My $.02: Game Review - Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

To begin with, I finished reading Doctor Faustus, and I have to say I feel a little robbed. First, I got it off a list of the 100 scariest books, and it's not even a damned book. It's a play. Okay, fine. Whatever. I've read plays, and what with Marlowe being a contemporary of Shakespeare, it's not like I'll just blow through it. I'm sure some of you had to read Hamlet or Macbeth in school and know what I'm talking about. Well, guess what - I blew through it. I will say this - I think that if it was properly staged, it could be scary as hell. So, no review for that.

So, onto the actual topic - Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. First, I would say this is one of the most open games I've played. Yes there are a sequence of events that you have to follow to finish the game (which I didn't do - more on that later), but if you want, you can just run around smashing stuff up and collection points and comic book covers while irritating the armed forces into attacking you.

So, the gist of the game should be familiar to any Marvel fan (and now a lot of movie fans). You're Bruce Banner. When you get mad, you turn into a big green guy that has anger issues. He smashes stuff. The game arc is that your doctor friend found a way for you to exercise some self control while you're the Hulk, using his strength for your own purpose, that purpose, as usual, being to find a cure.

At first, it's a great setup. As the Hulk, you can interact with nearly everything in your environment. Sure, that interaction usually results in something getting destroyed, but it's entertaining anyway. Nearly everything is a weapon. See a light post? Break it off and use it as a bat. Pick up a car, split it in half, and now you have a pair of righteous boxing gloves. And while throwing a cow was fun, throwing a tank was so much more satisfying.

The catch is the sheer number of things you can do. As you destroy stuff and accomplish missions, you earn point you can use to buy new moves. While this is cool, you eventually hit the point of having all of these moves that you really don't use. In fact, I managed to get by with only two or three of the moves for most of the major battles. Add to that the fact the moves become fighting game style button combos, and I would have to have dedicated hours to just learning how to pull them off. As a "casual gamer", I'm not really a fan of spending more time learning a game rather than playing a game.

The other issue was that the missions themselves get repetitive really quickly. The whole game boils down to "Destroy X", "Retrieve X", or "Defend X", all while being attacked by military personnel. The first few times it was amusing, and the big boss battles were interesting, but a lot of the stuff in between was a lot less fun than free roaming.

I will point out that the game has a ton of mini games that kind of make up for the lack of interesting missions. The mini games are hot spots in the areas you roam where you can take on challenges for points to earn new moves. They range from Golf (with a boulder as a ball) to races to kicking cars through a goal post. The mini games ended up being a lot more fun than the actual game.

In the end, I lost interest in the missions to the point where I didn't finish the game. Because all of the missions have to be performed in a linear order, it started to become a chore to try and progress. Each time I played, I had to seriously consider whether I wanted to try and make any progress, or if I'd just smash stuff until the tanks showed up to try and stop me. As often as not, I chose the latter.

So, overall, the game was amusing, but not anything I would highly recommend. If you're big into fighting games you might get more out of it. I just couldn't make myself care anymore about retrieving one more part for one more machine.

Oh, and they put in an escort mission (you know - protect this doof driving a Pinto through a military zone). I've said it before and I'll say it until they learn. No one likes *$&%ing escort missions. No one. Stop putting them into games. Seriously.

A New Meaning to the Term "South of the Border"

As discussed previously, I went to the gastroenterologist yesterday where I was given a clean bill of health. Apparently, my low iron is the result of my being a frequent blood donor. I guess that's what I get for helping people. Anyway, this is good news, because I was afraid I was going to have cancer and have to get chemotherapy, and I don't want to have to start growing my hair out all over again, so we dodged a bullet there, huh?

I have to say, though, that the procedure ended up being quite unnerving to me, not because of the procedure itself, but because of the drugs that accompanied it. As promised, right after we talked about what was going to go down (or up, depending on what you're referring to) the nurse took a small amount of something and pumped it into my arm. I remember wondering how long it would take to kick in, as the doctor was already gloved in a somewhat menacing manner.

And then I remember nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Seriously, next thing I know, I'm in a recovery room with my lovely wife, vaguely aware of the fact that I can see other people waking around and I've just let loose with a thunderclap, all the more frightening given the amount of laxatives I had taken the evening prior. The nurse was kind enough to explain that it was a side effect of the procedure, which somehow doesn't make me feel better about trumpeting in a room full of strangers, but I guess I should be grateful. Fortunately, it was all thunder and no lightning, so I had that going for me as well.

I find the memory loss aspect of this all terrifying though. I seriously have absolutely no recollection of anything after the drugs. Not even a glimmer. Now, I'm sure the nice people who did the procedure were on the up and up, but it's scary that I was essentially in their care and helpless for up to an hour and I can't remember any of it. Worse, they knew that I wouldn't be able to.

What if they dressed me up like a clown while I was out? What if they used my posterior as a vase for a dozen daisies and then sent a picture to an ex? I'm petrified to Google the name of the doctor for fear that I will discover one of those MySpace pages where you can't see the picture unless you're added as a friend.

What's funny is that those of us who used to follow the X Files knows that alien abduction is the usual culprit of lost time. There's a certain irony is this, considering that getting probed is what I expected, and it's the other alternatives that bother me. Besides, I'm reasonably sure that the doctor wasn't an alien. Although now that I think about it, he did have kind of a Pancho Villa mustache, and it's not like I asked to see his papers or anything.

Oh man, I totally got probed by an alien. Someone call David Duchovny.

Hopefully I Would Be Conscious Enough to Say "Ta Da!"

So as mentioned yesterday, tomorrow is the procedure, and as usual I'm approaching it with all of the seriousness that such a medical matter requires. I'm following all of the doctor's instructions, including today's all-clear-liquid diet and self-induced illness (let's just say I'll be taking more laxatives than the cast of America's Next Top Model on the way home from Burger King). Other than that, I've just been giving a lot of thought to ways I can go above and beyond to prepare for my colon's video debut.

My first idea was graffiti. I have no idea how one could pull it off, but how cool would it be to have the doctor looking into his little television only to come across "Richard Gere's place was nicer" scrawled across an intestinal wall. Or "Why is everything they sell in the gift shop corn based?". Okay, that one was a little rough, but you get the idea.

Of course this is completely impractical. I mean, where does one buy a tiny can of spray paint anyway? So, let's come up with something else.

My next thought was creative things that could be eaten a reasonable time before the procedure that would result in an amusing discovery. I had trouble coming up with what though. At first I was thinking a small warning sign, either "Do Not Step" or no smoking or some sort of high wind advisory. Then, I considered a fortune cookie fortune ("Beware - the end is nigh."). Building on the previous theme, maybe a rubber gerbil. (Do they make rubber gerbils? On second thought, don't answer that.) Then I read how many laxatives they expected me to take today and any hope of an amusing ingestion went right out the window.

In the end (heh), I realized that any such shenanigans would be highly irresponsible on my part, and that instead I should just approach this the way any reasonable person would - hope the doctors don't find a damned thing. Still, a small part of me will continue to consider the possibilities right up until the drugs kick in. Really, how often does such an opportunity present itself?

On an unrelated note, does anyone know where I could get one of those bouquets of flowers that appear out of nowhere that the magicians use? No reason, I was just thinking, you know, that would be something really cool to have around the house.

In Brief...

No, not in briefs (perverts). I have way too much going on to write a long post today, but I wanted to let you all know that I went to my appointment yesterday, and it led to another appointment on Thursday, the details of which we won't discuss here.

I'll be swallowing a camera, and that's the part I'm comfortable talking about. 'Nuff said.

My $.02: Book Review - Haunted

There is this group of people on internet message boards who put links in their posts that say there something funny or cool or relevant to the conversation. Some of these links are genuine. Others are harmless pranks, Rick Rolls or Bananaphone links. Some of these links though, are something dangerous. One innocent click, and you're presented with a horrific image or video that, depending on your sensitivity, potentially damage you, something that will shake your belief in the general good of humanity, and most importantly, something you can never un-see.

This, in a nutshell, is Haunted.

This is a book that is not interested in frightening you so much as making your stomach turn. Endlessly. Seriously, it's the literary equivalent of dead baby jokes - it doesn't fulfill any need other that trying to see who can be the grossest.

Now maybe that's someone's thing, but it isn't mine. When I rent a horror movie, it's either because I want it to be creepy, a la The Others or The Sixth Sense, or I want the horror and gore to be done in a campy, we-know-how-silly-this-all-is style like Army of Darkness or Planet Terror. In books, I want the same thing. What I don't want is detailed descriptions of stomach churning goriness.

There were two factors that made this extra painful, the first being that this was a collection of short stories wrapped in one larger story arc about a group of kidnapped writers lured by a writers retreat. This was painful because when you're faced with a bunch of short stories, you know the results are going to be hit or miss. That's just the nature of short story collections. This book, however, was way more misses than hits. Out of over twenty short stories, I would only call two of them interesting, and only one of those good.

