Kablammo!

berth (bûrth)

n.

1. Sufficient space for a ship to maneuver; sea room: kept a clear berth of the reefs.
2. A space for a ship to dock or anchor: a steamship moored to its berth at the pier.
3. 1. Employment on a ship: sought an officer’s berth in the merchant marine.
   2. A job: a comfortable berth as head of the department.
4. 1. A built-in bed or bunk, as on a ship or a train.
   2. A place to sleep or stay; accommodations: found a berth in a nearby hotel.
5. A space where a vehicle can be parked, as for loading.

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About a year ago I was talking with a friend of mine about my near-obsessive compulsion to download and buy music, when I mentioned that I was glad that I didn’t seem to like jazz. After all, just listening to rock and such can take up way too much time to begin with. Checking out new releases can be a full-time job, and that doesn’t even start to address the issue of back-catalogs. There are hundreds of albums that I own and hundreds more that I “own”, and I still don’t even know what Deep Purple sound like. Hell, two years ago I barely knew who David Bowie was.

I’m not an expert on the music I listen to, but I can drop some pretty obscure names if I need to, and I also have a decent sense of my failings as it were and what I really should get around to listening to. Jazz, on the other hand, I felt was a completely foreign and alien world, with such a ridiculously long and thoroughly-catalogued history that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I was thankful for my ignorance, shielding me as it did from the need to listen to and explore the world of jazz. (Lite-FM stations, incidentally, were also a big help in this regard.)

Sadly I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and for some stupid reason I decided to take a semester course on the history of jazz and the blues. Fuck me in the goat-ass; it turns out there’s a lot of this stuff that I really enjoy, and recently I’ve been purchasing a Horace Silver album a day. (In my defense, he was essentially Xploding Plastix 40 years before they were.)

Am I going to start seriously listening to classical music next? I don’t know if I could take that. At least I should have a steady paycheck (i.e. a way to subsidize this insane music habit) soon.

Song of the Moment: «Calcutta Cutie» — Horace Silver

“Due to extenuating circumstance, our associates are not able to take your call right now. Please try calling again at a later time.”

Fuck you, Bank of America. You strand me in Europe without being able to withdraw any cash from my bank account, then you don’t even let me get money out of one of your own goddamn ATMs, and then you don’t even have the decency to pick up the fucking phone. I sat through your stupid menu and pressed ‘9’ to hear more options, and it’s not my fault you didn’t offer “Press 3 if we suddenly and inexplicably decided to prevent you from using any ATMs anywhere in the world” as one of the choices.

Sons of bitches. I suppose I should be grateful I can be angry at something, but I’m not.

The above notwithstanding, I’m in a good mood and things are going well and Tartu was great and I only regret, say, 60% of my spring break. But it pisses me off to have to borrow money from my friends when there’s perfectly good money sitting there in my bank account that I’m being forbidden from accessing.

I sent the following letter today to each Senator and Congressman supposed to represent me, after having read this frankly horrifying post.

I recently learned that Senator Frist has threatened to change the bipartisan nature of the Senate Committee on Intelligence unless the Committee agrees not to investigate the warrantless NSA wiretapping. Even ignoring the fact that he is trying to derail an investigation before it begins, it is reprehensible that he would hold a crucial committee hostage in this fashion.

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Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of those famous books that every good nerd is supposed to read. (Just look at those 926 glowing Amazon reviews, for Chrissakes.) So when I saw it on the shelf of the library’s self-service Book Swap, I decided to pick it up and leave my similarly-serendipitously obtained (and recently read) copy of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in its place.

After all, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed other such nerd-staple series as Foundation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Lord of the Rings. Hell, I’ve even slogged through over 10,000 pages’ worth of The Wheel of Time and I’m still looking forward to reading Book 11 for some reason.

When I started reading Dune, then, I was expecting to enjoy it because I’m a faceless drone who usually enjoys whatever nerds enjoy, even if I don’t come right out and admit it. But I was a bit put off by all the bullshit two-word phrases and made-up jargon like “Bene Gesserit”, “Padishah Emperor”, “suspensor lamp”, and “Kwisatz Haderach”: the kind of terminology that’s completely fucking pandemic in sci-fi and fantasy, and is also responsible for the giant glossary (complete with pronunciation guide) in the back of each volume of WoT. After reading all of the above-quoted phrases on page 1 of Dune, I decided to keep reading. How much worse could it get?

