left or right, there's no need to be an asshole

Someone who was clearly batshit insane shot a bunch of people in Arizona at a political event. Not the first time, not the last time. Some on the left are trying to blame Sarah Palin graphics and partisan bickering, but as David Brooks points out in the Times, that's nonsense. As my girlfriend and Jon Stewart have both said, it's just like people who blamed heavy metal music for violence and suicides. Tragedy should not be thought of as an opportunity to try to score cheap political points. Alas, it always will be.

Musings on Good Dancers, Bad Dancers, and the Surprisingly Subjective Nature of Deciding Which is Which (A Very Long Essay)

Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow. - Bob Dylan

It is a truism that the more one learns, the less one knows. When we know only a little about something, we have a shining certainty, but with knowledge comes perspective, which leads to the question: How sure can any of us really be about anything?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about “good” dancers. Swing dancers, specifically, since that’s what I spend most of my time doing.

For many years, I thought of good dancing in purely linear terms. I had the image of a ladder in which there were people above and below me. I think most people I know are similar, feeling sure about who the good and bad dancers are, who is great, who is terrible.

Dancers also generally have an opinion of where they are on the skill ladder. They are often wrong. Most commonly, dancers who have been doing it for a while assume they are better than they are. Many dancers complain vociferously about dancers deluded in this way, and most of those complaining are just as deluded. Much in the way that people think they have great singing voices until they record their voice, most dancers assume they are moving beautifully until they see themselves on video. (Some dancers, newer to the scene, will, refreshingly, think they’re worse than they are.)

The cold hard fact of social dancing is that when the dance is bad, it might not be your partner’s fault. It might be your fault. Or it might be something else entirely, and that something else is the point of this essay.

What is a Good Dancer?

So let’s begin by thinking about what good partner dancing is.

In the most subjective sense, a “good” dancer is someone you enjoy dancing with. But among people who have taken a lot of classes and learned a lot of technique, the term is often used to refer to people who have good technique; good dancers have good dance posture, good balance, good musicality, a good connection with their partner and a feel for the physics of the dance.

To some extent, that is all true.

But before we worry about technique, let’s think about what partner dancing is; dancing to music with a partner.

At its simplest, it is what is referred to by dancers, derisively, as “wedding dancing.” Wedding dancing is what people who don’t dance do at weddings when they try and recreate the vague notion in their head of partner dancing. They hold hands, they sway back and forth, they spin around. Wedding dancing is ugly to watch and it is terrible to dance with someone who thinks that is what dancing is. But is it inherently bad?

It depends. If they are having fun and they are dancing on the beat, well, it is a successful dance. If they are communicating through movement – that is, if the leader successfully gets the follow to turn the direction he wants her to – then it is even a successful partner dance.

It is, in fact, street dancing, and street dancing can be a very interesting thing.

On Street Dancing

I learned to dance in dance schools, and wasn’t aware of street dancing for many years. It came to my attention first when I went salsa dancing at a bar in the East Village. The dancers there, all Hispanic except for me and my friend - were clearly not people who had learned to dance in a school. While I had learned specific footwork and a lot of turns, these people were holding each other close, moving to the music, doing nothing elaborate but looking really sexy and cool. They seemed not like people who were taking dance classes but like people who had been dancing in salsa clubs for years, just making it up as they went along. (Years later I discovered blues dancing and realized that street salsa was much closer to blues dance than to school salsa.)

I once spoke to a guy who had grown up somewhere in Central America and had started dancing salsa as a teenager. He said salsa dancing was just dancing to salsa music. When I asked how he learned the basic step, he said, “there is no basic, you just dance to the music” as though I was a little slow.

Not all dances are street dances. Some are created and popularized by dancers, like the Foxtrot, which was presumably invented by Harry Fox and popularized by dance superstars Vernon and Irene Castle. But many start as street dances. Thus dances are created locally to popular music. I met an elderly woman who told me when she was young, swing dancing was different in each borough of New York, where she grew up; it was just kids who knew how to dance figuring out how to dance to new music and teaching other kids in the neighborhood what they were doing.

Some of those kids were in Harlem, and their version of swing dancing, Lindy Hop, is the one that caught on. It came out of older dances like the Charleston, and was popularized first by entertainers like Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers then was brought in somewhat altered form to Hollywood by Dean Collins and was altered for the masses by the Arthur Murray Studios in the form of East Coast Swing, a somewhat simplified variant that focused more on 6-count than 8-count steps to make it easier to learn for people familiar with Foxtrot. (At least this is what I have gleaned over the years.)

