SPEAKING OF CRINGE-INDUCING: The Tiger Woods-Joslyn James texts. Not for the squeamish. But if you love cheap double entendres you'll have a blast!

I MEAN I LOVE VILLANOVA BASKETBALL: But hearing their squeaky homer announcer do his trademark CATS WIN! CATS WIN! CATS WIN! after an inept overtime win over Robert freaking Morris was teeth-grindingly bad. What a debable. Everyone who had Nova in the Final Four can consider their brackets killed dead.

"SO EVERYBODY'S CHEATING" IS NOT JUST FOR THE SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE ANYMORE: Barry Ritholtz on the bleeding-gum toothlessness of the Securities and Exchange Commission here and here.

CHAIN MAIL SCAMS: Taibbi deconstructs one regarding the SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!!! healthcare reform efforts. Noted because Taibbi is in a similar position to me, in thinking the healthcare bill is a pooppile, and yet not enjoying stupid teabagger opposition to it at all.

WITH A GRANT FROM LONG JOHN SILVER'S: The latest frankenfish is a meatier filet. Via Reef Tools. I dunno...I go back and forth about stuff like this. The science seems reasonable enough but I'm still not sure I want something like this in my BK Big Fish.

The transgenic fish we all want, by the way, is this little fella. Think of the aquarium trade, science!

IN SICKNESS AND IN SICKNESS: Don't you hate it when you've been blowing your nose so much the edge of your nostril starts getting dry and flakey? I mean, dude, that's gross. And you're totally unprepared for the sickness as usual (the daily vitamin C did nothing apparently) so you have no Puffs Plus and are stuck using the portable tissue packs you found under the sink and old Popeye's napkins. Yeah.

But! The sickness allows you to test your resolve vis-a-vis your workout routine. I have not skipped a day! That is good, because science has proven while skipping a day here and there won't kill your attempt to form a habit, skipping in the beginning isn't the most helpful thing to do either. I think I'm on Day 17 of the habitual working-out. Science has also proven it takes about 66 days to reach maximum habitualness. I only have 49 days to go!

LEAVING NO (SHORT) DISTANCE UNCOVERED: Usain Bolt to conquer the 300.

SPEAKING OF UNREASONABLY POPULAR INTERNET PEOPLE: Trashing Dave Weigel is beyond the pale.

EDIT: Dave responds.

FALLING UPWARDS: Sheer persistence really does pay off in Big Media, it seems like. Well--it has to be the right kind of persistence I guess. You might think--say--Rush Limbaugh's job is easy, but it really is quite a feat to be able to consistently disable the voices in your head that tell you when to not say something offensive or obnoxious. Learn that skill and keep applying it again and again--you're on your way to a big contract from a stupid conglomerate!

PARTLY A PETER GRAVES MEMORIAL MST3K EPISODE: And partly a chance to see if I can get this Youtube share playlist thing right. Here's the episode. Can I embed it?



I can! Enjoy the late Mr Graves as well as the late Mr Van Cleef.

SO MUCH OF ECONNED: Reminds one of old time science fiction where people had discovered secret scientific rules of predicting human behavior. Like when you're given anecdotes about trading firms putting such stock in mathematical formulas designed to extract money from market behavior, which is of course a special case of human behavior. In the genre I believe trying to use those rules usually blew up in people's faces. Who says science fiction doesn't have predictive power?

SLAVES OF THE CANNIBAL ECONOMIST: Here. Title of post not completely related to article but this blogger cannot resist references to Ursula Andress exploitation films. Makes the point that the most important thing to remember about Keynes is that he wasn't dogmatic, unlike actual Keynesians, or anyone else operating out of a particular school. Via Nemo.

NCAA STANDS FOR NO CAVORTING ATHLETICS ASSOCIATION: Doesn't roll off your tongue like the similarly-intended No Fun League, does it? We'll work on that. Anyway, Temple and Cornell are probably the two teams nobody wants to play in the first round of the NCAAs--so let's put 'em in the same jar, shake 'em up and watch 'em fight! It's the basketball version of the most recent Fiesta Bowl. Though the reasoning behind it is probably less sinister (and since the college basketball postseason is infinitely less sinister than the college football postseason it would almost have to be less sinister.) The bracketologists probably just thought the Dunph vs an Ivy League team and Dunph vs a former assistant were pretty good storylines for an opening round game and how much fun to you get to have like that in the first round anyway? So they went with that. Hey--that's what Dunph himself thinks:

“I think this was a planned endeavor by the committee,” Dunphy said at the Liacouris Center. “I think this was a planned matchup. If you had said to me who do you not want to play, I would say Cornell. Steve and I are good friends. There’s just a no-win situation in that.”

Dunphy also said he felt the Owls’ seed “was going to be 4 or 5.

“I thought if we could win today it was going to be 4,” he said.

Well the good news is (if you're a Temple fan) that Dunphy is 1-22 vs former assistants (via Dan Levy.)

JOEY, HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A TURKISH PRISON?: Fare thee well, Peter Graves. And thanks for the MST3K episodes.

I imagine it is completely generational whether you think of Airplane! first or Mission: Impossible first when you think of him (the former in my case.) If you think of Biography first I'm not sure who you are.

MASHUP OF THE DAY: Can't recommend Go Home Productions' Virgin O'Riley enough. Do watch the video, it's a slightly longer version and it's a Quadrophenia (the movie) vs Who concert footage vs Madonna video mashup as well.

FOR THAT WAS WHAT THE COMICS CHIEFTAINS WANTED, ABOVE ALL ELSE--AN ENDLESS SERIES OF WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS: It would explain a lot! Here are a few quotes from a recent panel regarding the death of a minor (in terms of age and importance) female character in the Green Arrow universe:

James Robinson: "That decision [was] a controversial and one that I know has been greeted with some displeasure by some people... I'm sorry if it upset people. In all honesty, they wanted to kill Speedy too, and I said no, so give me some credit for that."

Ian Sattler: "I'm happy it upset people because it means that the story had some weight and emotion."

James Robinson is the writer of Lian Harper's death, Ian Sattler is editorial staff. Speedy, by the way, is a woman as well. Robinson, you would think, understands the sheer laziness of killing off female characters to up the ANGST! of male characters (in this case, Roy Harper and Oliver Queen) which is why he's going with the "yes--killing Lian was useless. But at least I saved Mia!" line here. Sattler, on the other hand, seems positively proud of the frigerators status quo. I do hate the "well if people are talking about it, it must be successful" line of editorial thinking and self-justifying. I remember Ron Moore saying something like that about some old Star Trek episode, that people were really invested in it and so the fact that they were really upset by whatever episode it was meant the episode was successful, and people were rewatching it because it moved them. That does not always work, though, Ron. I mean I ended up strongly disliking the final movement of Battlestar Galactica, and it was strongly deflated my interest to ever revisit the series. I still have the DVDs, and I'll buy some merchandise here and there, but it's symbolic of the love I used to have for BSG, which is located in the past at this point. (I'm not watching Caprica at all, for instance.) Anyway--boo on DC editorial for continuing to lean on the laziest crutch in superheroes. I know cape books arise from adolescent male power fantasies, but jeebus, must it ever be so? Well, probably. Women in refrigerators are probably always going to be with us. There's always that next generation of readers who can still be moved by such things, I guess.

Relatedly I was also eye-rolling at the brutal death of Firestorm supporting character/two copies of the X chromosome-holder Gehenna in Blackest Night a few months back. I was inclined to blame Geoff Johns at the time, but who knows? DC editorial has an appetite for lady corpses. And clearly it's the only way to make Firestorm interesting! (Which might be true, but that's more an argument to stop using the character prominently in general, not to murder his supporting cast.)

THE TEN CENT VERSION OF ECONNED: If you don't have time for the whole book, I recommend this post.

FIREFOX GIVETH, AND FIREFOX TAKETH AWAY: Why does every new Firefox release involve some "upgrade" that I can't imagine anyone actually wanted? And yet generally in any complaint thread about the new feature you'll find people arguing how great whatever the new thing is (or, worse, claiming that the new feature is just so advanced that once you get used to it you'll wonder how you ever got along the old way--thanks for assuming I don't know what I actually want there, sparky) so clearly somebody wants the changes they keep foisting on us.