Proceeding to page 2 I came across this doozy of a paragraph:

Thufir Hawat, his father’s Master of Assassins, had explained it: their mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, had been on Arrakis eighty years, holding the planet in quasi-fief under a CHOAM Company contract to mine the geriatric spice, melange. Now the Harkonnens were leaving to be replaced by the House of Atreides in fief-complete—an apparent victory for the Duke Leto. Yet, Hawat had said, this appearance contained the deadliest peril, for the Duke Leto was popular among the Great Houses of the Landsraad.

At this point, I tossed the book irritably aside, since so far it had been doing nothing but drowning me in a morass of gibberish, and even the recognizable English words in between everything else weren’t particularly engaging. I took a little break and came back later and started reading against my better judgment.

But nobody talks like this, not even fictional characters.

A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the chuckle: “There it is, Piter—the biggest mantrap in all history. And the Duke’s headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?”

I think I’m not going to bother reading the rest of this book.

I don’t like Microsoft Word very much, in large part because its default behavior is to assume it knows what you’re trying to do and how you want things formatted. (Search Google for “paperclip.mpeg” for some catharsis.) This default behavior, of course, makes it very easy to make numbered lists and indented paragraphs and the like. The problem is that if you actually know beforehand what you want to write and what layout you want, it’s similarly very easy to end up with Not What You Had In Mind. It’s very frustrating to be in the middle of writing something, making steady progress, when suddenly your formatting changes in a way you weren’t anticipating and could frankly do without, and you lose your train of thought after feeling compelled to immediately undo all the changes that were forced upon you. The program works best when it functions as a tool, not as an entity that tries to predict what you’re intending to do next. I’d rather have to specify each bulleted list I want than unspecify a bunch of bulleted lists that are provided as a “favor” or “time-saver” and accomplish less than nothing.

I bring this up, as it happens, in the context of also hating something else, and for the same reason. I learned to drive on a stick-shift, and in fact I had been driving for years before I ever drove an automatic. I’ve gotten a bunch of experience behind the wheel of an automatic since then, and I must say it reminds me a lot of Microsoft Word’s auto-formatting.

That is to say, I don’t like it.

With a manual transmission, you’re (more or less) in control of the car. With the exception of things like spark advance, which you’re legitimately better off letting an automatic system handle, you tell the car what to do. Barring outside forces, the car won’t start moving without you telling it to, and it certainly won’t change gears without your explicit say-so. The steering wheel, pedals, and shifter are present as tools, meant to make your life easier.

In contrast, driving an automatic relegates you to the position of a passenger, or perhaps more precisely a back-seat driver. You can make suggestions, and if you scream loud enough you can generally exercise veto power, but your control over everything but steering is indirect at best—the car often tells you what to do, instead of the other way around.

You control an automatic with the brake pedal, not the gas. Easing off the brake shouldn’t be interpreted as a signal to accelerate, unless you’re freewheeling downhill, which you probably shouldn’t be doing anyway.

I reserve the right to continue this rant in the future. I don’t like automatic transmissions. Working the clutch in stop-and-go traffic, as I’m now firmly convinced, is a small price to pay for a car that doesn’t think it’s smarter than you are. And I’d like to learn how to use a real camera, one that isn’t just a point-and-shoot “good enough” idiot box. (Though I love my idiot box, and it’s [basically] good enough.)

I thought I had problems when I only had a single New Year’s party to ditch this year. Woe is me, look at what I have to decide between:

• Toronto
• Highland Park
• Chicago
• Jersey City
• Princeton

Every place has people I want to see, and all but one have people I haven’t seen in ages. But I’m probably going to end up at the one with people I last saw two weeks ago.

So it goes.

Before I begin, I should make it clear that I have the utmost admiration for Roger Ebert’s movie reviews. Even in the rare instances where I completely disagree with him on a film, I can understand his viewpoint since he explains it so clearly. There have been times, too, when I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a movie but been unable to articulate why, only to read his review and have him elucidate my own opinion for me. His crusade against pan & scan home video is also something I approve of wholeheartedly.

That said, here are excerpts from things Ebert has written [reasonably] recently. I’m using one movie review and some Answer Man columns as the basis from which I’m extrapolating what may or may not be his actual point of view, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting him. I’m not writing this out of malice.

