Cobb

Step

Alpha Phi Alpha
Originally uploaded by cecily7

I found this interesting photo cruising Flickr this evening. I uploaded a few old pictures of my frat and was curious to see what else was up there. This one's interesting on a number of levels. It's an Obama rally in Austin TX from last Feb.

The Other Plasma Burn

Cringley notes that we are on the verge of commercialization of plasma furnaces that can do 100 tons a day. I do like this idea very much:

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Moreover there are other downstream apps for byproducts. Plasma destroys most molecules down to their elemental components except for the heaviest elements which become molten slag. However..

If you were to blow compressed air through a stream of this molten material, you'd end up with rock wool. Rock wool has the appearance of gray cotton candy. It''s light and wispy, and according to Dr. Circeo, it has the potential to revolutionize the plasma waste treatment industry. Rock wool is a very efficient insulation material, twice as effective as fiberglass. It's also lighter than water, but very absorbent. Because of this, it could potentially be used to help contain and clean oil spills in the ocean. Cleanup crews could spread rock wool over and around an oil spill. The rock wool would float on the water while soaking up the oil, making collection a relatively easy process. Hydroponic growing systems can also use rock wool -- farmers can plant seeds in slabs or blocks of it.

Currently rock wool is produced by mining rocks, melting them down and then streaming the molten material onto spinning machines. The spinning machines fling strands of molten material in the air. Today, the price of rock wool is over a dollar a pound. Since rock wool would be a byproduct of the plasma gasification process, it could be sold for as little as 10 cents a pound. The price of insulation would decrease, efficiencies in energy-saving techniques would increase and plasma gasification plants would have another substantial source of income apart from selling electricity back to the grid.

Not bad.

Supermom Cranks It Up A Notch

This morning I am once again in wonderful Cleveland thanks to the safe, but enervating experience of air travel. I took a redeye which was two hours late. But I'm not the only one who is haggard. The Spousal Unit has completed a marathon of momhood, successfully. Again.

The Unit is a supermom. Not just a responsible parent, not just a soccer mom, but one of those backbones of the community. Anybody who watches the TV show 'The Unit' knows Regina Taylor plays Molly Blane who is the wife of Dennis Haysbert's character. That's what kind of woman my wife is, and for the record of those who say there are no strong black women on television - there are at 47 episodes which make all the difference. This time, my Unit got my two daughters through The Wizard of Oz.

Not that I really know, but there must be in Los Angeles, two dozen theatre companies for little kids to cut their dramatic teeth. My brother Deet and his wife are somewhat connected out Pasadena way with such things and have been involved with various professional and amateur productions over the years. This time we were invited to join a production of the Wizard of Oz which culminated in four 2 1/2 hour productions over the weekend. I've seen school plays and talent shows, but this was an extraordinary deal with a live orchestra performed at Pasadena City College. The baby Bowens made a strong representation all around with their cousins, Deet's kids. So we had four in the cast all with multiple roles in two of the casts including the Tin Man.

The Unit, for her part, did extra volunteer work and the kind of gap-filling that makes all the difference in the end. In addition to getting the kids out to rehearsals every week for 12 weeks or so, 80 miles round trip, she managed the whole food thing, as usual. See, the Unit is brilliant when it comes to feeding the masses. As a caterer, half-restaurant owner, and industrial food buyer and cafeteria manager, she's knows it all. It has made her invaluable to the PTA, the soccer league, the baseball teams, the family reunions, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the church, on God only knows how many occasions. People eat, always. She is there always. I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars we've spent at Smart & Final waiting for a reimbursement from a fellow caterer or charitable organization. She's not a machine, but the results speak for themselves. She puts everybody else to shame, with her organizational skills and yet charms them to putty. She is clockwork, backbone, and the doer of deeds. She puts on the apron and all the right things happen.

A couple months ago I bought a replacement wedding ring. This one is Tungsten. It's not glamorous, but it's stronger than gold. That's how I think about my marriage. It's made of working metal, not bling. And my daughters know very well that they have a high standard to live up to. That chapter of organized drama is now officially over. We'll get the DVDs and I'll have some stills. The flowers will stand in vases for a while staying fresh as the memories. But the continuum of work that the Spousal Unit has assembled will long be felt, not only by our family but others as well. It's an extraordinary blessing to be married to a woman such as this.

Now if I can only get the airlines to recognize.

A Rant Against Journalism

I'm particularly angry at journalists these days. I think for the first time I am starting to really feel the kind of animosity that must energize certain bloggers. I am angry at journalists because they are leveraged by stupidity, and because they are particularly arrogant.

It's probably not fair that I listen to NPR only on the weekends when this is in evidence most clearly. There is nothing so indicative of the kind of thing that gets under my fingernails as the smarmy cocksure baloney that oozes from Wait Wait Dont Tell Me. But even more, I fell into a portion of a radio drama about the heroics, the heroics mind you, of the journalists breaking the Pentagon Papers story.

Journalists are this and rarely anything more. They are intermediaries who are mass-articulate who are paid to find people who are too busy actually producing work of intrinsic interest to be mass-articulate themselves. Mass-articulation may or may not be a skill. It seems to me that a halfway decent education would obviate the need for such proxies as the overwhelming majority of journalists are. But with any luck they'll all get disintermediated by a panoply of Google-able cloud-bots. If everyone had their own amanuensis and website, we wouldn't need journalists at all. Until that day we are stuck with their effluent. I am part of the transition. The 'sphere is part of the transition. God please let it be quick.

It is only under the influence of great storytelling that one recognizes how much of what passes for useful information is mindless dreck. I don't know what to do with my intolerance but rant today against journalists who haven't the cojones to establish certifications in their industry and yet complain about the information that wants to be free.

I continue to lament this problem of information theory. I am ready to throw up my hands. There is only a very narrow augmented path. The freedom of the press is constantly invoked and the role of the press is forgotten.

Wanted

Wanted is a poor movie. It's Fight Club for people who dig wrestling. It's Chuck meets Office Space meets The Bourne Identity, IQ adjusted for the Grand Theft Auto demographic.

I happen to be in that demographic and I'm not going to pretend at this moment that I'm any better than anybody else. After all I did fork over the dollars for this improbable almost campy rompy stumblebum of an action flick. The interesting thing about it is that now that I've experienced it, I feel like I want to slap a bitch up. I was composing gay poetry in my mind and channeling some woman hating uber-butch. That's the kind of emotional vibe I got. It's not so disturbing to me, I mean, I inherited some fairly mean street wisdom in my life, but I realized that I was listening to NPR before and after the show. The intellectual type of bitch-slapping I usually feel, and felt before the show, was supplanted after the movie by a kind of perverse rage. It was accentuated by some snippets of This American Life in which a drunk dude wants to stay drunk, and it startles the goodie two shoes liberal babe with the sociology degree. I practically wanted to do some damage to her earholes through the radio.

Then Larry Mantle comes on and insinuates more insinuations about how stupid our political and military leadership has been upon the release of a new report from the Pentagon that's bound to be all people talk about this coming week.

The protagonist of Wanted is a nobody who recognizes that his life has left him emasculated.  To give Wanted credit, the film doesn't blame society. I do, like Fight Club did, and I have my reasons, but it occurs to me in this reviewing that a Libertarian is someone who has figured out that they're too smart to care. It seems to be the most arrogant of all politics, because it has no real reason to ask to lead. I cannot tell the difference between Mugabe and Libertarians. The point is that I perceive two political classes of Americans who have no interest in what this kind of movie has to say, liberals and conservatives. But the theatre was packed. This kind of movie has this to say: we are nobodies but we all fantasize about taking control of our lives and fulfilling some kind of destiny and that destiny is fantastically violent because everybody around us are such killer assholes and everything is a lie.

There is no truth in Wanted. There is only ugly fate and convoluted destiny. Finding one's future and one's self out is an ugly business that only involves betrayal. It is a film without hope that only seeks purpose for a violent period. I am waiting to see how many gozillions it makes, and what popular following is to follow. I can tell you that I had to wait in line to see it, and I know I should have seen WallE instead.

But being a conservative and not minding my own uptight business, venturing out into the stinking stew of the masses for this bloody entertainment, I have come face to face with some part of my own pscyhe and of America's as well. And I think it leaves me a touch more anarchist than I want to be - given the conceit that I'm actually learning something from this experience. I am struck by the incredible arrogance of philosophically consistent liberals and conservatives who would dare to call this their nation where such a film can become a blockbuster. I don't know whether to be ashamed or to run and hide.

Distributed Biotech

Here is the relevant extract of the idea from Dyson's Utopia that I see happening sooner rather than later:

That's exactly what I had in mind. There are three items I cover in the new book. First, I didn't know Teledesic was going up, but I knew something like it was always within 10 years anyway. The second is solar energy, which is wonderfully world distributed. It's only a question of a factor of two to five between the cost of solar energy and the cost of oil. In the long run, oil will get more expensive and solar energy will take over. The third item is biotech, which is essential for using solar energy in crop plants designed to do all the industrial processes.

So you're not talking about solar electricity.

That's also part of the deal, but the more important thing is that you'll be able to make your gasoline locally. People will live in the villages and commute to work in the towns, and they'll produce gasoline on the local farms.

This is from biomass that you refine right there?

You don't even have to refine it. The plants produce it.

Isn't this a more complicated process?

True, we don't have the biotech yet. For that I'm talking maybe 50 years - when we really understand how DNA functions. However, there's no reason plants should be limited to 1 percent energy efficiency. We know photovoltaics can reach 10 percent quite easily. Plants are stuck at 1 percent because they use a particularly elegant process involving chlorophyll. But it's wasteful; it involves a long chain of chemical reactions. It's a historical relic that plants got stuck with. If you could design a plant from scratch, you'd probably use silicon films instead of chlorophyll to collect sunlight. Silicon is abundant, and you've simply got to have a plant that will process soil and extract silicon the same way that plants now process carbon dioxide into carbon.

By the way, this was from 1998, and the interviewer was none other than Stewart Brand latent of the Long Now.

End of the Cereal Aisle

Now is the end of the cereal aisle metaphor. I am a couple years late in following up on the work of Michael Pollan. I read 'The Botany of Desire' several years back and was stunned. Pollan talks about the thing we in the information business almost never talk about which is the supply chain of food. He has demystified that which we have been taking for granted and he has stirred up the self-evident controversy which is there. It goes a little something like this.

It turns out that so many farmers grow corn that corn has become so cheap that the cereal aisle is not a good way to judge the efficacy of the market. The processed in processed food is the corn and they are making corn into everything because there is too much. So the marketing of food has taken over what determines what we eat and it's not all good. The cheapest food is not necessarily the best. Even our poor people are fat is because they're on their way to diabetes, not because this is necessarily a land of plenty. Our poor people don't grow cabbages in their own backyards any longer. They are just eating at McDonalds and it's killing them. The Cheez Whiz, the Twinkies, the fortified breakfast cereals are all culprits. Why? Because they are not real food. The selection is there because it's false - it's like the selection of videos on MTV. It doesn't mean we have an excess of talent. In agribusiness there are various inversions of commonsense economics associated with the markets of foodstuffs. Essentially demand is almost infinitely elastic. Everybody eats up to a point, no matter how expensive. Beyond that point we have to be force fed. So what if you have a crop that's so successful that there's more food than anyone could possibly eat? Thats what we have with corn in the US, and so our friends at Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland force feed us and cows both. It's not expensive oil that's killing us, it's cheap corn.

