In the weeks now since Star Wars Episode III was released, the invectives leveled against its progenitor, George Lucas, have reached proportions more epic than anything that’s come out of the brain trust at Skywalker Ranch. The British daily The Guardian called Lucas less a director and more a “chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option,” whose corporate avatar, Industrial Light and Magic, contains “no magic, little light [and] an awful lot of heavy industry.” An ‘alt’ American paper, The Observer, suggested assessing films of negative aesthetic merit in terms of “Lucases” - as in, ‘Dude, Where’s my Car? got three Lucases in the Chicago Tribune’. The Salon review, marked by its usual sass, was entitled “Same old Sith” and the film summarized as the work of “an occasionally clever but mostly simple-minded auteur-wannabe”. But perhaps it was the dreaded New Yorker (which, it should be noted in fairness, is responsible for more conversions to the Dark Side than Palpatine ever was) who went furthest in criticism qua witticism. Anthony Lane calls the Bard of Endor a “rootless soul” with “a near fascistic rage for order” who has created:
“an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.”
I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that most critics with a failed-novel on their shoulders and a circulation of over 10,000 are prone to the occasional hyperbolic judgment. But rarely is such lavish and luxuriant venom heaped upon a film that makes no pretensions to Oscar-worthiness. Surely, this literary-lashing, this critical-cornholing, can’t be warranted, not by Our Man George. Can it?
The short answer, children, is yes. Yes it can.
Star Wars Episode III sucked. It sucked essentially - sucked at the root of its very being, and sucked by and large because of an obscenely wealthy, beard-and-pompadour-sporting pestilence known as George Locust - er - Lucas. Lucas, then, is worthy of revile. Still, I won’t offer much of a critique of the film itself - that has been done, with all the subtlety and restraint of a blowjob from a vacuum cleaner. Besides, I actually hold certain of its elements beyond reproach; protected, as it were, from a death of suckitude stretched indefinitely in space and time at the event-horizon of suckiness that is this Lucasian suckfest of a Black-Hole-suck-suck.
Yoda, for one. Yoda can do no wrong for me, not since he watched Luke’s X-wing lift-off from Degoba, squinting sagely and replying to Obi-Wan’s portentous claim that “that boy is our only hope” with “No, there is another.” Anthony Lane is so perturbed by our little-green-friend’s cadence that he begs us to “break [him] a fucking give”. True, Yoda’s inversions may be contrived and irrelevant, but they are fucking YODA’s inversions. Besides, Lane’s review shares column space with New Yorker cartoons. He should know all about contrived and irrelevant.
Two. Natalie Portman. The poor girl is as beautiful as she is useless in this role. I mean, we know she can act. Just look at her wonderful performance as the Madonna-Whore in Closer; and her in some ways even more impressive turn as the Atlas to Zack Braff’s globular ego in Garden State. The problem is that Herr Lucas writes romance like he would a car stereo installation manual, and he has forcefully ejaculated such unspeakable tripe past the lips of Amidala that - could I prove paternity - I would bring him up on charges of rape.
Needless to say, most if not everything else in the movie sucks. Or if it doesn’t itself suck, it is so bathed in Lucas’s putridity that one can’t stand in its presence for long before one’s stomach turns and one’s eyes water.
Still, Lucas’s real crime has nothing to do with the film itself, but rather its audience. I saw Revenge of the Sith a week after opening, at a 10PM showing in Oxford (a highly disreputable time to see a movie in England) and the house was packed. A line had formed outside the small theatre 45 minutes before the 45 minutes of commercials before the 45 minutes of trailers before the movie. When John Williams’ anthem and STAR WARS finally leapt to screen, a great applause went up: the sound of an anxious hope that an under-the-desk hand job - begun in 1977 in the spirit of innocence and exploration and gas shortage - was finally to reach its climax after seven-odd years of cinematic blue-balls. When it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t to be, we ragtag band of geeks, dorks and dungeon-masters turned to the one weapon losers have wielded since time immemorial in the face of romantic (Romantic?) jilting: self-important, sneering mockery.
In short, we laughed. And we laughed not just at 3PO’s obliviousness or R2’s irascibility, not just at Palpatine’s coiffure or Mace Windu’s purple light saber; nor even did we draw the line at snickering over Hayden Christensen’s bitchy rejoinder to Ewan MacGregor’s warning of the Sith lords’ evil (“Not from my point of view! From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”). No, friends, I am sad to say that we laughed at the Man in Black himself. When Vader, freshly be-suited and strapped into a Kafkaesque device of wrought steel, is deceived by the Emperor into believing that he has killed the woman he loves, he tears free of his restraints, shakes two black-gloved fists in the air and vociferates the kind of “NOOOOOOOOOO!” that can only issue from the darker regions of James Earl Jones’ soul.
And we chortled with all the righteous irony of Janine Garafalo at a straight bar. We laughed at Darth-motherfucking-Vader. And why? Because some dude in this dumb ass movie was totally ripping off Star Wars, and didn’t he realize how fucking kitsch that was?
In the short time it took Luke and Lea to be born, something distinctively American died. That bright-eyed, naïve earnestness; that seriousness about kidding ourselves; that starving for a mythos which was as fun and facile as it was sacred and indispensable. In a word, that unselfconsciousness. That - can I even say it without you cringing in this age of I Love the 80s and Best Week Ever?…..that innocence.
Somewhere in the vast conceptual gulf between the Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars became what Jean Baudrillard (known in some circles simply as ‘French Theorist #163’) calls a simulacrum - a cultural copy of a copy whose original has long since gone the way of the sitcom. Worse yet, it became a simulacrum of itself. A kind of hyper-movie (or hyper-franchise) whose logic and aesthetics we had already chewed up, spoofed, and spit out into the dust bin of irony-for-its-own-sake. In short, even if the prequels had sucked half as much as they actually did, they were destined to be subjected to the bored and disaffected nihilism of an X-generation of maladroit malcontents who wear bowling shirts with other people’s names on them. In the greatest cultural perversion in recent history, Star Wars has become Space Balls. And Space Balls - if you ask the average video store clerk worth his salt in vapid cynicism - has become Citizen Cane.
None of this, of course, is to exonerate Herr Lucas, whose Leviathan ILM was practically at the helm of Hollywood’s perfection of the vacuous summer blockbuster. But if you ask me, his soul is cleaner than yours or mine. After all, he’s got your ten bucks, and he carries it with a perfectly straight face all the way to the bank. You and I, on the other hand, are left in this Recycled Land of Thin-Candy-Shelled Men, wondering why it is we can’t help but smirk every time we hear the name “Grand Moff Tarkin”.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Monday, May 23, 2005
Pissing In The Wind: Use the Pun!
Star Wars. Episode III. What do you think?
-D"brevity is the soul of restraining one's feelings and remaining anonymous"an
-D"brevity is the soul of restraining one's feelings and remaining anonymous"an
Thursday, May 19, 2005
What a Racket
Quoth the Comedy Central: "Watch never-before-scene features from the Chapelle's Show Season 2 DVD before they're released!" Well, considering you're the network that airs the show, it seems like that would include EVERY SINGLE EPISODE.
It's always nifty when you can impress people by not showing them something. E.g., imagine the conversation at comedy central:
"Wow, that sketch sucks. I mean, I know every thing Dave Chapelle thinks about is some racial commentary, but the getting-in-the-mind-of-a-member-of-some-obscure-Andean-Sheep-Herder-tribe is so overdone."
"OK, fine it's cut."
"Wait, no, let's just put it off for a few months, to have some morsel to throw at his screaming fans."
So, in summation, fuck you Comedy Central; Dave, good luck getting your mind off the bitches that be drivin' you so crazy.
It's always nifty when you can impress people by not showing them something. E.g., imagine the conversation at comedy central:
"Wow, that sketch sucks. I mean, I know every thing Dave Chapelle thinks about is some racial commentary, but the getting-in-the-mind-of-a-member-of-some-obscure-Andean-Sheep-Herder-tribe is so overdone."
"OK, fine it's cut."
"Wait, no, let's just put it off for a few months, to have some morsel to throw at his screaming fans."
So, in summation, fuck you Comedy Central; Dave, good luck getting your mind off the bitches that be drivin' you so crazy.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Silver, Part 3
Continued from part 1 and part 2:
Fact one: Humans are the only mammals that exude no experimentally verifiable sex pheremones. Fact two: there exists no woodland species whose male is willing to continue playing video games in the presence of a female in estrus. Though no link has been satisfactorily demonstrated in a peer-reviewed journal, and though full fault cannot be ascribed to Brian as it was still within his refractory period from their last mutual satisfaction, these two facts are clearly related. This typical Saturday night of the still-young relationship found Brian and Tony on the couch poking frantically at their controllers while Cindy flopped on the loveseat in her sweats. In a subconscious nod to the history of handling sexually aroused and arousing women by placing them in a societies composed exclusively of other women and castrati, Brian had tuned their second TV to a showing of her favorite musical, Aladdin.
The second television of their household was a relic from an ex-roommate's ex-roommate, a 60 cm job allegedly from France but of questionable enough workmanship that ex-Soviet Republic lineage was not out of the question. Most households would have junked in a second (several, in fact, already had). But Brian and Tony kept it not for its color, not for its vertical hold, certainly not for its necessitating an obscure electrical converter, and not for what its measurements were, but for what its measurements were given in. This Cold War relic was the centerpiece of their living room simply because it was measured in System Internationale Units.
