messiestobjects

Conscientia Mereo in Choeung Ek

    I had my first International assignment last week, very exciting. A client had a branch in Dublin, so I used up all of my miles to bring Julie along and we got to spend a few days in Ireland. Unfortunately, it coincided with finals so I really had to scramble to keep up with all of my school work so that I could enjoy some free time over there; while I took a couple of pictures I haven't had time to go through them so the Ireland post will have to wait a week or three. I actually have my last final exam later today, for Astronomy. In the meantime, I wrote a poem and introductory essay for my final term paper in British Literature so I thought I'd post it along with some old pictures from a trip I took to Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. I had a choice between just writing a seven page essay or the poem and intro essay in response to any of the works that we covered in class, and even though poetry is terrible I chose it for reasons I will explain in the essay itself.

    For anyone who hasn't read it, Paradise Lost by John Milton—the main subject of my attentions here—is a dramatic rendering of the fall of both Satan and Man based on the Bible in the style of the heroic poetry of Homer and Virgil. Milton opens several chapters in his saga by breaking the third wall and appealing to his muse, the holy ghost, for inspiration that his poem might be infused with skill and veracity. He was aping the greek poets when they would appeal to the Muses in their own epics.

On Paradise Lost and Knowledge Gained

    I trepidatiously chose to write a poem rather than an essay because I wanted to try my hand at a piece of Heroic poetry that did not rely on a moral foundation that I wholly disagree with. I decided on this course of action in response to the religious literature that we covered such as Doctor Faustus and Margery Kempe; however, the form and content of Conscientia Mereo, as I’ve called it, are linked most directly with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I originally considered writing a lengthy diatribe about the problems with literature based on religious principles and how any moral content or heroic actions become corrupted by a dogmatic view of the Universe rather than a naturalistic or at least agnostic one. But I feared the arrogance of judging what is considered to be an important piece of historical literature based on more modern personal preferences and prejudices without adding anything creative to the conversation myself, and so I committed the arrogance of aping it and subverting the message instead!

    The title of my poem means ‘knowledge gained,’ a would-be clunky name which is why I chose to use the Latin rather than English and it is a rather obvious play on the title of the poem that inspired it. Interestingly, mereo means ‘to gain,’ but it also means to serve as a soldier, a connotation I like in the context of knowledge as antipathy to religion. Additionally, I like the idea that anyone who would want to know what the title meant would most likely have to look it up online. It both supports an idea in my poem and further serves as ironic subtext, as Latin is a dead language formerly used in church masses, alienating parishioners who didn’t speak it. This restriction or shrouding of knowledge is a major theme of my poem; an important part of religion is the idea that things must be taken on faith, which is detrimental to gaining knowledge about the cosmos. Now that we know that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, that it started in a massive “explosion” of matter, and that humans evolved from apelike ancestors who in turn evolved from single-celled eukaryotes, scolds about original sin and the danger of knowledge are ill-suited to epic literature that would strive to inspire our imaginations and heroic yearnings rather than to keep us in our place.

    To wit, the hero [Adam] in Paradise Lost is admonished by the angel Raphael to avoid seeking knowledge when he says that “God to remove his ways from human sense, / Placed heav’n from earth so far, that earthly sight / If it presume, might err in things too high, / And no advantage gain” (Milton 8.120-122). Basically, he is saying that the quest for knowledge is far above human capabilities and even if we didn’t muck it up, any knowledge attained would gain no advantage for us anyway. Rather than fighting against this arbitrary restriction as a true hero might, Adam rather meekly accepts this condescending judgment. As we in modern times can attest, the successful quest for knowledge has actually led to quite a few advantages, and it has been a heroic, generational battle to overcome those who would have preferred to keep us in the dark. The play Doctor Faustus, for example, serves as a reminder of how someone living in darker ages viewed the acquisition of knowledge when the eponymous character trades his soul for it. We are led to interpret this as a petty lust for puerile power, which of course is not true knowledge at all and is nothing more than a cheap trick meant to instill the idea that knowledge can only come at the cost of one’s salvation.