On Dance Schools

When a street dance becomes popular enough, dance schools start teaching it and it becomes codified. Much in the way that grammarians did not invent English but did decide on a set of rules so that people would speak it the same way, dance schools take the street dance and chop it up into clearly definable, teachable movements bite-sized bits so that anyone can learn it. This is not bad in itself – we can’t all pick up dance steps just by watching – but it does create a mindset in which there is a right way and a wrong way to dance, whereas in street dancing right or wrong is more a matter of, does it work, is it fun, does it look good, and did anyone die?

I learned Lindy Hop at the Sandra Cameron Dance Center, a dance school whose main claim to swing fame was that they employed Lindy legend Frankie Manning as a teacher. Sandra’s had practice sessions for their students twice a week, and for the first few years that is where I did most of my dancing. It was pretty clear who was a good dancer and who wasn’t, and I generally had a strong sense of where I was in the skill hierarchy.

Things changed when I started going out to swing dance events. People did not dance much like my fellow students at Sandra’s. Many dancers focused more on musicality and flair than on learned steps. It was both exciting and annoying, as many people focus on style before they really understand how to dance. But the experience changed my dancing for the better.

On Snooty Dancers

When you go out social dancing, some people will not dance with you. Most will, but there are a few people who stick to a small circle of acquaintances. These people are often thought of as being good dancers, partially because many of them look good when they dance, and partially because we always assume that people who think they’re too good for us actually are too good for us.

For a long time I thought the same, but had to reconsider after a dance teacher gave me his thoughts on those cliquish dancers. What he said, as best I can remember, was:

“They don’t dance with you because they think they’re better than you, but they’re not. Most of them don’t really follow. They have memorized leads to certain moves, and if they feel that lead, they do that move automatically, regardless of what you are trying to lead.”

Was this possible? Were the snootiest people on the swing scene nothing but back-leaders? Did they look good when they danced only because they were favoring their individual movements over the integrity of the connection? I began to think that perhaps looking good was simply a different skill from feeling good. If you have a dance background in jazz or ballet or modern you might be able to look great, because you know how to move, but you might feel awful, because you have terrible partnering skills.

Every once in a while one finds oneself in a club so empty that one of those follows who always says no surprises you and says yes. And dancing with those cliquish dancers seemed to prove that dance right. Because I found most of them terrible to dance with. They seemed confused by simple leads; things I could lead flawlessly with almost anyone left them standing there looking confused.

I began to think these dancers simply had a narrow competence. That when dancing with people they were familiar with, that they’d danced with hundreds of times, that they’d taken the same classes with, they could be amazing, but that they were rigidly incapable of dancing outside of their social circles.

But like every neat theory, there were holes in this one. For one thing, there were people I didn’t like dancing with who I knew were much better dancers than me. It can often be almost as hard to dance with extremely good dancers as it is to dance with extremely bad ones, because they have simply reached a point of subtlety in their movements that you aren’t competent to match. Yet, there were some amazing dancers I danced beautifully with, while other dancers who gave every indication of being just as good just annoyed me.

One of the big ah-ha moments in my search for answers came when the same dance teacher who had complained about cliquish dancers back-leading told me that one of my favorite people to dance with, who was also a teacher, didn’t know how to do a proper Lindy Circle. This was clearly nonsense. The problem, I suspected, was that these two had learned how to dance from Lindy teachers with radically different approaches to the dance.

While Lindy has been codified, the best dancers always play with the concepts they learn, trying to perfect and improve them, and then they teach other people. Thus, dance teaching evolves along separate tracks. They are all teaching Lindy Hop, they are all doing Texas Tommys and Swing Outs and Tuck Turns, but they have different approaches to compression, to stance, to counterbalancing. I can often tell what teachers someone has learned from by the way they dance, and I find I can sometimes improve my connection with a dancer by doing things in a way I learned from some specific teacher.

On Argentine Tango

Consider, for a moment, the Argentine Tango cross.

In Argentine Tango, the man can choose to step to his left so that he and the woman are walking on separate, parallel tracks. When this happens, the woman may take a step back and then slide her other foot back so that her ankles cross. How does this happen? It depends who you ask.

There are two basic approaches to the cross. One is that it is a lead move. You walk alongside the woman, and when you want her to cross, you give her a little push with your hand that forces her to cross.

The other approach is that the move is done by convention. If a man takes three steps in the outside track, she will cross on the third step. You do not, under any circumstances, lead this. It is simply a convention of the dance of long standing that every dancer should be familiar with.

I don’t know which of these is correct. Presumably I could go to Argentina and ask a 100 year-old dancer and he or she could say, this is the tradition, and I could say, that’s right then. Or someone could argue that the tradition is not important, that Tango is a living dance and that regardless of what was being done 80 years ago, this is the way to do it in the modern age.