Worse than this was the fact that all of the stories, including the main arc, are predicated on the idea that people are essentially awful. Every action is based on pure selfishness, but even that isn't enough of an assumption. In order to accept, at face value, any of the various stories, you have to accept that nearly everyone is a murderous, perverted freak only being kept in check by the law or something like it. We're all potential pedophiles or such attention whores that self-mutilation and murder is acceptable if it brings us fame. I don't know if Chuck's mother didn't hug him enough as a child or what, but this is taken to such an extreme that it ends up being so far from realistic that by the end I couldn't take any of it seriously at all.

So there you have it. What I believe was supposed to be a statement about the nature of celebrity, about our obsession with tragedy, about the way media effects our lives was completely lost in a stew of body parts and "what's grosser than gross" descriptions. It's too bad really. Palahniuk seems to have a fairly extensive vocabulary. "Subtlety", however, seems to be missing from it.

On My Own Here We Go

A couple of nights ago, I thought I had insomnia, so I got up, killed a little time trying to get a game running on the PC, failed, and went back to bed. It turns out that instead of insomnia, I was just having a little trouble sleeping that night.

Now last night, I had insomnia.

Laying awake in bed still after almost two hours, I finally got up. I had a monster headache, so reading was out, and I was afraid to play video games because I lose track of time when I do that, so I flipped through the channels, not watching anything. I would absorb a five minute snippet of a bad movie (apparently Paul Rudd was in a Halloween sequel - huh), another five minutes of some cartoon (I still don't get Aqua Teen Hunger Force), five minutes of an even worse movie (if it stars Lou Diamond Phillips and isn't Young Guns, just keep moving), etc.

So yeah, I'm a little ball of joyous sunshine today. At least I've moved beyond the hideously cranky level of exhaustion I'm usually at by now. Nope, I'm all the way into the much preferred slightly-giddy stages. It's a little like being under the influence, but without any of the harsh repercussions. Well, as long as I don't nod off at my desk anyway.

See, that's the catch - I have a job where thinking is involved, and I'm now so entrenched into this project that the thinking is not just involved, it's expected. I have to constantly work with a second or third person, so just sitting back and writing monkey code while listening to my headphones is out. I'm expected to be brilliant, dammit.

Hopefully I can fake my way through the rest of day without having to drain too many more pots of coffee. I'm starting to reach dangerous levels here. Just a minute ago I felt an uncontrollable urge to shave off everything but a mustache, get a sombrero and poncho, and wander through the woods with a donkey carrying a sack of coffee beans.

Ah hell, who am I kidding. I always have that urge.

Hopefully They Won't Notice That All My Good Ideas Come From There

So, about a month ago I had a medical scare involving my heart beating funny. Well, after blood tests, the concern came back that my iron was pretty low. We discussed my diet, blah blah blah, I went back to taking my Flinstones Chewables, eating more leafy greens, whatever.

A month goes by, and two days ago I follow my instructions and get more blood drawn to see how we're doing. I make an appointment for Friday and figure the doctor will tell me that everything is swell now. Instead, the next day the doctor calls me wanting to talk. As a rule, doctors do not ever call with good news.

Well, my iron is still low, and while that can be caused by all sorts of innocuous things, there is a big one that isn't innocuous, which is internal bleeding caused by who knows what. So, the doctor cancels my appointment and instead hooks my up with a new appointment on Monday to see a gastroenterologist to see if something yucky is happening internally (actually, I would assume that something yucky is always happening internally, so I should say something dangerously yucky).

I can not properly express my trepidation at this information. See, I know how these people work. It'll start out innocently enough. They will ask about my family history. They feel around my stomach, maybe asking if it hurts when they push in one spot or another. Next thing I know, the lights will go down, someone will put in a Barry White cd, and the doctor will be lubing up a tiny camera and assuring me that he will still respect me afterwards.

I don't know how to type a shudder, but if I did, I would.

Regardless of my discomfort with the situation here, I don't really have a choice. I'm feeling pretty run down, and this morning I woke up with what felt like a bad hangover, which I typically don't mind but since I didn't go to bed drunk I'm not thrilled with. Also, the fact is that the men in my family tree aren't exactly known for their impressive life spans, a family tradition I have every intention of breaking. So no matter how humiliating it may be, I will proceed with whatever the doctor insist upon.

You think they'll send me flowers afterwards?

It's Like Finding Them In the Street...Sorta

So, as discussed previously, I'm a gamer. This doesn't necessarily imply that I actually play video games, but rather that, given free time and the choice of activities, I would frequently choose them. Anyway, while I do label myself a gamer, I am also someone who doesn't spend money on himself, and thus doesn't spend money on video games.

We live in an age where you can actually do quite well for a while without spending money. For example, there are lots of flash based games free to play on the internet, some of which don't suck. A man named Ben Leffler has produced three such diversions in the form of Ex Mortis, Ex Mortis 2, and Purgatorium, three entertaining and occasionally disturbing little survival horror/adventure games. Many examples of free content like that can be found at sites such as Newgrounds. The catch is that a lot of that content sucks (and a lot of it is filth - don't go randomly clicking around until you read the rating), so you have to have some serious time to invest in looking for good stuff. (I used to have a job that included scheduled time where they knew they had no work for me to do. For weeks. So yeah, I've tested those waters pretty thoroughly.)

What if I don't want want some online trifle to mess with though? What if I want to play a real game, with production values and everything. Well, here we run into the dreaded moral gray area. See, I believe that downloading music and movies, when such things are not being offered by their creators, is a bad thing. We, as a generation, can try as hard as we want to justify such things by railing against the evils of the RIAA or MPAA, but the truth is that we all, deep down, know it's still stealing. Argue if you will, but it is.

What has this to do with the topic at hand? Well, like my book selections, I don't believe that a game's worth is inherently tied to it being the newest thing with the hottest graphics. I think of a lot of games as art, and if it's well done, if it moves you somehow, the value doesn't diminish with time. So when I look at an old review for something, or have to look up some reference in an effort to understand a joke I'm missing (I really don't like missing jokes), sometimes I find some game I really wish I had played, but simply can't go out and buy anymore unless I feel like getting swindled on Ebay.

It turns out there are whole sites dedicated to this very topic. It's referred to as abandonware. It software that no one distributes any more. They had their run, they made their sales, and now they've moved on. Hell, some of these companies don't even exist any more. So you have sites like Home of the Underdogs that does nothing but catalog images of this software and make it available for download.

And therein lies my issue. Technically, no one who made this product is trying to make money on it any more. In fact, I couldn't go out and buy a copy if I wanted to, unless I got some old used copy online that might not even run. Still, I feel like I'm doing something wrong when I download these games, and each time I do, I feel like I'm a bad, bad man.

On the bright side, I probably won't have time to play them anyway, so it's really more of a light gray moral area. Maybe even an off-white. Maybe beige. Maybe I just really want to play System Shock 2.

Stupid morality.

Why No One Hangs Out With Susan Anymore

I don't watch a ton of television, and frequently when I do, there aren't commercials (or, in the case of Disney, there aren't commercials for anything that isn't made by Disney). Nevertheless, it seems that every time I do watch commercial television, I am inundated by commercials for prescription drugs, which really bothers me. It's not so much the actual advertising for these drugs that gets to me (although I do think that's a little weird). Rather, it's the way they work in the big medical warnings.

At first, it was blatant and appropriate. Near the end of the advertisement, a professional voice actor would start talking about possible side effects, drug interactions, etc. Sometimes, they would even put it in print, in case the television is muted perhaps. Either way, aside from the occasional surprising and outlandish notification (I've still never heard anything that can beat "may cause explosive flatulence with oily discharge"), it was pretty straightforward.

That was eventually found to be insufficient for our good friends in Madison Avenue. We can't have the drug makers breaking the brilliant illusion of a man who has successfully dealt with his erectile dysfunction by letting them cut in with this big scary warning about the potential heart attack he could have (although I'm always unclear if the risk is caused by the drug, or the shock that this poor fellow is getting lucky after who knows how long, but again I digress). No, instead we'll have him sit down with a fake doctor who will pretend that he has memorized, word for word, every bit of the associated warning label, while Mr. Back-in-action sits there and nods thoughtfully. Progress!

Even this was found to be lacking, however, so they progressed to what I find to be the most irritating version. A woman is telling her friends about some wonderful new birth control pill, and halfway through the conversation starts spouting off the warnings, again perfectly memorized, in this 30 second diatribe. Her friends sit there, looking at one another and again nodding thoughtfully. They end the whole mess with one of them making a joke about the loquacious saleslady having been to medical school or some such bull&$%*, and they all have a good natured laugh. In reality, this kind of verbal assault would probably have been met with something more along the lines of, "Wow, that drug sound interesting and all, but seriously Susan, do you ever shut the &$%* up?".

So please, whoever is out there writing this crap, cut it out. We're all big kids who can handle a little truth in our advertising. None of us believes that you guys have come up with some batch of chemicals that we can pump into our system with complete disregard to what effects other than the desired ones may be the result. It's okay to just tell us what the risks are without dressing them up.


**WARNING**

Possible side effects of reading Dangerously Low On Grog may include eye rolling, snickering, guffawing, chortling, and potentially projectile spraying of a beverage from the nasal cavity. Drinking beverages while reading Dangerously Low On Grog may increase these risks. Also, some incidents of weeping have been reported, but these effect were generally mild and only occurred during serious posts in either women related to the author, big sissies, or both.