    Another, more important detriment to the idea of a heroic epic is the way in which the underlying moral structure of Milton’s worldview corrupts the very concept of heroism. In book 12, the angel Michael says the son of god will come, “Proclaiming life to all who shall believe / in his redemption, and that his obedience / Imputed becomes theirs by faith, his merits / to save them, not their own, through legal works” (Milton 12.407-410). In other words, no man or woman can be a hero because Jesus is the only hero, he has used up all the heroism, and it doesn’t matter what good deeds or heroic acts that anyone else performs; we will only be judged on whether or not we believe in this man who we’ve never met from a book full of claims with no historical veracity. This hardly inspires the rest of us to live up to heroic qualities.

    To counter these problems, there were two main things I wanted to accomplish in Conscientia Mereo; I wanted to show that the search for knowledge was the true heroic stance, and I wanted to illustrate that what these Christian writers interpret as morality is actually quite immoral when presented in a slightly different context and is therefore problematic when proposing a heroic epic based on such a foundation. I chose a Luddite father-figure as the stand-in for God, a curious young daughter and her brother for Adam and Eve, and an estranged Uncle as Satan. My underlying idea was that God kicking Adam and Eve out of Eden for the crime of disobeying an arbitrary rule designed to keep them in their place would be a shocking abuse of power in any other framework. And this is without even taking into account the appalling idea that the entire future race of man are to be punished for this crime as well, shouldering the burden of the choice between irrational belief or infinite punishment for a finite crime.

    Whether or not I succeeded is definitely up for debate. Perhaps if I had years to perfect the language and more space to flesh out the story, it might approach something like a respectable attempt. However, in trying to adhere to pentameter and in getting quickly to the point in each “scene,” I believe that I have at the very least made a statement worthy of consideration regardless of my skills as a poet. I've chosen to begin with my own appeal to the Muses; it seemed important to carry on that particular epic tradition in my own humble way.

 

Conscientia Mereo

The Muses of old are now hard to find,

ancient spirits and ghosts, all lost their shrouds.

In the age of cause and effect, the Gods

and aether are replaced by the sciences.

Thus, should my fare fall short of the poets—

the bar that serves Homer, Virgil, Milton—

I’ve no one to thank and no one to blame;

the vision dies alone, unseen, my own.

And yet in such times, ever there are found

those who shun and loathe the light of the truth

and still prefer the comfort of leaving

their reason on some unnatural plane.

The brothers lived in a happier home

before the rift. Raised in a Luddite way,

taught to fear change and to hold to the old.

The elder learned well, the younger did not.

He’d questions and doubt, fire troubled his blood.

 

And when the manse passed on to the firstborn,

the new ruler of small places declared

an end to all inquiry. “In my stock

the book is the law, I’ll hear nothing else.”

Young Hob took this ill and started a plot,

shut up in his room, his spirits burned hot.

“His house it may be, yet also my home.

My preferred way in my life is my own.”

A battle ensued between wits and might,

and bad blood is e’er bitter with brothers.

It ended of course in the way it must;

the heir remained, and the contender shunned.

Hob left for a terrible place, alone

a job at McDonald’s, and his new home—

a two room apartment and five bunkmates.

Yet even in his anger and defeat

he thought to himself, “at least I am free.”

Time passed and things got better, as they do

Hob went to college, Summa Cum Laude.

 

Now in the meantime two children were born,

their names were not new but old as the Earth.

The father, still fearing all change, raised them

on a diet of old legends and tales.

He schooled them at home and kept them closed in—

“My garden is all you shall ever need.

Go out and play, but I warn you right now

wander not astray, great are the evils

for which you are prey, and all things but one

I can help you forget; the internet.

Ask me not what it is, and no one else

avoid it like fire, to touch it is death.”

He told them these things because knowledge burns

and births awful questions from which he’d turned.

This went on for years, they learned without peers

and all that he told was all that they knew.

Until came a time with her Pa away,

no longer a girl, a woman near grown

lovely to see, a travesty to hear

incomplete knowledge of all she held dear.

She raked in the yard and when she looked up,

A man in a car was watching her work.