I don’t really care which is right. I go with the cross by convention, because that’s how I learned it, but if I’d learned it the other way, I would do it the other way.

My point is, these two methods are both taught by a great number of teachers, and they are incompatible. If someone schooled in one method dances with someone schooled in the other method, there are going to be issues. She is not going to cross when he expects her to, and he’ll think, she doesn’t know how to dance. He’ll force her into a cross, and she’ll think, he doesn’t know how to dance.

In fact, they both know how to dance, they just don’t agree on the ground rules.

With that in mind, let’s go back to swing dancing.

There is nothing I can think of in swing dancing with the sharp disagreement found in the Argentine Tango cross, but there are differences in how the dance is taught. I learned a sort of compression-release version, which is quite common, where tension is built up to the point where movement happens, at which point everything is relaxed until tension is needed to redirect the flow of movement. In other words, if I and a girl are holding hands, and I take a step back, tension will be created. When the tension reaches a certain level where the girl cannot comfortably hold her ground, she will move forward. At that point, the assumption is she will continue to move forward without any assistance from me, so I relax my arm and there is no tension until her movement takes her far enough past me to create tension again. (There’s more to it than that, of course; based on this description alone, swing dancing would simply involve the girl traveling back and forth as though she were attached to a pole by a bungee cord.

Some dancers, though, maintain a level of tension at all times. Some dancers are always a little slack. Some follows will always make big movements even if you lead small ones. When leading a follow at a certain speed, she may travel faster or slower than the lead intends.

Sometimes it’s just bad dancing. Sometimes the girl back leads, which means she guesses what is wanted and does it without really being lead into it. Sometimes the guy’s lead is so weak that there is no way to know what is wanted, and then the guy will be mad at the girl for not following, and sometimes a follow or lead grips their partner’s hand with so much force that a sprained wrist is a distinct possibility. There are definitely a lot of crappy dancers out there.

But when you get to a certain level, it’s not really a matter of crappy dancing anymore.

On Ebonics

Years ago I saw an English professor talking about the study of “black English,” by which was meant the dialect in which you hear phrases like “I be going to the store.” What the professor said was that, while this is generally described as ungrammatical, it is actually a dialect with its own built-in grammar. Its rules are different from those taught in school, but the rules exist, and just as every other mode of speech, children learn these rules by listening to those around them and then speak using these rules. It is an internally consistent dialogue that could just as easily be broken down and diagrammed and taught from textbooks as any other dialect. Grammarians chose a particular dialect and declared it “proper English,” but it is not intrinsically more right or more complex or requiring of more intellect than any other dialect. But it still sounds wrong to those of us who grew up with a different dialect that was reinforced in school.

Dance teachers have dance dialects, but there is no authoritative voice that can declare any particular dialect correct. If you are steeped in one Lindy dialect, others will sound wrong to you. And this is why great dancers say other great dancers don’t know how to dance, and great teachers say other great teachers are teaching incorrectly. Because they feel they were taught the right way, and any way that is not that right way is the wrong way.

Can differences in dialects be bridged? It probably depends on how wide the disparity is between two styles. I asked a teacher whose been performing and competing for years if at the highest level differences gave way to the underlying expertise of people with a deep understanding of body movement, and she said at any level there are people you just don’t connect with.

I came across an interesting post on a dance blog that starts with video of two top-flight Lindy Hoppers failing to connect well. They do fine a lot of the time, but then suddenly everything will fall apart and the follow will look completely perplexed. The blogger has an interesting analysis of why that happens, but the important thing for my point is that it happens.

That being said, the better I get as a dancer, the more people I can connect with. If I have trouble dancing with someone, I assume there’s something I could do different, and I like to try and figure out what that is. I don’t always succeed – it’s hard to pick up the rules of someone else’s dialect – but the attempt itself is instructive. Dancing is a conversation, and like any conversation, there is always common ground if you look for it. (Which is why, even though I understand the appeal of only dancing will people you feel are at or above your level, I still think people who do so are like those who go to a party and won’t talk to anyone but their friends: it’s a party, mingle for god’s sake.)

Concluding Remarks

There are bad dancers in this world. There are people who get on the dance floor and break even the most basic rules of partner dancing, sometimes injuring their partners in the process. But it is too easy to write off dancers you can’t connect with as bad, and more and more I see that what we call good dancers are simply dancers who speak with our particular accent. It is often easier to dance with a newbie follow who moves in a way that seems familiar than to dance with an experienced follow who does everything different from the way you learned it.

I know what I like in dancers, and what I don’t like. Some things I don’t like are, I’m pretty sure, just plain bad, but others are just personal preferences.