No known issues have occurred in those taking prescription or recreational medications while reading Dangerously Low On Grog. In fact, if such medications make the author seem more witty or talented, then taking these medications are encouraged.

Do not attempt to operate a vehicle or heavy machinery while reading Dangerously Low On Grog.

Should you experience any nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, or other such medical emergencies while reading Dangerously Low On Grog, you should probably step away from the computer and go see a doctor or something. For the doctors sake, take a shower first. Depending on the symptoms, maybe take two.

Guess How Far He Can Throw Cake

Today, my little man turns two. Strangely, I'm not dealing with this well. I'm thinking it's a combination of things, the first being that I know he's my last baby, and he's simply not a baby anymore. The other thing is that Father's day is Sunday, and this year I'm feeling a little, I don't know...off I guess.

Currently, the Moose continues communicating mostly through actions, although he does talk more these days. At least these actions are becoming more civilized. For example, when he's finished eating his dinner, he now stands up in his seat and declares, "All done". This is much improved over his previous habit of deciding he was finished with something and using that something, be it a sippy cup or a slice of pizza, to see how far he can currently throw. He was starting to get pretty close to the couch, so I'm much relieved that this is a habit he's phasing out.

He's also starting getting into more complicated games with me. Previously, his favorite activity was sitting on my stomach, bouncing up and down and laughing each time I went "oof" at a landing (I'm only faking about half of them - he's pretty heavy). Last weekend, we entered into a long game of blanky tug of war instead. I pretend to strain and heave, eventually pulling him into my lap. He would giggle and also pretend to pull. After a few rounds, he started really pulling, so I let him win. He liked that one a lot more, laughing out loud when I landed on him.

Beyond that, we continue on the way we were. He likes to throw things. He likes to play ball. He really likes to be in the water (we start swimming lessons next week). Overall, he's just your average two year old boy. Of course, by "average", I mean handsome, charming, cute, funny, and overall perfect little boy.

Happy birthday, bud. I love you more than either one of us will probably ever know.

Now In Living, Breathing 3-D!

The Moose loves to throw things. If he can reach it, he will pluck it up, smile with glee, and hurl it with great force as far as he can. For someone who not quite two years old, "as far as he can" is a greater distance than you might think. It is for this reason that I found myself at the optometrist this week, picking up my now repaired eye glasses.

Now, the theory is that just the frames were broken. I was told that they would send them to the frame manufacturer, who would fix up the frames, and send them back. The key thing to note here is that, according to this process, nothing should have changed with my prescription.

When I put my restores glasses on after three weeks of wearing an old pair, things seemed distorted. It's kind of hard to describe to anyone who hasn't had any experience with hallucinogenic drugs, but everything seemed to be shifting all the time. Naturally, I put my old glasses back on to drive back to work, but since then, I've worn my new ones. The shifting has settled, but hasn't entirely gone away - occasionally, when I move my head, walls and floors look to be angled somehow wrong.

Even weirder than this (which adds a bit of surrealism to my day that I have thus far been enjoying), I have gained an odd version of 3-D vision. You know how occasionally you'll look at a flat picture, and if the foreground is the right shade of red and the background is the right shade of blue, the former will seem to float above the latter? Well that's happening to me, but for really odd things.

As an example, at work I have adorned my cubicle walls with the manuals, covers, and sometimes even discs of various games I have enjoyed in the past. One of the wierder games I played was Total Distortion, a game centered around traveling to another dimension to take footage that was then used to make and sell music videos back home. No, seriously, that's what the game was about. Anyway, this is the cover on my wall:



Now, with my glasses off, this just looks like a weird guy with red hair and a guitar warrior getting his rock on - so, nothing unusual. I put my glasses on, and I swear that it practically swims in three dimensional goodness. It's really hard to describe how disorienting this is. I read todays Penny Arcade (which won't be funny to anyone not following Jack Thompson's current shenanigans), and the black bubbles float above the images, and the red text pops out a mile above that. As Keanu put it so well, "Whoa".

Thus far, the new visual oddities are minor and don't seem to be doing any damage, so I've not returned to the optometrist with a "WTF?". I can only assume that my glasses were exposed to some odd form of radiation, and that, given time, more awesome powers will develop. Maybe, just maybe, I'll finally have those x-ray specs I was promised by my comic books so many years ago.

Sweet!

And Don't Ask About A Through W.

At some point in my mid twenties, I was branded. I don't mean that someone took a hot piece of metal and used it imprint their mark upon my hiney (and if I did, I certainly wouldn't be telling you all about it). No, I mean some freak in a marketing department decided that they needed a way to refer to people my age without actually acknowledging that we were anything more than a demographic, thus allowing them to remove any humanity we had in their eyes.

Thus, Generation X was born.

Actually, Generation X was originally the title of a book about teenagers in the sixties. Unfortunately, someone in the nineties caught wind of the expression and, since we were just getting started with the habit of putting the label "extreme" on everything from sports to snack chips, it seemed fitting to pin an X to an entire generation. Think of it - an entire population of people born between 1965 and 1982 that would be totally "extreme". To the max. Or something.

It took a while for it to sink in that when people on the nightly news referred to Generation X (or worse, "Gen X"), that it was my people they were talking about. There was no questionnaire or anything to see if I qualified. No one asked if I distrusted government, used the internet, or felt apathetic towards politics in America. They didn't even ask if I listened to Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Nope, one day I woke up, and there it was - I was part of Generation X.

I do try to look at the bright side of things, however. "Generation X", as a title, sucks less than a lot of other generational titles. "Baby Boomer" is something my son does to his diaper that makes me leave the room. "Generation Y" is just a derivative of "Generation X", and sounds not nearly as cool. And seriously, "Millennials"? What is that, something you plant and hope it comes up nice in 1000 &$%#ing years?

So there you go. I guess all in all, it's not so bad being pinned with the label Generation X. There are a lot worse labels a person can be pinned with, like "pundit" or "lawyer" or "Jack Thomson".

Ooh, that last one gave me a chill.

My $.02: Book Review - The Caves of Steel

Recently, I joined a message board of like minded people who I felt reflected many of my interests (read as "geeks"). In entering a conversation one day, I had my geek credentials questioned, resulting in a pop quiz on Asimov's three laws of robotics. Having read I, Robot many years ago, I had quite forgotten these, and had my geek card taken from me. It's hard to express the shame and suffering this caused, but a kind soul recommended I read The Caves of Steel in an effort to better educate myself.

The Caves of Steel is Asimov's first full-length novel revolving around the previous world he had created in the short stories of I, Robot. While the story takes place in the far future, when man has inhabited several other worlds and intelligent robots are seemingly everywhere, it's really a simple murder mystery. Apparently, Asimov didn't really care for science fiction being seen as a genre, rather viewing it as a flavor that could be applied to other genres. Thus, we get The Caves of Steel.

The story is pretty straight forward. People who have moved off of Earth are separated from those who have remained both in distance and life views. Spacers, as those that live their lives on other planets are called on Earth, believe in strict population control, and rely completely on their robots for survival. People on Earth lives in great enclosed cities (the titular caves of steel) where they eek out a life consisting of strict rules about when you eat, what you eat, where you live, how you travel, etc., and resent any robot presence as a threat to their livelihood, as the robots take jobs away from humans.

Naturally, there is much tension between the Spacers and those who have remained behind, tension that is held tenuously in place by the fact that Spacer technology is advanced to the point where they could pretty much wipe out their terrestrial counterparts without too much effort. As such, the murder of a prominent Spacer within their Earth embassy causes much tension for those who have been assigned to solve said murder, a problem exasperated by the fact that the officer assigned the task is also assigned a Spacer partner in the form of a robot that looks just like the victim. Despite the obvious sitcom potential here, hilarity does not ensue.

Interestingly, this really doesn't read like a science fiction book. It took me a little bit to get into it, but once I did, it sort of blew by. The story was engaging, and the twists were well done and logical. Really, it was overall a good mystery story, and this is coming from someone who doesn't particularly like mysteries. I was especially impressed that when everything came out at the end, I realized that had I wanted to, it was something I could have inferred from the facts given. One of the reasons I stopped reading mysteries was that after reading most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, I got sick of feeling like there was always a clue left out, that no matter how closely I had been paying attention, I could not have guessed the outcome. There was none of that here, and it made it all the more enjoyable.

So there you go. This one definitely doesn't fall into my books-that-make-me-think-too-hard string that I've been running lately, but I enjoyed it all the more for that. Sometimes, I just need a good story.

*Clears throat*
Now then:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

There. Can I have my card back now?

Lucky Thirteen

Today is the the thirteenth anniversary of the day my lovely wife and I got married. For years I relied on the good people at Hallmark to put into words what I needed to tell her, telling myself that it wasn't that I was lazy, it was that they put it better than I could. Maybe at the time, that was an accurate statement. These days all the cards feel, I don't know, fake. Inaccurate maybe. At the very least, there's something insufficient about handing my wife a card that some other guy has handed his wife.