He opened the door and gave a small wave:

“Hello there young lady, how do you do?”

“I’m feeling just fine, who the hell are you?”

“I once lived in this home, ages ago.

By any chance, is your father about?”

“He’s gone for the day, but just leave your name,

I’ll tell him you called, now please go away.”

“I’ll do you one better, here’s my email…”

Suffice it to say, one question hatched more,

by end of the day, her brain was aflame;

she knew that Pa's wrath would cause her some pain.

First she said nothing; she thought she’d combust,

'til one restless night, to brother she said:

“Did you know the Sun is really a star?

Our forebear’s not Adam, but a monkey?”

“What story is this? A children’s fancy?”

“No brother, it’s real, my eyes are opened.

I’m terrified, true, but Pa lied to us.

Here look at this, old Hob gave it to me.”

She showed him her phone and accessed the Net,

and taught him to use Wikipedia.

“Any question or thought, type it in here—

smaller in size but worth a thousand books.”

Horrified yet drawn, and fearing Pa’s wroth,

he asked her “just who the hell is old Hob?”

“He lived in this house, ’til Pa kicked him out.

He came to make peace, but something I said

made him quite angry and say we’re ill-used,

that no child should live in fear of the truth.”

Hesitant at first, but fear giving way

to a flame squelched down hard by years of shame.

Time lost in the night, an orgy became,

question and query turned into a game.

When Earth came around and greeted the Sun—

eyes blurred and minds buzzed—new day dawned within.

 

Caught by surprise when Pa opened the door:

“Oh my dear children, you’ve betrayed my love.

The day that I feared has finally come,

Just as I’d warned of, you’re banished from home.”

Cold, out on the street and shivering bright,

twinkle in her eye she said to him now,

“After Pa’s ‘love,’ there’s no fear in the night!”

Czech Out My Book Report

    I had to write a book review of Frederick Douglass' autobiography for my American History class, and I have a few pictures from the Czech Republic left over. Since my professor really liked my paper, and I really liked the Czech Republic, enjoy yet another place-saving photojunk mash-up.

Frederick Douglass: Born Into Slavery but Never a Slave 

The narrative by Frederick Douglass of his life is suffocating and important. All slave literature from this dark period of American history that I have read feels that way to me. My reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of great consternation and produced my first epiphany regarding the true evils of our slave-owning past; Harriet Beecher Stowe illuminates quite well the actual consequences of slavery for black Americans, which—other than having a vague sense of the injustice of being owned and abused by another person—is something that I think most people in the modern day have trouble imagining. At least, I know that I certainly did. Django Unchained, the recent film by Quentin Tarrantino, affected me even more viscerally—trite as that may seem—in that after vicariously experiencing the depravity of slavery through the medium of two limited dimensions, I was then complicit in delicious vengeance, cheering for the titular character’s bloody and gratuitous retribution. It made me wish that, if it were possible, I could fully partake in the dark joy of whipping the white slavers into mewling submission.

The important difference between Douglass and these others—besides the very relevant fact that they are fictions written by white people sympathetic to the plight of slaves, while Douglass is someone who actually experienced slavery—is that to hear the voice of Douglass is not simply to hear the voice of a slave telling the story of his emancipation, or of his horrors, or of a base desire for vengeance. Rather, it is instead to hear the voice of a man who was born with freedom in his heart tell the story of how a repugnantly self-righteous, morally bankrupt and appallingly vicious society tried to convince him that he was never meant to be free, and thus how they failed.

One of the most striking things in this light is the significance that Douglass places on books, or to be more precise on the importance of literacy. When recalling the experience of the first time he was introduced to letters by Mrs. Auld, Douglass recounts Mr. Auld’s reaction and subsequently his own deep thoughts on the matter: “if you teach that nigger… how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” Douglass’ reaction to this statement was lucid: “I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man.” In my mind, there has never been a better advocacy for literacy. It is far easier to enslave a man who has not been taught to read, and therefore lacks the most important tool with which to learn critical thought. Douglass’ insight—young, uneducated, and inexperienced as he was at the time—is profound on the level of genius. In one fell swoop he understood not only the underlying enabler of his enslavement, but the means by which he might ultimately escape it.