Cows are not supposed to eat corn, they are supposed to eat grass. But since we in the US have a whole lot of corn and corn is the cheapest way to stuff a steer full of calories, we feed them corn. Corn-fed beef is, simply stated, unnatural. The cows' have rumens, not ordinary stomachs like us. They are supposed to be eating a different kind of stuff because their metabolisms can process such stuffs. Like some people are lactose intolerant, cows are essentially corn intolerant. One result is all that methane you've been hearing about. Cow farts and belches are on the rise and contribute to greenhouse gasses. Fortunately, methane dissipates relatively quickly. Not so, cattle's heartburn. So 'ranchers' stuff them full of antacids. But while the cows rumens turn acidic, they become host to new strains of e Coli which thrive in acidic environments. So 'ranchers' stuff them full of antibiotics. But we're talking millions of head of cattle, and godzillions of bacteria, some of which will eventually become drug resistant. And guess what? Since we humans have naturally acidic stomachs these are the e Coli that can live in us too, and some of them are just deadly. Wonderful. There are technical workarounds to be sure but we're doing a lot of work here just to slaughter beef earlier in their lives. Nature pushes back.

That's the first quarter of the book and once again I am feeling rather stunned and informed. Pollan is on the T50 list and every one of his writings has the clarity and probity of the works of John McPhee. Pollan is the intellectual patron saint of smart eaters, and so I have to get through this disturbing work onto the next. I'll also be feeding it to the Spousal Unit for the good of all of us. What is most surprising in reading Pollan is how we normally smart folks can fall for some hokum because the level of retardation in general is so startlingly high. It's relatively easy to be provident, but damned hard to be intelligently informed when it comes to our food supply chain. That's my aim. I think it could even swear me off Carl's Jr. That's saying a lot.

Pollan does me the favor of being biased and provocative, because it's very easy to say 'so what'. One's liberal knee (I have those occasionally) jerks to ask whether it is good or bad to eat American beef or corn. Well, there's not much influence you can have except over your own health and meal plan is there? If you monitor your own caloric intake or carbon footprint or sexist thoughts for the day, that's all well and good, but what effect will that have on society? Not bloody much - primarily because any change in popular taste only constitutes a half-ass populist movement. Anyone can change, any million can change. Change does not insure reform, it just funds alternative markets. You'd think 'organic' food is organic. The answer is Clintonesque. That depends upon what the definition of 'organic' is. You can be sure that if you have no idea what lecithin is, then you probably don't have a workable definition of organic. We've got scientific animism at work here, not to mention dueling narratives evoking semiotic myths. Sure, I'll endeavor to become a smart eater. It's not going to change Cargill.

Ever since Pollan piqued me with his story about opium, I've been thinking about red- and blackneck fantasies of off-grid hideouts and organic retirement. I'm coming back around to thinking about such matters again, especially this year since I've begun my gardening again. The Spousal Unit got a rose bush from me for Valentines Day 2008 and the first yellow roses bloomed this past week. They're almost thorny enough to resist the squirrels, but I guard them still. Moreover, in cross-pollination with the ideas of Venter, I am coming to believe that within my lifetime, some form of Dyson's Utopia may become available. That's the home run. I will certainly revisit these ideas in the Critical Theory category as time rolls forward.

In the meantime, as a mark of American prosperity, the diversity of brands in the Cereal Aisle no longer counts. It is a false indicator of diversity and is hereby retired.
 

Why Bother Being Pissed?

Once again, I have been stranded. Tonight I am sleeping in Cleveland when I could have been sleeping in Atlanta when I should have been sleeping in LA. Why? Why ask why? I've got my Bhudda and money in the bank so this time I am enjoying and deserving the club level. At the airport.

T50 Project

My new project is about a mind alteration and intellectual reorientation. The subject is me, and by extension, you. It is what I had in mind, generally, when I changed the blog. And it has been sneaking up on me for about two years now.

It turns out that I am not particularly interested in becoming Lucifer Jones, or if I am, it is that Lucifer Jones is not particularly interested in theology. The reason for this is relatively simple for me to explain now that I've transitioned further out of political bloviation as a hobby. I'm not interested in things that need explanation - those things that are mediated through rhetoric. Instead I am much more interested in the physical world and mastery of the undeniable. This is of deep comfort to me personally. It reinscribes my original orientation towards the sciences having convinced myself that I could and do communicate with God without further assistance from you.

What I am to do with my philosophical curiosity remains unclear, but it is most likely to go slowly out of the window. I am satisfied that I have lived an ethical life above and beyond the call of duty, so in further pursuit of an actual understanding of God's creation I will remove myself even further from the rhetorical ambit of scribes and pharisees. I am sick to death of the semiotic swamp. I have spent too much time in thrall to it. Eggs is eggs. I revert to a Randian clarity with little patience for those who don't get it.

T50 itself is an arbitrary figure, but close enough, I imagine to all the rest I need to heed. It stands for 50 thinkers. I am pursuing the top fifty thinkers that I should mind for the rest of my life. The list stands at around 7 at the moment. So I'm thinking what I ought to do is find out these people and never buy any more books from anyone but them, and not concern myself with whatever else is going on. In other words, I'm working my way out of the world wide web and the surprises, outrages, analogies and derivative babblings of people like me.

Currently on the list are {Craig Venter, Nassim Taleb, Niall Ferguson, Steven Berlin Johnson, Michael Pollan, Om Malik, Tyler Cohen, Iain Banks, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Davis Hanson, Larry Kolb, Richard Fernandez}. I haven't reduced my RSS feeder to those individuals, partially because not all of them post regularly. But it's coming around to that.

Concurrently, I'm looking for a long-term puttering project. My guess is that it is likely to be packet radio or something of that sort. Something which is tangential to computing but allows me to build hardware. But I should also mention that because of Craig Venter, I am beginning to believe that Dyson's Utopia might actually become a possibility. If that is the case, then the city-state may re-emerge as the primary geopolitical entity. This bodes well for a retirement for me somewhere relatively geographically remote, and yet completely connected. I'd be doing a lot of gardening.

The Irony of Union Protest

There's a union protesting in Cleveland.

Is that big news? I doubt it. You probably would guess that it's one of the things unions do well, if not best. They always seem to have enough people to make any little dispute seem significant. There probably aren't that many people who know or care what the difference is between the wages of a guy who uses a shovel and wears a hardhat and a yellow vest in the union and outside of the union. What strike me odd is that the union would believe we do.

All arguments about the merits of collective bargaining aside, there's something fundamentally unfair about unions. If you don't believe this, ask any black man in America who tried to get construction work before hmmm, yesterday. I exaggerate of course, but I think it is a reasonable proposition to suggest that unions have been better to Irish and Italians than to blacks. This is the first thing that struck me when I saw the black dude with the other union dudes holding their pickets downtown Cleveland last week. Specifically, how is it that we in the public are supposed to feel sorry for the essential discriminations that unions make between labor they control and labor they do not control? It's like Ivy League lawyers telling us how difficult it is to raise kids in a dual income family.

Once upon a time, perhaps when my father was young, the idea that the majority of workers in the would should be unionized made sense. Or at least it made more sense to more people than it does now. I suspect that the idea of appealing to the public during those days was perfectly reasonable. But now, the overwhelming majority of working Americans do not owe unions. And I perceive that for the most part, our recent immigrants are not getting admitted in record numbers. So why should the public support union protests? What's in it for us?

The Player of Games

I just finished my fourth Iain Banks novel, his most famous, The Player of Games. This is the one that I think would probably best be made into a movie. That's because, of the four, it's the simplest and most straightforward.

It's clear that Banks has been (this being his second of the Culture series) making it up as he goes along. In PoG, as a description of The Culture, he makes it seem to be a great deal more human-centric than it could possibly be. This book works well as an allegorical critique of contemporary society as well, and it could very well do so for some time to come. At the moment, I am wondering if I have some kind of brainy self-satisfaction that readers of Philip K. Dick might have had on the eve of the making of Blade Runner into a film. Much of Banks' future I am using as a sort of framework for What Can Be. I think I'm onto some things but I've only just begun.

You see, last summer, my best friend at a remove came to town. He's an AI researcher who is privy to some national security stuff and is doing well in advancing his career that-a-way. He has also done remarkably well in evading the inevitable lines of query, as well he should. Still, there is an appreciable gap between those who think about doing and those who do. Naturally we have only the foggiest notions of what we are on about in our respective industries even on the subjects we can mutually gab about. But one thing he did many years back was introduce me to one of my favorite books of all time, Cryptonomicon. So I thought he might do something of that order again. My love hate relationship with sci-fi is all love now, considering that I'm reading the more literate of the literature. I asked for something thick and considerable, and he gave me Banks. What I hope is that my imagination can be inspired in the same ways that those responsible for thinking about doing on the cutting edge of what is possible in computing. Now I have some bigger ideas, whereas two years ago I might have been thinking of the future in terms of product cycles.

All this has to do with Gurgeh, the protagonist, in a circular fashion. Like most merry metrosexuals in our decadent society, his greatest challenges are certainly as erudite as one might hope - however they have nothing to do with life or death. The practical application of all of the knowledge of our infoverse (Google + Wiki + whatever) hardly gets us to any greater understanding of how power is applied for our benefit. I certainly read that allegory into the dilemma of the post-scarcity, post-post-modern human. When most of the drama has been removed from our lives, should we bother to test ourselves? Gurgeh lives out that question unconsciously as he takes a dare and challenges the entire hierarchs of an empire to the very game upon which their society's power is based. He does so, unwittingly, as a pawn in a much greater game. We witness him change as this fascinating game unfolds.

I have long been fascinated, deeply as I am leveraged by the compute world, in human willingness to take the abstractions of life at face value. So I am returned in many ways to the dance around the semiotic swamp. I do so with a bit of tongue in cheek. On the one hand I understand, as surely every grown man must, that life can come down to blows at any time. Anyone who thinks they live in the Matrix only needs to be waterboarded for that illusion to be shattered. And yet decisions we make through apparatuses which do everything to comfort us can deliver us from evil. It is the central paradox of living in a complex society which aims to and actually is successful in providing material comfort. We all know the idea, like the eTrade baby.  Some talking infant makes an online trade through a computer interface and increases his wealth. Some winner of the Super Bowl says five magic words into the camera after victory and makes another small fortune from the coffers of the magic kingdom. Some fraction of humanity is partially there in that stress free world where comfort and security are taken care of simply because it's a good idea. And yet we must be aware at some level that somebody somewhere must pay the price for that good idea, even if it's only the crushing of all their ideas and therefore their way of life and all of their identity. In Iain Banks' future, all of this has been done and except for a few holdout or obscure species. In Player of Games, the view is from The (massive) Culture down to a (puny) Empire. The man of leisure's ethics, and his revulsion over the barbarity of anything that draws actual blood must be finally vindicated by overwhelming force. Or must it? Can you game an inferior society into collapse by beating it at its own game?

There is a great quote in this book that merits repeating and probably incorporation into Cobb's Rules. That is: The corrupt system recognizes no innocents. That hit home for me on a number of levels, not the least of which was my appreciation of the differences between schools for rich kids and schools for poor kids in my own life.