My current working theory is that it is impossible to figure out objectively how good other dancers are. Oh sure, you can tell when people are incompetent, and you can always tell the true dancers, those who move with breathtaking grace and beauty (most of whom are half my age and have been dancing twice as long as I have, meaning I can never come close to doing what they do), but all those people in between ... they may not be as bad or as good as you think they are.

The Rally for Sanity, False Equivalency and the Affronted Left

I loved the Daily Show's Rally to Restore Sanity (my girlfriend and I went to it on the Huffington buses, although unfortunately the bus took so long we were only there for the last 45 minutes and couldn't get anywhere close to the rally itself). The concept was simple: public debate has become nothing but name calling, insults and lies, and we should all stop it. We should make nice.

In a world where everyone is accused of being Hitler, that seemed like a good idea.

Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann disagreed, at least in part. They both objected to lumping left-wing pundits with right wing ones.

Maher said:

“The message of the rally, as I heard it, was that, if the media stopped giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side forgetting that Obama tried that and found out…there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said the national conversation was dominated by people on the Right who believe Obama’s a Socialist and people on the Left who believe 9/11’s an inside job, but I can’t name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11’s an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama’s a Socialist…all of them.”

I couldn't find a transcript of Olbermann's discussion of the Rally, which you can find on youtube, but he and his guest Jonathon Alter discussed the fact that MSNBC prioritizes facts and journalism over opinion and political agenda, whereas FOX "News" does exactly the opposite, and functions more as a propaganda tool than as a news station. He also said the hard right is not going to start acting more reasonable just because the hard left lowers its rhetoric.

Those are good points, and if Jon Stewart really does have, as he mockingly promised on The Daily Show, a "Rally To Determine Precisely The Percentage Of Blame To Be Doled Out To The Left And The Right For Our Problems Because We All Know That The Only Thing That Matters Is That The Other Guys Are Worse Than We Are And/Or Fear," well, the right, particularly in the case of FOX, will be apportioned more of the blame.

It's true. In a tit-for-tat comparison, James O'Keefe (the miscreant who took down ACORN) plays with the truth more egregiously than Michael Moore, and Sarah Palin makes up more absurd lies than anyone on the left outside of 9/11 conspiracy nuts, who, as Maher points out, are not a part of the left-wing mainstream in the way birthers are a substantial part of the right. On FactCheck.org you will find flat-out lies come more from the right, while the left's attacks are more likely to be just misleading or unproven (although the worst campaign ads of the season were the inexcusably sleazy commercials of Alan Grayson).

Yet, I don't think it's good enough to say, "why are you bitching us out, the other side is way worse."

"We're better than them" is a common excuse. In the 20th century, Communists throughout the world excused the bad behavior of Russia and China's because they claimed America was worse. Meanwhile, American's would answer any accusation of U.S. governmental oppression by saying, we're much better than Russia. You can always say, "I won't let gay people marry, but I least I don't want them executed" or, "I don't think women are as capable of men, but I wouldn't prevent them from voting," and point at the people who would do those worse things, but that doesn't mean you're right. It just means you're less wrong.

The truth is, both sides are full of hypocrites. I expect it from the right, because they lie so casually that it is just who they are at this point, but I don't want it on the left, because I want the left to take the moral high ground.

Olbermann, alas, often wallows in the same hypocritical mud as the Republicans (I can't speak too much to Maher, because I never watch him - I always found him facile and annoying). I remember a few years ago when the right wingers were complaining about some inflammatory comment on a left-wing site, and Olbermann made the very reasonable point that the site had no control over what people chose to post on their forums. Then, a year or two later, a right winger posted something inflammatory on a right-wing site, and Olbermann immediately jumped on that site, seemingly oblivious to the role reversal.

I am often bothered by the left. It bothers me the way Nancy Pelosi relies on meaningless talking points as much as anyone on the right (I think Joe Biden has the reputation of putting his foot in his mouth primarily because he is not afraid to say what he thinks, unlike most politicians). It bothers me when the left attacks free speech. As I pointed out before, you can't laud Lenny Bruce and then damn Don Imus, because they both said equally provocative and inappropriate things. It really bugged me when the left mercilessly went after beauty pageant contestant Carrie Prejean for saying she disapproved of gay marriage, both because people do have a right to their opinions and because, well, she was a really insignificant celebrity whose opinion was not remotely influential. It didn't matter what she thought, but she was attacked for months for what had been a fairly mild statement.

Yes, it's terrible when people are racist, sexist, homophobic or anything like that, but it's actually their right. People are entitled to believe what they believe. If you insist other people cannot express their opinions, you give other people the right to insist you keep your opinions to yourself.