Brian and Tony's house had originally been two marginally historic whose combination, so went the thoughts of one urban developer, would open up one of the lots for a 24-hour gas station/mini-mart. It was only when the houses had been uprooted and resituated that it was realized that one house was built to Imperial specifications and the other to Metric proportions. What this meant was that while the windows, doors and ceilings were of similar height, eventually the rounding error caught up and the home assumed a leitmotif of "not quite right". The architect behind this contraption of a living space came out of his drunken stupor long enough to reveal the move was a minimalistic retelling of a dialogue between prescriptivists that mimicked the something something of who cares. The art was promptly entered into the state's register of historic places and permanently saved from the demolition that passers-by perpetually wished upon it. The upside for a video store clerk and roommate of similarly moderate
ambition was that it was rent-controlled not by fickle legislators but by humanity's innate desire for consistency in aesthetics.
Many a weaker pair of decorators would have attempted to hide the disparity that comes with having a footed kitchen/dining room but a metered living room. This is roughly as intelligent as attempting to draw attention away from a hunchback with vertical stripes. Instead, Brian and Tony highlighted it. Objects were only allowed on the side of the divide where they belonged according to their primary unit of measurement. So while all their comfortable seating surfaces (couch, loveseat, a smattering of easy chairs) were on the upper, metric half of their common space, Brian and Tony, being true to their vision, kept the 30", flat screen beaut of a television that was their pride and joy just over the border of the seven-eights of an inch minus 2 centimeters (each half had been meticulously constructed and they spent one night calculating the difference) dip in the floor.
"Look, you're not going to be able to make up this deficit," said Tony.
"I've come back from worse situations."
"What? When I was drunk? As long as I'm sober, this kicking of your ass will continue. And I think we both know it."
"*WE* don't know anything. We have to wait and see it--"
"Brian, honey, are Jasmine's tits nicer than mine?" Cindy broke into the conversation.
"She's a cartoon."
"I'm not going to get mad, I promise. You can tell me what you honestly think."
"I honestly think she's a cartoon."
"You're no help. Tony?"
Tony glanced over at the Sonyski. "I'd say maybe. But I think that's just because her wardrobe is very to her advantage."
"Guys, she's a cartoon. She doesn't have tits. They're lines of ink."
Cindy weighed her bosom in her hands. "Do they bounce more naturally?"
"They can't! By definition, whatever your breasts do are natural as it can be."
"What would you say she is, Tony, D-cup?"
"Oh, at least."
"But back in those days they didn't have push-up bras. How much could they really amplify her cleavage? Maybe they're just really buoyant, like, double-Es."
Brian couldn't stand the horrible combination of inanity and insanity. "Back in those days? You mean 1994? Or are you implying that Disney, the commodifier of all that was holy, drew period costumes? Considering that half the things that came out of Robin Williams's mouth in that movie were anachronistic at best, I'm pretty sure historical fidelity was not one of their primary goals."
Tony and Cindy ignored him. She continued, "Man, this is the hardest part for girls, when we're comparing. Trying to guess how much of that is real and how much is underwire. I wish I could just," she motioned, "see them, and really know."
"There are websites," Tony said, faster than he probably should have. The conversation faded into laughter, embarrassment, and eventually embarrassed laughter.
Cindy got up from her reclined position and wandered over to behind her boyfriend. "You're so focused on your race car or horse cow or whatever that is, I feel like you're not paying attention to me."
He continue jabbing and lunging at the plastic in his hand, leaning it in the direction he was already pushing, in the shared unconscious hope of every man who was a teenager since the 80's that the game console has some hitherto undisclosed way of sensing and responding to ferocity of motion and purity of intent. "Probably true."
"You're impossible!"
"No, what's impossible is making this... jump... right... here. Oh, and I made it. How you like that, Tony? Don’t call it a comeback, I was never out of it."
She cozied up closer behind him. "You sure you wouldn't rather... play another sort of game. I know how we could involve electronics." While she said this, his head was nestled between her Golden Globe-winning golden globes.
He was affected by the temptation, as his race car or horse cow or whatever crashed and ignited into a heap of polygons ablaze. But he would not succumb to it and turned to face Tony. "'Nother game?"
"Why do I put up with you?"
"Because I don't respond to rhetorical questions?"
Cindy had little to say to that, and went into their kitchen. She looked through the cupboards, the refrigerator, and the freezer before finding what she wanted. "Anybody else want ice cream? With whip cream? Maybe some chocolate sauce?"
Tony spoke up first. "This is really cool, having a roommate who dates a movie star."
"What do you mean?"
"I learn new stuff every day. Apparently, in some cases, the camera doesn't need to add ten pounds!"
"Brian, are you going to let him talk to me like that?"
"Tony."
"Sorry. 4.5 kilograms."
Cindy playfully tossed a stuffed animal Brian and Tony had distributed around the kitchen the morning after a drunken friend had found the only throwable object in the kitchen to be a tea pot and in their drunken frame of reference thought that with the correct lobbing motion such a flight could be considered playful, resulting in a broken window and a missed tea time. She situated herself and her Haagen Dasz between the them on the couch. "Hey, Brian, can we talk?"
He didn't take his eyes of the screen. "Is this like a breaking-up talk?"
"No, no, nothing like that."
"Is it more important that, say, what we're doing for dinner tonight?"
"What is this, twenty questions? Yes, it's larger than a bread box."
"OK, based on my priorities, and the knowledge that it's less important than breaking up and more important than what we're doing for dinner, it's not important enough to end this game early, but important enough to not start another one."
"So I have to wait till the end of this game?"
"I don't think you know it well enough to help me win."
She sat for a moment, and the only sounds in the apartment were of clanking metal and battling animal-hybrids over a soundtrack of futuristic apocalyptic rock. While the boys jousted virtually, she mulled her thoughts and replayed in her mind the conversation. She contented herself to watch Aladdin (which was her favorite musical) for the next few minutes. But, really, how did they stay so pert? She asked, quite simply, "Would you enjoy it if I wore a bra while we made love."
Both of the race cows blew up at the bottom of ravines simultaneously as Brian and Tony looked at her.
"Oh, good, we can talk now. What are you doing three weeks from Sunday?"
"Umm, I think I have plans with Tony."
Tony tried to help his roommate. "Dude, that's the night of the Oscars."
Brian didn't get the message. "See, we do have plans. And I can't just bail on him."
"You can just bail on me. You must. I'd sell you to go the Oscars. Unless we were in prison. Then I'd sell you for a carton of smokes."
"Hey."
"Sorry, 20 decacigarettes."
"So, Brian," she paused, biting her lower lip, and as Brian looked at her he damned Ansel Adams for applying his photographic talent to the pale beauty of nature when faces like this existed, "will you be my date to the Academy Awards?"
Fact one: Humans are the only mammals that exude no experimentally verifiable sex pheremones. Fact two: there exists no woodland species whose male is willing to continue playing video games in the presence of a female in estrus. Though no link has been satisfactorily demonstrated in a peer-reviewed journal, and though full fault cannot be ascribed to Brian as it was still within his refractory period from their last mutual satisfaction, these two facts are clearly related. This typical Saturday night of the still-young relationship found Brian and Tony on the couch poking frantically at their controllers while Cindy flopped on the loveseat in her sweats. In a subconscious nod to the history of handling sexually aroused and arousing women by placing them in a societies composed exclusively of other women and castrati, Brian had tuned their second TV to a showing of her favorite musical, Aladdin.
The second television of their household was a relic from an ex-roommate's ex-roommate, a 60 cm job allegedly from France but of questionable enough workmanship that ex-Soviet Republic lineage was not out of the question. Most households would have junked in a second (several, in fact, already had). But Brian and Tony kept it not for its color, not for its vertical hold, certainly not for its necessitating an obscure electrical converter, and not for what its measurements were, but for what its measurements were given in. This Cold War relic was the centerpiece of their living room simply because it was measured in System Internationale Units.
Brian and Tony's house had originally been two marginally historic whose combination, so went the thoughts of one urban developer, would open up one of the lots for a 24-hour gas station/mini-mart. It was only when the houses had been uprooted and resituated that it was realized that one house was built to Imperial specifications and the other to Metric proportions. What this meant was that while the windows, doors and ceilings were of similar height, eventually the rounding error caught up and the home assumed a leitmotif of "not quite right". The architect behind this contraption of a living space came out of his drunken stupor long enough to reveal the move was a minimalistic retelling of a dialogue between prescriptivists that mimicked the something something of who cares. The art was promptly entered into the state's register of historic places and permanently saved from the demolition that passers-by perpetually wished upon it. The upside for a video store clerk and roommate of similarly moderate
ambition was that it was rent-controlled not by fickle legislators but by humanity's innate desire for consistency in aesthetics.
Many a weaker pair of decorators would have attempted to hide the disparity that comes with having a footed kitchen/dining room but a metered living room. This is roughly as intelligent as attempting to draw attention away from a hunchback with vertical stripes. Instead, Brian and Tony highlighted it. Objects were only allowed on the side of the divide where they belonged according to their primary unit of measurement. So while all their comfortable seating surfaces (couch, loveseat, a smattering of easy chairs) were on the upper, metric half of their common space, Brian and Tony, being true to their vision, kept the 30", flat screen beaut of a television that was their pride and joy just over the border of the seven-eights of an inch minus 2 centimeters (each half had been meticulously constructed and they spent one night calculating the difference) dip in the floor.