For example--Firefox 3.6. Now I am at least partially anal retentive. I like my tabs in a certain order. Message board, Blogger, message board, politics blog, everything else. Or message board, politics blogs, shopping sites. (And these orders depend on what computer I am using to "surf the web" as the kids say. I am Rain Man on the Internet.) And I like tabs to open all the way on the right so my tab order is not disturbed. Firefox 3.6 forces tabs to open to the immediate right of whatever tab you've opened a link in and shifts all your other tabs to the right. Outrageous! Who wanted this? Not anyone who values an orderly tabbing experience, that's for sure! So if this is one of your annoyances--it might be, I don't know--the steps noted here will rectify it simply and easily. Tab how you like--not like how The Man says you must tab! Dude, I was using Firefox before it was cool. They've totally sold out now. Totally.

THE WONDERS OF CHEAP GENOMICS: Family of four (with two children with rare genetic diseases) have their genomes sequenced. Mutant genes found! Or nearly found--"Family-based genome analysis enabled us to narrow the candidate genes for both of these Mendelian disorders to only four." Fascinating stuff. Soon we'll all get ourselves sequenced ritually, on our 13th birthday or somesuch. And then THE GUVMINT WILL WANT IT ALL!!! Then we'll exercise our 2nd Amendment rights. Darn tootin. Or enact the Thirty-third Amendment where we all have an inalienable right to the privacy of our genetic material. Unless we want to sell our genetic material. Which will be no problem whatsover--the future is a libertarian utopia! And free markets always produce the bestest outcomes. As any American citizen living in 2010 just knows, deep in their bones.

"NO SALESMEN AT THIS ENTRANCE." "BUT I'M NOT A SALESMAN! I'M THE CHUBBY BLUE LINE!": Goodbye, Merlin Olsen. I suspect the number of people who knew you best from Mitchell are a small, but passionate minority.

YOUR "THE HEADLINE WRITER IS ENJOYING HIS OR HER WORK" HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Giant meat-eating plants prefer to eat tree shrew poo. Via somebody I steal links from way too much.

YAKUZA 3 EARLY THOUGHTS: I can sort of see why Sega thinks this series is a hard sell to American audiences--there is a ton of plot to get through in the beginning. And then your first actions before you get to the fighting tutorial (which is fun!) involve wandering around your fictional section of Tokyo buying ice cream for your little sidekick and visiting people from the previous games (which I have not played.) It's not exactly an open world game either--you can't immediately start pitching people down the sidewalk a la Saints Row 2. Because Kiryu Kazuma is an honorable dude! Unlike a GTA or Saints Row protagonist. (Also unlike a Fukasaku gangster.) He doesn't start fights. People start fights with him. To their regret.

So if you don't pay attention to video games you have not heard that Sega cut some stuff out of the game. Or that in general it seems to be a rushed release, being dumped on the marketplace at the same time as Final Fantasy XIII and God of War III (both blockbusters) and thus not being given a great chance to succeed. The conspiracy theory I've heard (from a fellow DVDVR poster here) is that Atlus--who are generally thought to be the best localizer of Japanese video games for the niche American audience--wanted to make a bid for the license, and told Sega headquarters in Japan that very thing. Sega of America, noticing that the Yakuza series could be Sega's best remaining franchise, has a bit of a panic attack (since they've been publicly dithering over whether to release it in the US at all) and begs for the license back, since if they give up Yakuza 3 maybe they lose the rights to future installments in the franchise. Corporate parent Sega says fine, but you guys have a limited amount of time to get this thing out, otherwise we give it to Atlus. So Sega of America rushes it out and we have them to blame foremost for getting a truncated version and poor release timing. And then we can blame Sega HQ for not giving it to Atlus in the first place.

It's a conspiracy theory! It may not make perfect sense. But like other conspiracy theories it expresses the desires of people who believe in it, namely that Atlus would have been the perfect choice for a game as Japanese as this. That's what they do--they have their passionate niche of Japanophiles that they serve and they serve them well. It may have even worked out the same way sales-wise, Atlus has previously gotten people to buy many copies of the also-veddy-veddy-Japanese Persona series. Plus we definitely would have gotten a cool collector's edition out of them. Maybe some Yakuza 3-branded cigarettes.

WELL I DID HAVE A LINK TO THE WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT BLOG THERE ON THE RIGHT: But I'm so incensed by Dave Weigel pointing out conservative media types and tea partiers (are they the same category?) embarrassing themselves I'm delinking them!

Alternatively this blogroll gadget is for some reason stripping the blog part of the URL and leaving it as a link to the main Independent site, no matter how many times I remove it from the blogroll and re-add it. So to keep my blogroll pure I'm just cutting it out. What the hey, Blogger? Do you not want me to know when Spencer Ackerman is making fun of the Cheneys again? Don't make me have to HTML it myself. Because--you know--I can't actually do that. Poor atrophied computer skillz....

NOT TO TURN THIS BLOG INTO A SERIES OF LINKS TO NAKED CAPITALISM: But Yves is on fire here. It's re: the appreciations of Geithner that were noted here yesterday. Sample:

The stock market has rallied over 60% from its early March lows, enabling the wounded banks to sell new equity to the public and avoid further contentious taxpayer-funded rescue measures. But the justification for the soft glove treatment of the banking classes, that what was good for them would prove to be good for everyone else, has proven to be wildly false. When the Dow levitated over 10,000, mainstream news outlets celebrated the event, with nary a mention of the continued train wreck in the real economy. As Matt Taibbi observed, “the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional ‘market indicators’ is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.”

BIG TEN EXPANSION TEA LEAVES: Are saying Rutgers at the moment. As a Rutgers fan and a Big East fan, if the Big Ten takes any Big East school I would hope it would be Rutgers. The football program would continue to be able to build its national prominence, and the basketball program (men's I mean) can continue to be terrible and nobody will care. Meanwhile the Big East can replace a terrible basketball school with a good one like Memphis and maybe get them to improve football too. It would insure the continued survival of the nation's best basketball conference and that's the important thing for me. (Also I'm glad these stupid "Texas to the Big Ten!!!" rumors are dying down. That whole thing was some of the more annoying meaningless Internet sports speculating I can think of.)

ABOUT A THIRD OF THE WAY THROUGH ECONNED: And I think I really can recommend it at this point. It's not just a collection of Yves's blogging if that's what you were worried about. There's history here, of how financial economics started to get quantitative (haven't gotten to her conclusions about the ultimate effect of trying to get all physicist-like on finance, though I suspect she thinks they have done more harm than good thus far. I agree!) In the early portions she's already criticized Krugman and Friedman. And I suspect she has a nuanced appreciation of Keynes, unlike--say--that funny but probably unfair Keynes vs Hayek battle rap that came out a few months ago. Four out of five stars on the Amazon scale (four because it really takes a lot for non-fiction to impress me to OMGness. Plus I haven't finished it yet.)

By the way, have you noticed that the popular press has decided it's time we talked about how unappreciated poor Tim Geithner is? When The New Yorker and The Atlantic--those two great middlebrow house organs--pick roughly the same time to run their Geithner appreciations you tend to think something is up. Geithner did his job, America! Our cultural referees have spoken. Pay no attention to those pesky unemployment numbers. Or the utter lack of any kind of financial reform.

Also noted: a glowing appreciation of the CEO of BlackRock. Back to business as usual!

RANDOM THOUGHT AFTER TOURING A ZEBRAFISH LAB: I wonder if Sea Monkeys would make good model organisms...

I can just see the paper in Nature: "The Sea Monkey Genome Project." Slotman J. as first author. And curiously only author. Wait--the journal is Naturre? Two Rs? Some sort of Taiwanese bootleg? Well great.

BONOBOS (THE CONTINUING STORY): Of which this appears to be the first part. I never mentioned bonobos on this blog before? Huh. Let's change that! Bonobos opt for altruism. Via Yves. Given food they'll opt to unlock their fellows and share it with them. OMG what happened to red in tooth and claw??? (It was a poem--that's what happened to it.)

Remember, everyone, bonobos and chimps are equally related to our species. Science has removed a lot of the emotional value of devils and angels and left nothing to replace it with in our internal narratives. Why not think of one's self as a being forever caught between warlike chimpdom and peace-loving (and just loving, in the carnal sense) bonobo-ness? They are the better primates of our nature. Yes--this is totally the religion I'm working on. Jack Chick-style tracts to follow. ("I'm sorry, Steve, but without bonobos--your family is doomed.")