The thing is, it's still difficult to explain how much my marriage means to me. In the past thirteen years, I've become a different person, or at least that's how I perceive myself anyway. When I can make myself, I can sit down and look at every bad habit I came into this marriage with, and look through the years as she helped me diminish each one of them. I can look at every strength I have, and track the ways she encouraged me to develop those strengths. She'll tell you that this is the person I've always been, that she knew that thirteen years ago. I'm not sure I'll ever be convinced of that, but in every way I'm a better man for having her in my life.

Every day, my wife in some way makes my life a better place to be than it ever could be without her. Every day she helps me to become a better person. I'm sure that in another thirteen years, or another thirty, I'll feel the same way.

I love you sweetie. Happy anniversary.

What Does Wonder Woman Say About You?

The wonders of the sleeping mind fascinate me completely. What goes on when we sleep is such an odd process, and while I'm always interested in the debate of whether our mind is just wandering when it creates those bizarre visions it presents us, or if it's attempting to update some sort of internal filing system to make sense of the past day's events, the results are always interesting. Perhaps my favorite part, though, is in those moments just before we completely give ourselves to Lord Morpheous' embrace, instead slipping between wakefulness and dream. It was in this moment, I suppose, when the following bit of advice was given to me:

"That's easy. You just need to ask them who their favorite superhero is."

These were the words spoken to me by my lovely wife Saturday night as I lay there waiting to sleep. They were said with the complete conviction of someone who has seen the light and determined the best course of action. They were clearly not words to be taken lightly.

The only problem was that I didn't know what the *$&% she was talking about.

So, being me, I asked, and this is where things get wonderfully weird. See, she remembered saying it, but could not for the life of her figure out why. So by the time I asked, mere milliseconds, her mind had already done away with the process that had led up the statement. We have no idea where that came from.

So now I keep asking myself what possible problem, what ponderous question led to such a solution. Was it about someone's moral character (are you a Superman or a Wolverine)? Did it have to do with determining potential (I'm guessing Aquaman fans don't expect much of themselves), or maybe social tendencies (Ooh, Batman huh? Not good.)? Maybe it would help if you were buying someone tights and needed to know what color to pick.

Dammit, what does it mean?

But Where's The Intrigue?

So last night I attended my first ever home owner's association meeting. There were discussions of management groups, budget reviews, considerations on topics such as entryway landscaping, etc. Honestly, it was more interesting than it sounds, but only because I had never seen one before.

I will say however, that it was almost painfully normal. My occasional viewing of Desperate Housewives, which I mostly watch because my lovely wife enjoys it, has led me to believe that there would be a seedy underbelly to the whole scene that someone as perceptive (or imaginative) as myself would spot in an instant. I don't mean something blatant - I wasn't expecting a gun fight to break out. I was thinking that there would be some sort of seepage though, like a hidden wound bleeding through a shirt, that would present itself as a point of interest.

Instead, it was a bunch of normal people discussing business stuff. What really got to me was the idea that maybe this is how everything works. I mean, if I were to attend the village meeting next week, it would be just like that, but with more people. Little political plays, but really nothing more than people concerned with property values and who has to shovel snow. Worse yet, what if the actual government works this way? Like, it's just a bunch of people sitting around talking about stuff, and each level it's just stuff that affects more people.

Okay, I know what you're saying right now - "Well, duh.". But come on, you can't tell me that some part of you doesn't secretly wonder what's really going on. I mean, it can't all just be people sitting around and discussing things. Obviously, at some point corruption enters the system, and we get that seedy underbelly I was alluding to earlier. (Which is a really weird expression now that I've said it twice - isn't a burger bun technically "seedy"? Is there something wrong with that?)

I digress. I guess the point I was trying to make is that our media is, as usual, misleading me into believing that there is a lot more going on here than there really is. I mean, between the television dramas and the news only covering scandal, you get to thinking that this stuff is everywhere (not unlike my use of italics today - hmm). Instead, I just find a bunch of seemingly decent people wanting to make sure that their kids (and subsequently, mine) aren't hit by cars or stray paint balls. Hardly the stuff of a saucy nighttime soap opera, no?

Well, I'll keep my eyes peeled for untoward going on around the neighborhood and keep you posted. So far, the only thing I've heard about is a creepy, long-haired guy who seems nice enough but sort of watches everybody like he's looking for something.

Here's hoping I don't run into that freak.

I Shudder to Think of the Potential Flinging Abilities

I'm crazy busy, so for today, read this and stop to consider how best to serve our new cyborg monkey overlords.

Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own

Probably Can't Be Used For Coconut Transportation Either

So, in desperation we were watching the special features of Six Feet Under last night (I didn't feel like driving out to get the next disc), which basically consisted of a short making-of about the show's title sequence. If you've never seen the show, you should - get thee to a video store promptly. It's brilliant in a way I've never seen before, and while the feature was definitely DVD filler (there's a reason special features almost never interest me beyond the gag reel), the titles are really well done and deserved a little attention.

Anyway, in the process of listening to the commentary, one of the people who put together the opening sequence mentioned trouble getting footage of a crow because it is illegal to film a crow for commercial purposes in the United States. I actually had to pause the DVD for a moment to confirm with my lovely wife that I had heard that statement correctly. She confirmed, and we continued.

Being me, I felt the need to find out what the *#$& this was all about, so I turned to my trusty web browser and fired up Google, and lo and behold, there it was. Due to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 you may not possess a migratory bird, including the common American crow. Because you can't possess one, you can't film one for commercial purposes, I suppose because it implies that someone owns the bird being filmed (well, that and the fact that migratory birds are notoriously bad about signing release forms).

I have to say I was much relieved to see that it applied to all migratory birds, because my first thought was that it was just about crows. I was trying to imagine the justification of not being allowed to film crows while a bald eagle could be used to shill tampons. Well, it isn't so, so you can all rest easy. (I should point out, however, the fact that bald eagles are incredibly absorbent and have been proven to reduce embarrassing odor. Just sayin'.)

Anyway, I thought that was an interesting little tidbit of information worth passing on. Of course this totally ruins the script I'm writing about a downy woodpecker who plays by his own rules having to parter up with a straight laced turkey vulture to uncover the facts surrounding the mysterious death of a local cliff swallow. Oh well, perhaps it could be an animated feature.

Does anyone have Pixar's number?

Ice Cream Antisocial

Once again, this weekend I found myself at another gathering that revolved around food, the first of two this week. I won't go into the gory details, but it could have gone better. I know that it's a human trait that every single culture has all of these traditions built around food, but honestly, sometimes it makes my life a tremendous pain in the neck.

I understand that the intentions are always good. Seriously, a neighborhood ice cream social sounds great. Come on out, make a sundae in the park, meet your neighbors, etc. For most people, this is an excellent opportunity. However, our decision not to eat like everyone else turns into a bit of punishment here.

It's kind of a funny thing actually. Of all the ways you can divert yourself from a culture, food choices are surprisingly painful. Most of the ways people differ from those around them are internal - beliefs that wouldn't come out until you had gotten to know someone better. The decision not to eat meat or dairy, however, puts me in a special, awkward place, because as soon as I arrive, I can't participate normally. I have to either not eat at all, which at a social eating event stands out a little, or I have to find a way to being substitute foods with me, which I still haven't figured out how to do discreetly.

I suppose the real issue is that I'm already socially awkward at these things. I'm extremely self-conscious around people I don't know. Honestly, I have no idea why, but I am. The fact that I'm at a party explicitly built around food that I have chosen not to partake of amplifies this tremendously. I'm self-conscious, and then I'm drawing attention to myself because I'm choosing not to engage in the same behavior as everyone else. Silly to be sure, but the mere knowing that an emotion is ridiculous rarely allows us to change it.

Anyway, now I'm concerned that my social awkwardness, which I would otherwise write off as acceptable, could be affecting the kids and how they interact with people. So now it's something else I have to fix about myself. Fortunately, I have until Thursday, when we attend the home owner's association pizza party. I'm sure I will have come up with something by then. I'll start working on conversation starters if nothing else.

So, who else here likes pants?

But It's For the Family...I Think

We've established on several occasions that I'm a geek of many flavors, a moniker I wear proudly. I'm a computer geek. (Hell, I'm a programmer. What choice do I have?) I'm a video game geek. I teeter even on science fiction geekhood, reading Asimov and Heinlein joyfully, but never quite tipping over the brink (examples: I still can't name Asimov's three laws of robotics or tell you how many parsecs the Millennium Falcon can do the Kessler Run in).

One area I have managed to dodge, however, is gadget geek. I'm not one of those people who sees the newest things and drools longingly over it. I have a real old cell phone for example. It does one thing - it makes phone calls. I can't browse the internet. I can't take pictures. When it rings, it sounds like a cell phone ringing, not the latest rap hit. I'm actually okay with all of this, particularly the last bit, since I find it a little disconcerting that a cell phone ringing these days makes it seem like we all have discotheques in our pants (as opposed to just me).

Lately though, the lure of the toy side has been strong. Not because I'm weakening - I'm a rock, still unmoved by high definition televisions (I mostly watch Lost, and no offense meant, but I don't really need to see Hurley any better than I do now) or the latest gaming systems. No, it's because for the first time, one of these things actually seem useful.