"Look, you're not going to be able to make up this deficit," said Tony.
"I've come back from worse situations."
"What? When I was drunk? As long as I'm sober, this kicking of your ass will continue. And I think we both know it."
"*WE* don't know anything. We have to wait and see it--"
"Brian, honey, are Jasmine's tits nicer than mine?" Cindy broke into the conversation.
"She's a cartoon."
"I'm not going to get mad, I promise. You can tell me what you honestly think."
"I honestly think she's a cartoon."
"You're no help. Tony?"
Tony glanced over at the Sonyski. "I'd say maybe. But I think that's just because her wardrobe is very to her advantage."
"Guys, she's a cartoon. She doesn't have tits. They're lines of ink."
Cindy weighed her bosom in her hands. "Do they bounce more naturally?"
"They can't! By definition, whatever your breasts do are natural as it can be."
"What would you say she is, Tony, D-cup?"
"Oh, at least."
"But back in those days they didn't have push-up bras. How much could they really amplify her cleavage? Maybe they're just really buoyant, like, double-Es."
Brian couldn't stand the horrible combination of inanity and insanity. "Back in those days? You mean 1994? Or are you implying that Disney, the commodifier of all that was holy, drew period costumes? Considering that half the things that came out of Robin Williams's mouth in that movie were anachronistic at best, I'm pretty sure historical fidelity was not one of their primary goals."
Tony and Cindy ignored him. She continued, "Man, this is the hardest part for girls, when we're comparing. Trying to guess how much of that is real and how much is underwire. I wish I could just," she motioned, "see them, and really know."
"There are websites," Tony said, faster than he probably should have. The conversation faded into laughter, embarrassment, and eventually embarrassed laughter.
Cindy got up from her reclined position and wandered over to behind her boyfriend. "You're so focused on your race car or horse cow or whatever that is, I feel like you're not paying attention to me."
He continue jabbing and lunging at the plastic in his hand, leaning it in the direction he was already pushing, in the shared unconscious hope of every man who was a teenager since the 80's that the game console has some hitherto undisclosed way of sensing and responding to ferocity of motion and purity of intent. "Probably true."
"You're impossible!"
"No, what's impossible is making this... jump... right... here. Oh, and I made it. How you like that, Tony? Don’t call it a comeback, I was never out of it."
She cozied up closer behind him. "You sure you wouldn't rather... play another sort of game. I know how we could involve electronics." While she said this, his head was nestled between her Golden Globe-winning golden globes.
He was affected by the temptation, as his race car or horse cow or whatever crashed and ignited into a heap of polygons ablaze. But he would not succumb to it and turned to face Tony. "'Nother game?"
"Why do I put up with you?"
"Because I don't respond to rhetorical questions?"
Cindy had little to say to that, and went into their kitchen. She looked through the cupboards, the refrigerator, and the freezer before finding what she wanted. "Anybody else want ice cream? With whip cream? Maybe some chocolate sauce?"
Tony spoke up first. "This is really cool, having a roommate who dates a movie star."
"What do you mean?"
"I learn new stuff every day. Apparently, in some cases, the camera doesn't need to add ten pounds!"
"Brian, are you going to let him talk to me like that?"
"Tony."
"Sorry. 4.5 kilograms."
Cindy playfully tossed a stuffed animal Brian and Tony had distributed around the kitchen the morning after a drunken friend had found the only throwable object in the kitchen to be a tea pot and in their drunken frame of reference thought that with the correct lobbing motion such a flight could be considered playful, resulting in a broken window and a missed tea time. She situated herself and her Haagen Dasz between the them on the couch. "Hey, Brian, can we talk?"
He didn't take his eyes of the screen. "Is this like a breaking-up talk?"
"No, no, nothing like that."
"Is it more important that, say, what we're doing for dinner tonight?"
"What is this, twenty questions? Yes, it's larger than a bread box."
"OK, based on my priorities, and the knowledge that it's less important than breaking up and more important than what we're doing for dinner, it's not important enough to end this game early, but important enough to not start another one."
"So I have to wait till the end of this game?"
"I don't think you know it well enough to help me win."
She sat for a moment, and the only sounds in the apartment were of clanking metal and battling animal-hybrids over a soundtrack of futuristic apocalyptic rock. While the boys jousted virtually, she mulled her thoughts and replayed in her mind the conversation. She contented herself to watch Aladdin (which was her favorite musical) for the next few minutes. But, really, how did they stay so pert? She asked, quite simply, "Would you enjoy it if I wore a bra while we made love."
Both of the race cows blew up at the bottom of ravines simultaneously as Brian and Tony looked at her.
"Oh, good, we can talk now. What are you doing three weeks from Sunday?"
"Umm, I think I have plans with Tony."
Tony tried to help his roommate. "Dude, that's the night of the Oscars."
Brian didn't get the message. "See, we do have plans. And I can't just bail on him."
"You can just bail on me. You must. I'd sell you to go the Oscars. Unless we were in prison. Then I'd sell you for a carton of smokes."
"Hey."
"Sorry, 20 decacigarettes."
"So, Brian," she paused, biting her lower lip, and as Brian looked at her he damned Ansel Adams for applying his photographic talent to the pale beauty of nature when faces like this existed, "will you be my date to the Academy Awards?"
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
My English Legacy
I recently got back my last paper as an undergrad English Major. I got a 97. This is also my best grade in an English class. And it is now I realize what must have convinced everyone else that English is an easy major: it is.
You just have to find your Hobby Horse. Some people preach "semiotics", others "epistemology", and me? My phrase is "What's at stake for the author?" The one thing these three intellectual bents have in common? I have no idea what they mean.
But they make professors swoon. At the top of the page was, scrawled in his handwriting, such raves as "one of the highlights of my quarter thus far" and "it leaves me rather speechless." And then, further down the page, he had highlighted a section. The sentence when I whip out the big gun, "constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author."
The paper follows,
-D"almost enough to make me go back to grad school"an
P.S. It's about Tristram Shandy, a good novel about Tristram Shandy.
-----------------------------------------------
I wrote this at 5:16, May 4th, 2005.
So far we've seen at least two instances of Sterne discussing the actual time of his writing: I.vxiii (page 24) "this very day, in which I am now writing this book [] -- which is March 9, 1759" and IV.xvii (page 230) "It is not half an hour ago, when [..] I threw a fair sheet [...] slap into the fire[.]" Now what I wonder is, are these statements true?
Our editor believes him (in the notes to Vol. I on page 540 he writes "dates that seem to correspond to the dates Sterne writes"). And why not? What is there at stake? Why would an author have any reason to lie about when they wrote something? It's a nice gimmick to connect with readers, and surely nothing should get in the way of that honest and direct bond that Sterne is creati--
But this is not the kind of writer Sterne is. He has already created the chronology of the telling, the chronology the characters live in, and the chronology of the reading. What would keep him from playing with the chronology of the writing?
Absolutely nothing. That's why I view all references to the act of writing as being as fictional as Dr. Slop's caricature or Trim's babbling. Instead, the dates are puzzles. What dates would I pick to insert into my own writing? March 20th. September 3rd. June 28th. Why? Well, that's for Bentley Biographers of the future to figure out. But if most of writing is a conversation with the reader, than this seems like a place where Sterne could be embedding a conversation with a specific reader.
The astute reader will point out that of course the narrative of writing is a fictional one: the narrator is not Sterne but Tristram. Maybe the converse is true, then, that Sterne is turning the seemingly fictional to the real. But even this would be a measured dose of reality. It is not opening a door, it is setting outside empty milk bottles to be picked up.
The key of all these theories is that Sterne remains in control. This book was written. We can be reasonably certain that he wrote later volumes after earlier ones (especially as Volume III opens with epigraphs in response to criticisms of the first two). More than that we can not necessarily say. And that's great. It makes us conscious of what we would assume in any other book. It's like Andy Warhol or Andy Kaufman. We have to constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author. And is anything truly at stake if they tell an unknowable lie?
Sterne is probably safe from any attacks on him or his writing. Or, wherever he is, he won't be any the worse for whatever we or biographers prove about him or his writing. Even were he alive, the worst that could really result from someone ascertaining the truth or falsity would be more press, which could only result in more sales and royalties.
Sterne often plays with the physicality of the object of the writing. Here is one manner in which he plays with the physicality of the process. And this is what is so rich about this novel. Sterne just had to look over at the calendar or remember what he just did, jot it down, and he'll set me off for an hour thinking about nothing. But maybe, just maybe, he stole the idea of writing on March 9th from someone else, and I am thinking about something. Something real.
I'd just never be able to know.
You just have to find your Hobby Horse. Some people preach "semiotics", others "epistemology", and me? My phrase is "What's at stake for the author?" The one thing these three intellectual bents have in common? I have no idea what they mean.
But they make professors swoon. At the top of the page was, scrawled in his handwriting, such raves as "one of the highlights of my quarter thus far" and "it leaves me rather speechless." And then, further down the page, he had highlighted a section. The sentence when I whip out the big gun, "constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author."
The paper follows,
-D"almost enough to make me go back to grad school"an
P.S. It's about Tristram Shandy, a good novel about Tristram Shandy.
-----------------------------------------------
I wrote this at 5:16, May 4th, 2005.
So far we've seen at least two instances of Sterne discussing the actual time of his writing: I.vxiii (page 24) "this very day, in which I am now writing this book [] -- which is March 9, 1759" and IV.xvii (page 230) "It is not half an hour ago, when [..] I threw a fair sheet [...] slap into the fire[.]" Now what I wonder is, are these statements true?
