly how he does it, but now, alas, I am on my own.

How to create customer dissatisfaction with ease

Sometime back I signed up for some sight called ilike.com, because they had a facebook app, and this was before I got sick of facebook apps.

I'm not quite sure what ILike.com is, but you tell it what music you like and it tells you something. It will tell you when bands you like are performing, but I don't go to concerts so I set my iLike email notification settings to never tell me about favorite bands performing.

So when I got an email notice from iLike that U2 was playing near me soon, I was annoyed. I went to the site and checked my settings, and sure enough, my settings were such that I should not have received that email.

Okay, so there's some flaw with their programming. That's no big deal, sites always have issues. I'll just contact someone on the site and let them know there's a problem and give them a chance to fix it, right?

Wrong, because there is no way to contact anyone on the site. There is no way to report any problem. I could not find a single, solitary email address for users. So then I thought, okay, I'll just close my account so the can't bother me any more. But guess what? I couldn't find any way to close my account.

So I added iLike into my spam filter. iLike is dead to me. A site that does not want to hear from its users should not, in my opinion, have any users.

Vista no more, and I don't miss it

A couple of weeks ago, my PC died. Not the PC itself, actually, just the operating system Windows Vista, which stopped booting up. After a lot of internet research and a lot of trying this and that, I gave up and wiped the hard disk for a fresh install.

I did not, however, install Vista again; I went back to XP. Because I have hated Vista since I "upgraded" to it. The terrible security system that wouldn't let you do the simplest things without asking you if you were sure, and wouldn't let you do some things at all (there were certain folders and files on my computer for the entire time I had Vista simply because it wouldn't let me delete them. The software incompatibility that included Microsoft's own products. The ass-backwards way they tried to improve Windows for gaming and made it worse instead. I had meant to write a whole blog entry about the ways in which Vista sucked, but never got around to it. It is shocking that Microsft would issue what is at best a poorly designed service pack as a new OS, although more understandable if you read this interesting description of how the Vista shut down interface was designed (read the comments too; some are from other Microsoft programmers).

I didn't instantly go back to XP simply because it seemed like too much work. And I thought I would miss the handful of new, minor but useful features of Vista. But I was wrong, I don't miss Vista. Forget those commercials in which Microsoft tried to convince the world that Vista was a good product with bad buzz; Vista had nothing that counterbalanced all its aggravations.

Sure, the folder search on the fly was handy, and the checkboxes that could be used to select files were rather clever. But that's about it. I liked the new start menu, but I discovered that the best thing about it, the ability to type in a program name to find it, can be more-or-less replicated in XP with a freeware program called Launchy that actually works better than Vista's version of the same idea.

Microsoft should never have released Vista, which is the most disastrous OS update since Windows ME. And once they realized it was a disaster, they should have spent time trying to fix its serious flaws with a series of service packs rather than devoting all their energy on their next OS. Microsoft has pissed a lot of people off and made as convincing a case as anyone can that there is no reason to upgrade, ever. XP works fine, there still seem to be drivers for everything and if we just all agree to stop buying new Microsoft OSes then we can all just keep using XP until some Linux programmer comes up with a satisfactory solution for playing games on PCs.

Is Microsoft Trying to Kill Windows

While Windows Vista, the poorly designed mess that makes hell of the life of anyone stupid enough to install it, has been seen as just another Microsoft screw up, I've begun to wonder if perhaps Microsoft is depressed and is trying to kill itself. Like people who do really dangerous things until they die, as opposed to people who just shoot themselves.

This has come to mind because for about the third time, Vista has decided it might be pirated software and is bothering me about it. Last time I had to phone up Microsoft and spend 10 minutes convincing a human this really was a genuine copy of Vista (sent to me by Microsoft's PR people). This time there's no one to call; I'm getting a pop up, and none of the solutions on Microsoft's website work.

With all the problems and disappointments of Vista, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to want the next version of Windows. Vista sucks so badly that Microsoft has pretty much shown that they have no idea how to design an operating system.

A bunch of smart people work for Microsoft though, so how could that be? I think instead the whole company has gotten depressed that Gates is gone and they've decided to just keep using Vista to fuck with people until no one will buy Microsoft products anymore. Then the company will die and I think we'll all be happier for it.

like putting lipstick on a chimpanzee

A few months ago, conservatives claimed Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark was a sexist slap at Sarah Palin. Liberals and people of common sense rose up as one to say, justifiably, that the claim was absurd; just because you mention lipstick and a pig in mocking John McCain's claims of bringing change to Washington does not mean you are attacking a woman.