The problem is that there is a particular object that I'm repeatedly tempted by, and I'm having more and more trouble differentiating it's usefulness from it's gee-whiz factor. See, now that one of the kids is in school, my calendar is constantly shifting. My lovely wife and I starting utilizing Google Calendars to manage it all, and now we're up to four calendars, one for each of us, one for school events, and one for home maintenance tasks. This is working out fairly well, but if I'm not at a computer, I don't see this stuff.

The other day, someone put a classified ad on our message board at work for a new iPod Touch, a gadget that, like most, I've mostly ignored for the last year. I clicked the supplied link to Apple (much like the one above) and, in reading, I realized that the Touch has wi-fi access I could use anywhere that wi-fi is available, which includes most places I go and my entire house. Using that wi-fi, I would have access to my email and calendar nearly everywhere I was, allowing me to manage our schedules whenever they needed to be updated instead of having to actually remember things until I got back to my computer or write them on my hand (a habit that both the Princess and my lovely wife have now admonished me for).

Oh sure, it's also an iPod. I mean, I guess it would hold 8 gigabytes of music and pictures or whatever, and that I could easily fit my entire Jonathan Coulton and MC Frontalot collections. But my real concern is the time management. That other stuff is just gravy, right? Right?.

So there it is. For all my good intentions, I now have gadget jones, an indescribable need for a thing. I just can't figure out if I want it so badly because I think it will truly help me manage things (which I really, really do), or if it's just shiny. Seriously, I haven't had a desire for the possession of an inanimate object since receiving my NES as a youth.

Do any of you have any experience with this sort of thing? Am I succumbing to the Apple cult? Does anyone make a patch or something?

My $.02: Book Review - Breakfast of Champions

For those of you who haven't had the chance to read a book by Kurt Vonnegut, let me tell you that it's an experience. Reading Vonnegut is like hanging out with an uncle. He's going to tell you jokes that your parent's don't want you to hear. He's going to tell you stories that scare you a little bit, but are so entertaining that you can't help but listen. Most of all, he's going to point out things about our world that others would be uncomfortable bringing up, because to him, it's his duty.

Now I've been through Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle, as well as most of his short stories, and they were all entertaining, but none carried the brutal honesty of Breakfast of Champions. What we have here is a story about two men. One is an ignored writer of science fiction. The other is a successful car dealer. The car dealer is losing his mind. The writer will inadvertently help him do so. This is, in a nutshell, what the book is about.

Having made the previous statement, let me assure you that the book is hardly about just that. Instead, the book is about all the people that these two interact with. It's about the places they live. It's about history. It's about racism and fetishism and money and pollution and humanity. It's about a whole lot of things, and every one is approached with this amazing, matter-of-fact tone that stresses the fact that he didn't discover these things, he's just pointing them out for those of us to busy to look for ourselves.

I'm really not sure how much more I can say about this one other than to tell you that you should read it. Having done so myself, I will definitely start pouring through the other books he's written that I've missed. Well, at least after I read some more Asimov to make up some lost geek cred points on a certain message board.

Let me tell you, the geek crowd can be an unforgiving group.

Pirates and Princesses in 2016

So, last night the Princess and I were discussing what our platforms would be should we be running for President. Of course I went with the usual "monkeys for everyone" promise, but her ideas were much more creative. As such, we have decided to start campaigning now to build up momentum for when I'm actually old enough to run for President.

Having already covered the whole monkey thing, our next campaign promise is to push legislature that will require all stores, regardless of purpose, to provide complimentary frozen treats (think of the colored tubes you buy in a case and then freeze when you get home) with each purchase. Buying a new pair of shoes? Have a frozen treat. Need a notebook for school? Have a frozen treat.

I know what you're thinking: won't this be an unfair burden on the shopkeepers? Well, there will be the initial investment of putting in a freezer, but the treats themselves will be provided by the government. This is a relatively minor cost when you consider the fact that the average frozen treat of this variety is nothing but sugar, water, and flavoring. So, we add to the economy in two ways. First, there will now be government jobs relating to the frozen treat industry. Second, people will spend more money. Seriously, they will. They'll be thinking about putting off some purchase, but then the lure of a delicious frozen treat will drive them to commit to that purchase.

Do not underestimate the power of a frozen treat. Especially lime.

I know my opponents will claim that this will undermine the existing frozen treat industry, but that just isn't so. People will continue to purchase them for home consumption, and designer treats such as those made by the actual Popsicle company will continue to fulfill the needs of those who have more elaborate tastes when it comes to iced snacks on a stick (say that five times fast). What's more, there will be the added benefit of immediate satisfaction, since a person who goes to the store to buy frozen treats will receive an already frozen treat with their purchase, alleviating the frustration of having to wait for the box of treats to freeze when you want one right away.

This is just the beginning, people. I'm sure that in the next eight years, our candidacy will become a thing of greatness. Of course I'll have to find a suitable running mate, as the Princess will be like thirteen at that point, but she'll make a fine cabinet member.

What do you think of "Secretary of Really Good Ideas"?

**UPDATE**
The princess informed me that the sleeve type frozen treats are not good enough, and that what we need is the standard frozen treat on a stick. You don't mess with a really good idea.

I'm Sorry, Did You Want To Say Something?

So, I'm a voter, which should not be worth mentioning having previously discussed the fact that I'm an American, but sadly this is not the case. This used to be something that the press lamented, admonishing all of us for not going out and voicing our opinions, however ill informed those opinions may be. It would seem, however, that not only the press, but many people within the government have decided that they no longer want to hear our opinions. In short, they want to put a stop to our infernal meddling with the matters of who leads this country.

I am, of course, referring to the long running contest for the Democratic nomination for our next President. I don't associate myself with any party, but I do tend to vote Democrat. I don't always agree with a lot of their positions (both have voiced opinions supporting governmental involvement in censoring video games for example, which is a big red flag of ignorance in my book for a lot of reasons), but until we get people to actively seek out what each of these people believe in, allowing for more than two parties to realistically run for office, I can see where we will continue our binary voting system. What's more, I don't at the moment have a vested interest in which of the two gets the nomination. I think both of the candidates show a great deal of promise, and no matter which goes forward with the nomination, it will be an important historical moment for our country.

What is of key importance here is that it should be our decision. That's right, Joe six pack, you should be mad as hell right this minute. See, many people on the news and within the Democratic party itself are singing the same song: Senator Clinton needs to drop out so we can move on with this (sorry, but she and I don't know each other so I'm not going with the whole first-name thing). They say that the extended contest is hurting the Democratic chances in the Fall. They say that it's dividing Democrats and causing a split in the party that won't be easily mended. They're saying a lot of things.

What they're not saying (out loud anyway) is this: we don't want to hear from any more voters. We wanted the entire thing to be decided by Super Tuesday (February 5th this year) so we could all talk about other things like John McCain being old and being drinking buddies with George W. So if we could just decide that we're all done with this, and the rest of you remaining states can go ahead and vote (or not - whatever), that would be great.

I remember way back in December, when my home state of Michigan was being told that it would lose all of its now important delegates for moving our vote up to January 15th, there were people being interviewed in Iowa talking about how it made sense that Iowa should be the most important state to vote because they took the responsibility more seriously and did their research. It was a refreshing change of pace, because usually I have to actually meet someone to decide that they he or she is a pompous ass. They highlighted the problem though, pointing out that people expected it to be over long before any of us lesser states could put down out remote controls and PBRs long enough to voice our opinions.

So if all you nice people saying these things could just show a little patience, sit down, and shut the $%&* up, there's only a few weeks left before this is officially over. Let Senator Clinton and Senator Obama actually talk about things in public. Let every *$&%ing person who wants the opportunity go out and vote for the candidate that they believe will serve their party best. Just for fun, pretend you actually care about our opinions. Pretend you care about this country being a democracy, at least in public.

On a brighter note, I promise that this will all be so much easier when I take over as Supreme Emperor of Everything. Remember kids, monkeys for everyone!

For True Art, Look to Your Elder

Last week we lost Will Elder, comic artist and one of the original contributers to Mad magazine. For the kids in the audience, Mad, before it was a television sketch comedy, was a very funny satiric magazine a long time ago. Okay, they actually still make Mad magazine, but I gave up on over a decade ago, in part because of Mr. Elder.

Now, if you try hard enough, you can find compilations of the old Mad spoofs penned by Elder, and his were always my favorite by a mile. Not only could he do a perfect caricature, but he was responsible for my favorite parts of the comics, which was the over-the-top content in the background, which he referred to as "chicken fat". You could read through the actual comic storyline in about ten minutes, and then spend twenty more looking at all the jokes he had slipped into the background.

Here's an example of one of his pages. Click the image to get the full size so you can see everything that's going on here:





Seriously, every single panel was full of this. As the action got underway, it wasn't as much, but almost every single panel had at least one bonus joke in there somewhere. It was amazing.

I discovered these in old Mad magazines my father had kept around. As time went on, I occasionally would pick up a current issue, but it could never live up to my expectations. I don't really blame the new artists, and I'm sure that some of it is probably funny, but after seeing something from a master, it's hard to appreciate anything less. So go out and try to find them, and failing that, do the digital thing and get them on the computer. For Elder's work alone, it would be money well spent.