Our editor believes him (in the notes to Vol. I on page 540 he writes "dates that seem to correspond to the dates Sterne writes"). And why not? What is there at stake? Why would an author have any reason to lie about when they wrote something? It's a nice gimmick to connect with readers, and surely nothing should get in the way of that honest and direct bond that Sterne is creati--
But this is not the kind of writer Sterne is. He has already created the chronology of the telling, the chronology the characters live in, and the chronology of the reading. What would keep him from playing with the chronology of the writing?
Absolutely nothing. That's why I view all references to the act of writing as being as fictional as Dr. Slop's caricature or Trim's babbling. Instead, the dates are puzzles. What dates would I pick to insert into my own writing? March 20th. September 3rd. June 28th. Why? Well, that's for Bentley Biographers of the future to figure out. But if most of writing is a conversation with the reader, than this seems like a place where Sterne could be embedding a conversation with a specific reader.
The astute reader will point out that of course the narrative of writing is a fictional one: the narrator is not Sterne but Tristram. Maybe the converse is true, then, that Sterne is turning the seemingly fictional to the real. But even this would be a measured dose of reality. It is not opening a door, it is setting outside empty milk bottles to be picked up.
The key of all these theories is that Sterne remains in control. This book was written. We can be reasonably certain that he wrote later volumes after earlier ones (especially as Volume III opens with epigraphs in response to criticisms of the first two). More than that we can not necessarily say. And that's great. It makes us conscious of what we would assume in any other book. It's like Andy Warhol or Andy Kaufman. We have to constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author. And is anything truly at stake if they tell an unknowable lie?
Sterne is probably safe from any attacks on him or his writing. Or, wherever he is, he won't be any the worse for whatever we or biographers prove about him or his writing. Even were he alive, the worst that could really result from someone ascertaining the truth or falsity would be more press, which could only result in more sales and royalties.
Sterne often plays with the physicality of the object of the writing. Here is one manner in which he plays with the physicality of the process. And this is what is so rich about this novel. Sterne just had to look over at the calendar or remember what he just did, jot it down, and he'll set me off for an hour thinking about nothing. But maybe, just maybe, he stole the idea of writing on March 9th from someone else, and I am thinking about something. Something real.
I'd just never be able to know.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Technology's Unkept Promise (one of them)
There was a simpler time. A time when you could say as much as you had to say to the person you have to say things to. Well, at least until the dinosaur ate you.
But as hunting/gathering became all the rage, more time was spent apart. No longer was she by your side as you felled and butchered the mastodon. She was back searching for rutebagas and tending to the young'uns.
Enter the alphabet. You can leave a note for your love on the wall of your cave. You go out to slay the migratory beasts, and when she wakes up she gets to read your your note of love, written in the blood of a sabertooth tiger. As long as you can fit your declaration of love in the first twenty feet of your stone abode where the light can reach.
A long time passed. And then, paper. You could leave reams of correspondence to your beloved. Except for that damn candle that would burn out before you had written out all you meant to tell her.
Ah, oil lamps. Refillable (as long as there are sperm whales). But now the rage is the telegraph. Send your message by post and it will not arrive until your debutante is a fiancee. But those telegraphs are so expensive--
Now the Telephone! Then the Singing telegram! Marvel before the Dancing bear-a-gram! Every mode of communication that has supplanted another has this same limitation: you can't write as long as you find yourself wanting to. Just when long-distance telephone companies priced themselves into oblivion, it was all the rage to have the mobility of a cell phone. Which one of us has not found themselves revealing the deepest darkest secrets of their soul to a "battery empty" message flashing on the screen? At least wired phones have the decency to respond to your most tightly-held thoughts ("I killed a man" or "I bought a Spice Girls album", the stuff you could only admit to a lover with a heart not fitted to later blackmail) with the reaffirming constancy of a dial tone.
Why can't inventors focus on turning an old technology reliable, instead of making new ones that make our art and our expressions end before--
But as hunting/gathering became all the rage, more time was spent apart. No longer was she by your side as you felled and butchered the mastodon. She was back searching for rutebagas and tending to the young'uns.
Enter the alphabet. You can leave a note for your love on the wall of your cave. You go out to slay the migratory beasts, and when she wakes up she gets to read your your note of love, written in the blood of a sabertooth tiger. As long as you can fit your declaration of love in the first twenty feet of your stone abode where the light can reach.
A long time passed. And then, paper. You could leave reams of correspondence to your beloved. Except for that damn candle that would burn out before you had written out all you meant to tell her.
Ah, oil lamps. Refillable (as long as there are sperm whales). But now the rage is the telegraph. Send your message by post and it will not arrive until your debutante is a fiancee. But those telegraphs are so expensive--
Now the Telephone! Then the Singing telegram! Marvel before the Dancing bear-a-gram! Every mode of communication that has supplanted another has this same limitation: you can't write as long as you find yourself wanting to. Just when long-distance telephone companies priced themselves into oblivion, it was all the rage to have the mobility of a cell phone. Which one of us has not found themselves revealing the deepest darkest secrets of their soul to a "battery empty" message flashing on the screen? At least wired phones have the decency to respond to your most tightly-held thoughts ("I killed a man" or "I bought a Spice Girls album", the stuff you could only admit to a lover with a heart not fitted to later blackmail) with the reaffirming constancy of a dial tone.
Why can't inventors focus on turning an old technology reliable, instead of making new ones that make our art and our expressions end before--
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Let it Snow, Let it Snow
Leave the shower running, throw open the faucets. Precipitate as it may, I will not be stopped.
No, I'm not a postal worker (though I am a Postal Service fan). I blush at the thought of going out in the rain and I'm stopped dead in my tracks by torrential downpours. But even try as he might, it took Our Father Above forty days and forty nights to flood the Earth to the tippy tops of mountains.
And, today, there are only 38 days left until I receive my diplomae. So do what you will, there will still be an Earth when I go to granulate, no matter what precipitation may come.
Even if it is the first Himalayan Commencement.
-D"Fuck you, Water Cycle"an
No, I'm not a postal worker (though I am a Postal Service fan). I blush at the thought of going out in the rain and I'm stopped dead in my tracks by torrential downpours. But even try as he might, it took Our Father Above forty days and forty nights to flood the Earth to the tippy tops of mountains.
And, today, there are only 38 days left until I receive my diplomae. So do what you will, there will still be an Earth when I go to granulate, no matter what precipitation may come.
Even if it is the first Himalayan Commencement.
-D"Fuck you, Water Cycle"an
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Vestigial Keycaps
Do you now or have you ever actually used the Caps Lock key? I mean for a use other than calling someone an assface, such as, "THAT'S SO FUNNY LOLOLOLMAOTIPROLOL !!!11!1!!ONE"? No, you haven't.
And while I go about more than doubling my current draft for Freshman Writing (yes, I'm in Fresman Writing) in the two hours before class, you should start a petition. We got rid of those superflous ivory keys on pianos, what nobler next cause could there be than getting rid of the one button in my life that can suck the charm out of an eloquent or elegant sentence?
And while I go about more than doubling my current draft for Freshman Writing (yes, I'm in Fresman Writing) in the two hours before class, you should start a petition. We got rid of those superflous ivory keys on pianos, what nobler next cause could there be than getting rid of the one button in my life that can suck the charm out of an eloquent or elegant sentence?
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
The Essay the Blog was born to write
Despite its less-than-printable name, this essay is the best I've read in years. Move over Mencken, sit down Sedaris. There's a new kid in town. Observe the use of an interlocutor to draw out the author's true belief system. Note how the belief system is representative of the vast hordes of the mildly liberal who felt so disenfranchised after last November. Consider the obscene nature of it, but, hey, that's the internet.
http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com
-Dan
http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com
-Dan
Friday, April 29, 2005
Literature of the Pitiful and Powerpoint
I recently came across two links to mock Powerpoint Presentations.
http://home.nyc.rr.com/dradosh/ppaol.html&e=7620
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
Of course they mock powerpoint by showing how it could make great works common, even laughable.
Today in class, I had the opposite experience. The presentation of a man's pitiful (in the most literal sense) life made it hilarious. After spending 5 weeks teaching us his theory of the world of Linguistic Evolution, he had us read a dissenting opinion. Fair enough. And then in class, he described the clash of the minds he had personally had with the author.
Long story short: my prof said the author of the article had not really disagreed. In fact, the author came to my prof's aid when the author was also the editor of a journal my prof was submitting to. He switched slides, and we got a glimpse of this "defense." Snippets I can remember of this alleged defense, "though [my prof]'s tone is admittedly grating, he may be proved to be right in a few decades" and "I would push to allow [my prof] to resubmit this paper after fixing many widespread criticisms". This man was taking his personal correspondence and showing it to all of us, seeming unaware that his best ally was only praising with faint damn! Note to self: make sure to redact all mentions of phallus as "not intolerably small" in collected letters before dying.
In any case, many good htoughts. Look in the coming months on this blog for a short story written in .ppt (that's Powerpoint format, you technically illiterates).
http://home.nyc.rr.com/dradosh/ppaol.html&e=7620
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
Of course they mock powerpoint by showing how it could make great works common, even laughable.
Today in class, I had the opposite experience. The presentation of a man's pitiful (in the most literal sense) life made it hilarious. After spending 5 weeks teaching us his theory of the world of Linguistic Evolution, he had us read a dissenting opinion. Fair enough. And then in class, he described the clash of the minds he had personally had with the author.