Now those same liberals who decried McCain's attacks on the lipstick remark as transparent political posturing are up in arms over a cartoon in the New York Post in which a chimp is said to have authored the stimulus package. Notorious opportunist Al Sharpton claims that the cartoon is a racist attack on Obama, and the liberal media has fallen in lockstep behind him.

But no, it's not. It is no more racist than Obama's lipstick remark was sexist. The cartoon isn't funny, or clever, and The Post is a right wing piece of shit, but that doesn't make the cartoon racist.

People are looking for subtleties in a cartoon devoid of any. The cartoonist just took his cue from the recent shooting of a chimpanzee gone mad and clearly meant to suggest nothing more than that the stimulus bill was a mess.

The chimp is not made to look like Obama, even though some headlines are describing it as Obama portrayed as a chimp. On the other hand, there is an entire website devoted to comparing George W. Bush to primates, and a cartoonist for the British paper the Guardian frequently presented Bush as an ape.

I suspect you could find a wealth of political humor over the decades comparing presidents with monkeys; the monkey/chimp/ape is often used to reference a lack of intelligence. Are monkeys now verboten from political humor because someone has decided they are racist? I would say any cartoonist that drew Obama as a monkey would just be asking for trouble, but are we now in a place where no monkey can appear in any cartoon referencing the Democrats?

I am disgusted by the hypocrisy of people defending Obama's lipstick remark and then turning around and attacking the Post for something quite similar. If it's wrong for one side to play these opportunistic games, then it is just as wrong for the other side to do it.

Why I Won't Be Watching the New Season of Lost

Imagine you’re at this party and you start talking to this guy. He’s a really cool guy, and he starts telling you a story that is one of the most interesting you have ever heard. It’s a story you think can’t be topped, but then he segues into another, even better story, and you think, wow, this is the coolest guy ever.

Forty minutes later he’s still talking, and it’s all still pretty interesting, but it looks like the alcohol’s running out and there’s this really hot girl talking to a friend of yours and you’re thinking, is this guy ever going to run out of stories? And after another 10 minutes you decide no, he is never going to run out, or pause to take a breath, and you politely excuse yourself.

This is the best analogy I can come up with for why I’m not going to watch the new season of Lost.

If Lost had wrapped up its story at the end of season three it would have been a short but perfect series. But now, as season five is about to kick off, I just don’t care anymore.

It was obvious by the middle of season three that Lost was losing focus. It was still really good, it still had a lot of “wow” moments, but it felt like there was a little more filler, that the show had to go a little too weird to keep up the momentum, and that it was really time to wrap things up. I even thought of blogging an open letter to the producers asking them to make that season the last one, but never got around to it. It is unlikely they would have listened anyway.

I didn’t think the show had anywhere to go by season three’s end until that last “wow” moment in which we get a glimpse of post-island life. Perhaps, I thought, this new twist would kick start the show back into high gear.

It didn’t. Instead, Lost increasingly seemed like a show going in a thousand directions at once. Since season one I’ve been worried that the series could never wrap all its bizarre twists and turns into something that made sense. I thought it would end with nothing but loose ends. But as Lost kept explaining one thing in a convincing manner while introducing something else, I began to think maybe they would pull it off.

As season four progressed though, I came to the conclusion that such a thing was no longer possible. The show has increasingly relied on a sloppy mysticism and it is my belief that the producers have probably convinced themselves that the Island should remain in great part a mystery. I do not believe they plan to offer a satisfactory explanation to all these years of weirdness, and that because they’re not planning to explain, they feel free to throw in more and more "out there" plot turns.

I could be wrong, but it’s unlikely, because you could not at this point explain everything in a two-hour finale. They would have to start explaining things bit by bit from the first episode and do that all season, without introducing any new mysteries. And based on the last four years, I don’t think that will happen.

Season four once again had me thinking about writing that open letter, but once again, I didn’t. It would not have mattered; the producers had actually decided already that they were going to end the series ... in 2010.
I can't go through another two years of unanswered questions, weird pseudo-science, and characters who refuse to answer the simplest question in a straightforward manner (seriously, if I were on that island I would've tied Benjamin to a chair and beat him with a stick until he told me what that smoke monster was). If Lost were a book, I would be jumping ahead to the last page right now.