Noted with one comment: bonobo does not exist in the Blogger autocorrect dictionary. This is what happens when you can't get your species in Hollywood.

AN AMAZON ERROR IN YOUR FAVOR: If any of the Great Comics Omnibus Sale of 2010 items actually ship. But they probably won't--it's an Amazon error and it's going to be corrected and I will not get that Golden Age Marvel hardcover for eight dollars in change. Hey, let's all start Twitter accounts and #amazonfail the crap out of them! My outrage at not being able to profit from Amazon's mistakes is palpable.

THE PHRASE "YOU KNOW" UTTERED IN A SIGNIFICANT QUANTITY:  What are verbal tics exhibited by Slotman during admissions interviews, Alex?

I think I may have thrown in a few "and stuffs" as well. To my eternal embarrassment.

THE CINCINNATI SKYLINE: Is delicious! And a much milder taste than when I've tried to make it at home (the recipe seems to involve half my spice rack, so I may be overseasoning.) Didn't finish my pasta though--when you combine the spaghetti with the bag of oyster crackers they give you it turns into a carbohydrate time bomb. Which is particularly deadly to Atkins dieters.

Really wanted to try this place. Or this place, which offers a six-way: pasta, chili, beans, onions, cheese, and for the coup de grace: chopped garlic! Wasn't in walking range of my hotel though, and my minders seemed fairly ambivalent about the local chili in general so there was no way to get there. But if ever I am in Cincinnati again it will be mine.

I FLEW ON AN AIRPLANE TODAY: If I was The Mustache of Understanding (Tom Friedman; as opposed to Mustache, The Destroyer of Worlds, John Bolton) I would write a whole column about how Chinese airports are leaving our primitive airports in the dust. But sadly my upper lip remains hairless, and I have no enhanced knowledge (or pure destructive power.) I can only say that it's really chintzy for the Philly airport to not have free wireless. I bet Jinan's got free wireless! (Randomly googled Chinese city is random.)

UPDATES IN DEAD TREE FUNNIES (PHILADELPHIA EDITION): The Inky has replaced Rick Detorie's One Big Happy with a brand new effort from political cartoonists Steve Kelly and Jeff Parker, Dustin. Dustin seems to be getting a bit of a national rollout because it's OMG TOPICAL--about a college graduate going back home to live with his parents (a situation not wholly unfamiliar to me, in the interests of full disclosure.) Of course the yuks thus far seem to be based on Dustin's lack of ambition (the dad in the strip is prominently displaying want ads in the promotional material) which, um, does not seem to accord with the facts on the ground for "boomerang" children. Or for anyone else currently unemployed!

Anyway, good on the Inquirer for trying something new (if predictable thus far) but did they have to get rid of One Big Happy to do it? It really was one of the better strips in their comics section, sort of a realist take on Lucy Van Pelt (all the Peanuts kids were incredibly self-aware; Detorie's Ruthie has the intelligence and wisdom of a Peanuts kids, but more of the actual reactions of a six-year-old.) Meanwhile Hagar and Beetle Bailey stagger on. The truly mean-spirited Sherman's Lagoon remains. (Don't pick on Blondie, though, people, I'm convinced it's the best of the existing very very old comics strips. Dilbert before there was Dilbert.) Ziggy and Dennis The Menace: still there! And if you need to bring a bucket of irony to enjoy any strip it probably isn't worth keeping around. I hate to say it but that applies to Family Circus too. So please, Inquirer: bring back One Big Happy. You have a lot more chaff you could cut before axing Ruthie and Joe and Homework Hotline Lady.

(Looking over the One Big Happy Wikipedia page it seems it was the only Creators Syndicate strip the Inky had, and Dustin is from King Features, which they have a lot of, so maybe there's corporate shenanigans involved here.)

THE GENE-CULTURE EVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS: Little NYT article suggesting culture plays a role in human evolution. Which is sort of well, of course. How could it not? It's a product of evolution itself! But it's not really true until somebody writes a paper about it.

MITTMENTUM STAGGERS FORWARD: Or at least moves in some direction--possibly swaying side to side. And then Spencer Ackerman reads his book so you don't have to.

“[T]here can be no rational denial of the reality that America is a decidedly good nation,” writes Romney, or perhaps a third grader. “Therefore, it is good for America to be strong.”

That's in there! It's called "No Apology"! So if you were the sort of Obama voter who was voting to sort of apologize to the rest of the world for the previous 8 years...yeah. This probably isn't for you. Mitt is such a transparently conservative focus grouped individual. A walking font of Reaganite shibboleths that have been polished down to be as generic and broadly-appealing as possible. With a power executive haircut. And he's their best chance in 2012!

Look, the bloom is long off the rose between me and Barry O. Nobody can be plugged into the finance blogosphere and stay Obot. But as long as the Republicans remain not just incompetent, but aggressively stupid, I will have to continue supporting the Indonesian. I mean--look at this part:

At one point in the text, Romney is forced to concede that the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that until at least 2030 there is “no evidence to support the notion that China will become a peer military competitor of the United States.” He waves away that inconvenient fact:

On the other hand, Afghanistan fighters were certainly not a peer military with the Soviet Union, yet they defeated the Soviets — not globally of course, but certainly in Afghanistan.

One could conclude from this analogy that the lesson for the U.S., then, is not to invade and occupy China.

I agree! Thanks, Mitt!

THEY'RE ALIENS (AND PREDATORS): And they're playing CHEEESSS!! Picture of the day in other words.

Via here, via Destructoid. It's the spinoff media franchise that cannot be killed! Yes, when the sun cools and our species is safe in their colony ships, heading for the new star, there will still be Aliens vs Predator merchandise. Probably.

YOU CANNA CHANGE THE LAWS OF BIOLOGY: What I got out of this neat little article (concerning a panel divided between physicists working on time, and other researchers taking biological approaches to investigating time) is that while physicists continue to debate the exact nature of time, and what direction it goes in, or if it has a direction, biologists don't even question that time goes one way. Evolution doesn't work without time's arrow! And evolution "has also produced brains that seem extremely adept at navigating a world in which time's arrow is real." Well--time's arrow is definitely real around here. (I've been wounded by it myself.) It may not be true everywhere, would be a physicist's rejoinder I would guess

MORE MEDAL COUNT DORKERY: Fourth Place Medal has their own goofy system, that also puts the U.S. on top. The system works! But they do silly things, like giving "marquee events" higher point values. Figure skating and hockey, I would get giving them higher point values, but not because they're marquee events--more because one person cannot Phelps the crap out of figure skating or hockey and win a bunch of medals. Alpine skiing should count a little less, right? All due respect to Lindsey Vonn's ability to sell Pantene, but we have within alpine skiing events where the same people can win multiple medals. Those medals have to be worth a little less! Whereas a curling medal should count for a lot, since there's only one set of medals. Of course a system that highly values curling and hockey might give Canada the overall victory. Let us never speak of this again. (Well, maybe I'll fool around with this at some point, in a fit of nerdity.)

MEDAL COUNT DORKERY: Using the probably too-obvious system of "three points for a gold, two points for a silver, one point for a bronze" I get the following ranking of the medal winning nations (total points on the right):

1 USA 70
2 GERMANY 63
3 CANADA 61
4 NORWAY 49
5 KOREA 32
6 AUSTRIA 30
7 RUSSIA 26
8 SWEDEN 23
9 CHINA 23
10 SUISSE 21
11 FRANCE 18
12 DUTCH 17
13 POLAND 11
14 CZECH 10
15 ITALY 8
16 JAPAN 8
17 AUSSIE 8
18 FINLAND 6
19 SLOVAK 6
20 BELARUS 6
21 SLOVENE 5
22 CROAT 5
23 LATVIA 4
24 GBR 3
25 KAZAKH 2
26 ESTONIA 2

Well hey--it looks mostly just like the actual medal table! U-S-A! I was a little worried before I excelified this stuff, I thought maybe Canada could jump ahead of us due to their five gold medal edge. But no.