Long story short: my prof said the author of the article had not really disagreed. In fact, the author came to my prof's aid when the author was also the editor of a journal my prof was submitting to. He switched slides, and we got a glimpse of this "defense." Snippets I can remember of this alleged defense, "though [my prof]'s tone is admittedly grating, he may be proved to be right in a few decades" and "I would push to allow [my prof] to resubmit this paper after fixing many widespread criticisms". This man was taking his personal correspondence and showing it to all of us, seeming unaware that his best ally was only praising with faint damn! Note to self: make sure to redact all mentions of phallus as "not intolerably small" in collected letters before dying.
In any case, many good htoughts. Look in the coming months on this blog for a short story written in .ppt (that's Powerpoint format, you technically illiterates).
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Pissing in the Wind: Food Rainbow
I know that Dan & Dan will probably poo-poo the government's newly designed Food Rainbow, but let me be the first to say that I think this is the greatest idea ever. That's right, EVER. I mean, this makes Dewey Decimal look like a retard.
Consider the old system. You have different food "groups" like meats, vegetables, dairy, etc., with the most important group forming the bottom, or "base," of the pyramid. But here's the tricky part: the pyramid if full of words. Words spelled out with letters. Letters, for God's sake! Excuse me, Food & Drug Administration, but I didn't come hear to pass a reading test, I came her to eat, dammit!
Herein lies the genius of the new system. Drawing on the success of the Homeland Security threat system, the new food pyramid uses colors. Accessible, easy to understand, colors. Eating is no longer just for the English-speaking, literate Americans ( i.e. liberals and their activist/homosexual judges), it's for everyone. This is democracy at its finest.
Q: "But what if I'm blind and I can't see anything, how am I supposed to know what to eat?"
A: "You'll eat whatever the hell I put in your cage, dammit."
Some critics charge that the new system is more "confusing" or "difficult" than the old system. Some critics also have "shit for brains." But I digress. Under the old system, if you wanted to know what food group a food was in--for example, yogurt--you needed to think. You needed to think about whether yogurt came from a cow (dairy group), whether it had seeds (fruit group), or whether it was spore-based (meats & vegetable group). But with beautiful new (techni)color system, you need only associate a food with a color.
Take a look at the new rainbow pyramid. Orange stands for grains, Green stands for vegetables, Red for fruits, Yellow for oils, Light Blue/teal for dairy, and Indigo for meats & beans. So what color is yogurt? If it's plain yogurt, it's white. That color isn't in the food pyramid, so you shouldn't eat it. If it's flavored yogurt, say, blueberry, it's probably some sort of a bluish-purple. If it's more blue than purple, it's in the Dairy group, and if it's a darkish purple, it's in the Meats & Beans group. Then I want you to ask yourself: do you really want to eat a Meat & Beans yogurt? I didn't think so. Find a different colored yogurt and start again.
"Wow, the new rainbow pyramid is so easy to use, why didn't they think of that in the first place?"
Good question. When the original monochrome food pyramid was released in 1992, the world was a different place. Buffalos roamed free throughout the Midwest, presidents were free to engage in acts of extra-marital fellatio, and a little thing called "focus groups" had yet to be invented. As noted in the official Mypyramid.gov website:
In other words, pretty colors test well. Hence the updated and more scientific color pyramid.
"But wait? With the old food pyramid, I knew the group at the bottom was more important than the group up top. With the new system, how do I tell what group is most important? This rainbow has no bottom. For the love of God this rainbow has no bottom!"
First off, I'm not going to answer your question unless you put some pants on. Secondly, the new pyramid doesn't even need a bottom. The bigger the sliver of color, the more important. See the picture below for details:
Consider the old system. You have different food "groups" like meats, vegetables, dairy, etc., with the most important group forming the bottom, or "base," of the pyramid. But here's the tricky part: the pyramid if full of words. Words spelled out with letters. Letters, for God's sake! Excuse me, Food & Drug Administration, but I didn't come hear to pass a reading test, I came her to eat, dammit!
Herein lies the genius of the new system. Drawing on the success of the Homeland Security threat system, the new food pyramid uses colors. Accessible, easy to understand, colors. Eating is no longer just for the English-speaking, literate Americans ( i.e. liberals and their activist/homosexual judges), it's for everyone. This is democracy at its finest.
Q: "But what if I'm blind and I can't see anything, how am I supposed to know what to eat?"
A: "You'll eat whatever the hell I put in your cage, dammit."
Some critics charge that the new system is more "confusing" or "difficult" than the old system. Some critics also have "shit for brains." But I digress. Under the old system, if you wanted to know what food group a food was in--for example, yogurt--you needed to think. You needed to think about whether yogurt came from a cow (dairy group), whether it had seeds (fruit group), or whether it was spore-based (meats & vegetable group). But with beautiful new (techni)color system, you need only associate a food with a color.
Take a look at the new rainbow pyramid. Orange stands for grains, Green stands for vegetables, Red for fruits, Yellow for oils, Light Blue/teal for dairy, and Indigo for meats & beans. So what color is yogurt? If it's plain yogurt, it's white. That color isn't in the food pyramid, so you shouldn't eat it. If it's flavored yogurt, say, blueberry, it's probably some sort of a bluish-purple. If it's more blue than purple, it's in the Dairy group, and if it's a darkish purple, it's in the Meats & Beans group. Then I want you to ask yourself: do you really want to eat a Meat & Beans yogurt? I didn't think so. Find a different colored yogurt and start again.
"Wow, the new rainbow pyramid is so easy to use, why didn't they think of that in the first place?"
Good question. When the original monochrome food pyramid was released in 1992, the world was a different place. Buffalos roamed free throughout the Midwest, presidents were free to engage in acts of extra-marital fellatio, and a little thing called "focus groups" had yet to be invented. As noted in the official Mypyramid.gov website:
As part of the design and development process, potential images and messages were tested with consumers to determine how well they communicated the intended content and how appealing they were to consumers. The results from the consumer research were used to revise and finalize the consumer materials so that consumers can more easily understand these messages and incorporate them into their lifestyle.
In other words, pretty colors test well. Hence the updated and more scientific color pyramid.
"But wait? With the old food pyramid, I knew the group at the bottom was more important than the group up top. With the new system, how do I tell what group is most important? This rainbow has no bottom. For the love of God this rainbow has no bottom!"
First off, I'm not going to answer your question unless you put some pants on. Secondly, the new pyramid doesn't even need a bottom. The bigger the sliver of color, the more important. See the picture below for details:
"OK, I see the Yellow group is the smallest, and the Indigo one looks a bit smaller than the Red. But I think the Green and teal are about the same size. Why not do some other design like a graph or pie chart?"
Another good question, but the good folks at MyPyramid are one step ahead of you. As they note, "Several designs were tested. Pyramid-shaped designs, Pyramid-like designs and non-Pyramid designs were all tested with consumers."
You see that part about "non-Pyramid designs," smart-ass. They tested it and it failed. Failed miserably, in fact. When the non-pyramid design was tested on the focus group, they were so confused they were eating 20 serving of cottage cheese a day, and drinking a glass of marinara sauce with each meal.
"OK, you've convinced me that the new color-based pyramid is more efficient than the old one, and it seems like even a Swede could understand the new version. But what about that man climbing the stairs in that picture? Is that supposed to symbolize something?"
Actually, no. He's just lost.
(Same post, different blog)
Another good question, but the good folks at MyPyramid are one step ahead of you. As they note, "Several designs were tested. Pyramid-shaped designs, Pyramid-like designs and non-Pyramid designs were all tested with consumers."
You see that part about "non-Pyramid designs," smart-ass. They tested it and it failed. Failed miserably, in fact. When the non-pyramid design was tested on the focus group, they were so confused they were eating 20 serving of cottage cheese a day, and drinking a glass of marinara sauce with each meal.
"OK, you've convinced me that the new color-based pyramid is more efficient than the old one, and it seems like even a Swede could understand the new version. But what about that man climbing the stairs in that picture? Is that supposed to symbolize something?"
Actually, no. He's just lost.
(Same post, different blog)
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Pissing In The Wind: Shape of the Shapely
In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. Food was provided for you, heck! The mutton was right next to the... lion... meat. Where else could you turn one picked-clean rib into two sides of meat (with a nice rack). Take that Olive Garden, you're no restaurant compared to the Eden Garden! But that same piece of fruit that gave us the Original Sin of Knowledge gave us both Shame and Vanity. We've all seen the drawings of Eve covering herself with shrubbery when she realizes for the first time ever nudity's incorrectness. The part of the story they don't tell you is that the first thing she said after that was, "Does this fig leaf make me look fat?"
Soon afterwards, brothers became murderers, extra people conveniently popped up, so-and-so begat a-lot-of-effing-people, and hunters became gatherers. We ate whatever we could catch/steal from the hyenae. In the words of an NPR story about what we found in the dried-up shitters of Vikings, they ate "meat, beer, and more meet." Or maybe it was the other way around.
But during the 1950's, everything became standardized. Students across the country learned to be vaporized in the same under-desk crouch. Across the country you could get the same sub-standard beef (hopefully it's beef) at Kroc's McDonald's, and we could live in the same houses on identical cul-de-sacs as the Cookie Cutter made its first appearance as a tool of the architect. The food square showed us that we needed to get different types of food. Three-thousand calories from those delectable apple pie concoctions that have never been near either an apple nor a pie from the Golden Arches does not a balanced diet make.