In Boots Like These

Before today if you googled 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and 'pleasure to go the the front in boots like these', you would only find one website on the Google-accessible planet. Shows how much they know. Well, I'm watching that film for the first time and it is bringing up a number of pleasant ironies. Pleasant for an intellectual, I suppose, but perhaps not so pleasant for a farm boy or a peasant.

The quote comes from one of the young German soldiers in WW1 who dons the pair of expensive imported leather boots that came from a fallen comrade. In the short montage that follows, he is killed and the boots are passed on. That soldier dies and the cycle repeats. The full quote is:

"I don't mind the war now. Be a pleasure to go to the front in boots like these."

This film is a great deal more sentimental than I expected it to be. It appears to be the kind of lesson that today only naive people need to be taught. And yet I have heard in some lecture recently that the romantic notions about war and patriotism were a great deal more commonly held before WW1 than anyone today might imagine. I wish that I could remember the name of the German who essentially invented the phrase, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. But his story intertwines in the evolution of thought regarding masculinity and battle in the West.

Like 'Il Postino' and 'The Bicycle Thief', this movie evokes what I have come to call 'European Innocence', a kind of naivete associated with the provincial ethnics of the world. It's difficult for me to judge the absolute position of these portraits in juxtaposition with American attitudes. Are we the cynical ones and they merely unpolluted, or are their sensitivities hightened for dramatic effect, or am I just a crabby old buster? Hard to say. But in the end I couldn't stand the weeping of this film, and I can generally be moved.

Few things seem so clear in retrospect as to the idiocy of trench warfare tactics. The amount of intelligence brought to the modern battlefield is so overwhelmingly significant now that by comparison the battles of WW1 were shear chaos. The ability to control territory in those days was achingly primitive; one doesnt' need to imagine how far we have advanced. And yet doesn't that advance bring us around towards notions that a small army of Jack Bauers could turn the tide in warfare? Isn't that the new romantic notion? I think it was Thoreau who warned us from becoming tools of our tools. With technology like this...

Pissed

It took me 17 hours to get home from Cleveland last week. I am currently sitting in a hotel room in Chicago trying to get back there. I've broken my own record. It's not mine however. The fault lies with United Air Lines and fate. At this moment, I'm awake and pissed. But I hope to sleep once more before I take the wayward shuttle back to OHare.

The Horses He Rides

David Brooks is identifying some of the people who are bankrolling Obama. I don't expect, as Brooks notes, that any of those blinded by the light will care to know exactly how much Obama has zigged on campaign finance.

The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

The story is simple. When Obama was 'for the little guy' he was all about campaign finance reform and talking about how evil rich Republicans want to buy everything. Now he's taking Hillary's money and all the big bucks he can. Slippery. Classic.

Obama, Chamchamal, Rezko

Here is Barack Obama saying that America should not withdraw troops from Iraq. I'm going to take a moment to transcribe his exact words.

"No, no I've never said tr.. I've never said that troops should be withdrawn. What I've said is that we've got to make sure that we secure and execute the rebuilding and reconstruction process effectively and properly and I don't think we should have an artificial deadline when to do that. I think what's important is that we have long term plan in process and a short term security...

Note this analysis:

This is April 5, 2004 now. The bloodiest month of the war. Blackwater contractors strung up, First Fallujah, etc. And the hawkishness lasts all the way to November 20, 2006, when it suddenly changes. The elections were long over. But Chamchamal had been cancelled on Nov 6, 2006. In between the Auchi party and the cancellation we had the steadfast Obama. Before and After we had the "let's pullout" Obama. Coincidence? Maybe.

I've been recently paying attention to the 'who sent you?' argument in search of the True Obama. There's a fairly well understood principle in politics and in power that you don't get to even see The Man, much less *be* the man unless somebody important sent you. Who sent Obama? What exactly is the horse he rode in on? Let's not be coy. You don't simply walk in the door in Chicago politics and say I'm going to be the next senator in this state. You gotta have backing, and believe me, it couldn't have possibly come from Trinity Church and the South Side neighborhoods.

I say Rezko was Obama's major sponsor, but probably not the only one. Who are the men behind the man, and exactly which strings are they pulling? You really don't know do you?

Where They At?

Where are all the good brothers at? Where they at?

I'm going to answer this question seven ways using seven different men I know who are all good brothers and seven different songs you know.

Byron: One Love
This tune is from Whodini. The same people who asked 'Friends, how many of us have them?' also procliamed, 'One love, one love, you're lucky just to have just one.' Byron was shy and goofy in high school. He graduated with good grades and a good sense of humor, and a virgin. He never had a girlfriend and never really tried to get one. Not even for show. He always took love seriously and said that one day he'd find the right girl, and that was all he had to say about it. He is not, was not and never will be on the market for romance. He found that one girl, married her 20 years ago and never looked back. In fact, he never looked up, down, sideways or any other way for any other girl.  If you ask Bryon about love and the dating scene, he'll turn his head at you like a puppy. Women and men who shop for the perfect mate to him sounds like people who shop for the perfect refrigerator.

Daniel: Control
You're Janet Jackson. All of 21 years old talking about how you are going to have everything in your life and you don't even know how to have a baby. Daniel dismisses you without hesitation. He is the man. He wears the pants. He will work from sunup to sundown seven days a week. He will sacrifice and work his fingers to the bone. Driving a bus. Walking the postal route. He will buy a decent house and a decent car and decent clothes. All you have to do is not ask for diamonds and pearls. Do the kitchen work, the kid work and the bed work, and he will marry you and fulfill your every need. The problem is that you confuse need with desire. Daniel doesn't make a lot of money and he never will. He just wants to be the man of his house. If you want a man who will fly you to Hawaii, then he wants a Victoria Secret model. They are both dealbreakers, so why can't you just be satisfied? Daniel is an honest, decent man who just wants to be a man. You want 'more'. That's why he's not having anything to do with your ass.

Zachary: Climbing Up The Ladder
Zach is all about success. You don't understand why but everybody knew it when he was just a kid. All he dreamed about, all he talks about, all he ever wanted to be was that thing. Zach doesn't eat to enjoy the food, he eats to fuel his body so he can spend more time doing that thing that one day is going to get him to that place. In other words, you will never be first in his heart, his mind or his soul. Get used to it. Zach isn't cruel. It's not that he doesn't understand your needs. The problem is he will always think of you and the things that are important to you, second. He is singleminded about him and absent-minded about you, so half the time he will need to be reminded.  It's not that you aren't perfect, he needs you to be able to understand him - to balance him and make him a whole person. But you will always be second fiddle to his dream. Get used to it. He's a perfectly good brother who doesn't read Essence magazine. You are too high maintenance. Zach is either a dreamer or a visionary. That depends on you.

Milton: Why You Treat Me So Bad?
Milton has been burned. Milton is fundamentally a good brother, but he is not even ready to trust. It makes him look more pathetic than he actually is. On the one hand, he doesn't want or need to be patronized. On the other hand he is desperately trying to be the man he once was. See Milton only knows one way to love - completely with all of his heart and soul. So in one way, he's never going to get over that bitch. In another way, he needs you more than you know. All you have to do is be 100% sure that you love him. Milton, will eat you up. He will devote himself to you - he wants to say all the perfect things and utterly sweep you off your feet, but if you even sniff another man's second-hand cigarette smoke without choking he's going to give you the evil eye. He gives total devotion. He demands total devotion. With Milton, it's do or die. Why do you keep pointing out his obvious faults? Nobody's perfect.

Larry: Never Give Up on a Good Thing
Larry is not a good brother, per se. He is a de facto good brother. Why? Because Larry has a great woman, a woman who truly loves him and works harder than the average bear. So Larry realizes he's probably not worth it so he's not going to risk anything so he does all the right things at the right time (at her prompting) and keeps his head above water. You are not going to get him because even though he wants you, you cannot outdo his woman. One day Larry's charm is going to wear off and then people will see right through him. He's an actual good brother because he's holding all the right cards, but that's luck, not principle.

Harry: I'm Too Sexy
Harry is Larry's twin brother, except Harry actually does got it going on. The problem is that Harry is not even ready to settle down and quite frankly you can't compete with the hoes. Harry is eventually going to turn into the model citizen, but right now he's young and full of himself, plus he's already heard everything you could possibly say. He's bored, in fact, and there's a chance that he'll never settle down at all. You know it, he knows it, everybody knows it. It ain't fair, but there it is. Prostrate yourself, or be a bitch. You never know what's going to work and it'll drive you crazy just trying to figure it out. Give up. Or try blackmail.

Tony: It's Raining Men
Well he's gay of course. One out of seven? Don't be surprised.
--

Now to answer your question, I have been most of these men at one time or another. Well, all except Tony and Byron. Right now I'm probably Larry, meaning I'm very much into playing the stupid husband role, if you can remember that episode of the Cosby Show.

Secondly, this is a black public question. Or at least I should say that it was put to me in that way. The way I see that is through the lens of Cobb's Rule #2: There is Marriage and there is everything else: everything else doesn't count. There are no rules for relationships, it's all about people getting their jollies off whomever is willing to dole them out. Anything goes. And since anything goes, who cares what you think, and who cares what I think? The reason Marriage has lasted for centuries is because it is an arrangement that satisfies public and private needs, and there's an accumulated mass of wisdom associated with it. So everything I say about the good brother only makes sense in the context of Marriage, because quite frankly if you only want a relationship, the stakes aren't high enough to really matter in the end. People tend to bet their lives on Marriage, and that's the point. It's only when you bet your life that you get off your ass for something like exactly how you are going to treat another human being. Short of that, it's all transitory and fleeting and not worth much discussing.

To that black public question, you kinda have to ask why is the question out there? My kneejerk reaction is that the good black man becomes invisible to people who have to ask 'where they at?'. Daniel drove that bus right by you today. Did you notice him? Zachary wants to be a fashion designer. Did you think that was kinda gay? Milton is 36 years old, has never been married and has no kids. You keep thinking there's something wrong with him.

I know it sounds kinda strange, but men tend to confide in me about the subject of women. I sympathize, and I've heard these kinds of stories all the time. I think most men are like Milton and they end up being like a hard version of Daniel, and that is because most women don't know how to act like ladies. More specifically, most women don't act like they really want to be married, faithful and true. Those who do don't seem to recognize that they actually do have to compete with other women - it's all that shallow cow metaphor. The women that get it, then tend to think they're too smart to be a wife, like it's a punishment for being too fat or unsophisticated or something.

My personal opinion goes a little something like this. Women are crazy, and women know that women are crazy. Aside from predatory lesbians, there are no women who would go through what men do just to get in another woman's stanky drawers. And if women thought about just that thought long enough, I think they'd come to realize what I know to be true. Good wives are much, much happier in the long term. There is nothing quite so pathetic as an old single bitch. Well, OK an old single bitch with pictures of her toy dog on the piano instead of kids.

Men, of course, are filthy and ruthless. And men know that men are filthy and ruthless. Aside from bottom boy homos,  there are no men who would subject themselves to the business end of a dirty, thoughtless man. And if men thought about however it is what women take pleasure in satisfying us, I'm sure they'd conclude as I do. A good husband is way more secure than a rogue. There's nothing quite so pitiful as the old man in the club. Well, an old poor man in the club who knows he's going to die alone.

Where are all the good brothers and good sisters? All around. Except they forgot what the endgame was. The question should have been, how can I get her to marry me? And until that question becomes more frequently asked 'good' is just a relative term. It ain't about the person. It's about betting your life.