You Dipped It In What Now?

Let us discuss one of the many joys of being a vegetarian. See, when you go all veggie like, you have to start paying attention to everything that's in your foods, so you start reading ingredient labels. Then you realize that you don't what half that crap is that they list as ingredients, so you start finding out where it comes from.

That's where the real fun begins.

Take, for example, marshmallows. What could possibly be more non-threatening than a marshmallow, a little pillow of sugary goodness, bringing up fond memories of campfires, hot chocolate, or little, brightly colored Easter chicks. But then you read the ingredients, and see gelatin. For the average uninformed consumer, no big, because that's just an ingredient in numerous delicious desert type dishes.

Ah, but under that innocent exterior lies a dark secret, for the production of gelatin actually involves extracting the connective tissue of deceased animals. To quote WikiPedia, "Gelatin is a protein produced by partial hydrolysis of collagen extracted from the bones, connective tissues, organs, and some intestines of animals such as the domesticated cattle, and horses.". Um...ewww. So now when I see a marshmallow, all I can see is this huge witch's cauldron filled with churning bones and intestines. Let me tell you, it sucks the fun right out of s'mores.



Okay, so that's nasty, but I can get over it because it's essentially the same as eating meat. Not everything is so simple though. See, I'm not a vegan, so I don't protest things like eating honey. Sure, it's a little weird, but we're all used to it, right?

One day I'm reading the ingredients of a nut mix that has candy coated chocolate pieces, and one of the ingredients was shellac. Now, I found myself a little thrown by finding a product I normally associate with picture frames and paint primer in my food, but I figure the good old FDA must have looked into it and found it acceptable. Plus, it was a failure on the part of the candy company's marketing department, since it is commonly called confectioner's glaze, which sound a lot more food like in my opinion. Nonetheless, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out where it came from. Stupid curiosity.

Turns out that shellac is made from lac, and that lac is a secretion of lac producing insects. So, in essence, my candy was covered in bug juice (along with a certain number of bugs that got caught up in the collection process). Again, for those that continue eating meat and dairy product, obviously consuming the bodily fluids of another species isn't something you find bothersome (although I've noticed that when I refer to milk as 'bodily fluids' around them, they do find that bothersome - go figure). For those of us that have moved away from that, this is, again, unsettling.

Honestly, there are times that I long for the good old days, the days where I would order a plate of nachos without even looking at what came on it, or would not hesitate to eat a shrink wrapped meat stick from a convenience store. Those were the flighty, innocent days of my youth, and yes, occasionally I miss them.

I do not, however, miss my size 48 pants.

Happy Birthday - Now Beat It

The scene: a local church in the town where I went to high school.

The event: the annual Holiday performance by the high school choir.

The choir stood in front of the usual suspects: the elderly looking for something local to do, regular church attendees, parents there to see their offspring perform (as I recall, this was one of the many events where I was asked if I really wanted them to go, which was an attempt at a polite way of saying "Do I have to?", which, as usual, I said no to). I was wearing whatever idiot costume the smaller, elite choir had chosen that year - I don't recall specifics, but I'm reasonably sure that a shiny blue vest and bow tie were involved. I was packed in the middle with the other six guys in the choir of sixty.

The choir was restless. During a break for applause, I leaned forward and launch the first offensive. To no one in particular, I said, "What do you get when you cross Lassie and a pit bull? A dog that will chew your leg off and then run for help.". The effect was not instantaneous, but rather moved across the group in waves. The choir, already getting dirty looks from our director for idle chatter and shifting, began a ripple of giggles, moving outward like a pool of water that has had a stone dropped into it. The more fierce the dirty looks became, the worse the giggles got. Clearly, I had started something I hadn't anticipated.

As we were in a church, administering beatings was out, so all the choir director could do was move on with the next song. She showed us a piece of music, raised her hands, and we began the next song, doing our best not to giggle while we did so. As we proceeded through the song, the giddiness began to die out out, and we became the well oiled, off key machine that was expected.

Then he appeared.

At the back of the church, the double doors opening to the lobby framed a lone figure, wearing the same sartorial nightmare that I was. He moved across the doorway, scoping out the crowd. He made eye contact with several of us currently standing at the front of the group, and those of us who knew better could tell that we were in trouble.

And then he began to dance.

Those of my younger readers may not be familiar with the works of Michael Jackson in the eighties and early nineties, but the people of that choir knew too well what we were seeing. There was moonwalking. There were legs kicked in the air. There were even, and I cannot emphasize enough the effect of this on our fragile teenage minds as we plowed our way through some inane Christmas carol, crotch grabs. In short, it was magnificent.

Of course we were in ruins within moments. The choir director's face reddened until she resembled a larger species of the holly berries that lined the pews. As these things so often go, a concerned citizen happened to turn around during one of the more explicit portions of the impromptu choreography that was going on and felt the need to report it. Nonetheless, for those of us on the stage, another dreaded holiday concert had become something more, something magical that would stay with us long after the last, terribly flat notes had died out.

So here's to you Troy, a man who wasn't afraid to risk yet another trip to the principles office (I'm pretty sure he had his own chair at that point) in the name of spreading a little holiday cheer. The brave men and women who stood before that bored, probably-wishing-they-were-somewhere-else audience will never forget you.

The Eyes Have It

As you all know, I'm invincible. When I say that, you should keep in mind what it means, or more specifically what it doesn't mean. You see, my invincibility (wow that word has a lot of 'i's in it) is a physical trait. Like any superhero like figure, I have my weaknesses.

No, I'm not referring to doughnuts, which is apparently a common misconception (the Princess once, when trying to explain why I hadn't done something, actually spoke the words "he was probably distracted thinking about doughnuts"). My weakness is a pair of brown eyes that have been manipulating me for over twenty years now. For reasons I can not entirely explain, I seem to have no resolve when faced with these particular orbs. I don't know if it's the heavy lids or the deep chocolate color that lulls me into complacency. I think it's something more though, for simple physical characteristics cannot explain the thrall that I am held in when faced with them.

I don't think of myself as being a docile henchman to my love's demands (and if any of you do, my ego would appreciate you keeping it to your damned selves). Sometimes a favor is asked, but I'm tired or distracted or just don't feel up to it. So long as my attention remains elsewhere, I'm safe. But should I find myself actually looking into those eyes as the favor is asked, minutes later I'm administering a foot rub or retrieving a blanket. Sometimes I don't even remember how I got there. I'm telling you, the woman has some kind of feminine hoodoo working that I'm powerless against.

In all seriousness, it stuck me today that I could not tell you if my wife has actually aged in the last twenty years. I can, with perfect clarity, bring up images of every crease that has become a part of my own visage in the past two decades, but draw a blank when I try to do the same for my love. One would assume that some variety of aging has occurred, but I have her senior picture here on my desk, one of the few photographs that do her beautiful eyes justice (as someone who isn't fond of having her picture taken, the smile may be there, but her eyes don't necessarily match it), and when I look at it, I see the same big, brown eyes I saw when I left for work this morning.

Cicero said "The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter" (well, he said something like that - when he said it was all Roman and stuff and thus harder to understand). When I look into her eyes, I see so much energy, so much intellect, such humanity that sometimes it startles me. Her eyes can convey so much about how she feels, whether she's playful or proud or tired or hurting, and always with such grace and beauty.

So there it is, my overwhelming weakness. Fortunately, she has thus far used her powers for good - I shudder to think what might happen if that were to change. I can't honestly call it a debilitating weakness though. Besides, I guarantee that I'll be looking into them the first chance I get.

Free will is so overrated anyway.

As I Recall, Smoking and Drinking Were Not Among the Habits

So, I'm back into a book I started a while ago, but gave up on, which was kind of a funny thing. Seems like when you're reading a self-help book, and a big part of the book is changing your outlook on life, getting laid off can be a bit of a deterrent to continuing the process. Oh well, it only took a couple of years to get back to, right?

So, in addition to whatever it says that I'm currently reading to the left, I'm back into The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I started this one a while ago, and I like the basic premise of it, which is that changing the way you interact with people and whatnot is great and all, but if you really want to have control and influence over your life, you have to first figure out what your perceptions of the world are, since that's really what determines how you react to things.

Like most self help things I've read, this simultaneously falls under the categories of "duh" and "why didn't I think of that?". I mean, it's not exactly a stretch that if my perception of the world is that everyone is a mindless robot but me (with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut), then that world view will influence how I react to things. But in my day to day life, I forget that all the time.

It actually reminds me of one of the more enjoyable musings of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, where he was pondering the classic philosophical question: What if this is all for my benefit? What if I'm the linchpin of the universe, and existence is exactly what I perceive, no more or less. Or, as he put it, "Does light even EXIST when the refrigerator door is shut?".

It is, of course, like most philosophy that I enjoy so much, a stupid question. Of course the world exists beyond what I perceive of it - this isn't the matrix. If it were, I would hope I was in better shape and have a cool, full length vinyl coat. Oh, and I would totally know kung-fu.

How often do we forget that though? Have you ever seen someone on the street, someone you've never even spoken to, and as you drive away tried to conceive of their life, a life that, for you, existed in exactly that moment, and no longer. Seriously, where are they going? Where do they live, and do they live alone? What does their living room look like? You'll probably never know, and yet there are answers for all of these. Frankly, it makes my head hurt a little.