I constantly have to watch out for my own hypocritical tendencies. For example, a while back someone created a dumb joke group on Facebook that basically encouraged God to kill Barack Obama. I learned about it when I got an invite to sign a petition demanding the group be deleted. And at first I thought, I should sign that. And then I thought, what would I think if this "kill Obama group" was a "kill Sarah Palin" group or a "kill George W. Bush" group? Would I sign a petition insisting Facebook delete the offending group? Hell no. I might not go so far as to join it, but I certainly wouldn't mind it.

In fact, in the 1980s, I wrote a song about how, if it weren't illegal, I would write a song encouraging people to kill Ronald Reagan. It was one of my most popular songs in the left-wing folk circuit I was a part of. I thought it was terrible to make a joke about killing Obama not because I had a problem with people making jokes about killing presidents but because I had a problem with people making that joke about a president I liked. But even though I think the people who joined that Facebook group (who vastly outnumbered all those who had joined any group suggesting we harm George W. Bush - the right is really far more savage than the left) are probably all idiots who believed Obama is a socialist Muslim ready to institute death panels, they have a right to believe that. People should use their free speech rights to counter these beliefs and educate people as best they can, but they should not criticize behavior on the right that they wouldn't think twice about were it coming from the left.

And that is why I like Jon Stewart; he believes in non-partisan civility. I often compared Bush Jr. with Hitler, and yet, he didn't gas a single Jew. I have tossed out words like "fascist" far too casually, and I think it's great that there is a national figure who is pointing out that "only Hitler is Hitler."

Is MSNBC as bad as FOX? Of course not. And even though Olbermann objected to being compared with Glen Beck, he did, in honor of being less provocative, suspend his Worst Person in the World segment. Olbermann also once apologized for an over-the-top attack on a Republican after being called on it by Stewart, even playing Stewart's entire Olbermann parody on Countdown. Would Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly do that? I don't think so. And if all Olbermann wants is to be a better person than Glenn Beck, he has easily cleared that hurdle.

But the point of the Rally to Restore Sanity was not, I believe, to encourage people to be slightly less of an asshole than the other guy. So while Maher and Olbermann are correct in saying the right is worse, they would be better occupied in thinking about how they can work to shed more light and less heat.

intolerance marches on

The 2010 election results were depressing but not remotely surprising. Once again, the Democrats did a terrible job of selling themselves because of timidity and stupidity, and if they keep this up Sarah Palin could be president in a couple of years. Pretty scary.

But for me, the scariest election result was Oklahoma's passage of an anti-Sharia law measure.

The law itself isn't important; there are barely any Muslims in Oklahoma and no one is using Sharia (Islamic) law there anyway. What is important is that, like the recent controversy over the Muslim center a few blocks from ground zero (as well as controversies over Mosques hundreds of miles from ground zero), this is a straightforward slap in the face of Muslims and a clear statement that they are considered, as a group, criminals with no rights.

The increasing oppression of Muslims terrifies me, because it could mean we are entering a dark phase in American history along the lines of putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps or blacklisting suspected communists and communist "sympathizers." There are people in this country who are devoting themselves to crushing Muslims, and I will not be surprised if we soon start seeing the passage of laws prohibiting Muslims from teaching in public schools and joining the army.

This cannot end well. If you tell a group of Americans that they are not American and that they do not have the rights of Americans, they tend to object. The Watts and Stonewall riots were both cases of disenfranchised groups expressing their outrage.

But while American Muslims may riot at some future point, if this oppression continues, they're not the ones I'm scared of. I am afraid rather of what happens when anti-Muslim attitudes reach that tipping point where it becomes dangerous to speak out against them.

I recently read a book on the 1950 Communist blacklist. What I found interesting was that, when the witch hunts first started, there were many people who spoke out forcefully against them. There were newspaper editorials and political speeches saying, this is wrong, this is un-American. But after a few years, few people were no longer speaking out, because it had become too dangerous; defending constitutional rights made you as much of a criminal as reading Marx. Right now, someone like Michael Bloomberg can take a principled stand in favor of sanity and tolerance, but if anti-Muslim hatred in this country keeps getting stronger and stronger, eventually everyone will be afraid to speak out. And once that happens, American Muslims are fucked.

Right now anti-Muslim sentiment is mainly coming from hardcore red state nut jobs, the same people who blathered on about Obama being a Muslim, but the idea that Muslims are dangerous lunatics is becoming a part of the philosophy of this country that extends beyond midwest Republicans.

So right now, I'm scared for American Muslims, and scared for this country, and, if we really entering yet another dark age of extreme intolerance, scared for people like me who speak out about it.