Spore

Yesterday I downloaded the Spore Creature Creator and I'm hooked.

Will Wright, notorious creator the mind-sucking Maxis franchise of simulation games, has returned with a galactic scale sim called Spore. It is a god game which does the simple thing of expanding the role of god. Instead of giving you a garden to plant and capture animals, like Viva Pinata, it gives you a planet or two and allows you to evolve creatures. The full game is due in September, but in the meantime you can join the Spore community and download the creature creator.

The implications of Spore, if Wright is onto what I think he may be onto, are enormous. What Wright should know is that this is the brainspace we've not been using creatively. It's one thing to play dress-up with Sims who are all human, it's another altogether to open the box and allow you to create every sort of species of vertebrates. From there it's just a relatively small step conceptually to go to invertebrates, virii and bacteria. The scale of interactions between all of these species is extraordinary and the opportunity to design those interactions is an untapped vein of human curiosity and art. That's why Spore is colossal.

Doc Rivers

I don't know if Doc Rivers is the first black NBA coach to win the championship, but he must certainly be the happiest man in America tonight. The Celtics just owned the Lakers tonight in such a convincing manner that I don't even feel so bad being a Laker fan.

The last time I played pickup ball competitively was about 16 years ago back in Boston. Even then, the game had changed and it was difficult for me to respect the new three point shot's effect on driving the lane. Showtime basketball was how I grew up. Fast breaks and full-court presses. The game of the blisteringly fast guards and the unstoppable power forwards. But when the NBA stopped running plays and tried to make everybody into the next Michael Jordan, I enjoyed the game even less. It wasn't until Detroit won a couple years ago that I felt like the team game was making a comeback. It was then, when Kobe was disgraced that I longed for a team like today's Celtics to dominate the game.

Watching this game, I was amazed at how well, fast and often the Celtics passed the rock. Not knowing all of the players (I never watch during the regular season), it was frustrating for me to see who was moving the game. I realized that contemporary ball had changed the way I even watch casually. But these Celtics are the team.

I've always liked Doc Rivers. I used to watch him occasionally when he played for Atlanta. He always had more heart than just about any player on the court. We were born in the same year and I held a little special place in my heart for the man. Now he is the man among men. My hat's off to him. It's your world Doc.

Allegory

This is a great video that presents an excellent argument against nuclear proliferation. If you have the patience and something of a strong stomach, it is worth watching all the way through.

The way I see things, technology is enabling, and idiot-proof technology empowers idiots. This video game, World of Warcraft is just that sort of technology. It is democratized, like many technologies become, and it leverages a class of individuals who are incapable of building the game, but quite capable of mastering the game. But it is not the question of whether people are smart or not, rather it is whether or not they have character which is based on the defense of democratic principles. Here you have Athene, who is rather obviously powerful in the virtual world of Warcraft who makes a very competitive living by keeping people alive that he doesn't respect. He is in a position of power and games the system by appearing to be generous, but he is clearly ruthless and megalomaniacal.

I expect that the experience of seeing the man behind the curtain, as it were, in all sorts of global pursuits will swing the pendulum back towards nationalism. Unless and until there are classic liberal values behind powerful government regimes, this kind of shock is inevitable. I say that with the assumption, of course, that my audience shares the values and ethics which find the person of Athene thoroughly disagreeable.   

McCain: I Hate War

Stating the Obvious, Presidentially

Now that the lines are drawn, there is little more to be said or done except to pander to those in the muddled middle. The differences between the candidates are obvious enough for anyone who has spent more than 24 hours' worth of thinking about the past 15 months of campaigns. Now is the time, except for the debates (perhaps), for both candidates to say dumb and obvious things as if they were already the leader of the free world. This weekend it was about Father's Day and Tim Russert.

In death, Russert outshines both candidates in life. As far as I'm concerned there are about five worthwhile journalists remaining in the English speaking world who do television. Charlie Rose is one of them as was Russert. Tim Russert was one of those men of whom it is often said, you cannot cheat an honest man. And so there was little wiggle room on his television show for conniving politicians, and the lot of them knew that. So all this weekend, we got the reflections of Obama and McCain trying to get underneath the skin of Russert as a dedicated father and man of integrity. The better they could trade on his reputation, the better they could prop up their own. It was particularly nervy of them to do so, but then again, this is campaign season.

So I haven't bothered to hear Obama out on 'Fatherhood'. Cosby wrote the best-seller two decades ago and it wasn't all that deep then. Nor am I inclined to hear McCain intone sonorously on any such trope. Blah blah whatever. I'd actually rather hear them tell me what happened to all the tomatoes last week, and why nobody still knows what went wrong.

I expect we'll be hearing more blatherous stentoria between now and then. Maybe a suitably arcane subject will actually arise. Better yet, a crisis.

A Simple No

"Great GoogaMooga, can't you hear me talking to you?"
-- The Temptations

A friend thought I had switched. Along with Father's Day wishes I got a 'so you're with Obama now". The answer is a simple no. But that fact doesn't preclude me from making some interesting and complex observations.

There is a certain irony, one that is not delicious, in picking the black guy so that a whole lot of black existential issues get resolved once and for all. Certainly as a conservative I would like little more than to be able to have Obama erase the race card, but I know that won't happen. Not because I don't think he can't or won't win, but that his win would change anything on that score. If you already have a true black hero, then you're not accepting excuses today. Secondly if you have no need for a black hero, then you're not accepting excuses. Therefore there only seems to be one reason to vote for Obama as the black guy which is that you hope that his success is a proxy for you - in other words, you hope that because there is a black President, people are going to treat black people better. That seems to me to be the very definition of aiming low, and low self-esteem - not to mention a level of racialism that borders on paranoia. Then again, this is a prescription for those who would desire or need such a thing as an Afrocentric church, and clearly Obama has that base covered.

So I don't really buy that America changes culturally if Obama gets elected. America has already changed, and Obama is evidence of that change. The person of Obama is not the question, the politics of Obama is.

I hear that some black conservatives are having some difficulties with the possibilities that Obama presents, but I think that the biggest attraction in that regard is not the 'historic opportunity'. I mean, whenever the first African American gets elected President it will be historic. But if history itself is any guide, the first is rarely the best. Surely the first black quarterback in the NFL was not the best. Surely the first black player in major league baseball wasn't the best. They were certainly good, more than good enough. Sometimes the first is nothing more than the first. Bryant Gumbel better than Bernard Shaw? Nope. If you're holding out for a hero, which is a dubious idea, you ought to hold out for one with whom you are absolutely sure about.

In this regard I've always looked at TV and the movies, because to the extent there is any cultural significance at all in how blackfolks are viewed (for whatever that's worth) drama is where it is supposed to happen and it has happened most. It's a long way from Amos and Andy to Denzel Washington. Can you give up the movies in the interim? Or do you accept what's given as good as it gets? There's certainly a line of stars, from the likes of Poitier to John Amos to Richard Roundtree to Roscoe Lee Browne. The more you look, the more you find. The more you know, the less you care. Everybody can find a black hero somewhere - so why has it taken until now for Obama to 'fix' America?  I say there is no fixing to be done culturally at all. The fix is in.

So, as I said before as regards the social implications of Obama's election, if you need to love Obama, it's because you still have your own personal demons. It's tiring but topical for me as an African American conservative to voice my simple no. I vote Republican because I think conservatively. Nothing special at all in that. So duh, no, I don't vote for the black guy. He's a Democrat.

All that said, a lot of people don't seem to remember that part of being Old School is politicking for change in the Republican Party. I'm part of the Republican Leadership Council's way of thinking. And I am convinced that a McCain presidency gathers more power for these moderate conservatives in particular. It is part of the same positive trend I have seen in the downfall of Tom DeLay and Trent Lott and the ascent of Arnold here in California. None of that is going to change, and so I really don't have a great deal to think about between now and November. The lines are drawn and the Rezko conviction will not derail Obama (that was the only remaining question mark in my mind). So it's McCain vs Obama. Well for me the choice is obvious and simple.

One more thing. I've been thinking about the lyrics to an old Temptations song called 'Ball of Confusion'. Remember this?

People moving out, people moving in. Why, because of the color of their skin.
Run, run, run but you sure can't hide. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Vote for me and I'll set you free. Rap on, brother, rap on.

Well, the only person talking about love thy brother is the...(preacher.)
And it seems nobody's interested in learning but the...(teacher.)
Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, Aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation.
Ball of confusion. Oh yeah, that's what the world is today. Woo, hey, hey.

The sale of pills are at an all time high.
Young folks walking round with their heads in the sky.
The cities ablaze in the summer time.
And oh, the beat goes on.

Evolution, revolution, gun control, sound of soul.
Shooting rockets to the moon, kids growing up too soon.
Politicians say more taxes will solve everything.

And the band played on.
So, round and around and around we go.
Where the world's headed, nobody knows.

It has been a long time since I was that confused.

Super President

I swear to God it is true, that this was my favorite superhero growing up as a kid. There is something deeply, deeply patriotic in me.

Americans & Afghans

Chillin' in Cleveland With Jimi Izrael: Part One

The thing about Jimi Izrael that's difficult to believe is that he's not trying to convince you. This is just how he sees it. And he's not necessarily trying to show you that he has the illusive scoop on the Nature of Things. He just transduces like a funky speaker. All he needs is juice. So I took him to dinner at the House of Blues in Cleveland this early evening. We had a good time.

Jimi understands hiphop but he's not going to tell you the details for free, and why should he? Hiphop requires ambition and ambition requires scrilla. Izrael lives hiphop. He is an icon of it, or at least should be on the theoretical side. Perhaps I should have launched into that before we got to the chocolate cake, because by the time I got him banging his fist on the table, I was halfway dunked in the itis myself. Besides, as you all should know by now, I'm done with the Negro Problem, and politics these days is just about too petty for me. I'm in the Kalahari hunting big game ideas while pinhead pundits are dithering about 'Why'd he'. Or is it Whitey? Only your manicurist knows for sure. Jimi don't care, at least he didn't around me. We were old buds having a brew or three.

Unfortunately for the photographic memory, I left my reading glasses in the hotel room, and so while there was just cute popping off his iPhone pictures, I didn't catch so many details as I would have liked. And so I chilled with Jimi in the great renovated realm of Downtown Cleveland without a whole lot of pressure, because I'm stuck here for weeks and we're going to have plenty of time to air some dirty differences starting on the Barbershop next week. You see, Republicans are responsible for the fact that something's wrong with Cleveland. I'm not quite sure of what that is but it's nice to have a bad boy role. You see there are no more hookers on Prospect and you can't buy heroin and brass knuckles on the 4th St Alley any longer. There are cops on bikes and women pushing strollers and dorks in suits.

When I walked around the Soldiers and Sailors monument the other night I couldn't help but notice all of the signs that tell me in no uncertain terms that nobody is allowed to be here between 10pm and 5am. But I can't tell if that's the thing that empties out Cleveland's downtown, or if it's the spectre of the straight out blacked out police cruisers. All I know is that I could tell which way direction the ghetto was by eyeballing the patrons at the southbound bus stop, as contrasted with those of the westbound. The whole of downtown looks empty as compared with ten years ago, or eleven, when I was last here. There's much more office space then there are people.  None of the tallest buildings have signage anyone from out of state would recognize. There's Key. There's Fifth Third. There's little else.