So obviously this is a ridiculously simple system, I've seen others, like--say--number of medals relative to population, or to GDP. But first, second and third place are the positions the IOC has chosen to glorify in their stodgy wisdom, you know? You can argue that the nation with the most gold medals wins the Olympics too, but the IOC cares about more than one winner. It cares about the vice winner, and the vice vice winner! Plus the gold medal argument forces you to make ridiculous statements like: Great Britain with one gold had a better Olympics than Japan with five medals. (Another terrible Olympics for Japan by the way. You would think getting humiliated by the Koreans every two years would motivate them more.) I say--no the overvaluing of gold medals! The IOC wants us to care about more than that, and I respect their wishes. America won Vancouver and I have mathematical proof. (Of course the IOC also doesn't want us to declare a "winner" of the games as well but we'll look the other way for the purpose of this post.)

HOLCOMB DOES IT: Americans win at four man bobsled! Holy cow. That never happens.

And with that gold medal I believe we set the all-time Winter medal count record with 37. (That's including the medal in the hockey game later today, color to be determined. I don't have a good feeling about beating Canada twice.) In a sporting event like this you can usually look at a lot of different areas where if X or Y had happened we'd have less medals, or more. But really, in these particular Olympics two of our medals were out-and-out gifts from the Korean short track team (and Ohno and Celski were in a position to accept the Korean generosity) so if you need to point to a particular moment to explain why we're at 37 and not 35, well that would get my vote.

SHORT TRACK IS A JUDGED SPORT WITH ELEMENTS OF RACING: So you gotta decide what's better for your medal chances--stay on your feet? Or go down and try to draw a DQ? It's strategy, baby. And it's sort of infuriating to watch, possibly even when it's your nation winning the medals. But definitely when Ohno gets a hand in and gets DQed and Hamelin gets two fingers in on Sung Si-Bak and gets gold. Look, I'm not bitching, honestly, I think just think this might be one of those permanently flawed Olympic sports. The winter taekwando if you will (not to pick on sports Koreans are good at. I mean I have no problem with archery. Who could?)

(This is all a reaction to this. We needed that medal to beat our Winter record, man.)

(Edit to add of course it is also wonderful when the race is relatively clean and nobody goes down and the American takes silver.) (Or even when the team gets bronze! Okay, we've officially broken our medal record by two, and I don't think anyone can catch us in the overall medal count.)

YAY: Gold and silver for Demong and Spillane! This is of course represents unprecedented American success in the Nordic combined. What next--do we become great in biathlon? Regular ski jumping? Or--dare I hope--curling?

And with the certain medal for the women's hockey team tonight that gives us a stunning five medal lead on the Germans. You to the ess to the a....

UGH: I'm going to assume that Vonn's crash that lead to Mancuso having to redo her giant slalom run cost us a medal, since it took both of them out of contention. And double ugh since a German ended up winning gold--Team USA only has a three medal lead on them now. Stupid Olympics.

AH, AMERICA: These are my favorite American fans thus far:

Via Fourth Place Medal.

MEDAL STANDINGS: I wonder if the Colorado College prediction people are sweating it a little bit at this point--they had Canada taking first and the US and Norway tied for second. Canada is not going to get close to winning the overall medal count at this point, and Germany is America's closest competition at the top. We really need a bit of luck to fend the Germans off at this point, I think--Vonn crashing today doesn't help, though apparently giant slalom is not her strong event (apparently it's the only event she hasn't won in on the international circuit.) Maybe there'll be a meltdown tonight in the figure skating and Flatt or Nagasu will medal somehow. Or maybe our strangely competent Nordic combined team will pull something out. Who can say.

YOUR SURE SIGN OF AGING OF THE DAY: In a music notes sort of way. Unlike Jim I have too much invested in my Gen-X identity (implying generational hatred of the Boomers, with The Beatles being the easiest symbol of their doofiness--seriously, a bunch of dudes with bad haircuts and silly accents and you people went apeshit?) with side order of American chauvinism (you want we to worship a foreign band when The Beach Boys are right there?) to ever embrace Beatlemania, phony or otherwise. But lately when the radio on scan mode hits a Fleetwood Mac song--I have to stop the scan. I just do! I am transitioning into some kind of older demographic. Plus Fleetwood Mac doesn't seem to carry a lot of generational baggage with them--they're for old people of all ages! I want to be with you everywhere...

The true trigger for my newfound Mac fandom, by the way, is listening to the wonderful little mashup album The Fleetwood Mix. You wouldn't necessarily think FM as being a great backup band for Snoop and Kanye and Q-Tip--and yet it makes perfect sense in retrospect.

SLOTMANS IN EVERYTHING, THE CONTINUING SERIES: On Facebook now. If you're an old blogfriend give me a friend request. Or if I revert back to anti-social networking and my privacy settings go back to "get off my property" mode just shoot me an e-mail (above.)

You know I also think I should start a LiveJournal one of these days? Though I'm probably fooling myself it'll get me to start fiction writing more (one of my eternal internal goals.) Twitter, though? Still not using that. Well--maybe just a little account to start following a few people. And then it's a slippery slope to "OMG baloney and cheez is tremendous!!!" mode.

A WARBLOGGER'S LINKS, CIRCA LATE 2002 OR EARLY 2003: Or whenever I stopped changing the blogroll. This new template took away the blogroll, and anyway I don't read most of those blogs anymore, so I'm just going to post it here for posterity. You know--like an internet historical document or something. A warblogroll, preserved in the cyberember. (And Blogger still has no easy way to put stuff below the fold so this will be one big post.)

After abortion

The Agitator

AintNoBadDude

Airstrip One

Alas, a blog.

American Samizdat

Amritas

Amygdala

Balloon Juice

Bear Droppings

G. Beato

The Beauty Of Gray

RiShawn Biddle

Blogcritics

bloggedy blog

Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog

Blowback

Body and Soul

Boing Boing

Bookslut

BugPowder

CalPundit

Catallaxy Files

Cella's Reviews

China Hand

Christianity Today Weblog

Corsair The Rational Pirate

cut on the bias

Daily Kos

Dancing with Dogs

Peter David

Daze Reader

Brad DeLong

Diotima

Disaffected Muslim

Distorting the Medium

Dr. Manhattan

Dr. Frank

Dr. Weevil

benjamin domenech online

Dreaded Purple Master Blog

drivelwarehouse dot com

Electrolite

The End of the Bench

Eschaton

Mark Evanier

Flit

Gene Expression

GoodShit

Grasshoppa

hanging-fire.net

Hawspipe

genehealy.com

Franklin Harris

HokiePundit

Kevin Holtsberry

Diana Hsieh

The Illuminated Donkey

The Indepundit

inluminent/weblog

Instapundit.com

INTEL DUMP

Interesting Monstah

intueri

Ipse Dixit

Jeff Jarvis

Joanne Jacobs

Journalista!

JUICY JUICY SQUISHY SQUISHY!

JunkYardBlog

Kitty Bukkake

Mark Kleiman

The Knowledge Problem

the Kolkata Libertarian

Kyle Still Free Press

Lake Effect

Amy Langfield

The Last Page

Letter From Gotham

listen missy

Lonewacko

Derek Lowe

Media Minded

medpundit

Midwest Conservative Journal

Mind Over What Matters

CharlesMurtaugh.Com

Neilalien

Newsrack Blog

New York Timez

No Watermelons Allowed

Objectionable Content

Off the Kuff

off-wing opinion

Andrew Olmsted

On The Third Hand

Pacific Views

pandagon.net

Gareth Parker

Photodude

Plato's Cave

Virginia Postrel

Prestopundit

Pure Content

Radio Free Blogistan

Ramblings of a Blue-Collar Slob

Rantburg

Ravenwolf

relapsed catholic

Richard Bennett's Omphalos

Elayne Riggs

Right Wing News

Steve Sailer

Julian Sanchez

Sand In the Gears

The Sardonic Subversive

Andrea See

Sensible Erection

Sgt. Stryker

Shoutin' Across The Pacific

Shouting 'Cross The Potomac

The Sideshow

Arthur Silber

SLAM LINKS

Sneaking Suspicions

Natalie Solent

SPORTSbyBROOKS

SportsFilter

SportsFrog

Ginger Stampley

Bjoern Staerk

t a c i t u s

The Talking Dog

Dave Tepper

Talking Points Memo

Thoughts from the Rapmaster

Through The Looking Glass

Tom Tomorrow

Transterrestrial Musings

Eve Tushnet

Unqualified Offerings

The Volokh Conspiracy

A Voyage To Arcturus

Jesse Walker

War Liberal

We are full of shit.

weisblogg

Amy Welborn

Matt Welch

Where is Raed ?