So anyway, I'm starting over again. I'm only on introductory material at this point, so while I get caught up I'll try to post something amusing in between. That way you might still come here and read this, if only under the false hope that I'm running something you wanted to read and not this self-improvement based drivel.

While you wait, however, I give you Indexed, an amusing site that falls somewhere between math and life.

I Blame Romeo and Juliet. I Hate That &$*%ing Play.

So this weekend we managed to actually rent and at least partially enjoy a couple of movies: Charlie Wilson's War, which was really good, and The Savages, which was okay but I think I missed some layer of. Heady with our success, I hurried back to the video store to attempt another round. Unfortunately, not only did I fail miserably on the one we tried to watch last night, it actually led to a evening of unrest.

See, I rented The Fountain because it looked interesting and it was supposed to be romantic. Apparently, the writers of the film think that a man creating an elaborate fantasy to deal with the death of his wife is romantic. Perhaps I read the box wrong, but suggesting to your wife that a film is supposed to be romantic, and then having the movie deal pretty much with the fact that the guys wife is dying, well, it just doesn't go over as well as one might hope.

Worse than the failed romantic nature of the movie, however, was that the movie led to a moment of exquisite pain for me, a moment that reminded me that my entire system needs to be reformatted and programmed from scratch. My lovely wife looked at me and, referring to the main character of the movie who was a researcher trying to find a cure for his wife's terminal illness, playfully asked if I would do whatever it took to save her if we were in the same situation.

Now, for anyone who is even vaguely aware of how things work between men and women know that this was a total freebie. This isn't a girlfriend test, where we're seeing if the boyfriend knows how to answer certain questions to please his lady (a nasty form of communication that my love has never participated in as far as I know). No, this was a simple serve, and required nothing but a simple volley back.

Unfortunately, my wiring is sufficiently faulty to make even this simple exchange an experience in awkward failure. See, when she asked, my brain did two things simultaneously. First, it processed the word "duh", which, while technically correct, did not seem a proper response to such a weighty question, even when said question is asked in a playful manner. While my brain searched for the proper response, it started opening incorrect files, where it came across this, a random comic that matched the situation closely enough for my mind to momentarily veer off in that direction. Realizing that this was a dead end, I realized that I hadn't responded to the question, causing a semi-panicked response to what must have seemed like hesitation to such a simple and obvious question.

"Sure."

So, now I'm watching a not exactly romantic movie about a guy who is trying desperately to save his wife, and I've just responded to my wife with all the passion one reserves for such weighty questions as "Hey, you feel like some nachos?". Ugh. Not long after, we decide that it's time for bed, and that we would finish the movie later, but all I could think of is this Q & A. What an utter and total failure.

Of all the jobs I have, what could be more important than letting the people I love know how important they are to me? At what point did I lose the ability to convey this message without assistance from card makers and flower shops? For that matter, why is it I haven't bought anyone a card or flowers? For a long time, I haven't been anywhere near the person I want to be, and it's my family that suffers for it.

So I woke up this morning after a lousy night's sleep pondering all of this, and I remembered that I needed reprogramming. Unfortunately for me, I cannot perform the aforementioned formatting, wiping my hard drive and putting back only the things that matter. So I have to find another way, and I'm not sure what that's going to be. As a result, this blog might not be the jovial place you're used to for a while. I'll try to put a link to something that's more fun in an effort to make it up to you. For today, the link above will have to do.

Maybe We Should Take Up Role Playing Games

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point I just stopped caring about most movies. I know when I stopped watching action movies - I worked at a video store, and after renting nearly every action movie made I realized that they were all the same and all nonsense. But when did I stop caring about all the other movies? I'm supposed to be an American, and thus enjoy mindless entertainment, but lately I just can't make myself do it.

Maybe I'm just getting pickier. I loved Juno. It was a movie that was so good it actually made me happy to have seen it. Previous to that, Little Miss Sunshine had a similar effect. But there was a long string of "meh"-worthy films in between. Micheal Clayton barely interested me. The last Pirates of the Carribean movie just sort of overwhelmed and confused me, and I didn't even have rum for that one (which in all fairness might have been the problem). I can't even make myself rent Transformers, and I *&$%ing loved those things as a kid.

Instead, I wander the video store aimlessly, looking at cover after cover, each one eliciting from me all of the excitement of George Micheal at a Hooters (or not - for all I know, he really digs hot wings). Eventually I turn to my only potential respite lately, which is the television shows on DVD. Maybe I just need a longer story line to hold my interest, or maybe the writers for television have gotten a lot better. Either way, it seems I'm more likely to enjoy a television series these days.

One major problem is that I don't look at older movies because the selection is overwhelming. If you can't tell from my reviews, I don't concern myself with reading the newest books or playing the latest games (it takes a lot longer to finish the games, but I'll review those too), but that's because those are arenas where I've acquired a certain expertise. I know which authors I like and which one's to avoid. Similarly, I know what I like in games, and which reviewers to trust.

The other major problem is that the genres of popcorn movies that I do enjoy, horror and science fiction, are plagued with awfulness. Not the kind of enjoyable, campy awfulness that one could hope for either (dammit Sam Raimi, come back to us). No, we're talking Jar Jar Binks awful - the kind where they were shooting for something really great and take themselves way too seriously. Ugh.

Despite all of this, this afternoon, when they release us early in the name of a product release (I hope), I will trek out the local video store and make another attempt to find something for me and my lovely wife to amuse ourselves with this evening. Hopefully, I'll have better luck than the last few trips. I may even go to the big store in the big town, as they have more television shows to choose from. It's either that, or I have to try and convince my lovely wife of the benefits of the zombie sub-genre, if for no other purpose than training and preparation.

Seriously people, you can't be too ready for the zombie apocalypse.

My $.02: Book Review - Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut

As we discussed yesterday, I like to partake of the occasional comic book. Actually, that's not quite true. Similar to my television habits, I like to partake of comic collections, where an entire series or story arc is put together in book form, allowing the reader to enjoy it from beginning to end. Also, they're easier to take care of, and you don't need those geeky plastic sleeves - I'm far more interested in literary value than monetary.

Enter Johnny the Homicidal Maniac(JTHM) by Jhonen Vasquez. This is a seemingly simple piece of black comedy that follows a young goth kid around as he ponders existence, critiques society, senselessly tortures and murders hundreds of people, and terrorizes the neighbor kid (although I'm not entirely sure he means to). I tend to have a dark sense of humor, so naturally this seemed like something I would enjoy. Happily, I was right.

One of the strange things about these comic collections is that, at least in the ones produced by talented people, you get to see the artists grow. A prime example of this was The Sandman, where the earliest collections look and read like smart comic books. By the time the series ended, ten collections later, what I was reading struck me as important as any other literary work I had read in the past.

So it was with JTHM. The early comics, often consisting of only a page or two, are amusing, but they are also rough. There is little in the way of story arc or continuity (which is often played with intentionally, such as the pictures and text on Johnny's shirts which change from panel to panel), and the art, while edgy and interesting, is sparse and clean. As the series progresses, we meet more characters, most of whom are (or should be) inanimate objects in Johnny's house, and larger story lines begin to emerge. The art becomes more full as well, with the backgrounds filling with various bits of humor. It actually reminded me of the old Mad magazines, where each panel was good for two or three gags.

I should point out that the comics are occasionally broken up by other, somewhat unrelated comics. Some are mocking public service announcements, and those, while disturbing, are at least amusing. Unfortunately, there are also a fair number of Happy Noodle Boy comics. These revolve around a stick figure who yells nonsense at pedestrians until he is invariably shot and killed at the end. The reason these are featured so heavily is because they are supposedly the work of Johnny himself. Unfortunately, I could not glean any further connection to the storyline (with the exception of Johnny mentioning that "Noodle Boy" was a childhood taunt referring to how skinny he was), and frankly just became annoyed with these. Luckily, they become more sparse as the series continued.

Despite these side features, I really ended up enjoying this series, and hope to find more in the future. The intermittent social commentary, broken up by random acts of humor and violence, make for a far more interesting read than I was expecting. I'm not sure if it's something I'll read again, but for those that enjoy dark humor, it's definitely worth giving a chance.

Mommy, What's a Homicidal Maniac?

So, if you didn't figure out from yesterday's book review, I ran out of book again yesterday. This led me to the local library, where the old people, children and I gather to partake of a wide variety of textual treats, plus the occasional cd and dvd. Yesterday, I was needing something light, something not so intense as the proceeding readings (heh, it's all rhymey). So I wandered over to the comics/graphical novel section, in my town still found in "Youth", to grab something of a different flavor.

Unfortunately, I found just what I was looking for. This is unfortunate because I wasn't looking for a "Youth" type book. See, I'm not a big super hero fan. Don't get me wrong, I liked the first two X Men movies, and similarly found the Spiderman films to be okay (although let's face it, Bruce Campbell is carrying that series). When it comes to comics, thought, that's not my bag. I read comics for grown people. Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. MAUS. Y: The Last Man. These are comics, yes, but they deal with adult themes and adult issues. Sure, that probably means that there is a sex and violence aspect to them, but that hardly defines them as a genre.