Fall 2010 New TV Series Capsule Reviews

As a lifelong TV junkie, I always feel an obligation to check out every fall television series. I skipped a few this year – Outlaw, because of its bad reviews and absurd premise (supreme court justice decides he can do more good in private practice), S#*! My Dad Says, because William Shatner is a joke and the commercials looked awful, and My Generation, which also looked painful from the commercials. But I saw at least part of an episode of everything else, and here’s what I thought.

Raising Hope

Premise: Young guy raises a baby.

Review: When I saw the commercials about a young doofusy guy raising a baby, I thought, there is a show I don’t need to see. Then I heard it had been created by the guy who created My Name is Earl, so I had to check it out after all. Like Earl, Raising Hope deals with poor people living in the margins who happen to all be really interesting, good-hearted characters. Also like Earl, the show is riotously funny.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely

Follow-up: Still very funny. I showed an episode to my girlfriend and now she insists I keep the episodes for us to watch together on weekends.

Running Wilde

Premise: Spoiled millionaire woos do-gooder.

Review: Running Wilde was co-created by Michael Hurwitz, who made the brilliant Arrested Development, so of course I had to watch it even though the commercials were pretty dumb. Its opposite-attracts formula, in which a snarky millionaire still has a crush on a long-time love who is repelled by everything about him but still can’t resist him, is kept going by a lot of very clever humor, and while it’s not quite as good as Arrested Development, it’s definitely one of the better sitcoms this fall.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely.

Follow-up: Still lots of fun.

The Event

Premise: Government conspiracy. Kidnappings. Aliens. That sort of thing.

Review: Interesting attempt at a Lost-style collection of mysteries each wrapped in their own enigma. Like Lost, The Event uses a lot of flashbacks, but they are shorter, hop around more in time and are used less to explain character and more to explain what is going on. So something will happen, and then you’ll have a flashback from a week earlier, and then that might go to a flashback a year ago, and eventually you wind up back in the present with a slightly better idea of what is going on. So far I’ve seen two episodes and while it’s not as good as Lost was in the beginning, it’s better than shows like FlashForward and The Nine that attempted the same sort of high-concept mystery but wound up creating more boredom than intrigue.

Will I keep watching it? Yes.

Follow-up: So far this has kept up my interest and left me curious and wanting more.

Mike & Molly

Premise: Ordinary people fall in love.

Review: This looked cute and funny from the commercials and turned out to be just that. It’s simply about two people beginning a relationship, and I’m going to assume they will just follow that straight through, with the two characters, who met at an OA meeting, getting to know each other, falling in love, getting in tiffs, and, if the show lasts long enough, getting married, having a baby and eventually (since the show is nice with a capital “N”) dying and going to heaven.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely

Follow-up: This episode and the next one I saw were both quite funny. Then the two after that were unwatchable. Then I got around to watching the pilot episode, which was also terrible. It's a shame, because when it worked, it was good, but it's way too hit or miss, so I've stopped watching.

Chase

Premise: Lady chases down bad guys.

Review: Watched about 10 minutes of this, which mainly involved good guys running after bad guys. It didn’t grab me.

Will I keep watching it? Nope

Hawaii Five-O

Premise: Hawaiian cops or something.

Review: I’m old enough to remember the original Hawaii Five-O, and its success always puzzled me. It was just this square-jawed cops capturing generic bad guys sort of thing. I watched maybe 10 minutes of the first episode of this revival, which gives the main character a little macho back story but which looks to be similar in tone to the original, and then I turned it off.

Will I keep watching it? Of course not.

Hellcats (HS cheerleaders)

Premise: Girl who despises cheerleaders becomes one to win a scholarship.

Review: Hellcats is a real mixed bag. The actors are good and some of the dialogue is sharp and witty, but at other times the first episode was almost unbelievably moronic. For example, the protagonist tries out to be a cheerleader and completely screws up the choreography, instead just winging it. But the coach gets excited by her brilliant dancing and insists that all the cheerleaders start winging it. Seriously? I turned it off before the end; even the pretty girls in half-shirts weren’t doing it for me, as they all seemed oddly sexless. I could also do without the super-bitch who always has to be a part of these soapish shows.

Will I keep watching it? Nope.

Terriers

Premise: Slacker detectives.

Review: I watched a little of this. It looked like it was trying for a Big Lebowski vibe. Honestly, I’m one of the few people who didn’t love Lebowski, so this show would have had to be much better than it was to keep me watching.

Will I keep watching it? No.

Nikita

Premise: Ex-assassin/spy decides to destroy her former employer.