Maybe I was hoping for a ghetto tour (not the real ghetto - everyplace is a ghetto), but my man was in an offbeat mood. He was dealing with stuff and keeping demons at bay with feng shui. I could tell that this Cleveland was not Jimi's world. It's not my world either, but I'm reserving judgment for some look into the human element. The problem is that there aren't that many humans.

Philadelphia has a vibrant kind of living zombification.  You can smell the rot in the streets just outside of downtown, but downtown Philly is a bustling clutter. People may not show a lot of personality when they hustle and bustle in the streets of Philly , but at least they hustle. No time for down time downtown PA. Ohio is something vastly different and Cleveland can go either way.  There is a tight alley of action on 4th and you can see the impetus for change but the rest of the canyons are ready to collapse in owing to the vacuum. I don't know how far Kent State is from downtown, but however far it is, it's too far. It feels small. I can see how Cleveland is trying to be like Denver. It's not there yet. Cleveland is doing marginally better than Ft. Worth, but I couldn't find a Houston's here, nor a PF Chang. The investors haven't shown up. Or maybe just everyone was at the stadium or watching the Lakers.

We went to the coffee joint where the guy in white sneakers and Oakley blades was hawking his joint, while the dual folk guitarists inside played everything but Coldplay, the only dual acoustic worth listening to. They were out of coffee. I had tea in a mug.

Jimi's favorite movie is The Professional. We agree that Jean Reno has made few mistakes. We also agree that Fame was a very significant flick, and further we agree that I have not seen quite enough gangster flicks. Although I cannot see how he finds flaws with Heat. We didn't talk much politics other than his continuing observation that Cleveland is what it is because of Republicans. The best spin to put on that is clean and empty. That's what I see.

Anyway. We'll see each other again. Maybe go bowling. Maybe cruise to the Cumberland Pool.

Matter

I just completed Iain Banks' latest Culture novel 'Matter'. He is something less of a yarn spinner in this one and I was stalled at page 20 for a while, but by the time I got to page 120, I could tell it was going to be a great story.

Unlike 'Phlebas' which was the second Banks book I read (after the Algebraist), Matter was a bit more predictable. The intrigue from this book comes from knowing in some detail what Culture SC operatives and their technology are capable of. So the drama builds in this story by knowing that several species at various levels of sophistication are going to be met with the wrath of god, god being a relative term - achievable by humans in already achieved by one woman exiled from a doomed world.

The other interest in this story comes from the seemingly infinite hierarchies of species which are so incredibly alien to human emotions and storytelling. A fascinating device to be sure. Here you have the story of essentially almost modern humans in something of a Napoleonic age who live in a world dominated by the Oct, a species that most resemble nothing more or less than crabs. Not giant man-eating crab-people, but dinner plate sized creatures who smell funny, think and talk sideways. The Oct were described as possessors of the most untranslatable language in the galaxy. Every year they win the prize and nobody can understand their acceptance speech. The Oct are enmeshed in a constant struggle for power with the Aultridians, an even more smelly race of creatures that resemble doormats. Above the Oct are an insectile race, and above them a race of waterborne creatures which I can best say resemble a cross between porcupine fish and sea urchins.

If you can imagine how difficult it might be to live in America if your candidate doesn't win in November, imagine what it must be like to be ruled by crabs inferior to ants inferior to fish and that the fish basically own a volume of space containing two million stars. This is the predicament of Ferbin, the playboy prince whose father, the King is assassinated. He must plead his case up this motley chain of command while running for his life. Unbeknownst to him, his exiled sister a secret agent for the Culture, the masters of the galaxy, is working her way down back to her home planet and finding it not difficult to care even in her post-ghetto life. Family still matters. But her lust for revenge is tempered by her new sophistication and the rules of engagement, or is it?

Banks shines in his description of the Shellworld, a new invention into his great galaxy. And the appendix adds to the wiki-able knowledge base that attaches to his interstellar inventions. There is great multi-species drama and intrigue in this novel, and yet another reason to read all of Banks.

By the way, the title, like 42 is an answer to one of the great philosophical questions of our age.

Infant Chorale

I'm reading Banks with my mind on the impossible and listening to Philip Glass' Pruit Igoe. This time I'm really listening to the human voices. They are what gives this piece all of it's haunting urgency, and it's all in the timbre.

It occurs to me that as humans we are hard wired to be psychologically affected by the human voice. A woman screaming, a man bellowing, a baby crying. They get to us at a limbic level. I know recordings of babies crying have been looped to harass with less than lethal force. So what if by some magic of superb technology we were able to simulate the voices of babies to perfection? The emotional effects we could produce with a choir of infant voices could be extraordinary. I think it could produce a kind of music that would be psychologically dangerous.

Extremistan

From Tom Nutall's review:

The black swan was the example used by John Stuart Mill to illustrate the problem of induction in the philosophy of science, which states that no amount of empirical evidence for a proposition can ever prove conclusively that it is true.

For hundreds of years, zoologists assumed that all swans were white, because they had never seen any evidence to the contrary. But then with the discovery of Australia came the sighting of a black swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book of the same name, has a more specific definition—for him, a “black swan” is an event that meets three conditions: a) it was unpredictable b) it had a big impact and c) after the event, we tried to explain it and make it appear more predictable than it actually was.

I first came upon Taleb via the Long Now Foundation, whose seminars + my reading of Iain Banks is opening up my mind very wide after a long, eventually boring cycle. On that note, when I think about it, I have really only encountered 2 very big ideas in the past decade, the first was eCommerce and the second was Hayekian Conservatism. One of those ideas was new, the other fairly old. And so now I am looking for a couple more big ideas and I have begun to stake out several dozen individuals in whose work I think I can find them. The Long Now is an excellent source of futurist thinking and so is Bank's science fiction. Along the way to these big ideas are a number of intellectual tools, and I expect that I may be able to use these tools in my career in Business Intelligence. The conceptual tool of Mediocristan and Extermistan is one such tool. If you'd have asked me a month ago about the brilliance of markets, I might have pointed you to the Black Shoals model in general, and the book My Life as a Quant in particular. But Taleb said that Black Shoals is a joke, and he should know. He worked many years on Wall Street. While I have noticed a significant number of people sniffing at the practices of hedge funds, not least Mr. Ron Paul, in the past several months - often dripping with populist rhetoric, none has convinced me that what they do is fundamentally wrong. But as Taleb describes the phenomenon of the unexpected, I know see the light. Knowing whether or not one is in the domain of Mediocristan or Extremistan will be very helpful in assessing the ultimate utility of Business Intelligence tools. If you apply them to domains in which the extraordinary is probable, you may find them of little use. How one might go about determining the nature of the domain is what I need to chase down.

Taleb describes Mediocristan in terms of human height and the applicability of bell curve-like statistics. If the average human is about 5 foot 9, you can calculate with some assurance that you will see a 6 foot tall human. You might even be able to predict with some accuracy that if one million humans walk through your door, you'll probably see some seven footers. The chance that you'll see an eight footer, maybe one in a billion. But the chance that you'll see someone twice the height of the average Joe? Probably not even human. Human height is in Mediocristan. Human wealth, on the other hand is in Extremistan. If the average wealth of an individual measured in income per year. You might figure that somebody with an order of magnitude more comes in at some fraction and two magnitudes at a very minute fraction. But thinking about wealth, you might have a million people walking through the door and have somebody 1000 times wealthier the average. Extremistan.

From Tom Nutall's review:

The black swan was the example used by John Stuart Mill to illustrate the problem of induction in the philosophy of science, which states that no amount of empirical evidence for a proposition can ever prove conclusively that it is true.

For hundreds of years, zoologists assumed that all swans were white, because they had never seen any evidence to the contrary. But then with the discovery of Australia came the sighting of a black swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book of the same name, has a more specific definition—for him, a “black swan” is an event that meets three conditions: a) it was unpredictable b) it had a big impact and c) after the event, we tried to explain it and make it appear more predictable than it actually was.

I first came upon Taleb via the Long Now Foundation, whose seminars + my reading of Iain Banks is opening up my mind very wide after a long, eventually boring cycle. On that note, when I think about it, I have really only encountered 2 very big ideas in the past decade, the first was eCommerce and the second was Hayekian Conservatism. One of those ideas was new, the other fairly old. And so now I am looking for a couple more big ideas and I have begun to stake out several dozen individuals in whose work I think I can find them. The Long Now is an excellent source of futurist thinking and so is Bank's science fiction. Along the way to these big ideas are a number of intellectual tools, and I expect that I may be able to use these tools in my career in Business Intelligence. The conceptual tool of Mediocristan and Extermistan is one such tool. If you'd have asked me a month ago about the brilliance of markets, I might have pointed you to the Black Shoals model in general, and the book My Life as a Quant in particular. But Taleb said that Black Shoals is a joke, and he should know. He worked many years on Wall Street. While I have noticed a significant number of people sniffing at the practices of hedge funds, not least Mr. Ron Paul, in the past several months - often dripping with populist rhetoric, none has convinced me that what they do is fundamentally wrong. But as Taleb describes the phenomenon of the unexpected, I know see the light. Knowing whether or not one is in the domain of Mediocristan or Extremistan will be very helpful in assessing the ultimate utility of Business Intelligence tools. If you apply them to domains in which the extraordinary is probable, you may find them of little use. How one might go about determining the nature of the domain is what I need to chase down.

Taleb describes Mediocristan in terms of human height and the applicability of bell curve-like statistics. If the average human is about 5 foot 9, you can calculate with some assurance that you will see a 6 foot tall human. You might even be able to predict with some accuracy that if one million humans walk through your door, you'll probably see some seven footers. The chance that you'll see an eight footer, maybe one in a billion. But the chance that you'll see someone twice the height of the average Joe? Probably not even human. Human height is in Mediocristan. Human wealth, on the other hand is in Extremistan. If the average wealth of an individual measured in income per year. You might figure that somebody with an order of magnitude more comes in at some fraction and two magnitudes at a very minute fraction. But thinking about wealth, you might have a million people walking through the door and have somebody 1000 times wealthier the average. Extremistan.

Obama Laughter

Yesterday I was in San Francisco. Not just any part of SF but the most touristy part of Fisherman's Wharf. There are certain parts of Fisherman's Wharf where you can pretend to be sophisticated, but there are other parts which are so self-consciously touristy that it becomes unbearable for urbanites of any white collar pretension. Since I happen to be something beyond that, or at least clearly apart from that I  can tell you with all honesty that I perceived a moment of clarity.

Barack Obama has single-handedly erased black guilt.

You know the drill. You are in a supermarket and you are a young college student with nothing but bright promise ahead of you. You are slim and attractive and generally speaking, on the make at all times, because you are the kind of human that everybody wants to be. So you see her, that overweight woman. And you hear him, that bratty child. And you watch the drama that happens when the kid embarrasses his mother and she retaliates in clear view of you. You realize the social coup. She see you in you relative perfection and she is beyond reconciliation - all she can do is beat it into the child that they should behave in your presence. You look at them with pity if not contempt. They are, sadly, beneath you. You register their look as dowdy. You monitor their accent as ethnic and downscale. You know the type - cousins and in-laws you avoid.