Will all our questions be answered in two years? I doubt it. I expect the show will end with many loose ends, the producers will decide to make a Lost movie they promise will explain everything, the movie will come out and simply add some more mysteries and everyone will feel like a sucker.

So I'm done. By the end of season four I had simply lost my enthusiasm for what was once my favorite dramatic series. I just don’t care what happens from now one, except to the extent that when the series is finally ended I will go to Wikipedia and find out how it all turned out.

Lost isn’t the only series at this party, and I’ve listened to enough of its stories. Now I’m going to go over and say hello to that hottie from Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.

how my anger at Republicans got the better of me

Sometimes you know you should keep your mouth shut but don't. Well, I guess some of you know to keep your mouth shut and do, but I'm not one of those. It's something I'm reminded of every time this girl I know glares at me from across the room.

A bit before the election, a facebook friend posted a status report that if McCain won he would leave the country and hang out with his friends talking about how stupid Americans are. Another facebook friend replied to his comment that it was absurd to say people who voted for McCain were stupid. I knew she was voting for him, because her own facebook status had said something like, "I'm voting for McCain, and I'm not stupid or a liar." (I don't know what the liar thing is a reference to.)

Obviously there was no good reason to say anything, but between my paranoia that somehow the Republicans would manage to steal this election like they did the last two and my general fury at those who had kept Republicans in power, I added a comment of my own beneath her comment, which was something like, "Most of the people voting for McCain re-elected Bush, and if someone did that, and after what has happened in the last four years still believes the Republicans somehow deserve to continue to run this country, well, stupid isn't such a stretch." I did not add, even though I wanted to, that saying "I'm not stupid," does not mean you're not stupid. Paris Hilton says it all the time, and then manages to say something utterly moronic within the next two minutes.

She wrote me an angry note and took me off her friends list.

So why do it? Well, partly because I've always been bad at keeping my mouth shut. But mainly because of my rage at Republicans. I mentioned the re-election of Bush for a specific reason; because it is less defensible than a vote for McCain, and I wanted to offer her the opportunity to say, well, I wasn't dumb enough to vote for Bush again after the mess he made, but McCain will be different.

Her not saying that suggested the she probably did vote for Bush in 2004, and as far as I'm concerned, that is a vote for torture, preemptive war (a.k.a. invading foreign countries that have not attacked you) and redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. And I really have an issue with that.

Still, it was impolitic, and unkind, since I think she's a genuinely nice person, though misguided. Had she said after the election that she voted for McCain and the people who didn't were fools I would probably have simply ignored her.

Of course, had I been in her shoes I would simply have made my case. She could have argued that McCain would be different from Bush. Some would say the real problem with Bush was not his politics but his gross incompetence, and that McCain is smarter and more capable than G.W. Or you could simply say that the issues important to you are those McCain supports. While you can argue with their politics, you can't say people who voted for McCain because they were against gay marriage or abortion or because they desired a radical right wing court were stupid. In that case, obviously you would want McCain over Obama.

I would argue that adding a comment on facebook opened her up to replies, impolitic or not. If I added a comment to a right wing facebook status report I would not be surprised if I got some flack for it. That's the danger of chiming in.

This doesn't make me any less undiplomatic, of course, nor does it change the fact that someone who goes to almost every dance I go to hates me. Learning to let stuff sail by without comment is something I aspire to, but it's hard to change a lifetime habit.

Addendum: eventually I and the Republican had a dance class together, and since she seemed perfectly friendly there, the next time I saw her I asked her to dance and she said yes. So everything's as it was, except we're not facebook friends.

a city explodes in joy

I have never seen anything quite like the streets of New York after Obama won. Union Square was packed full of people cheering and shouting. Lots of college students, so you had the interesting site of dozens of teenage girls screaming as though they were at a Beatles concert. More people were flooding down 14th street towards the park as I walked home, some carrying signs, some playing instruments. Someone would hold up a picture of Obama and everyone would start screaming and cars would blast their horns. People were high fiving each other as they walked past. It was awesome. It is so great to live in a city where the election of a progressive candidate causes people to run through the streets in ecstasy.

This is such an important night. It's been years since I could feel proud of America, but tonight we elected the first black president, and that says something very good about this country. It is suddenly cool again to be an American.