Review: This is an interesting way to revisit Nikita, the protagonist of two movies and a previous TV series, all of which involved her being forced to work as an assassin for a secret and often evil government organization. This time around, she has escaped the agency and is bent on ending its bloody career. The most interesting aspect of the pilot was the way she played cat and mouse with the agency. It was absurd but entertaining.

Will I keep watching it? After the first time I saw it I thought I would probably watch it again, but then when it came on a second time I just didn’t feel like it. For me it’s really borderline, so unless I hear really good things I probably will let it go its merry way without me.

Boardwalk Empire

Premise: Mobsters rule Atlantic City.

Review: Created by Martin Scorcese and starring Steve Buscemi, there is no way I was not going to check out Boardwalk Empire. The first episode was very good. I didn’t feel it was quite great, but it could easily become great. It’s certainly very interesting.

Will I keep watching it? Yes, unless my girlfriend cancels her subscription to HBO.

Follow-up: This one keeps getting better and better.

Detroit 1-8-7

Premise: Cop show

Review: I saw the first episode, and I liked it. I remember thinking it was a solid, entertaining show that had just enough originality in it to make it worth watching some more. But outside of that, I can’t remember a damn thing about it. Nothing.

(While watching another episode, I suddenly remembered something from the first episode, a scene in which a cop interrogates a suspect by simply staring at him blankly. The suspect gets nervous, starts talking, keeps talking, and hours later is telling the guy his entire life story and breaking down in tears. That's the sort of thing that makes this seem appealing.)

Will I keep watching it? I will, at least for now.

Follow-up: The more episodes I watched, the more generic this show seemed, with the interesting, quirky moments getting less frequent and less interesting. I stopped watching.

Better With You

Premise: Three couples, all related, get in situations and tell jokes

Review: Like Detroit 1-8-7, I can't for the life of me remember anything from this show unless I'm watching it. Part of that is just the painfully generic title. The show involves a couple who have been married 35 years and their daughters, one who has been with her boyfriend for 9 years and the other who has just got engaged to a guy she's known a couple of months, and it contrasts these relationships, which fall broadly into the categories blissful lust, deep understanding and loathing. It's generally funny, but by tomorrow I'll have forgotten what it's about again.

Will I keep watching it? Sure, why not.

Follow-up: In spite of being best described as generically funny, this one has been pretty consistently funny. It's pretty much the reaction I had to Friends when I first saw it, and like Friends, it grows on you.

The Whole Truth

Premise: Lawyers duke it out, then at the end of the show the truth of the case is revealed.

Review: Generic lawyer show aims for a Law & Order feel but doesn't really get it. The show goes back and forth between the prosecutors and defense, showing how they deal with evidence and investigate. Through the verdict you don't, in theory, know whether the person on trail is guilty. Unfortunately, in the first episode it seemed pretty obvious, making the final reveal anticlimactic. The first episode also wound up with justice being served, and it all seemed pretty gutless for a premiere that should have shown the audience why this show was a good idea.

Will I keep watching it? Pass

Follow-up: Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has been canceled already.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret

Premise: Guy gets a job he’s not qualified for and just gets in deeper and deeper.

Review: Weird, twisted show starring David Cross as a schlub who accidentally gets a high pressured job in England and has already started melting down in the first episode. Each episode, I have heard, takes place the day after the previous episode, and the show is working towards a moment seen at the beginning of the first episode in which Cross is apparently being tried for a crime.

Will I keep watching it? Wouldn’t miss any of this for the world.

Follow-up: Still awesome

Outsourced

Premise: American runs a call center in India.

Review: Apparently some Indians are a bit irked about this show’s reliance on hackneyed Indian themes like sacred cows and spicy food. I can understand how annoying that would be if you’re Indian, but if you’re not it’s more likely to bother you simply because it’s such lazy comedy. But in spite of that, I kind of liked the show. Half of it is pretty dumb, but there are moments, like a girl who speaks in an inaudible whisper acting out a scene from a movie (it’s unclear which movie, but my guess is Taxi Driver) then proudly waiting for applause or an Indian who has studied America suddenly switching to a perfect southern accent that are actually pretty funny.

Will I keep watching it? For now.

Follow-up: This show has proven to be very likable. Yes, you could have a drinking game involving taking a drink every time some India stereotype is tossed out, but it's funny and well meant.

Blue Bloods

Premise: Family of cops.

Review: This glossy series about New York cops was somewhat rousing when it started off with Sinatra singing “New York New York” but lost steam once the actors started speaking (in what sounded to me like a Boston accent, but was perhaps a Queens or Staten Island accent, for all I know). First off, the show is very, very generic; I dare you to find anything in it you haven’t seen in 30 other cop shows. The series opener also had a rather murky and tedious approach to morality. One of the main characters tortures a criminal in one of those “ticking bomb” scenarios television is so fond of. Later the whole family sits around and debates whether it was the right thing to do, while carefully avoiding coming to any conclusions. This debating is admittedly less generic than the rest of the show, but not any more interesting.