Only when you are drunk and watch them watch NASCAR. Only when you are bored to tears and watch them play dominoes. Only when you are stuck with nowhere to go and watch them drive tractors are you ever slightly self-conscious about their possible superiority. You hear their countrified ass-backwards laugh and chuckle to yourself. Ha ha. Laugh now you think. You wouldn't be laughing if you knew the way of the world you think contemptuously. Laugh because somebody else has walked under a ladder or crossed the path of a black cat. You idiot. What do you know about how the world operates?

Most of the time you can seditty yourself into a sense of superiority. These are the occasions when you can't . And so you begrudge them their very entertainments, and denigrate them as airheaded foolishness. But not today, because today, their racial view of America has been turned upside down - the significance of a black victory in the Democrat party is beyond belief.

When the black eating grits and greens signifies unity with the black of Barack Obama, you sit in the restaurant next to the crowd, and know they will not be shut up. When their rumors and consipiracy are justified by the impossible, the democratic nomination, You know they will not be shut up. That now is today, and there is nowhere else to turn. Nowhere else to go - only to devastation and final resting.

The immovable object has had its day.

Monday Fragments

1. There is something inescapably lovable about the Midwest and all of the people in it. It's sophistication is honest. There are few things more admirable than honest sophistication. We do not honor it enough. The idea that the Midwest has to be escaped is one of the great forces of self-delusion and corruption in American life.

2. It's true. All of the Barack Obama T-Shirt phenomena are occurring, just as Jimi Izrael predicted they would.

3. I love my new job. So far.

Sunday Fragments

1. I am coming to believe that Colin Powell has some explaining to do. I'm not sure I like his post ervice political trajectory, and I am fairly satisfied that he is hiding a deep character flaw. I'll put it this way, simply. Like Malcolm, he talked a big game, but Malcolm never had the balls to face the Bull Connors of the world. And likewise Powell never had the balls to run for President, and he was putatively twice the man Obama is. So I think Powell had, and has, something to hide.

2. Hillary's concession speech was her most sincere of the year. If I never have to hear from her again, I could respect what she said and leave it at that. Give her HHS, Barry.

3. Something creepy is going on with Nulan. I think he has given up his perverse hope for global collapse. Hmm. Maybe one of his kids just got a scholarship or something. Hard to say.

4. I start my new gig in Ohio tomorrow. Blogging will be sparse until I get my new laptop. I'm still chilling with the Spousal Unit in Redwood Shores.

cya

Top Games of 2007

Yeah I know it's late, but I'm not even going to fake as if this was from the archives. I'm doing it now.

8. Guitar Hero 3
Now that I have played Guitar Hero 2, I can tell you how much better a game is GH3. It's an order of magnitude more fun and inviting to play, and I can actually master some of the songs on the Medium setting. The ability to download songs is brilliant, now if they could only build up a library worth downloading, they'd make a fortune. I'm sure that licensing money is stopping them but damn, they need to get with the program. Although I haven't tried Rock Band, I can see that this is the Karaoke of the future. It's huge, really huge.

7. Crackdown
This game was more fun than anyone might have predicted. Very Superman-ish but completely outdoors. I say 'Supermanish' not in the context of videogames, in that regard it's more Spidermanish, but nice powers and leaping ability and handling of sectors of a city. Good stuff. Very playable and lots of side trips. The best driving, shooting and fighting game of the year.

6. Call of Duty 4
I'm not going to tell you what you already know. But still I wasn't particularly compelled to finish the single player game, nor have I found the online character of games to my liking. But the excellence of the immersion and control cannot be denied. This is a first rate game by any measure. Now that I have the HiDef, I should give it a second look. I may probably find in it everything I missed.

5. Shadowrun
A completely different kind of big team battle game which is first rate and surprisingly rich. The more you play, the more ways you find to play. I only wish I could have gotten my crew to get into it. Here's my long review.

4. Halo3
It was everything we expected and more. It's still very playable and the add-on content is better than expected. Novel ways to play and the full construction kit were just the bomb. This is a great way to end the series, but giving the players everything. Excellent work guys, especially with the new weapons and defensive systems.

3. Half-Life 2: Orange Box
The Portal is the most innovative game I've seen on the XBox since Prey. It demonstrates thinking outside the box. Although I never finished the single player game and thought Team Fortress was a big loser, the combination gave me all kinds of wow factor. It's something I'd look at again.

2. Mass Effect
I'm something of a sucker for Bioware RPGs, and this one was so good that I played it twice. It was very well moderated. Not too much talking, not too much action. Bioware is showing that they have the capacity to be a new kind of studio. I would very much like to see them handling known sci-fi universes, like that of Iain Banks' Culture or that of Firefly or Ender. The possibilities demonstrated by their capabilities are uniquely pointed towards the future of gaming.

1. Assassin's Creed
Assassin's Creed is a damn near perfect game. It is deeply immersive, has the absolute best ambience and AIs in any game anywhere. It's decidedly low tech in a mix with high tech and I have been playing it on and off for months without tiring. It is gorgeous, the voice talent is perfect and the control is exquisite and challenging. I think it is the finest first person fighting system I've ever played, and you know there's something about swords. Prince of Persia never caught my imagination like this one. I think I wear the avatar hero of this one about as tightly as any character. As tightly as Sam Fisher and more than the Master Chief.

--

Also rans:

Two video games which absolutely sucked were Jericho and Two Worlds. I will also mention that Bioshock left me completely non-plussed. Just conceptually horrible. I think it survives as one of those games that you love or you hate. Hated it.

Grid

There's one problem with PGR and that is a lot of racers punk out when the driving gets a bit too furious. Specifically, in the online races when you bump somebody into a wall, especially in the first turn, they start whining and complaining. Some of these wimps even turn off collisions. Ridiculous.

GRID looks to be the end of that although I'm going to miss the first week and probably a lot of online. I downloaded the demo and I very much enjoy just about everything about the interface. It's not crazy difficult to drive like TOCA and you don't spend your life customizing the autos like Forza. The cars can take a fair amount of damage without coming completely apart and this will, I think, encourage some balls-out racing that's competitive and fun.

Scarface

I didn't realize how much of what I have been saying was Scarface. I'm starting to think that if I had seen this movie before there would have been little room in my heart for New Jack City.

Like a number of icons of American popular culture, Scarface is one of those films that I've only seen glimpses of. Or perhaps I had digested it so long ago without having refreshed my memory that I've been hearing echoes of its truth without giving it props. Instead, I just watched it yesterday and today and I keep saying - Oh, I thought Flavor Flav invented that, and Oh, I thought Nas invented that.

"Say hello to my little friend." OK everybody knows that was Pacino is Scarface, but I didn't know "Who do I trust? Me!" was Pacino in Scarface. There seem to be eight or nine scenes from this film that have been copied in a dozen other films since. One in particular I remember is the - cruising the car in the evening with an oil refinery in the background to a small humble house on the edge of town. Set It Off did that. Fracture did that. I'm sure it was also done in Deep Cover and in One False Move as well. The quote page on IMDB is huge. Anyway...

Now I know.

Dark Sector

I've been playing Dark Sector for a couple days now and I must give it a fairly high rating.  The official blurb sets the stage:

What lurks inside Dark Sector? A frightening Cold War secret and 3D-shooter action. Covert-ops agent Hayden Tenno is sent on a mission to Eastern Europe. During an attack by an unknown enemy, Hayden is infected with the Technocyte Virus, which turns its victims into mindless killing machines. Hayden begins to develop superhuman powers as his abilities gradually evolve. As the virus takes over, it works magic on his body, and wreaks havoc on his mind. Harness Hayden's new powers, which grow as the game progresses. You'll need them to survive Dark Sector's gritty, shadowy world that sits on the edge of ruin.

It looks pretty good. What you are forced to say is that the environment is reminiscent of Gears of War, as is the cover system. But beyond that it is very much its own game. Now generally I cannot stand zombie games, and there is one scene in the third or fourth chapter when it's nothing but zombies ad infinitum until you can find a trick to stop them from coming. But I have to say that I do enjoy sending zombies into the great beyond in Dark Sector.

The play is very good and the control is fairly well thought out. It's not very complicated but gives your fingers a different twist. The super cool thing is the glavie, your three bladed boomerang which you hurl using the right bumper instead of the right trigger. As is relatively standard, you zoom your aim with the left trigger and then either shoot lefty with your pistol, or hurl the glavie righty with the right bumper. Holding the right bumper and timing your letgo based on the color of your reticle gives you extra power. And, as you might expect a super boomerang to do, you can fetch remote objects, like the very guns the enemies were shooting you with.  Regular weapons, shottys, assault rifles, etc are only good for a certain time, then they auto-destruct generally before you can reload them. So you are mostly dependent on the glavie.

Environments are mostly tight to medium, and in dark places enemies can creep up on you. There are a few puzzles that you must solve to move from level to level, though nothing as complicated as those in Prey. But other than that it is a straightforward over the shoulder first person shooter, very much like Gears with sprinting and diving for cover.

I've gotten through a couple boss battles which are tedious but generally solvable with rockets. I've endured a lot of rain noises on a perfectly sunny day, and I've endured the ridiculously tight lock you have to have on weapon pickups. These mar an otherwise nice semi-tactical shooter.

Interestingly, the more games like this I play, the more I appreciate Black. This whole game would be an order of magnitude better if the environment were destructible.

How I Like Obama Now

I cannot wait until the Obama-McCain debates.

Last night I watched Charlie Rose and other folks discussing the prospects for Obama, and their views on what has transpired thus far. There were no real surprises except that I realized for the first time in quite a while what kinds of talent the mainstream media still possesses. If you hang out in the 'sphere too long, you can get a kind of bizarre tunnelvision that tends to mislead you into believing that other folks who run at lower bandwidth are mislead. In fact, there is a lot of low bandwidth expertise and sense out there that doesn't bother doing mashups and scobelizing 300 RSS feeds in some corner of the long tail. The advantage is that there are organizations that are mature and well-run that can put the right person in the right place. In short, Time Magazine can't be that stupid. It is an example of a newly adopted Cobb's Rule #16: It is never a good idea to underestimate the intelligence of people in power.

There is probably a good corrollary to that which is never to underestimate the capacities of people who acquire power quickly. Obama is an opportunist of gargantuan proportions, and he beat Hillary Clinton. He didn't beat her down, he bested her in what? 28 out of 54. Moreover, he leveraged the little guy and beat the Clinton machine. It's not unprecedented but it is extraordinary. The bastard pulled it off.

What is useful at this moment is to understand that he has done for himself an extraordianry thing, which is to set himself up for life. There is very little else, aside from Rezko, that is going to drag him down. When he has the Democratic Party, which is now inevitable, he will have the kind of power that stays around from here on out. He is Presidential. So all he now has to do is not make enormous mistakes, which is to say of the sort which cost people their lives. Short of that, he has free reign to make rather revolutionary steps, few of which we haven't seen before, but are likely to be handled in a way which is entirely his.

What Obama needs right about now are experts, and I think they will begin acreting around him as the days go forward into the summer and fall. He will get what McCain may not which is a coterie of young and ambitious people with big ideas and short intsitutional fetters. Star formation in Obama's gravitational field is about to begin, and that which was wispy gas not long ago will now begin to accumulate mass.