But that wasn't quite precise enough. And in the 90's we wanted to be exact. Title IX funding had to be even to a percent. Affirmative Action soared, and though school bussing firms went bankrupt, the formerly destitute specialists in impeaching presidents returned to the African American ("back in the black"). Thus the food pyramid. Everyone of the age 16-24 in this fine Republic learned it. For approximately 15 seconds. Before summarizing the information as, if society's is any indication, "Yes, I'd love you to supersize that."
All this was enough propaganda about common sense. But no. The pyramid was a familiar object, constructed of successively smaller blocks. Instead, let's instill in our children a fear of geometry by releasing this absurd assortment of amalgamated frightfully-Angled three-sided monstrosities. What? I mean, what? No, seriously, what the hell? Is this the only way that Americans under the Bush Administration can digest information? Can we not add? Were percent RDA's not enough? Commentators, tell me, what USA Today-worthy graphic describes your diet?
Soon afterwards, brothers became murderers, extra people conveniently popped up, so-and-so begat a-lot-of-effing-people, and hunters became gatherers. We ate whatever we could catch/steal from the hyenae. In the words of an NPR story about what we found in the dried-up shitters of Vikings, they ate "meat, beer, and more meet." Or maybe it was the other way around.
But during the 1950's, everything became standardized. Students across the country learned to be vaporized in the same under-desk crouch. Across the country you could get the same sub-standard beef (hopefully it's beef) at Kroc's McDonald's, and we could live in the same houses on identical cul-de-sacs as the Cookie Cutter made its first appearance as a tool of the architect. The food square showed us that we needed to get different types of food. Three-thousand calories from those delectable apple pie concoctions that have never been near either an apple nor a pie from the Golden Arches does not a balanced diet make.
But that wasn't quite precise enough. And in the 90's we wanted to be exact. Title IX funding had to be even to a percent. Affirmative Action soared, and though school bussing firms went bankrupt, the formerly destitute specialists in impeaching presidents returned to the African American ("back in the black"). Thus the food pyramid. Everyone of the age 16-24 in this fine Republic learned it. For approximately 15 seconds. Before summarizing the information as, if society's is any indication, "Yes, I'd love you to supersize that."
All this was enough propaganda about common sense. But no. The pyramid was a familiar object, constructed of successively smaller blocks. Instead, let's instill in our children a fear of geometry by releasing this absurd assortment of amalgamated frightfully-Angled three-sided monstrosities. What? I mean, what? No, seriously, what the hell? Is this the only way that Americans under the Bush Administration can digest information? Can we not add? Were percent RDA's not enough? Commentators, tell me, what USA Today-worthy graphic describes your diet?
Monday, April 25, 2005
Untimely Meditations
This morning, at 4:23 AM Greenwich Mean time, I was jolted awake from sleep; sticky with sweat, heart pounding, hands trembling and fixated...on that one eternally plaguing, endlessly nagging, infinitely mind-gnawing question:
Does Affleck regret every time he fucked her missionary?
...That we might all die wondering counts as proof that the Nihilists are right.
Does Affleck regret every time he fucked her missionary?
...That we might all die wondering counts as proof that the Nihilists are right.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)
Tragedy befalls all of us. But not evenly. Some of us live on Park Avenue (just adoring a penthouse view), some of us have those we love killed and maimed (possibly raped) (probably not in any of the orders I just described). Of course I grieve for those people, yadda yadda, showing reasonable human emotion.
This NYTimes article tells the story of a man who lost 2 wives/girlfriends. Wow. What a tragedy. What a story. What are the odds that two deaths close to him would each be ruled homicides? Wait a minute...
He's now been charged with the second murder (he remains the only viable suspect in the first). The English major in me, though, is conflicted. What was his tragic flaw? Was it hubris (I've gotten away with one murder, I can do another)? Greed (I don't need a third BabyMama)? Crimal Ineptitude(Cause bullets to the head leave so little forensical evidence)?
The point is, save your sick days. You only get so many free passes in life, whether it be missing a meeting at work or prematurely ending the life of a woman you once loved. So make sure this is really the day at school you dread the most or the chick whose voice gets on your nerves the most.
(P.S., the title is a reference to, among other things, a The Clash song off Sandinista, their tremendouly bizarre triple album.)
This NYTimes article tells the story of a man who lost 2 wives/girlfriends. Wow. What a tragedy. What a story. What are the odds that two deaths close to him would each be ruled homicides? Wait a minute...
He's now been charged with the second murder (he remains the only viable suspect in the first). The English major in me, though, is conflicted. What was his tragic flaw? Was it hubris (I've gotten away with one murder, I can do another)? Greed (I don't need a third BabyMama)? Crimal Ineptitude(Cause bullets to the head leave so little forensical evidence)?
The point is, save your sick days. You only get so many free passes in life, whether it be missing a meeting at work or prematurely ending the life of a woman you once loved. So make sure this is really the day at school you dread the most or the chick whose voice gets on your nerves the most.
(P.S., the title is a reference to, among other things, a The Clash song off Sandinista, their tremendouly bizarre triple album.)
Saturday, April 23, 2005
We've all heard the joke about a guy who dreams that he's eating a 25-pound marshmallow, then when he wakes up his pillow is gone. Now, personally, I never quite understand how that qualified as a joke to begin with. But after a particularly restless sleep, I woke up one morning to find that I had taken the pillowcase off my pillow, and laid it neatly across the top. I ask you to consider: what kind of a dream *was* I having?
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Vs. Man Machine Part 3
So humans will always be bribable, and computers, if they are halfway decent, will learn that bribes are the way of the future for the same reason they were the reason of the past: they make sense. The solution?
To be perfectly honest, I've never taken an economics class. So what I'm about to say is about as intelligent as what I have to say about, well, anything. But this, more than most of my rantings, is informed by scary dreams about supply and demand curves trying to eat me in my sleep. It seems like there's a rather fixed number of people who want to bribe (call them everyone) and a fixed amount of money that can be spent on bribing (everything). It seems like the problem is that, roughly, we're pushing "everything" into the hands of a relatively small number of "crooks". Every so often, these crooks are stupid and try to do things that, well, they deserve to be caught for. Clandestine immorality greases many a wheels of society; inept crime only loses limbs and sinks ships.
Instead, let us all accept bribes in exchange for, here's the key part, nothing. That's right: let's let anybody who wants buy our judges vacations: they deserve them. Encourage a mobster to send pizza to police stations. They can try all they want. But now that politicians are allowed to take Indians' money, instead of just their land, it'll be acceptable to renege (Indian-give) a promise to support a ballot initiative.
We can compartmentalize our corruption, and in so doing reclaim American politics by admitting it's dirty. Rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, but do it openly enough that presidents won't feel obligated to pardon the obviously guilty (you're still allowed to grant clemency to those technically felons, as long as there's some cause/institution/cross they claim to have been martyred for). Heck, the greatest example of this kind of dealing is none other than our former President William Jefferson Clinton. Walk up to him on the street and offer him 20 bucks for Social Security Reform. He will look you in the eye, speak of a bridge to this century, and promise you he'll work with Congress to ensure that yadda yadda and we'll utilize this and that, et cetera et cetera. And he'll be gone into the twilight of Secret Service protection before you can realize that he's just another middle-aged out-of-work man with a bum ticker living in Harlem who has as much chance of passing meaningful legislation as Harry Reid.
To be perfectly honest, I've never taken an economics class. So what I'm about to say is about as intelligent as what I have to say about, well, anything. But this, more than most of my rantings, is informed by scary dreams about supply and demand curves trying to eat me in my sleep. It seems like there's a rather fixed number of people who want to bribe (call them everyone) and a fixed amount of money that can be spent on bribing (everything). It seems like the problem is that, roughly, we're pushing "everything" into the hands of a relatively small number of "crooks". Every so often, these crooks are stupid and try to do things that, well, they deserve to be caught for. Clandestine immorality greases many a wheels of society; inept crime only loses limbs and sinks ships.
Instead, let us all accept bribes in exchange for, here's the key part, nothing. That's right: let's let anybody who wants buy our judges vacations: they deserve them. Encourage a mobster to send pizza to police stations. They can try all they want. But now that politicians are allowed to take Indians' money, instead of just their land, it'll be acceptable to renege (Indian-give) a promise to support a ballot initiative.
We can compartmentalize our corruption, and in so doing reclaim American politics by admitting it's dirty. Rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, but do it openly enough that presidents won't feel obligated to pardon the obviously guilty (you're still allowed to grant clemency to those technically felons, as long as there's some cause/institution/cross they claim to have been martyred for). Heck, the greatest example of this kind of dealing is none other than our former President William Jefferson Clinton. Walk up to him on the street and offer him 20 bucks for Social Security Reform. He will look you in the eye, speak of a bridge to this century, and promise you he'll work with Congress to ensure that yadda yadda and we'll utilize this and that, et cetera et cetera. And he'll be gone into the twilight of Secret Service protection before you can realize that he's just another middle-aged out-of-work man with a bum ticker living in Harlem who has as much chance of passing meaningful legislation as Harry Reid.
Monday, April 18, 2005
Gullibles' Travels
Having returned from my trip to France and Spain, and having rested comfortably in an undisclosed London flat before my return to Oxford, I thought that I'd take a minute to jot down 31 things which are true about the places I've visited:
1) In Paris, there is no such thing as 'speaking a bit of French', or 'kind of speaking French'. You either know their language or you don't. And if you don't, they won't have any of your stumbling gestures and awkward phraseology. They simply deal with you in English.