Will I keep watching it? Hell no.

No Ordinary Family

Premise: Dysfunctional family develops superhuman abilities.

Review: Family almost dies but become superheroes instead. The show is a mix of superhero stuff and family stuff. The family is mildly dysfunctional (like most families) but everyone acts like it’s a huge crisis. The parents are a bit bored of each other. Will being superheroes fix the family? I don’t really care, but it’s fun to watch them run fast or read minds. If the dysfunctional-family theme doesn’t push the superhero theme out the window this show could be pretty cute.

Will I keep watching it? For now, yes.

Follow-up: I watched this for a few weeks, but as I feared, the family stuff overshadowed the superhero stuff, making the whole thing more of a soap opera than an action series. Which would be fine if the family drama were actually interesting and the characters weren't like those from a million other shows.

everyone's a david

Sometimes PR firms send releases to publications having nothing to do with its coverage area, which is how I wound up receiving a release titled: David vs Goliath: Tobacconists Condemn Irresponsibility of W.H.O. Report on Smoking, which was sent to my nintendo.about.com email.

It's an odd release that portrays the World Health Organization as a tool of corporations and the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers as a struggling group of mom and pop stores compelled to battle the unfair claims of W.H.O. The oddest part of the press release is that it says the W.H.O.'s report is full of "wild, unsupportable claims” but refuses to state what those claims are, claiming that repeating these claims would just give them more coverage. Most organizations would try and refute unsupportable claims, but the IPCPR seems to feel that saying the report is wrong is quite enough.

It fascinates me that the release positions the IPCPR as a David battling the World Health monster. And there is a curmudgeon quality to the release that does suggest it is the work of a small, rather unpolished PR firm reduced to quoting angry, unpersuasive statements from its employer like "What would you expect from an organization that refuses to hire people who smoke?”

Yes, tobacco is under siege, but if it's a David, it's a David that was once a Goliath and has got cut down to size. The approach is similar to that of the Republicans, who are acting like a feisty little group of rebels even though they have run this country for most of the last thirty years (of course, they even acted like that when they were in power). But for me, a Goliath who has hit hard times is never a David.

baby experts

When I was a baby, my mother did what many mothers did; she bought books on how to raise babies. Parents do this because they're afraid of screwing up.

My mom took the advice of Dr. Spock, who at that time told parents that if their children started crying in their crib, you should just let them cry it out. Picking them up would make them soft, dependent crybabies. Your child needed to learn to deal with life right away.

And so, according to my mom, she would stand there, watching me cry, wracked with guilt but afraid that picking me up would lead to my ruin.

Years later, I hear, Dr. Spock said oops, he was wrong. Apparently, if you just leave babies alone when they cry they feel abandoned and forsaken and develop trust issues and have less of a bond with their parents, something like that.

So I figured that had all been settled, until today when I was watching an episode of the TV series Being Erica in which a parent talked about "self-soothing."

I looked it up. Also known as Ferberizing, the idea is, guess what? Let your baby cry it out.

Well, it's a little more detailed than that. The idea is to train your baby to sleep through the night, so you put him to bed, let him cry a few minutes, go in, pat him but don't pick him up, leave for a while longer, come back if he's still crying but still don't pick him up and so on. Eventually you've got your baby trained to go to sleep and leave you alone.

I imagine this does work, because once the baby realizes his parents aren't going to do anything for him when he's upset, he'll learn to deal with it. I'm sure if you stop feeding a six-year-old he'll figure out how to use a chair to get to the cabinets and find food and make himself meals too; children can learn to do a lot of things if they have to. The question is, how does this all affect the child's trust of its parents and his sense of whether he's got support in life or is on his own.

Would I be a different person today if my mom had picked me up when I cried? I have no idea. But I do think that parents might be better off listening to their instincts than reading a book. If you feel like picking your baby up when he cries, you should probably go ahead and do it. If you don't mind the crying, ignore him. But quit reading books on the subject, because in ten years there will be a whole new set of books that say totally different things.

Perhaps there should just be a golden rule for babies; treat babies the way you would want to be treated if you were a baby. Or perhaps the rule should be; parents should only do as much as they can do without losing it and crying themselves. I don't know; I'm not going to have any babies so it's not a decision I'll ever have to make.

But as someone who doesn't know enough to make an informed decision, I still think there's something a little creepy about this self-soothing thing.

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.