Of course, this joy isn't all about the historical nature of an African American president elect. It is also about an almost indescribable relief. Bush has dug this country into so deep a hole that the fear was McCain would come in and dig us in twice as far. But now after years of incompetence and ideological insanity we are getting a president who we know doesn't love war and cares more about the working class than the corporations. We have a president who is going to help us climb out of that damn hole. The adults are going to be in charge. And that is something to scream about.

The Republican Motto: Never Underestimate the Stupidity of the American Voter

The Republican's recently manufactured outrage over Obama's lipstick-on-a-pig remark shows how much the Republicans rely on the support of morons to win elections.

First off, it's transparent nonsense. "Lipstick on a pig" is an old expression that's been around for years. Obama was not discussing Palin, and that is obvious to anyone with a brain. To turn the remark into a sexist slur is the height of gall.

It's also an expression John McCain used when describing Hillary Clinton's health plan.

Hillary could, at the time, have insisted McCain was being sexist, but it probably didn't occur to her. And if it did, she probably thought, "no one is dumb enough to believe that."

And that's the secret of Republican success; they believe there are plenty of people dumb enough to believe that, and that those people vote. They believe that if you say, Sarah Palin has foreign relations expertise because Russia can be seen from Alaska or Iraqis planned 9/11 (a canard Palin is still repeating or that John McCain is a political maverick who will bring change to the White House, there are lots of people who will believe you, especially since the press will accept even the most absurd lie as being worthy of debate).

The Republicans know that there are people too dumb, people too poorly informed, people who are paying no attention at all, and that these people vote. If McCain says he has a plan to win the war, they don't wonder why he didn't save the country from all this agony by helping Bush win the war years ago (the secret win-the-war claim is disturbingly similar to the one that helped Nixon win re-election in '72). If McCain doesn't know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, people who don't know or care about the difference are easy to find in the U.S.

If Democrats decided to use the Republican's political model of lying about absolutely everything, would it work? It's hard to say. The Democrats have never been as willing to say things that no intelligent person would believe. I don't think they could do it with the same conviction; for whatever reason, Republicans are simply better at lying. I also think it's more dangerous for Democrats to say utterly moronic things, because Democrats are more likely to have a brain and to object to their party dropping about 50 I.Q. points.

How do the Democrats deal with this mountain of lies? I don't honestly know. As the Nazis proved, you can make a whole country believe the most absurd things. It's a lesson the Republicans have learned well.

nintendo.about.com, your site for ... oh, just go there already

Shortly after getting dumped by the Times I got accepted as the new "guide" for nintendo.about.com. This involved a lot of prep time during which I worked without pay, but now the site is live and I get paid per page view so go there and click on all the in-site links (i.e., don't bother with links that have a little icon of a piece of paper with a blue dot on it; they go to other sites).

It would also be nice if you'd actually read the stuff I wrote, but that's just my ego talking. The part of me that needs to make some money just wants you to click on stuff. Click click! Then go back tomorrow and click some more. And tell all your friends to go a clicking.

And wish me luck.

anal retentive critics

Just watched the amazing movie Children of Men, and after I was curious to see what the critics had thought when it came out.

Unsurprisingly, most of them raved about it, but I was curious to see who wouldn't like it and why. And I found a truly idiotic review by someone named William Arnold.

To summarize, at the beginning of the movie there is a quick reference to a siege in Seattle. It's just there to give a sense of a world in chaos, it's never mentioned again, and I didn't even notice the line.

But the Seattle film critic did. And he spent several paragraphs explaining what a stupid line it is, because Seattle simply could not withstand a 3-year siege.

He uses this as an example of why the movie is poorly thought out, which would be fine, if he offered other examples that actually related in some real way to the movie. He does mention a major flaw of the movie, which is that the basic debate over what to do with the central woman doesn't make much sense (this could be seen as a major flaw, since the entire story hinges on it, but it's basically just the MacGuffin to set in motion an exciting tale and stick in a ton of political commentary).

The critic is a perfect example of someone who can't see the forest for the trees. He spends a third of his review on the single line about Seattle. It seems like he just couldn't get past it.

This happens. I once read a comment by someone who felt The Matrix was fatally flawed because the science of powering a city in that unusual way was scientifically impractical, but that at least is a major plot point. But one line about Seattle? If I saw a movie that began with a quick blurb about the Empire State building being in Brooklyn, I wouldn't spend a huge chunk of my review on it unless the entire movie was set in New York, in which case I would think it was a bit of an issue.

Seattle is mentioned once in all of Children of Men. I would never trust a critic who trashes a brilliant movie because of a single sentence that isn't even going to register with anyone who doesn't live in Seattle. William Arnold, you are an idiot.