At this moment in time, it may or may not become easy. It's too early to tell. McCain has done the honorable thing all along and has been the last to throw the kind of mud that began in March with Wright. That dead end is self-evident, but not to a large number of Republicans. They seem to have a tough time recognizing that Obama has an almost Reaganesque teflon coating. He is a superbly skilled politician whom I predict will shed Rezko like Reagan shedded Meese. In a nation that is at war, Obama's worst gaffes mean didly. The American people can do the body count math and in the short attention span theatre that is the mass media, surviving Wright means Obama can survive all mistakes candidates can make. In short, the only thing that can kill Obama now is the popular vote. And guess what, he's the black guy. He's the underdog. And only wonky, principled, professorial curmudgeons like me are not impressed by that, and we don't rule the public.

Sixteen years ago, I wanted desparately to have someone in the White House from my generation. It simply didn't matter what Bush or Dole were saying - they were just too freakin' old. I can't tell at this moment whom I trust less, Obama in 08 or Clinton in 92. But it didn't quite matter to me because I was on about the new world I was in the middle of creating as a professional. (I liked Harkin and then Brown, BTW) I cannot see, therefore, how anyone in their 30s who is educated and successful could possibly resist the opportunity Obama presents in the face of McCain's Old Guard. McCain doesn't even have to be 'McSame', he's already 'Old McDonald' and we already know about his farm. Obama can easily swim to the Left and paint Bush as mad, as well as point to all Republicans as 'out of touch'. He has got the young vote and it will take a rather large presidential scandal for that segment to wake up. Of course by then it will be too late.

I also know that Obama will have no trouble doubling back on his tracks. Inheriting an institutionally incompetent CIA and an essentially weakend State Department as well as a scorned DHS puts him on just about equal footing with any visionary the Right may or may not have. As soon as Al Qaeda strikes here at home, he'll have all the support he needs. He is, I bet, perfectly willing to entertain the idea that 'they can't shoot our soldiers if we bring them home', and when the battle comes to American shores, he still gets to be a war hero president. The 'world' will little note nor long remember how many AQ kills if Iraq falls, so long as Obama keeps the body count of the next domestic attack to fewer than the WTC. That is the course calculation he can bank on. He can always blame Rumsfeld, Gates, Tenet - none of them were heroes, just Bush flunkies in ObamaWorld. All Obama has to do is retire Petraeus and Odierno quietly and the world is his. With McCain as THE Republican hawk, that may be an easier task than it seems. It won't take much for Obama to send millions of patriots scurrying back to Perot Wings of Eagles World. In other words, all Obama has to be militarily is a naive reactionary. Considering how he has manipulated everyone with his 'Gee, that person who was just exposed was not the friend I thought he was', refrain, I see he'll have no problem using it against whomever, whenever in geopolitics.

On the other hand, who has ever stood up to Putin?

Domestically, the rich get richer slower and the poor get poorer slower. What's the difference? The difference will be in wonkery. But I think the wonkery will only take place if McCain is president. The smug satisfaction that a Democratic Hill would have would b a slow nightmare unfolding. I'm most interested to see how much more of a press holiday Obama gets over the next few months to see what effect he might actually have on domestic tranquility. He's going to have to start filling in the blanks.

Now this Bob Barr character can only be the GOP's Nader. It was bad enough with Ron Paul. Anyway, I think it might not be too late for a Libertarian party. If Obama were really about change, he'd be a third party candidate - of course he's too smart to be that idealistic, and will fit snugly into the Center Left in no time flat. We'll all float on OK. Well, except for us principled wonks, who will continue to lay him plain.

On the positive side, I want to give Obama a big high five for bringing the Clintons to their knees. If he picks Richardson for his VP or Chief of Staff, I'd even give him a hug.

Korean Beef

According to a quick glance, South Korea does about 78 billion dollars of business with the US annually. However they stopped the importing of American beef five years ago out of fears of mad cow disease. That strikes me as strange. We've never had a problem. Some may say that mad cow is inevitable in all beef supplies, but that doesn't seem a cogent argument against ours. It's about 20 billion worth of business that we've been doing without and in April the Bush Administration signed a deal to restart the flow. That's a lot of beef.

Well it turns out that South Koreans don't trust American beef, no matter what kind of deals our governments have put together. And so thousands filled the streets recently to throw down against riot cops in the streets of Seoul. The Democrats are opposed to the trade agreement between Korea's Lee Myung-bak and GWBush, but it's unclear why. Lee has something like a 25% approval rating in his home country, and there is probably no easier way to excuse any behavior in the US than saying it's the opposite of what GWBush would do. So the South Korean government is caving in by playing on what appears to be a popular idea that cows younger than 30 months old are less susceptible to BSE. Don't ask me about how prion-based infections work, half the websites I looked for on BSE are down (except for PETA's of course).

Bottom line politically is that it comes down to a matter of trust. The number of people who are going to be able to make any actual determination on the quality of American beef is not going to change significantly. The Koreans in the street are going to take it on faith, just as they are taking it on faith that American beef is unsafe. There's an interesting unravelling going on here.

My interest in this is based on my own kind of information theory with regard to the ability of people to establish and maintain policy that is both transparent and well-abstracted. I will follow up in that regard again in speaking about how politics makes people emotionally deranged and affects their willingness to distinguish Natural Truth from Political Truth.

You see there's a bioengineered solution to the problem just at hand. But what Venter understands is that engineered genomics is predictable whereas random DNA fiddling is not. That is precisely the difference between bioengineering and agriculture.

Watching HD

I found a little joint called Signal Electronics over in Torrance. It reminds me of what electronics stores used to be, what Radio Shack used to be before they stopped selling the Tandy brand. It reminded me of the Heathkit stores. Still, I couldn't get an HDMI cable for a reasonable price, reasonable meaning 7 bucks which is what I think I should pay. Instead, I figured it was appropriate punishment for me not bothering to learn twisted pair crimping and all that hardware stuff back in my 20s. So I plunked down the 30, and promised that when I retire, I'll build the rack mounted electronics kits of my dreams.

If it weren't for computers, I'm certain I would be a ham. Pops was a radioman in the Corps and taught me how to read schematics back when I was a teen. The old sour chemistry sets they sold in the 'hood never turned 'water' to 'wine' by the time I could afford them, but electrons were much more reliable. My diode radio worked perfectly. I knew all the tubes in the Philco. Hmm. There's a word I haven't said in decades. Whatever happened to Philco? Hmm I see.

It occurred to me that Americans are not so interested in diodes and switches and capacitors and soldering irons as we used to be. That little logical slice of life is not so glamorous to a lot of us, not so much as it is to the Asian manufacturers who seemed to make most of the inventory at Signal. On the other hand, so what? I drove my BMW back home to watch my Samsung.

I remember Mark Cuban saying that once he started watching HD he could never go back. Of course you can go back, there's not that much HD out there to begin with. Right about now there's plenty available from FIOS including some movies that are several years old (Heist, fzample, one of my favorites which surprised me), but on his HDNet there aint much programming. I have about 8 categories of HD On Demand, including my favorite DiscoveryHD of course, and about 40 HD broadcast channels. But there couldn't have been that much last year and the BluRay battle is just only recently over. So I don't feel late to the market at all - the world hasn't gone HD without me, only a fraction of it is there. But that's OK because regular broadcast and DVD looks fine, mostly.

I must say that HD can even make watching Emeril interesting. So I watched him for 20 minutes adding pinches of essence to this and that. Watching otherwise tedious travel channels and the like have been actually uplifting. I actually watched tandem eight skiing yesterday - some Austrian bums telling stories about how they learned how to ski when they were 3 years old. Whooha. It was only halfway to Dumb and Dumber, but getting those HD cameras to the roof of the world was worth it. The excitement is reminescent of looking at National Geographic magazines and Jacques Cousteau all over again. So I'm still in gee whiz golly jeepers mode.

I have been told that most people cannot tell the difference between 720i and 1080p. I haven't really bothered to note the notices on my screen as I switch inputs between my XBox component feed and the one coming out of the FIOS DVR. But I have seen how ESPN switches between their HD feeds in 16x9 and 4x3 with their 'vertical letterboxing' logos on the far left and right of my widescreen. Other 4x3 signals come with just black on the borders. I've also seen letterboxed flicks inhabit a smaller rectangle inside my big screen. But Iam noticing that I cannot tell much difference between the component output and the HDMI output on the DVR. I'm going to put it to a closer test today.

The most annoying thing I'm dealing with now is that none of my inputs are known to my screen as 'TV'. And if I want picture in picture to work, one of the signals has to be TV. I've been wanting to game in the small window and watch TV at the same time. I know the Dell screens can do all that every which way but my PIP is only showing me snow. I've got to figure a way around that. I think it means that I need to hookup a coax.I'll figure it out, and I can live without it too.

On the whole, HD is great. Now I can fulfill my commitment to watching NASCAR. It's nice to know there are still a few places where high tech means something.

That Speech

"There's a party in my mind...And it never stops."
-David Byrne

Pops came by last night for my little dinner. On his way here, he called and asked that I use my high-falutin' technology to record Obama's speech. Channel 2? Nope. Channel 4? Nope. Channel 7 had it, it was pre-empting a game show. So now I have the speech in which Obama claims the Democratic nomination on my new DVR under the title Jeopardy!. Life is not without its little ironies.

Indulging Pops again and sitting through the damnable speech was a trying experience. If my belly wasn't full of lobster ravioli and spinach salad, I wouldn't have been able to stand it. Like no other politician I have bothered to listen to, Obama sounds more and more like an empty suit. The real him doesn't come out, and if that's the real him, he's changed. Perhaps it was just last night, but damn. He looked exactly like a poseur. 

Speaking of ironies, immediately before I switched to the speech, I was watching Koyaanisqatsi, the classic film that shows people as dehumanized units moving through the modern urban maze representing life out of balance. I was thinking at the time that if you want to make people's lives look insipid, you merely speed up the recording. If you want to make people's lives look dramatic and meaningful, you put them in slow motion. Nobody does the latter better than NFL Films. As I squirmed on the couch all I wanted to do was fast forward through Obama and his throng. In fact, I think I'll do it later today before I erase it, just for the satisfaction.

Pops thinks McCain is an idiot. Pops has a visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton. I had to hurry him out the door. Why does politics make people so emotionally retarded? It's a theme to which I will return.

For what it's worth, I've been thinking that an Obama presidency might give blackfolks some emotional satisfaction that America is OK. In fact, Pops actually did his own Michelle Obama moment right in my living room, saying that he is at last proud of America. Damn. I suppose such is to be expected from a 72 year old black man who was actually arrested for dating a white girl back in the day. Some injuries are never healed. But I'm not taking any comfort in the satisfaction of conditionally patriotic blackfolks. You can be sure that an Obama presidency will be credited to that minority, just as certainly Bush's slim majorities were credited to the Christian Right another loud minority whose hubris is execrable.

The black moment brings to mind the strange feeling I had many years ago on Bermuda. The same sort of electricity surrounding Obama was buzzing loudly upon the anticipated release of Spike Lee's 'X'. All you had to do was wear the hat. The iconic billboard signs were everywhere, a huge white X on a black background. That day on the island I looked towards the harbor and the largest X I had ever seen was taking up several degrees of sky on what appeared to be a huge billboard. I puzzled for a long time. Why would Spike have a huge party here for it? I finally got to the dock and saw it was on the smokestack of a giant ocean liner. X is the symbol for Celebrity Cruises and had absolutely nothing to do with Malcolm X or the hopes and dreams of a million kids wearing ball caps on backwards. Symbols.