Wil Wilkinson

Matthew Yglesias

Commentators

The Confederate Mack

Camille Paglia

Wrestling

DVDVR

The Other Arena

New Media

Coming Attractions

Drudge Report

InternetGossip.net

Metacritic

The Onion

Salon

Slate


Old Media

BBC

The Economist

National Review

The New Republic

Reason

Washington Post


Sports

Arenafan

ESPN

Joe Netsfan

OurSports Central

Bill Simmons

Science

The New Scientist

Yahoo Evolutionary Psychology Group


Comments by YACCS

THE TEMPLATES, THEY ARE A-CHANGING: I figure once a decade is about enough for me. Man, look how active I was in 2002!

And with this template change we say goodbye to the YACCS commenting system. Which I think hasn't been working in years anyway. Ah well. Fare thee well, gentle obsolete commenting system...

SEMI-RANDOM LITERARY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: I can't help but think Yiddish Policeman's Union would have been improved by the inclusion of a Sitka Jewish curling culture. (If this was present and I missed it I apologize to Mr. Chabon.)

RIGHT ON, MATT Y.: The "Torino" bullshit was annoying enough the first time--do we have to keep pretending Turin isn't the correct word in English, or isn't the word used by the actual citizens of Turin?

SLOTMANS IN EVERYTHING (AN OCCASIONAL SERIES): My Winter Olympics preview at Veteran Presence. Cribbed some facts from Wikipedia and NBC's Olympics site and strung words between them. Enjoy!

(And yes--just to bring some closure to one of this blog's few remaining plotlines--I totally whiffed at NaNoWriMo. Better luck next year, old bean.)

NANOWRIMO: STILL PRACTICING: Just not posting about it. Word count has been going down, though. I'm a little worried.

(Plus a bit of laziness, a sudden need to finish Saints Row, and a little disagreement my right hand had with my beloved cat Tiny. Tiny was having a bad day, due to a guest cat in the house, and let my right hand know all about it. With teeth and claws I mean--he didn't vomit on it, or worse.)

GIANT COMBINING ROBOT SCRATCHINGS (NANOWRIMO PRACTICE): Just thinking about, what would it be like to pilot vehicle Voltron's left kneecap? And an hour of brain pooping was done. Well--an hour ten, and only 1100 words again. Of course when you're doing something from scratch it's different from doing something with a proper outline and so forth. Anyway--scratchings do follow.

“Now you know we have an opening in left kneecap,” said Masterston, smiling, and baring a little of his perfectly white teeth. “I think you'd be perfect for that.”
Kasmeier sighed, looked away for a moment, but there was nothing else to fixate on; Masterston's office was dark and lit primarily by pulsing readouts, and was of course windowless. “That's not my kind of assignment,” he said. “You know that.”
“I don't see why not,” said Masterston, still grinning. “You have the requisite credentials.”
“I have an engineering degree,” said Kasmeier. “That's it. Fin. I've never piloted anything that wasn't a personal conveyance in my life.” And even with those, he thought, I was hardly an accomplished specimen. “I can barely park a car.”
Masterston sat back in his seat, chuckling lightly. “Now you know the job title is pilot, but it's really sort of a poor descriptor, right?” he asked. “It's just the job class. It hardly describes the nature of the work at this point.”
“Look, I'll be encased in a great big piece of machinery and be responsible for its movements from point a to point b, and all points inbetween,” he protested. “That sounds like piloting to me.”
“Come now, a combiner module doesn't have those kind of controls,” he said. “Once the join order is given, your job basically turns to monitoring: fuel pressure, nanotech linkup protocols, venous coolant flows, that sort of thing.”
“There's a steering panel smack in front of my chair,” said Kasmeier. “I know the schematics. But you're telling me—what--I won't be needing it at all?”
“Not for the crucial combining step,” said Masterston, who was beginning to lose his smile. “Every part knows where it has to go. It's predetermined. You will not have to manually fly the left kneecap onto the femur and fibula—they all connect themselves.” Like that old nursery song, thought Masterston. Knee bone connecting to the—beat--leg bone. Leg bone connected to the—beat--hip bone. And so on and so forth.
“And that's another thing,” said Kasmeier. “Isn't that fairly dangerous, working in a kneecap?” He swore he could remember news footage of a combiner robot doing a running kneelift on an attacking being. It looked painful for the latter party, certainly, but now Kasmeier found himself more concerned with the robot's well-being. Or with whoever was inside its knee at the time. What they felt as they were—for a brief moment—at the forefront of Earth's defense.
“The knee is a crucial area, which makes the kneecap a vital defense point—this is true,” Masterston acknowledged. “But there are few combiner modules more and better armored than the kneecap. Believe me, you'll be quite safe in there.”
Kasmeier sighed again, feeling increasingly trapped. How had it come to this, he wondered, that Earth's defense be maintained in such a preposterous fashion? By giant, human-piloted robots, each composed of tens to even hundreds (in the bigger versions) of human-piloted craft? “There's got to be a better way,” he said after a moment. “We used to fight with planes and ships, and tanks.” We certainly did not strap people into mechanical facsimiles of the human patella—he was damn sure of that.
“Come on, Menlo,” sighed Masterston. “You know the rationale. A ridiculous enemy requires a ridiculous response. If the aliens are going to send one hundred, two hundred foot tall creatures at us—well we have to respond. Respond in kind.” This was EarthGov's position, and his own personal belief, thought Masterston. It was the best way to continue humanity's survival.
“There have to be alternatives,” said Kasmeier. Alternatives to me getting into that module.
“Alternatives? The Combiner Corps is the best we have,” said Masterston. “Let me lay something else on you—something you have heard of as a rumor.”
“What's that?” said Kasmeier, uncertain. What had he heard about the Corps? Extra perks? Or a bit of hazard pay. But why, he thought mockingly, Masterston's already assured me the left kneecap is the absolute safest place to be.
“You heard of joiner's bliss?” said Masterston, leaning forward, voice low (though every word he said was being perfectly represented to a multi-dimensional recording device, for training and further quality control of the Third Human Resources Army, Combiner Corps Subunit Two.) “It's true. You're not just sitting back there in the left kneecap waiting for your robot to gore some giant alien squid. You're part of something a little more. The euphoria is breathtaking. In retrospect I mean—that's when you start to appreciate it.” Sometimes even now I wish I was back in my right radius-ulna, he thought. Chopping monsters in the back of the head. “You're your little part of the enterprise but you're the rest too. It's individuality and collectivity all at once.”
“I'm not exactly susceptible to bliss,” Kasmeier protested.
“As you join you become as fine as human can become,” Masterston went on. “Working for your own good and for the good of your team. Hell, your team is a new entity at that point. Humanity in miniature—our ideal state. That's why we're going to win, you understand? Because we're at our best as a species when we fight them.” Our finest selves, thought Masterston. He knew that to be true from personal experience. Never had he felt finer than when combining to form Fortressman Omega, defender of the moons of Jupiter. “You'll be at your finest too, Menlo. You just don't know it yet.”
This is going poorly, thought Kasmeier. “I don't want to be a part of this right now,” he said. “Send me to a monitoring station somewhere.”
“Well, that's the real kicker,” said Masterston, snapping out of his bliss-fueled nostalgia. “You've already been reassigned to patellacraft 2, Quantumtron Q.”
“Don't I have a right of refusal?” he asked. I've done enough for the service already, he thought. I know I have.
“Ordinarily, yes,” said Masterston. “But times are tough. We've had staffing issues.”
For an extremely safe position. “No choice, huh?” sighed Kasmeier.
“No choice,” said Masterston. “But you will enjoy yourself—take it from me personally.”
Kasmeier smiled, grimly. There was no argument left to be made.

SOME SOULCALIBUR: BROKEN DESTINY COMMEMORATIVE SCRATCHINGS (NANOWRIMO PRACTICE): This is some nonsense about an idea I was having about fighting game characters gaining sentience combined with how a fighting game would actually look as a narrative (multiple winners and losers, with the same characters winning and losing in the same story.) More importantly--wrote it in an hour and ten minutes, and it's about 1100 words. Gotta get that word count up. Writing after work--I can tell already--is going to be a little tiresome. But that's what practicing is for! And knocking off a few pages on the weekdays is going to make the weekends go much easier, I believe.