2) This refusal to let you butcher French stems from a deep-seated pathos which takes linguistic competence to be a measure of one's membership in a certain club.
3) Americans' offense at foreigners' incompetence in English issues from impatience; French offense at foreigners' incompetence in French issues from aesthetic disgust. For the American, you've wasted his time; for the Frenchman, you've broken his heart.
4) In the Louvre, one of the largest and most-frequented museums on the planet, housing art and artefacts from all corners of the earth, all the captions are in French. Thankfully, the signs telling you what you may not touch and where you may not go are translated into English.
5) The Eiffel Tower is NOT, as some would have it, a romantic figure. Nor is it a Romantic one. It is a monument of raw, metal-and-brawn Modernity. An unrelenting, inorganic labyrinth of Euclidian perfection; ultimately cold and rational, not wistful and nostalgic.
6) This being said, it is one of the most beautiful beasts hatched from Modernity's cast-iron womb.
7) If it's postcards featuring naked ladies of sundry stock and repute you're after, the banks of the Seine is where to get them.
8) Nice, on the Cote d'azur, is a beautiful town with rocky beaches, clear green water and sea breezes, delicious food and Provencal hospitality.
9) It is also the dogshit capital of the world.
10) If you stay at the Villa St. Exupery hostel, a converted monestary in the hills above Nice, you will come to understand that the fabled American backpacker class is very real, and comprised of individuals both younger and older than you think, whose ranks seem free of responsibility, well-fed and clothed, and more than adequately funded.
11) Many of them say things like "Venice is beautiful in a way I can't describe", as a preface to lengthy description of Venice's beauty.
12) Counterintuitively, the American backpacker does not embark on a tour of Europe in an effort to become worldly. Rather, it is his very self-perceived antecedent worldliness which for him justifies the tour.
13) During the 10 days of the film festival, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for the rich and famous.
14) During the 355 days between film festivals, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for no one.
15) If all of France were like Aix-en-Provence, then all the world would would want to be like France.
16) The street-corner t-shirt market in Western Europe is dominated by the twin pillars of Che Guevera and Iron Maiden.
17) If you've taken six years of high school Spanish, or minor in it in college, good luck in Barcelona.
18) Don't let the deliciousness of the paella you're eating, or the street-fiend who asks for a cigarette distract you when sitting in Plaza Reial in Barcelona. If you do, some guy selling model sailboats will run off with your favorite old backback which contains nothing but a bar of soap and a hardcover copy of an out of print book on Heidegger.
19) I'm just saying.
20) There are few favorite-old-packbacks and hardcover-copies-of-out-of-print-books-on-Heidegger in this world that a pitcher of sangria and a day on the beach won't help you forget.
21) I don't know if they had crack in 1881, but if they did, then Gaudi was on it when he designed La Sagrada Familia
22) Pamplona counts as proof that Ernest Hemingway knew what was best in life.
23) A hypothetical and a piece of advice: suppose Paz Vega is the bartender at a little joint off the beaten track somewhere in the mountains of northern Spain. She approaches you, and in her best broken English, asks you if you'd like some tapas, or (with a wink-wink) if you'd prefer some 'Tap-Ass'...Look, all I mean is its a tough call.
24) They don't tell you in your booking confirmation, but a lot of hostels close at midnight. Fortunately, park benches are open 24 hours a day.
25) The train from the Spanish border to Biarritz in France is 40 minutes.
26) It only takes you the first two minutes to realize that the long-held Fosterism--"the only good thing about French men is their close resemblence to French women"--is false. Frenchman aren't ther worst thing in the world. There are at least three worse things:
26a) Drunken Frenchmen
26b) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen
26c) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen from the region in and around Biarritz. In other words, BASK Frenchmen.
27) In today's communication age, a good way to avoid terrerist reprisals for insulting remarks is to misspell words like "BASK" and "terrerist"
28) When confronted by a coach full (+ - 75) of 26c who have made it evident that their desire is to fight you, a stout constitution and a healthy bloodlust won't cut it in the weapons department.
29) Some things that will:
29a) A claymore
29b) A claymore
28c) A flamethrower
28d) One of these, and a bunch of this
29) A Disclaimer: Of course, I wished no ill will towards any of my BASK brothers. I only wanted to read in peace.
30) I love the BASKS. As a matter of fact, I own a raspberry beret.
31) The difference between a vacation and a trip is, after a trip you need a vacation.
1) In Paris, there is no such thing as 'speaking a bit of French', or 'kind of speaking French'. You either know their language or you don't. And if you don't, they won't have any of your stumbling gestures and awkward phraseology. They simply deal with you in English.
2) This refusal to let you butcher French stems from a deep-seated pathos which takes linguistic competence to be a measure of one's membership in a certain club.
3) Americans' offense at foreigners' incompetence in English issues from impatience; French offense at foreigners' incompetence in French issues from aesthetic disgust. For the American, you've wasted his time; for the Frenchman, you've broken his heart.
4) In the Louvre, one of the largest and most-frequented museums on the planet, housing art and artefacts from all corners of the earth, all the captions are in French. Thankfully, the signs telling you what you may not touch and where you may not go are translated into English.
5) The Eiffel Tower is NOT, as some would have it, a romantic figure. Nor is it a Romantic one. It is a monument of raw, metal-and-brawn Modernity. An unrelenting, inorganic labyrinth of Euclidian perfection; ultimately cold and rational, not wistful and nostalgic.
6) This being said, it is one of the most beautiful beasts hatched from Modernity's cast-iron womb.
7) If it's postcards featuring naked ladies of sundry stock and repute you're after, the banks of the Seine is where to get them.
8) Nice, on the Cote d'azur, is a beautiful town with rocky beaches, clear green water and sea breezes, delicious food and Provencal hospitality.
9) It is also the dogshit capital of the world.
10) If you stay at the Villa St. Exupery hostel, a converted monestary in the hills above Nice, you will come to understand that the fabled American backpacker class is very real, and comprised of individuals both younger and older than you think, whose ranks seem free of responsibility, well-fed and clothed, and more than adequately funded.
11) Many of them say things like "Venice is beautiful in a way I can't describe", as a preface to lengthy description of Venice's beauty.
12) Counterintuitively, the American backpacker does not embark on a tour of Europe in an effort to become worldly. Rather, it is his very self-perceived antecedent worldliness which for him justifies the tour.
13) During the 10 days of the film festival, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for the rich and famous.
14) During the 355 days between film festivals, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for no one.
15) If all of France were like Aix-en-Provence, then all the world would would want to be like France.
16) The street-corner t-shirt market in Western Europe is dominated by the twin pillars of Che Guevera and Iron Maiden.
17) If you've taken six years of high school Spanish, or minor in it in college, good luck in Barcelona.
18) Don't let the deliciousness of the paella you're eating, or the street-fiend who asks for a cigarette distract you when sitting in Plaza Reial in Barcelona. If you do, some guy selling model sailboats will run off with your favorite old backback which contains nothing but a bar of soap and a hardcover copy of an out of print book on Heidegger.
19) I'm just saying.
20) There are few favorite-old-packbacks and hardcover-copies-of-out-of-print-books-on-Heidegger in this world that a pitcher of sangria and a day on the beach won't help you forget.
21) I don't know if they had crack in 1881, but if they did, then Gaudi was on it when he designed La Sagrada Familia
22) Pamplona counts as proof that Ernest Hemingway knew what was best in life.
23) A hypothetical and a piece of advice: suppose Paz Vega is the bartender at a little joint off the beaten track somewhere in the mountains of northern Spain. She approaches you, and in her best broken English, asks you if you'd like some tapas, or (with a wink-wink) if you'd prefer some 'Tap-Ass'...Look, all I mean is its a tough call.
24) They don't tell you in your booking confirmation, but a lot of hostels close at midnight. Fortunately, park benches are open 24 hours a day.
25) The train from the Spanish border to Biarritz in France is 40 minutes.
26) It only takes you the first two minutes to realize that the long-held Fosterism--"the only good thing about French men is their close resemblence to French women"--is false. Frenchman aren't ther worst thing in the world. There are at least three worse things:
26a) Drunken Frenchmen
26b) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen
26c) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen from the region in and around Biarritz. In other words, BASK Frenchmen.
27) In today's communication age, a good way to avoid terrerist reprisals for insulting remarks is to misspell words like "BASK" and "terrerist"
28) When confronted by a coach full (+ - 75) of 26c who have made it evident that their desire is to fight you, a stout constitution and a healthy bloodlust won't cut it in the weapons department.
29) Some things that will:
29a) A claymore
29b) A claymore
28c) A flamethrower
28d) One of these, and a bunch of this
29) A Disclaimer: Of course, I wished no ill will towards any of my BASK brothers. I only wanted to read in peace.
30) I love the BASKS. As a matter of fact, I own a raspberry beret.
31) The difference between a vacation and a trip is, after a trip you need a vacation.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Dr. Foster's Dictionary: 17 April 2005
Today's entry from Dr. Foster's dictionary comes from the glossary of American colloquialisms, under 'f':
for·ty-fiv·er
n. slang
1. An individual, usually a post-adolescent American male, who wears a baseball cap in such a fashion that its brim is approximately forty-five degrees off-center. Do you think those two forty-fivers are lovers?