(Even if I hated Children of Men, I would still think this was an incredibly lame criticism. I could trash this movie much more intelligently than this guy if so inclined.)

after the merge

Recently I heard someone was moving to another country because his "partner" got a job there. It took me a moment to realize "partner" meant boyfriend/significant other/whatever and refers to a "domestic partner" or "life partner," because it's a really lame way to describe a relationship.

A partner is the guy who co-owns your steel factory or has made it to the top of the law firm. It has to be one of the least romantic words in the human language. It should not be used to describe someone you're moving to another country with.

Yes, I know it's a popular word among gay people because it's nice and generic and won't offend the relatives. It's the equivalent of how in old movies if a girl got pregnant they would say she was "in trouble," and if you were a kid you would get really confused as to what the trouble was.

But when there's an out gay guy whose move is being discussed between two people who don't have a problem with it, "partner" seems like a horrible choice of words.

The problem of what to call people you're involved with is a strangely thorny one. I personally am happy with boyfriend/girlfriend, but my ex-girlfriend used to complain that she was no longer a girl, and my mother corrects anyone who calls her boyfriend her boyfriend, preferring "man friend" or just an ambiguous "my friend."

I am okay with being a boyfriend, but then, I gladly suffer from Peter Pan Syndrome.

If you don't like the boy/girl thing, and admit that something like "manfriend" sounds pretty dumb, there are other options. "Significant other" used to be popular, but while it is slightly more specific than "partner" it is about as lame. You can get even lamer by using "lover." "Lover" most often turns up in comedies nowadays as a way to indicate a character is a pretentious ass.

POSSLQ, for Persons of the Opposite Sex Sharing Quarters, was briefly popular, but that doesn't help gay people, since I can't think of any way to pronounce PSSSLQ.

Beau isn't too bad a word, but there is no female equivalent (arguably the female equivalent is belle, but no one uses that for girlfriend).

Sweetie and sweetheart sound rather saccharin, but they are gender and age neutral. Still, they're problematic when you've just had a fight. You don't want to say, "This is my damn sweetie, who never knows when to shut the hell up."

There are also handy phrases like old man, old lady, main squeeze, ball and chain, gentleman caller and lady friend, but none seem ideal.

Personally, I think everyone who's been together longer than two years can be called a spouse. In my experience, once you've been dating a girl a couple of years everyone starts calling her your wife anyway. Gay people may not be able to get married in most states, but I don't believe you can be arrested for impersonating a married person. I'm not a doctor, but if I can convince my friends to call me Dr. Charles it's legal as long as I don't perform surgery. So I'd be all for saying the guy is moving to another country with his husband.

What is odd is that while no one seems to be able to come up with a satisfactory word or phrase for an important romantic relationship, there are two descriptions for the person you have uncommitted sex with: "fuck buddy" and, for the more gentile, "friend with benefits."

Why is that so much easier? How long did it take someone to think up "fuck buddy?" Can that person sit down and come up with a boyfriend/girlfriend/lover equivalent of some sort?

I don't know if anyone will ever find a solution that will satisfy everyone. Probably not. In the meantime, I just wish I could find myself a girlfriend, sweetie, main squeeze, old lady or fuck buddy of my own. Whatever she wants to be called will be fine with me.

farmer and nazi are two words that should not routinely be linked

Just watched an episode of 30 Days in which a hunter lives with PETA activists for a month. The hunter at first considers all of PETA's stories of animal abuse exaggerations, but eventually he gets to see it for himself and becomes more sympathetic to animal rights, although he doesn't give up hunting or become a vegan.

So I began wondering if there is a place in the world for omnivores who support humane farming, and I found the same answer I found the last time I wondered about that: no, there's not. I tried googling for "meat eaters for humane farming" and found nothing but a list of articles about how "humane farming" is a contradiction in terms and that there's basically no such thing as a humane carnivore.

This is unfortunate. Those who call for humane farming are organizations like PETA whose ultimate goal is to make this world vegan. They've got members, like a woman on the episode of 30 Days, who compare eating animals with the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews. And I think that's nuts.

I actually think the PETA people are similar to the anti-abortion people, in that they divide the world up into the innocent and the guilty. Animal rights people think of animals as innocent beings that should be saved, and humans as fairly evil (like a friend of mine who doesn't care if children are starving in Africa but is broken-hearted about animal deaths). Anti-abortion people think of babies as innocents that must be saved, but once you're out of the womb you're no longer innocent, which is why the anti-abortion people who are pro death penalty are not actually being inconsistent; they just want to save the "innocent."