Need to arm myself with an outline going into November, though. Can't do this without some idea of where things are going--I've been realizing that as I do these little on-the-spot exercises. Scratchings follow.

She had that feeling that day, like she was a supporting character in someone else's drama. And it was her turn to lose. She didn't like to lose, as a general principle. But she recognized its inevitability. Sometimes she would not be up for a victory—her strikes would not be precisely timed, or she would lose focus and stand there and take hit after hit until she fell. Other times her parries flew like water, her counter strikes were bold and varied. Those were the days it felt good to fight.
Today was not one of those days. She raised her bo staff (covered in ornate metal designs that both reinforced and added heft to the wood) anyway.
“Let' s make this quick,” she said, eyes gleaming, voice sharp, none of her countenance betraying the fact that she was going to lose this battle.
“Egotistical fool,” said her opponent. “You dare challenge me?” He was Zanzeroff, the Russian woodsman, with his golden jewel-encrusted axe and shield with his personal dragon sigil.
No, she thought, not today. Today I will not be a challenge. She drew back her weapon and rained down blows upon him. A mid strike to distract him, then two strikes to the head. Disoriented, he fell back.
Zanzeroff, she thought. You have opposed me before. Was it—countless times? No, that was not quite right. The potential, though, was there. But she could remember a time when she wasn't fighting. There was an origin point to her ordeals.
The woodsman's axe belted her at her side; the force of the blow drove her into the ground. The impact sucked the breath from her lungs. Always I fall, she thought. But never for long. My pains are always temporary. So too, she realized, were her victories.
When have I defeated him? she wondered. It was during those stretches when I defeated them all: Zanzeroff, the Valkyrie Elhundra, with her enchanted sword; Boscov, the rogue circus strongman with his dual hammers; Athenae, who claimed to have a shield and sword blessed by the entire Greek pantheon; X'ian Minh, with her cruel whip; Red Richard, who fought with mace and shield; Satsuko, who wore a dagger on every finger. There was even a creature who called itself Wendigo, and fought with a wooden spear as thick as a log. It claimed to come from a land far away. A land, she thought, she might like to see some day. If only she could cross the Wendigo's path again....
She raised her bo staff, trying to ward off the Russian's blows. It was futile, she realized; she was stuck. She had method of counterattack. A kick at his shins somehow exposed her head to the flat of his blade, and with a final strike she was knocked to the ground, crying in anguish as she fell. It was my time to lose, she thought. There is no shame here, exactly.
“Such is the fate of all who oppose Zanzeroff,” said the Russian. He posed, briefly, with his axe, resting with his weight on it like it was a cane. Then he bounded off. Off to fight again, she knew. Victory means you keep fighting. Those were the rules of their games. Until you fought that one person who possessed humanity's most powerful artifact: the God-Scythe. The thing that was so powerful it could not be allowed to fall into the hands of her enemies (or her family's enemies; she had inherited their assets and their liabilities, as it turned out.) Why did Zanzeroff want it? Was it an act of vengeance? Something like that, she dimly recalled. The Mongol called Qengke had done something terrible with it, to his native village or his wife, and was threatening more his homeland with it.
Which was it—his village or his wife? she wondered. I should really know that, it was so important to poor Zanzeroff. So much of his motivation was tied to that initial wrong. Unless he was just a vindictive person in the first place—it wouldn't matter in that case what the wrong was, exactly; Zanzeroff would find some reason to take revenge. And the God-Scythe would be his at the end.
She sat up and stuck her legs out, then drew them in to her chest. It was a beautiful day for a fight, she thought. For winning or losing. The grass and earth beneath her smelled rich and fine. A light breeze stirred the leaves in the trees. It was curious, she thought, the way the leaves moved. The sameness of their motion—it was the same every time she took the time to look at the world around her, which wasn't terribly often (when she had a contemplative moment, sometimes after a loss such as this, sometimes during the flow of a battle when time seemed to slow a bit, and she would notice the smallest things, like the way the leaves were moved by the wind.) If she stared at the leaves long enough they would take on an unreal quality. Like they were composed of glops of paint. Tiny glops, stitched together. If she stared long enough, she though, she could see each glop individually, and then the spaces inbetween them. The sights of my world, she thought, like dots of ink on paper.
She stood up, stretched. A loss didn't end everything, she knew. Neither did a win—a win simply felt better. Someday she would possess the God-Scythe. She had held it in the past! It had whispered virtuous thoughts to her, how she would clear her homeland of its occupiers now that she had the world's finest weapon. Her journey had come to an end and she was content. Maybe that was how, she realized, she lost the weapon to another combatant. To the fighting nun Evangeline, who wanted the God-Scythe buried under tons of rock.
Preposterous, she thought. That sword was her people's last best hope. And yet if it was that important—would she have lost it so quickly? Or wouldn't she have at least started to cast out the invaders before she lost it? I have failed, she thought. Failed my people and my ancestry.
I'll get it back, she told herself. The weapon will be mine again.
But the doubts were still there. The knowledge that even if the God-Scythe were in her hands very little would change. She would fight to keep it and then fight to get it back.
There would always be one more fight, she realized. That was the one true constant of her existence. The chain of combat—at least I'll have that.
It was some comfort to her. Checking the sun's position in the sky, she picked a direction, knowing it was a path she had followed before.

SOME SCRATCHINGS ABOUT CATS (NANOWRIMO PRACTICE): Okay--timed myself for an hour tonight, actually went to about an hour and five minutes (or so) to bring things to whatever sort of logical conclusion I could muster. It's some nonsense about something somebody said to me a while ago about cats taking on the personalities of their owners, that may or may not be widely held folk wisdom or one person's little idiosyncratic opinion. More importantly--it's 1400 words in a little over a hour. My math suggests 50,000 words would take about forty hours at this pace. That's doing a couple pages on a work day at least, and then four or five more on the weekends, and that's only if your motivation holds out. Ugh. My poor pathetic stamina...

...still, it's a marathon, right? You gotta keep a steady pace without overextending yourself early on (<---- my completely imaginary perception of what running a marathon must be like.) Gotta practice forcing myself to write. Maybe slip some reading in too--I have a Charlie Stross book here, and something by Robert Charles Wilson, and my sister-in-law gave me some recent Michael Chabon. But writing is fundamental! Stupid practice scratchings below the fold. Wait--I don't have folds! But this is an actual 2001-era Blogger template, one of kind, very very valuable on ebay, and I refuse to change it. So--stupid scratchings follow.