The incompetence of McClelland, Bush's nth Press Sec'y among what, six? reminds us how many also rans will accompany the next president whoever he will be. But for drinkers of koolaid won't care. Koolaid and dogfood. If I ever join a group blog to continue to talk about politics, that will be the perfect title. In the meantime, devotees and worshipers of their political idols hope and pray for electoral victory. There's a political party in their minds with red, white and blue baloons and bunting. I'm merely nauseous.

HB2Me

Twenty years ago today I was feeling a bit shocked at how old I was, so I wordlessly got out of bed, dressed, grabbed a banana and a Super Socco and cycled for 27 miles. One for every year. I used to say back then before I was respectably married that I was having my midlife crisis ahead of schedule. It didn't heal the hearts I broke, but in a way it was true. I've always wanted to be an old man, and now my dream is coming true.

Since I am in the process of writing my autobiography (and Player the other day asked me 'for who', dead flat. Damn! - I said it had to be at least as cool as Nathan McCall's but now I'm not so sure) I might as well use this space to remember some birthdays past. 27 I already covered.

23
What I basically remember about being 23 was that it was the first age I reached for which there was no significance in the number. It was the year I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha, but at the time of my birthday I was much more of a high top fade kind of brother. It was the summer of the 1984 Olympics, the year of my most humiliating moment at the hands of the police. I drove a 1968 Karmann Ghia which was on its last legs, of course. I got on television that year when marathoners ran through my neighborhood. My brother and I had the largest American flag in the crowd. Like everyone, I watched Carl Lewis and wore my hair like him. It was the year of Purple Rain, the movie. A very good year. My girls were Tracy, Wanda and two others whose names I really should remember. Oh yeah. Antoinette and the girl from Pittsburgh. Wow. Oh yeah, and the girl from the Macy's in Santa Monica.

27
After I got back from my bike ride, my girl (who won the sweepstakes and became the Spousal Unit) pampered me in classic style. We had known each other about four months, and she actually did the French maid outfit. I had never been so spoiled in my life and I can still remember those sweet moments. And the fruit basket.  It was the summer with Cyndi, when me and my buppie buddies ran the City. We were at every party that mattered, mostly because we through them.  Housequake. Candy. Diamonds.

30
The beginning of a new austerity and consciousness. I began getting sentimental about my family and over-intellectual about everything else. I read all the critical theorists and jumping from the cliffs of the young urban professionals into the depths of radical feminism, afrocentrism, organic intellectualism and three or four more isms just to make the transformation complete. Plus I shaved off my moustache. I never did go all the way to idolizing Che or growing dreads. I still drove my BMW and played volleyball. But my mind belonged to Derrick Bell, Cornel West, bell hooks, Kim Crenshaw and Audre Lorde. I did have a decent birthday party at which Deet threw me into the pool. My girl was Lisa, who is now a famous playwright in black intellectual circles.

33
I was living with the Unit, my new fiance. We were at 125th and Broadway on the boarder of Harlem subletting a studio from one of the dancers from Urban Bush Women. It was hot and sticky and the air conditioner couldn't handle it. It only cooled the hot exhaust from the output of the other air conditioner on the facing wall just outside the window in which it hung precariously. She made me dinner on the hotplate and we listened to my favorite music, which was everything produced by French impresario Jimmy Jay. It was the last year that I lived with hair on my head.

40
I was laid off from my job on my 40th birthday, and it's a good thing that I already had my midlife crisis. I had actually considered all the things I might have done to move to the Silicon Valley. Like thousands of other stunned individuals, we shopped for houses in Half Moon Bay, calculating commutes vs mortgage payments. In the end nothing came of that mixed desire to relocate. It was the first of many happy accidents whose benefit we could only see in hindsight. I started my entrepreneurship once again. The wife had promised me a big fancy party, but the plan fell through, as did a lot of things in 2001.

Today I'm 47 years old. Just three years from 50 and proud of my gray hair, but I still dye it out occasionally. I'm wearing the full beard which I haven't done for a while. I spent a couple thousand at the dentist this year and I'm more than halfway through all that needs to be done which isn't a whole lot. I can still do just about anything for 15 minutes, way down from four hours, but just as exhausting. I'm watching my weight. Yeah that just about describes it, I'm watching my weight. Not controlling it or reducing it or anything like that, just watching it.

I'm right in the middle of fatherhood and getting pretty good and remaining fairly challenged by it. I feel powerful in my relationships with other people knowing that I have some respectable accomplishments and a cordial confidence in my career. I'm prepared for wealth, but not quite for poverty, although I'm managing to get better at the hedging, having suffered several heartbreaking setbacks over the past decade. My marriage is in good shape - I hesitate to say great because I know better than to insist on anything which involves the input of the Unit. My kids are still the greatest people I know, but I'm starting to see the cracks...

I think the one thing that changes now besides my growing distaste for political debate is my willingness to let it be all about me. It's not all about me, but it could be. I've got my new four year plan just about in place and I start my new job on Monday. I'm the senior manager with teenaged kids, the love for fast cars, the witty riposte and the eagerness to be with people. People with ideas and drive fascinate me more than just about anything.

Today, I'm going to take care of a little business and then do nothing. I'm on vacation just spinning through what a couple movies and things look like on my new big screen. I'm preparing to bore myself a little bit in anticipation of winding up the ambition next week. I've got a lot of energy to put into new ideas framing my work, and it's probably the best time ever to be in my career. Heh. More on that later...

LN46A550

I purchased my first television after I was 30 years old. Since they canceled Hill Street Blues, I've probably never watched more than an average of 10 hours a week, if that much. I bought it specifically because it was my first management job and all my employees were talking about Seinfeld and David Letterman. I needed the context. This was Boston, 1993.

Before I got married, I swore that I would never be one of those people with a television in the living room. It has always struck me as vulgar. I have large bookshelves filled with books that I have purchased over the years. When people come into my house, I expect them to examine my bookshelf, deduce something about my character and begin a conversation. That's what a living room is for. After I got married and had three kids in the house I made my peace with Barney. In the living room.

I purchased my next television in 1998 at Circuit City after considerable effort. I seem to recall that it cost me over 500 dollars, but I cannot remember specifically. It was a very strange period. At the time, DLP TV sets were huge and so was 'home theatre'. It was still before the year of the Matrix and DVD but the time had already come when the arrangement of the living room could cost more than the computer. Something strange was going on in the market, but I was determined to remain on the periphery. I happened to have a den with a futon, and so I gained the upper hand against the television gods. Besides, my kids had long been rid of that annoying dinosaur and were now digging Pinky and the Brain. Much better. As for me, broadband to the home was here, as were MP3s and Sprint PCS. Balance was returned to the force.

The DVD revolution did not pass my household. Not long after The Matrix was on DVD, I made the purchase. It was the spring after The DVD Christmas of 2002. Being part of the Silicon Valley revolution, I was aware of Tivo, but I didn't take the plunge. It didn't seem worth it and besides, I had Netflix instead. Besides, for me, it was all about gaming. So since the introduction of the XBox, my 28 inch tube was all I needed. Friends were getting projection TVs and I would overhear this and that about home theatre but by and large it was all about the sound. I had, and still have, component audio and didn't really care about what's up in the 5.1 world. Especially after the XBox 360, I had all I needed.

But I got a Tivo anyway.

Since most of my work involves travel, I had become a good friend of Spectravision. I can recall all the talk back before Y2K about how impossible video on demand was for the home. Everybody complained about the cost of the last mile and what kinds of data centers were needed to accomplish all that. But Spectravision managed somehow to meet the challenge - so I've enjoyed all the movies I like + CNBC when I travel. But then The Sopranos happened, and I actually wanted to be home and watch TV. Then Deadwood and then ultimately 24.

24 changed everything as far as TV was concerned. Finally there was a realistic IT person and, well, you know all of the reasons that 24 is compelling TV. Naturally, as with everything else in popular culture, I was skeptical and late to the party. Then one day while I was working in Atlanta, out of sheer boredom, I rented the series from the local Blockbuster. I was hooked. I stayed up until 2am every night catching up through three seasons. It just so happened that I did so at a friend's house, a friend with the big projection TV, which I had previously been using for gaming Morrowind. But soon came The Sheild, and TV was interesting again, for the first time in years. Still, it was just fine on my screen.

It wasn't until 2004 that things began to seriously change. And so I recall a conversation I had with a couple colleagues over at Versailles in Manhattan Beach. The guy with the boat was telling the guy with the convertible Mercedes that he was ready to buy the new HDTV. They were talking 720i and 1080p and I was completely lost. I tried to change the subject but it kept coming back to that, and I was actually feeling a little jealous. One day I actually cruised one of the stores and watched a Pioneer. It seemed to be very strange that Pioneer would beat Sony, but that's what everybody said. I had seen a Fujitsu years before and we had a flat panel back in 2001 in our new Foster City office. Now they were 'only' 4000 bucks and the investor class was ready. I put my hands over my ears. I was just happy with my Tivo and dealing with that revolution.

But after a while, and especially after I spent some time in the test lab at HP in Cupertino, I started to feel the burn. Up there, they had a massive 60 inch plasma flat screen which wasn't HD but man it was it beautiful. I played my favorite visual flick, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. (yeah I know, but it still is a cool movie). I was hooked. And so for two years I have been watching and waiting, and gaming in low-def while my online buddies are sniping my head off and driving circles around me.

Christmas 2007, I got the Spousal Unit a 20 inch LG. Last year I took the family to Knotts. We stayed in a family style hotel, and even these cheap ones have HD. We hooked up the XBox 360, (yeah I brought it) to the 720p screen via the component connection. By this time I was all read up. I was sick to death of going to Comp USA and seeing all of the demos for Project Gotham Racing 3 in HD on the little LCD panels. I knew everything about them and watched the prices go down, but never down far enough. More of my buds had busted the move. But it wasn't until last September that I had actually gamed on HD. It was stunning, even on this cheapo panel. The burn was getting deeper. Getting the little LG was the first step towards the inevitable.

Just a couple months ago, FIOS-TV finally became available in my neighborhood. I don't know what took them so damned long. We already hooked up the double play but the triple wasn't available. How could they not have TV? It was probably because Adelphia had just lost our area and Time Warner just came in. We hate Time Warner Cable. Its suckitude is massive, and the DVRs we got were far inferior to Tivo. In the meantime, I had undergone a transformation in TV watching that began two winters ago. I became a complete devotee to all of the documentary channels, plus four.

When Discovery put Mythbusters on and they did the experiment with the flying Chinese throne, Boy and I laughed for a full ten minutes. We played the piece over and over again (thanks Tivo) and from that moment on, we never missed an episode. The same was true for The Deadliest Catch, and finally with Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe became a new star in our household as did the Discovery Channel. Last spring in Philly, I got hooked on Modern Marvels and all of my fiction watching on TV came to a close. I had long tired of the HBO formula and two years ago stopped watching 24, The Shield and Lost. I continued to indulge in action flicks, but also started trying to get some classics.

Well it's finally June and my birthday is tomorrow and I'm off all week. I've worked enough so that I'm going to have overlapping paydays from my complete contract and my new job. So this weekend I got my over-researched machine. Finally. The Samsung LN46A550. Highly rated, good price, all that. And now I'm going through my library and seeing all kinds of things I've never seen before.

Today, the Verizon guy is supposed to show up with my new HD DVR. So sometime by 5pm I should be able to report on what HD really looks like from my living room.