Here is the first.

The reason we cannot accept pedophilia as we accept many other sexual practices is that it requires an innocent partner, whose life could be irreparably harmed. We do not have the right to do that. If there is no other way to achieve sexual satisfaction, that is our misfortune, but not an excuse. It is not the pedophile that is evil, but the pedophilia. That is true of all sins and crimes and those tempted to perform them: It is not that we are capable of transgression that condemns us, but that we are willing.

Here is the second.

Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

And here’s something in the same vein.

As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games.

What I gather from this is that Ebert is much more tolerant and understanding of pædophiles than of videogame players. Pædophilia, by his thinking, is “a deep compulsion, which is probably innate,” and the struggle against it lifts the pædophile to transcendant nobility. Making a film about this topic, then, Reveals Something So True For All Us Sinners, which as any filmmaker knows is a very good way to Make A Real Difference In The World. Or something.

Videogames, on the other hand, are nothing more than a waste of time that might occasionally feature a pretty picture displayed on a screen. And they are incapable, by definition, of ever becoming anything more. Moving pictures on a screen, as we all know, are only capable of artistic merit when the author is in control. Interactivity is the kiss of death when it comes to art, by this logic. (Much more on this later.)

The worst part is that people who play videogames are actively making a choice to become worse people. They have the audacity to use their leisure time on something other than reading Great Works of Literature (or watching Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit of course), which is an unforgiveable transgression against society. Videogames, and by extension the players of them, are to be written off as a loss. A sadly avoidable loss, but not a tragic loss because tragedy is an art form.

It is not that we are capable of transgression that condemns us, but that we are willing, and wasting those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic may be the worst transgression of them all. So a child rapist who is honest-to-God sincerely trying to reform (and, let’s say, reads Tolstoy in his spare time) is presumably a better person than a guy who plays a game or two of MLB 2005 to unwind after work.

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The other day I ran across a GPO publication, specifically a pamphlet printed in 1955 under the authority of the 84th Congress, after the ratification of Wright Patman‘s House Concurrent Resolution 85. It’s called “Our American Government”. Here’s a picture.

As you can see, the cover of the pamphlet clearly states “…our American government interestingly and accurately portrayed” (emphasis mine).

I have the pamphlet for the same reason I am the proud owner of a monstrously ugly (and surprisingly well-fitting) plaid suit with matching vest: my aunt is in the process of clearing out some of the copious amounts of junk that have accumulated over the years in the house where my grandmother lived. Some of said junk is decidedly more choice than the rest, and I’m not above rescuing it from the recycle bin though God knows I certainly have enough useless junk of my own accumulated already.

(Incidentally, the pamphlet was, back in its day, part of the materials that my grandparents used to study for their citizenship exam. But I digress.)

Anyway, as a point of comparison, here is the full text of the 2000 edition of “Our American Government”, printing authorized by the 106th Congress. What do you see on the front page? For one thing, you don’t see any snazzy eagle designs, but that’s just because this text-only version has GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE to it. For another thing, though, you don’t see any mentions about being interesting. Or accurate, for that matter.

Both 2000 and 1955 have the same general format, basically acting as a FAQ for the Federal government. Each gives the reader a good sense for the workings of the three branches and the two cameras and whatnot, and both editions mention the elaborate system of bells installed in the Capitol and throughout the several House office buildings.

The 2000 edition even soundly thrashes the 1955 in its inclusion of full texts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (including all Amendments) as appendices, but it has some failings of its own — for one thing, the number of questions answered is down from 300 to 178! Some of this can be explained by the merging of some sets of related questions into a single answer, but that can’t hide the fact that 2000 just has less information than 1955 did. The inclusion of the Constitution is all well and good and commendable, but it’s reprinted here and there and everywhere — I’ve literally never been unable to find the text of the Constitution when I needed it. It seems to have been included here at the expense of some very important (and interesting) information.

Information like this:

201. Is Abraham Lincoln the only President to have been born in a log cabin?
     No. Presidents Jefferson, Jackson, Fillmore, Buchanan, Garfield, and Arthur were all born in log cabins.

Song of the Moment: «My Friend Dario» — Vitalic

This is really despicable.

The DRM stuff in Civ4 isn’t fun either, but that doesn’t stop it from being the best Civ game since the original.