The problem with extremists is that they don't change the world nearly as much as if they set realistic goals. The world will never be vegan. Ever. Forget about it.

But when I once joined a mailing list for humane farming, I started getting a lot of anti-meat email. And even though I was a (non-judgmental) vegetarian for many years, I considered all those vegetarian-activist emails a waste of my time and dropped off the list. Because there just wasn't much about making animal farming better, only stuff about stopping it altogether. Which as I mentioned before, ain't gonna happen.

(Once again, anti-abortion forces are in the same boat, so focused on ending abortion that they fail to sufficiently focus on stuff they they could actually change - if every person picketing an abortion clinic would volunteer with an organization devoted to giving pregnant women the help they need to bring a baby to term and care for it they could lessen the number of women getting abortions, but by choosing an all-or-nothing approach they fail to achieve much beyond the occasional murder of a doctor.)

PETA, by focusing on a narrow agenda, pushes away people who would support more humane farming. But because extremists have the most energy, they control the agenda because they're willing to do the work. I don't have the motivation to start an organization to make farming more humane, and the people with that motivation tend to be the people who are thinking of each animal as a little innocent person being murdered by Nazi-like carnivores.

It's a shame. If anyone knows of an organization working for humane farming that is not connected with PETA and is not set on vegetarianism, let me know. I may go back to vegetarianism one of these days - I probably eat 90% vegetarian anyway - but I'm never going to support an organization wasting resources on an impossible goal.

how to be unpersuasive

I've been trying to get more reading done lately, grabbing the books I've collected off my shelves and actually looking at what's inside. The latest book I began to read was Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.

It's a famous feminist book, but what struck me about it is how little it bothers to actually try and persuade anyone at the beginning. First there's an interesting intro in which Brownmiller says she herself once didn't take rape too seriously. That's a nice, disarming way to start. Then she spends a couple of pages pointing out how thoroughly ignored rape was by people like Freud and Krafft-Ebbing, which is well worth noting. But within a couple of pages she wanders into pure conjecture, using the phrase "must have" repeatedly in sentences like "one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been ... gang rape ...." She ends with a remarkable blanket statement, stating rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women[/i] in a state of fear" (her italics).

I have two problems with this. As a reader I just don't like sweeping statements and generalities, because I feel they are almost invariably false. But I have a greater problem with the book as a writer, because for me this book represents a soft-headed preaching-to-the-choir approach that will resonate with those who already agree with Brownmiller while alienating everyone who doesn't.

Great feminist literature like The Second Sex or Backlash (two of the most elegantly reasoned, insightful and persuasive non-fiction books ever written) makes a case the way a lawyer does, introducing evidence and drawing conclusions based on that evidence. To refute a book written like that, one would have to do research, find flaws in the evidence and holes in the logical approach to analyzing that evidence. It's not that it can't be done - you can pick holes in anything - but it would be a lot of work. But it is no work at all to pick apart a book that keeps saying this "must have" happened or that is "probably" the case. If you say, "prehistoric man must have learned to flavor meat with garlic early on," I can say "prehistoric man probably believed garlic was poisonous." We would both just be talking out of our asses if we couldn't offer evidence to support our positions.

There's probably something of interest and value in Against Our Wills. It's almost 500 pages long and it's a famous book, so I will give it that much. But by tossing away all pretense at objectivity or scholarship by the end of the first chapter, Brownmiller fails to make a case for herself as the person qualified to analyze the place of rape in civilization, and thus failed to convince me that it was worth slogging through her seemingly baseless opinions to find what was of value in her book.

For the angry feminists of the 1970s, the book was probably great, because there was a lot of justifiable resentment at the way women had been (and continue to be) treated in society. But that's the problem with the book; if you're not angry already, you are going to instantly notice that Brownmiller is talking out of her ass. And that is no way to convince anyone of anything.

the fat grey lady has sung

Well, that's it, my final game review for the New York Times has run, and I'm feeling melancholy about it. I wish I could have gone out at least with a great game, instead of a couple of decent ones, but at least my final review wasn't of Wii Fit, which I only reviewed to pacify my editor not realizing I was going to get fired a week later anyway.

Now I just need to start pitching ideas to USA Weekend; they appreciate me there.