As such, I was practically giddy when, next to MAUS II, I found Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: The Director's Cut, a comic I've heard of but not actually seen. Then I realized that next to MAUS II, I just found Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: The Director's Cut in the "Youth" section. I tend to not be a prude or anything, but these are not youth books. I alerted the librarian, who showed great interest at the prospect of a holocaust book and the tale of a serial killer/mass murderer/social critic being being where the books for young people go, and said she'd bring it to the attention of the authority on where books go (which is apparently someone's job).

So again we face the question: why am I telling you all of this? Well, I'm trying to educate you. See, comics carry the same stigma that video games do: they are a medium traditionally associated with kids. Unfortunately, this stigma has stuck thoroughly, so books that are important will escape notice of people who would appreciate them because those people might not even consider looking at a comic or graphical novel. Don't get me wrong - I don't think The Incredible Hulk will change anyone's life (I've actually never read a Hulk comic, so I could be wrong), but something like MAUS or the Sandman series can be powerful literature.

More to the point in this case, however, is that because these are being misplaced in the library, there is a risk of some kid who doesn't know better picking up JTHM and taking it home. I'm not worried about it warping their fragile little mind necessarily - I think most kids are a lot smarter, aware and resilient than we give them credit for. Still, I'd rather this sort of thing be sought out intentionally, when they're ready for it, rather than being stumbled upon. More importantly, I don't want some conservative busybody finding it and demanding that it be removed from the library because their precious little snowflake might have read it.

So there you go. Go to your local library. Find out where these books are. Ask if you have to. Read a few. And if some of them should be reshelved in an effort to protect the kids sensibilities and our right to access the material, let someone know.

I should start doing geek public service announcements.

My $.02: Book Review - Kiss Me, Judas

There is a genre of books I've never read - the hardboiled detective novel. Sure I've seen the movies, and understand that from the minds of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler spilled the gritty, dark and disturbing crime tales that would long be associated with the genre, and eventually the film style that partially stemmed from it, film noir. The films I'm familiar with though - the common threads of human violence and degradation woven around a core of mystery, typically being solved by a less that sympathetic protagonist.

Enter Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer, a book that wraps up the entire genre in a neat little package and leaves it on your doorstep, oozing. The book is about Phineas Poe, an ex cop who, upon being released from a mental institution, meets Jude, a lovely young lady, in a bar. After accepting money to join him up in his hotel room (for exactly the reasons one would think), Jude leaves him in a bathtub full of ice and missing a kidney.

Then things get weird.

This was another title from the LibraryThing Book Suggester, presumably because like House of Leaves or Wittgenstein's Mistress, there is an open question of how much of the action is occurring and how much is in the mind of the protagonist. Here, the narrator is pretty up front about his delusions, and he makes a real effort to distinguish when he's imagining something. Baer does a tremendous job of making you sympathize with Poe despite every decision of his being completely self destructive. He is so desperate to replace his painful past with something that feels like comfort that he repeatedly puts his life in the hands of the woman who starts the story by betraying him in a rather unpleasant way.

I have to say that I really enjoyed this book. I wouldn't recommend it for any of my more sensitive readers - the subject matter is dark, and the matter-of-fact way the narrator deals with murder, drug use, rape, etc. all just makes it a little more disturbing. Nonetheless, the story was brilliant, and I love the way that the ends that are allowed to hang loose seem to be that way for a reason. Just enough is explained to make it feel real. The fact is, when it ended, it felt right. It left me a little confused, a little disgusted, and a little ashamed for having enjoyed it as much as I did. Considering the genre, I'm not sure of a better recommendation.

Or Name It After Marty Feldman, Cause, You Know, He's Got the Eyes

Okay, I'm pretty busy today, so we're going to be brief. I know that traditionally, we name diseases after the doctor who discovered them. As someone who's still waiting for my blood test results, I would like to personally like to protest the name Graves' Disease, a thyroid condition that my family has a history of, the mention of which caused my doctor to perk up like he was a dog and I had just produced a hunk of beef jerky.

No offense to Dr Robert James Graves, whom it was named after, but seriously, in the name of bedside manner, could we come up with something a tad less morbid? You wouldn't tell someone that they have a "crypt condition", would you? Or perhaps show concern over "sarcophageal symptoms"? No, because it would freak people out. So let's do the right thing and move the credit over to Karl Adolph von Basedow like the Europeans have done. Basedow's Disease sounds like something you can beat.

The Important Thing is to Not Stop Questioning

So, I'm driving the kids to the Moose's care this morning, and the Princess hits me with "Who were the first people?". I started trying to explain that this was a tough question, because there were lots of people around before they started writing things down. As a result, we have to use fossils to try and learn about where people came from, which of course leads to a very brief and high level discussion of evolution. She followed along and continued asking questions too, like when did people start having babies, things like that. I fielded everything as best I could, and she seemed satisfied.

So, going from the Moose's care to her school, the Princess was warning me that writing on my hand to remember things was becoming a habit now, which surprised me, because it was both accurate and pointed out that she seems to correctly understand the meaning of acquiring a habit. I explained that I needed a way to remember these things, because otherwise I say I'll do something and then forget (possible slipping in a hint that a smart phone that I would absolutely never wash with my pants would help break said habit and allow me to keep track of things properly). I cited the example of a few days ago, when I promised to find out what happened to Pluto now that it wasn't a planet anymore. I didn't remember that for a few days, and just yesterday discovered that it was downgraded to a dwarf or minor planet.

She told me that she had figured that when we decided Pluto wasn't going to be a planet anymore, we had pulled it down to the Earth and dismantled it or something, a far more poetic idea that the truth. So I started explaining that, while it may no longer be a planet, Pluto is still huge and very far away, and that people have never been there. I explained that we had never actually travelled to any planets, but we had sent machines that sent us information and pictures and stuff. I also told her that we had been to the moon, but that was it.

We discussed that we hadn't proceeded further with things like moon bases and space travel because people were too busy trying to agree about things here on Earth to plan things like that out. She asks for examples, so I launch into another very high level explanation of politics, about how all sorts of people in the world have all sorts of ideas about the best way to live, and since they don't agree, they sometimes fight about it. Upon further questioning, I explained that by "fight" I mean argue and whatnot, but yes, occasionally that means actually trying to beat each other up, which usually doesn't do anyone any good.

Finally, I say that with any luck, by the time she's a grown up, some of these arguments will be done with, and maybe she could even be an astronaut and be one of the people who goes to another planet if she wanted. She told me with complete confidence that no, she was going to be an artist. I mentioned that there were lots of kinds of artists, and she said she either wanted to draw pictures for books, or do the kind of art you put in a frame and sell. I start to tell her about other kind of artists, like graphic designers and whatnot, and she tells me that she knows about all that, but she likes her ideas better.

So, why am I telling you all of this? Well, I learned two things this morning. The first is that at some point (I'm thinking in the last few days maybe) my daughter became a brilliant and brutally inquisitive person who will pick apart the answers I give and volley them back at me until she's satisfied. This rocks, as I would much rather raise a person who isn't satisfied until she actually understands the answers given to her, as opposed to just accepting things people tell her. The other thing I learned is that I'm going to have to start drinking more coffee before I leave the house. I was not mentally prepared for that at all.

Someone break out the milk, cookies, and carpet squares. Daddy needs a nap.

MADD? I'm Furious.

Okay, I'm tired, and I'm stressed, and I don't particularly want to rant today, but dammit, someone always seems to give me a reason, and today it was MADD. See, the latest Grand Theft Auto, GTA IV, just came out, and it includes a scene in which the protagonist has the opportunity to drive while inebriated. They have shown the usual outrage, and requested that the makers, who will make millions on this game and rely on just this kind of publicity to drive sales, to pull it from the shelves based on this.

Now let's get something clear at this point - I'm not a fan of the games. I've read about and seen lots of the previous GTA games, and they are not something that interest me, probably because, as I've discussed before, I'm not a big fan of shooting other people in games. I don't think the games should be pulled from shelves for it, it's just not my bag. The other adults who don't find that content disagreeable and enjoy these games should have every opportunity to play them.

What's getting me here is that what MADD is doing is exactly what makes me insane about most people who bitch about video games, i.e. THEY DIDN'T ACTUALLY PLAY THE $&#%ING GAME. The scene that they are referring to involves the protagonist going out with a pal, getting hammered, and needing a ride home. The game tells him to call a cab because he's too drunk to drive. His friend tells him not to drive because he's drunk. Should the player ignore all of this and attempt to drive anyway, they will find that the car they are driving is nearly impossible to control and they will immediately attract the attention of the police who will pursue them and arrest them if they can. Essentially, MADD is protesting an interactive public service advertisement against the stupidity of drunk driving.

So there you go - well done, MADD. Like so many before you, the urge to get into the media by attacking whatever is popular at the moment has caused you to attack something that is not only irrelevant, but seems to be arguing for the exact same point you are. Now, those of us who know better will take every claim you make with a tremendous grain of salt, knowing how quick you were to jump to incorrect conclusions in this case.

Douche bags.