“Cats take on the personalities of their owners,” she said, matter-of-factly. “It's just the way of this particular species-species interaction.”
Hogwash, he though. Bullcrap. She probably plays the lotto numbers on the back of her fortune cookie fortune too. “I see no evidence for that. Cats is cats. You're reading human behavior into theirs.” She's being—what was the word, he thought—anthropomorphic? Was that right?
“I've seen it too many times to ignore it,” she said. “I mean, look,” she said, gesturing, “ they're just dumb animals, right? No no—that's wrong. They're clever animals, but their desires are pedestrian. Food and the occasional warm body.”
“That's about it for them,” he reflected. As far as their human interactions went. “Maybe a nice bug to eat sometimes.”
“Or a nice mouse to deposit on your floor.”
“Or the occasional vomit on your rug.” Or the hardwood floor. He imagined his own floor with its persistent stains. Not all were cat-related, though, he decided.
“A bit of grass sometimes too, though that's mostly for the vomiting,” she said. “But basically the pie chart is, like, fifty percent food, forty percent companionship, and like ten percent other,” and she put air quotes around “other.” “That's ninety percent devoted to pretty base desires. And there's very little that could be considered high-minded in the remaining ten percent.” Curiosity killed the cat, she thought—the old cliché came to her as she talked on. “Exploration being perhaps the only thing that you could consider to be a noble or advanced activity.”
“You're being anthropomorphic again,” he said, glad he had remembered the word. Although nobility was not exactly a human trait either at this point, he told himself.
“I am not reading anything into cat behavior here,” she protested. “I'm just starting my argument. Cats are in the main motivated by very few desires.”
“They're not dissimilar to humans,” he said, thinking it clever, but not over clever.
“So you have these beings,” she continued, ignoring him, “organized around a tiny set of desires. A set of two desires a majority of the time. Their skillset in acting on these desires, however, is pretty robust. It's adaptable.” She paused, wondering where she was going with this. “That adaptability is key. A cat's personality is plastic. A cat's desires are not.”
“So the clearest path to food and companionship for the cat is to act like its master?” he said. “I'm not buying it.”
“It's not like a cat says to itself, hey, let me act like the tall creature that bring me food every morning—I'll stay on her good side that way,” she said. “But over time you slip into a routine with your cat. She knows your personality—she has to in order to get food out of you. Or to know when the right time it is to climb on your lap.”
“My cats never pick the right time,” he said. “It's always when I'm in the middle of something.”
“But they've figured you out,” she said. “They've picked up on your chaoticness and are giving it back to you.”
“I'm not chaotic,” he said, chagrined. “Hell—I'm probably high on the rankings of routine-bound dullards worldwide.”
“Steven, you're chaotic in the head,” she said, smirking. “The random shit you come up with.”
“Oh, and you're completely appropriate at all times?” he said. Helen from hell sometimes—that's what she could be.
“I'm not saying that,” she said, “but my inappropriateness is different from yours. It takes a different form.”
“Cats are different too,” he said. “Their quirks take on different forms too. One of my cats is noisy and friendly with strangers. The other is anti-social with everyone who isn't me.”
“Oh, there's still baseline cat personalities, don't get me wrong,” she said. “But they're still going to take on a lot of the stuff that's going on in the head of the person who's giving them the Nine Lives every day.”
“So why are my two cats so different?” he said. “They're opposed in temperament.”
“Two sides of yourself,” she said. “Look at my cats—Suzanne is quiet and stupid and George hides under the bed when there's a thunderstorm, but he's still great at escaping when I open the door.”
“So it's your stupid side and your side that wants to escape?”
“Something like that,” she said, drily. “Or my contemplative side and my restless side. Look, this isn't something you can exactly prove, all right? But I'm convinced it's there.” That it is there and that is helps me make sense of the world, she thought. A better life through cats. Cats as pets and cats as avatars, now that the technology existed to make the latter a reality.
“Let me get this,” he said as an old Sousa march interrupted them. “Wait—it's not a call. It's an alarm—we have to get to our arenas.”
Time already, she thought. “Okay,” she said. “Good to see you again. We should do in-person chat more often.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “But we should hurry, you know how expensive server space is these days.”
She nodded, though she thought he was exaggerating. Isn't that why the common house cat—felis catus itself—was picked for the first application of the Mammal Crossover technology? MaCro. Be Differently. That was their slogan, picking up on the echoes of previous slogans that had been passed on down the decades.
Helen stepped on into the rain, black boots clacking on the concrete as the tiny punctuations of the raindrops coalesced into a gentle buzz around her. “Umbreller, ma'am?” said an umbrella.
What the hell, she thought. I can afford the microtransaction. She coded her assent and it positioned itself directly above her head. It's only a few blocks though. Maybe it was a waste.
But I'm a big time cat crossover artist, she thought. Steven and I both. We're catbenders, as people liked to call them (though the union frowned upon such vulgarity.) People piloting cats.
It doesn't make us cats though, she thought as she walked. That's why my argument has some validity. A cat who is living with you is going to take on some of your traits—that's just the kind of animal it is. The only animal in human history to self-domesticate. A cat that has you running in the background of its own consciousness—that has a consciousness that can be supplanted at any second by one's own—that's not you at all. A catbender never became a cat. Science had proved it and philosophy had argued against it.
So I can still think what I want about my own cats. Suzanne and George—just a few more hours, guys. She hoped the storm did not turn too noisy. Hang in there, George, she thought, willing him some courage.
If George had the right receptacles in his brainpan I could wire him some courage, she thought. Or substitute my courage for his absence of bravado. But now I have to see what my assignment is tonight, she realized as she came up to the main window of the MaCro building. MaCro subarena VII.
“What's the word tonight?” she asked the window.
“KL-17,” it responded. “The arena is firefighting.”
“Okay,” she nodded. Perhaps it would be a quiet night. The rain would keep people in, and KL-17 would not need to be crawling into any spaces too small for a human firefighter. Maybe she'd—at worst—have to rescue a real cat from a tree.
KL-17 was real too, though, she realized. Just proscribed for a different sort of existence from the theoretical cat in the tree. One cat is a machine-thing; the other a protected form of life. Both were different kinds of chattel. Perhaps there was some truth to the teachings of the Felis Front, she thought. They who sought to bring intelligence to all cats, and thus equivalent moral standing with humans. But honestly I don't quite feel like dwelling on contradictions tonight, she told herself. My personal ones or my society's.
She hurried down to the arena entrance, hoping she wouldn't have to live in the cat's head all night.

REGISTERED FOR NANOWRIMO TODAY: How many abandoned novels have I had over the years? Four? Five? So we'll see if anything comes of this. Maybe I've reached the point where desire to get something done overcomes the sinking feeling that what's coming out is crap.

How does one train for NaNoWriMo? Do you read a lot, or do you write a lot? The latter I'm guessing--I mean you wouldn't watch football games to practice for the upcoming season. Reading should be supplemental, like watching film in the coach's office.

THE ITALIANS MADE CRAPPY CARS. THEY EVOLVED. THEY BOUGHT CHRYSLER. AND THEY HAVE A PLAN: Fiat looking at GM Europe too. Interesting.

HIPSTERS OF THE WORLD UNITE: No, not a Kari Ferrell post (she's still on the lam it looks like, and maybe she'll stay that way now that her 15 minutes of Internet celebrity are up.) It's this probably-was-in-The-Onion-at-some-point-except-it-turned-out-to-be-true nugget: Chinese getting tattoos with nonsensical Roman characters. (Article does not actually say that, but it's close.)

SOMETHING THAT'S BEEN NAGGING AT ME ABOUT THE ROXANA SABERI SITUATION: How the heck does one become a dual Iranian/American citizen? Particularly when you're from freaking Fargo? It's not like we and they have anything like normal diplomatic relations.

From what I can gather (answering my own question) Iran says she is a citizen because her father has/had Iranian citizenship. I am curious if she sought Iranian citizenship, or if it was forced upon her for the purposes of locking her up.

WHEN YOU'VE LOST LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS: What is going on here? Charles Johnson is finding his internal John Cole?

EDIT: Maybe never mind? And JC never did a day full of updates about people talking about him becoming less crazy.

MAKING ME LAUGH ABOUT THE UPCOMING CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL DISASTER: China Becoming a Total Sausage Fest. Just one of the many headlines of the fairly disturbing news that China has 32 million more boys than girls. Million!

ONLY GIVING YOU THINGS YOU JOKE ABOUT WITH YOUR FRIENDS INSIDE YOUR LIVING ROOM: DougJ breaks blog kayfabe.

Have I mentioned that the evolution of DougJ from spoof poster to Balloon Juice front pager is one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed on the Internet? No? Because that would be true.

THE SECOND TIME, BUT AS FARCE: Thoreau draws our attention to the Obama administration's version of the Hainan Island incident. Really--this one paragraph is all you need to know:

"Because the vessels' intentions were not known, Impeccable sprayed its fire hoses at one of the vessels in order to protect itself," the statement said. "The Chinese crewmembers disrobed to their underwear and continued closing to within 25 feet."

"Cap'n--they're giving us the skivvies!" "Blast--the hosing wasn't enough! Courage, men! Launch the fool moon salute!"

THE GEITHNER TIPPING POINT: Yeah. This here is the last straw of the Geithner hate stuff I've been reading lately. It's probably a bit of a stretch--it blames Geithner for mishandling the Asian financial crisis, which leads to East Asia shunning the IMF (which they have little control over or say in) and building up their foreign currency reserves, which directly feeds into the current debt-fueled nightmare. But in concert with the dithering and lack of imagination and all around lack of response months into Great Depression II: Even The Homeless Have Cellphones? There's got to be somebody better, Barry. And someone not a total high finance thrall either (though that's certainly asking for too much. But just someone who might consider putting the national interest first at some point.)