[syn: tool, douche-bag, asshole, cretin, prick; see also 'Von Dutchman']
[ant: n. Fosterite]
for·ty-fiv·er
n. slang
1. An individual, usually a post-adolescent American male, who wears a baseball cap in such a fashion that its brim is approximately forty-five degrees off-center. Do you think those two forty-fivers are lovers?
[syn: tool, douche-bag, asshole, cretin, prick; see also 'Von Dutchman']
[ant: n. Fosterite]
Friday, April 15, 2005
Machine vs. Man, Part 2
In Yesterday's column, I showed why humans are evil: we cheat. Computers, on the other hand, only do what's best. They follow their programming.
And they're fast! Damn fast. Just today, a co-worker had the gall to complain when his computer took two whole minutes to scan a 600 megabyte file. 600 megabytes? That's as much as a CD! And it took me at least 10 minutes to know that the new Will Smith album sucked.
But if you've even just dabbled in popular culture during the last half-century, you've seen some tale of computers killing humans or robots beating up seniors for their pills. Allow me to take a moment to say (as both a computer scientist and a hater of near-deads): this is not going to happen. We are so far from understanding human emotions (computer scientists especially) that we will never be able to mimic this sort of irrational bias.
Instead, we will craft agents with irrational exuberance. They will be the best moneymakers out there. They will bid with astounding precision and lightning speed. Faster than a human could observe, heck, faster than any human could audit...
And they'll learn. They'll know to increase the price of ice when it's hot and to sell Sell SELL whenever a music label signs Will Smith (ha! Twice in one posting! Who's fresh now?). Amazing things. Optimizing profits and conversions, all that lovely stuff.
But, here's the thing: we don't believe in the Rising-tide Survival-of-the-fittest Laissez-faire capitalism. We live in a fluffy-bunny hugs-to-everyone bastardized marketplace. You have to pay people a "minimum wage" and give them "time off" for such hoitsy toitsy extravagances of the union imagination as "maternity leave" and "paternity leave" and "sawing through their bone with improperly installed welding equipment."
But the key thing is, you aren't allowed to talk to your competitors. Even though, it would be really good for you (the Stovepipe-Hat-wearing Fat Cat that you are) to do so: you could set prices to be artificially high. We begrudgingly begrudge knowing that gas station owners on an adjacent corner may *wink wink* *nudge nudge* each other and that's why they have the same damn prices. But computers, well... they can wink and nudge 5000 times a second.
If that's not clear, think about it this way: Amazon learns that when Barnes & Noble increases its price by x%, it will increase its price by y%. Barnes & Noble realize this, and adapts to it. The two co-evolve, until they have a signaling infrastructure as complex and indecipherable as the absurdity of baseball (where coaches mime Parkinson's to tell their batters orders for which a few syllables of speech would suffice).
This is not evil. It is dumb logic. The sort of "Lord of the Flies" naivete that you get whenever you give a child a machine gun. So what to do with these computers? You can't put them on the stand in court. And it's certainly not their fault. But, heck, we can barely make computers that can do this, we could never make computers that could do this and describe *why*. That's the central point of artificial intelligence as it currently stands: perhaps human-style responses are only 10 years away, but it will take at least 50 before we have a machine that can explain like a person (and a full century before they can ever lie like one).
Join us tomorrow for the resolution of this revolution.
And they're fast! Damn fast. Just today, a co-worker had the gall to complain when his computer took two whole minutes to scan a 600 megabyte file. 600 megabytes? That's as much as a CD! And it took me at least 10 minutes to know that the new Will Smith album sucked.
But if you've even just dabbled in popular culture during the last half-century, you've seen some tale of computers killing humans or robots beating up seniors for their pills. Allow me to take a moment to say (as both a computer scientist and a hater of near-deads): this is not going to happen. We are so far from understanding human emotions (computer scientists especially) that we will never be able to mimic this sort of irrational bias.
Instead, we will craft agents with irrational exuberance. They will be the best moneymakers out there. They will bid with astounding precision and lightning speed. Faster than a human could observe, heck, faster than any human could audit...
And they'll learn. They'll know to increase the price of ice when it's hot and to sell Sell SELL whenever a music label signs Will Smith (ha! Twice in one posting! Who's fresh now?). Amazing things. Optimizing profits and conversions, all that lovely stuff.
But, here's the thing: we don't believe in the Rising-tide Survival-of-the-fittest Laissez-faire capitalism. We live in a fluffy-bunny hugs-to-everyone bastardized marketplace. You have to pay people a "minimum wage" and give them "time off" for such hoitsy toitsy extravagances of the union imagination as "maternity leave" and "paternity leave" and "sawing through their bone with improperly installed welding equipment."
But the key thing is, you aren't allowed to talk to your competitors. Even though, it would be really good for you (the Stovepipe-Hat-wearing Fat Cat that you are) to do so: you could set prices to be artificially high. We begrudgingly begrudge knowing that gas station owners on an adjacent corner may *wink wink* *nudge nudge* each other and that's why they have the same damn prices. But computers, well... they can wink and nudge 5000 times a second.
If that's not clear, think about it this way: Amazon learns that when Barnes & Noble increases its price by x%, it will increase its price by y%. Barnes & Noble realize this, and adapts to it. The two co-evolve, until they have a signaling infrastructure as complex and indecipherable as the absurdity of baseball (where coaches mime Parkinson's to tell their batters orders for which a few syllables of speech would suffice).
This is not evil. It is dumb logic. The sort of "Lord of the Flies" naivete that you get whenever you give a child a machine gun. So what to do with these computers? You can't put them on the stand in court. And it's certainly not their fault. But, heck, we can barely make computers that can do this, we could never make computers that could do this and describe *why*. That's the central point of artificial intelligence as it currently stands: perhaps human-style responses are only 10 years away, but it will take at least 50 before we have a machine that can explain like a person (and a full century before they can ever lie like one).
Join us tomorrow for the resolution of this revolution.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Man vs. Machine, Part 1
An exploration, serialized because A) it relates to the classwork I'm doing in 18th Century Literature (when serialization was popular) and Freshman Writing (because I'm studying 18th Century Literature) and B) I have classwork in 18th Century Literature and Freshman Writing.
Over the course of the next few days, I intend to tackle the man vs. machine problem. Today, we learn how man is imperfect. Tomorrow, how machines may end up being even imperfecter. On Friday, we synthesize, and perhaps come to appreciate more the Amish (or, in a compromise, the Mennonites).
From today's Times: "In one case, at 9:41 a.m. on Oct. 2, 2002, the computer of a specialist in General Electric stock indicated that at a price of $25.85, there were orders to buy 39,500 shares and orders to sell 35,000 shares. The specialist, David A. Finnerty of Fleet Specialist, should have matched the 35,000, prosecutors say. Instead he bought 22,700 shares for Fleet's own account at $25.85, then raised the price to $25.95. Just after 9:42, he sold 12,800 shares from the same account[.]" Well, that certainly seems like a... series of events. But what does it mean? How does this fit into the conception of the world that you, a mere mortal, care about? To continue with their sentence, he "[made] $1,280 in about 14 seconds." Damn. I've spent the last 14 seconds trying to come up with an absurd comparison of what that amount in that time is more than (that metaphor's approximate street value: $0.017), and failed even at that.
So obviously, humans are both exploitable and exploitative. The solution being, make your money off them, but don't let them be in a position to screw you. (To paraphrase Polonius: "Don't a lender be.") Instead, the teeming masses of the uneducated pundit are lining up to scream, we should use the magic of "computors" and "market economies" make everything magically work. Democratization of capital ensues, and soon we've changed the NYSE building into the meeting place of orgies of hippie wealth. Whee!
Join us tomorrow on the Enfranchised to learn why this is the first step towards Skynet, or at least Robber Baron Mainframes.
Over the course of the next few days, I intend to tackle the man vs. machine problem. Today, we learn how man is imperfect. Tomorrow, how machines may end up being even imperfecter. On Friday, we synthesize, and perhaps come to appreciate more the Amish (or, in a compromise, the Mennonites).
From today's Times: "In one case, at 9:41 a.m. on Oct. 2, 2002, the computer of a specialist in General Electric stock indicated that at a price of $25.85, there were orders to buy 39,500 shares and orders to sell 35,000 shares. The specialist, David A. Finnerty of Fleet Specialist, should have matched the 35,000, prosecutors say. Instead he bought 22,700 shares for Fleet's own account at $25.85, then raised the price to $25.95. Just after 9:42, he sold 12,800 shares from the same account[.]" Well, that certainly seems like a... series of events. But what does it mean? How does this fit into the conception of the world that you, a mere mortal, care about? To continue with their sentence, he "[made] $1,280 in about 14 seconds." Damn. I've spent the last 14 seconds trying to come up with an absurd comparison of what that amount in that time is more than (that metaphor's approximate street value: $0.017), and failed even at that.
So obviously, humans are both exploitable and exploitative. The solution being, make your money off them, but don't let them be in a position to screw you. (To paraphrase Polonius: "Don't a lender be.") Instead, the teeming masses of the uneducated pundit are lining up to scream, we should use the magic of "computors" and "market economies" make everything magically work. Democratization of capital ensues, and soon we've changed the NYSE building into the meeting place of orgies of hippie wealth. Whee!
Join us tomorrow on the Enfranchised to learn why this is the first step towards Skynet, or at least Robber Baron Mainframes.
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