(This cellphone other thing is yards of silly, by the way. Like cellphones are any kind of a wealth marker, or like every destitute Somalian doesn't have a cellphone at this point.)

"FUCK THE HAWAIIANS. THEY DIDN'T VOTE FOR US ANYWAY:" I mean I don't watch 30 Rock so I can't enjoy that particular bit of Internet fun about the Jindal response last night. And the ridiculousness of the Republicans continuing to repeat the wasteful spending part of their catechism goes without saying. But picking on volcano monitoring? And putting it in scare quotes, as if the very idea that somebody in the United States of America could possibly have a legit interest in volcanoes was just obviously preposterous? They have nothing left, does the GOP. And if Mount Redoubt blows there'll be less GOPers!

(For the record I watched nothing last night, some of us have to work for a living. Barry needs to ditch the Summers/Geithner bankster cabal he's got working for him.)

EMBRACING MY INNER GLENN REYNOLDS: Or why I think I'm becoming a fake libertarian. Two reasons:

1. Most of the posts on Hit & Run about the financial crisis just annoyed the crap out of me, especially anything having to do with the auto bailout. Seriously--in the midst of a global meltdown and after giving bajillions to the people who actually caused the meltdown you're against keeping our manufacturing sector alive? Is "Austrian" Randite for "Hooverite"?

Comments about how much people enjoyed their Toyotas were particularly hard to take. As if the quality of their product was anywhere near the biggest reason the Detroit 2.5 are in trouble. (Or 1.5 as it turned out, Ford obviously put a priority on managing their company over managing the Lions.)

Sometimes I think I am still libertarian, but I think the unit of competition should be the nation-state, not individual companies. I mean do you think Japan or Germany would let their automakers fail? Of course not--they'd get in there and muck around because they know their national prosperity is at stake. And yet it's a big debate in this country. Maybe our nation-state needs more government intervention in business and such to stay competitive with the other nation-states, you know? It certainly works for the rest of the world.

Other time I think the big gaping hole in libertarian economics is there is no conception of finance--that is, there is no conception of how money actually works, I guess because it's a practical, pragmatic field that you can't just yell "GOLD STANDARD!!!" at and explain anything. The only libertarianish thinker (she was in Reason once) I've enjoyed during this whole megadebacle is Yves Smith, who was in the big money business and is absolutely nondogmatic about this stuff. More libertarians need to get into the sausage-making business, I feel like, even if they become less pure by their exposure to the messy way things actually get done.

2. I am completely on board with government intervention to bring down the BCS, like the Utah AG is trying to do right now. The BCS is as clear an example as I can think of of the free market reaching the worst outcome possible. And yet you hear people say "if the government gets involved think of how bad it could get!!!!!!" How could it be worse than what we have right now? We have the worst of all possible worlds right now. It's not really a poll-based system anymore, since the final poll isn't allowed to vote anyone other than whoever wins the BCS Championship as number one. You can still split a championship but only if you're somebody who's on the AP's radar from the beginning, those dudes are not going to say to themselves "you know what, Utah? We were wrong all along" (even though they were wrong all along, of course) and give them half the title. And it definitely isn't a playoff. I remember reading somewhere that the BCS sort-of made sense coming out of the late 90s when it was always clear who #1 and #2 were (not sure if this was true or not, but it's a nice idea.) But now? No sense whatsoever. There is no legitimacy in a 1-2 matchup today, but especially this year.

And yet ESPN has bid to broadcast this system through 2014? Are you serious? Five more years of anticlimax? Of national media peoples pretending anything was settled on the field? Ugh, and ugh again. The people in charge of college football have shown no inclination to change their ways, and they're not going to, even if everybody's (on ESPN) favorite coach, Pete Carroll himself, thinks they're full of it. The conference commissioners are in charge and will be in charge until somebody takes power away from them. The networks and advertisers don't seem like they want the power, even though they have the money. (I've never understood why no one has tried to set up a competing system yet. Fox gets outbid for the BCS? Okay--flash some cash at the non-BCS schools, try to peel off a few BCS programs for added legitimacy--USC can't be happy about Rose Bowl after mindnumbing Rose Bowl--instant Counter-BCS! Or playoffs even.) The government is the only entity capable of rectifying this situation. And antitrust seems a perfect way to do it, as we really do have teams excluded from championships based purely on what conference they play in. But no matter how they do it, they're the only ones who can.

And so my libertarianism gets faker. Next I'll be writing sympathetic portrayals of how THE LEFT!!!! destroyed poor Alberto Gonzales. But I'm not a Republican!

(Sorry no links in the above, you need a blog that updates more than twice a year for that kind of attention to detail.)

EPITAPH FOR THE BUSH YEARS, OR THE FINAL REPUBLICAN POOR DECISION: Yglesias:

The House conservatives who sank the bailout didn’t do so because they were listening to loud and angry voices. They sank the plan by accident. They were trying to double-cross the Democrats. First, they wrung lots of concessions out of Democrats at the negotiating table as the price for delivering 80 votes. Then, by not delivering 80 votes and forcing Pelosi to pass the bill as a partisan Democratic bill, they were going to wage a demagogic anti-bailout campaign. But Pelosi refused to be played for a sucker and so the conservative inadvertently sank a bill that, all evidence suggests, they actually wanted to pass. They just wanted to vote “no” on it for short-term political gain.

Getting rolled by Nancy freaking Pelosi is the final indignity for the GOP. If Matt's right with this, I mean.

And of course playing political chicken with financial armageddon in the balance is probably in poor taste. That said, I'm glad the bill died on Monday, since by all accounts it really is a big giveaway that won't solve the fundamental problem--see Yves. Of course Paulson's going back to try and get this particular bill done again, without explaining what the problem is (of course not, then he'd have to come up with a plan that wasn't a giveaway.)

By the way--I've always been curious if hedge funds contribute anything of real value to the economy, or if we'd even notice if they and their gallons of wealth disappeared. I guess we find out tomorrow!

AND PONTIUS PELOSI SAID TO THE CROWD, "WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE PASS UPON YOU: A BAILOUT, OR A DEPRESSION THAT SHALL BE CALLED GREAT?" AND THE CROWD SAID, "FREE MARKETS!!!11!: Pelosi to give everyone a day to decide if they like the final bailout bill or not. If a bill gets done, that is.

Yes, I am moving into the "something must be done fairly quickly" camp. Too many people (Roubini, Krugman, Buffett) saying we're in it deep this time.

OH LIKE LAUTENBERG EVEN KNOWS HOW TO WORK A FAX MACHINE: But if he did he'd be seeing this totally state-of-the-art Krugmanny bit of US American democracy:

I’m one of your constituents, and I want to urge you to not vote for any version of the bailout plan that does not involve an exchange of equity for taking troubled assets off a bank’s books. This is close to what Sweden did when they were going through a similar crisis to our own, and I think it would work much better than the massive cash dump Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson are proposing. The Chairman and the Secretary seem to think the crisis is one of confidence, and if we just pump more money into the banks things will turn around. I do not think they are right. We are in the midst of a massive deflation of the housing market and no amount of emergency lifelines from the Federal Reserve will change that. I think Congress will be serving the nation much more effectively if they offer banks the chance to exchange equity for their bad assets. This will ensure that the banks that are in trouble receive help—at a price—without simply giving money away. I believe this was how Sweden dealt with their crisis; it was painful, but it dealt with the crisis quickly. The alternative model is Japan’s, which propped up their failing banks for far too long and lost a decade of economic growth because of it, that they even now have not fully recovered from. I do not think that needs to happen here.

Thank you.

Hurray! My vote counts! Or something. Anyway--as far as I can tell the housing bubble is deflating no matter what. Tossing money at banks who may not even need it is not going to help.

ADMIRAL ACKBAR, A LONELY NATION TURNS ITS EYES TO YOU: Please, Democrats. Don't fall for it.

(Harry Reid said somewhere that they had no idea what to do. They should stick with that.)

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION REALLY HAS ONLY ONE RESPONSE TO A CRISIS: When in doubt, take more power!

AH, THE ECONOMY: At this point it's hard to do anything besides sitting back and watching the carnage.

MY FINAL WORD ON THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AS OF TODAY: I just don't think this is the year where stupid shit like moose hunting is going to work.

And at this point I should probably just secede from the blog reading community as I do have stuff (ugh) to worry about. But I probably won't.