Though I mostly agree with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison when he said that “Opponents of slavery should not talk about the evil influence of slavery on white society but rather the damage the system did to blacks,” I feel that it is extremely important to note in this case the damage that slavery did to Mrs. Auld. Douglass stresses the importance of it himself, describing how kind she was when he first met her, commencing to treat him “as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.” But in having been forbidden to teach him his letters by her husband, Douglass noted how she began to change.

Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear…Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities… The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practice her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself… a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.

Douglass thus manages to show us not only how the institution of slavery destroyed the spirits of the slaves—which seems obvious to the modern student—but how it less obviously helped to destroy the moral compasses of the masters and changed them from men and women into monsters who perpetuated the horrors of this national sin. Despite the strident language of Garrison, and even though his philosophy was very important to the abolitionist movement, Douglass’ observation is a very humanist position to take and as such is the most potent antidote to inhumanity.

One of the most important points that Douglass makes about slavery is that, despite apologist claims “which portrayed slavery as an essentially benign institution in which kindly masters looked after submissive and generally contented African Americans,” (Brinkley 276) utter degradation and cruelty towards slaves was not only the norm, but a vital component of the entire system. Slaves must be kept at a subsistence level, in a perpetual mode of survival, or else they might show unrest and have thoughts of escape or rebellion. As Douglass himself puts it (italics are mine):

I have observed this in my experience of slavery,—that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

Slavery, in other words, was a system that forced people—master and slave—to become something less than human. What becomes clear from his observation of Mrs. Auld—that slavery was as injurious to her as to him—is that Frederick Douglass regarded the damage done to his psyche a far greater crime than any bodily harm he had to endure. He remarkably ascended through this world of despair and managed to retain his humanity. In doing so, he brought a message of clarity, introspection, and strength to a world in dire need of them, both for the abolitionists of his time and for future generations in need of greater understanding.

---

 

The Ones Who Analyze Omelas

    Being a dummy, I took two writing intensive classes this semester. I wind up having to write something like 5 papers in a normal week. It's insane. So I'm going to dump the occasional class assignment here; the ones I like the most. For English II, I had to write a paper about a short story from our literature book, and being a sci-fi nerd I chose 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' by Ursula K. LeGuin. So you should follow the link and read it. It's only about 5 pages long and it's really really really really really good. Also, my paper really really really really won't make sense if you haven't read it. I assure you that it also is really really really good, and I've taken out all of the really reallys that were in it, beefing up the word count, so that now it is really much shorter than it was.

___________________________________________________________________

The Ones Who Analyze Omelas

      The symbolism in 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' by Ursula K. Le Guin is so pervasive that the task becomes one of winnowing out possibilities rather than trying to beef up a thin critique. Therefore in one sense I've picked an easy target, but in another, I'm using LeGuin's story to attempt an explanation of humanity itself. One thing is for certain: the story is compelling and speaks to your emotions in the same way that a disturbing dream feels full of meaning yet when examined more closely becomes detailed with uncertainties.

      Le Guin's writing style is delightful, and if you know anything about me, you know that I am far too cool to use that word lightly. A life size model of Candy Land constructed with real gingerbread is delightful. Bleh. But what other adjective can you use for a line such as this one, following after two pages describing the sickly-saccharine joys of Omelas? "I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate." (LeGuin) This remarkable ability of hers to not only create a world for her fable, but to make the reader ruefully complicit in its design, makes lesser writers tremble in awe.

      Ruefully? Well, you shall see why I chose that word. Omelas is a dystopian place where a child playing the flute is as religious as an orgy, where everyone is happy and fulfilled and guiltless. Except for the child in the basement whose dehumanization every single Omelasian is ruefully complicit in. In exchange for the prosperity of the city, there must be a victim, a scapegoat to take all of the guilt and horrors upon itself without even the balm of understanding why.

      You see, what is interesting about this story is that Le Guin shows us how we are not satisfied with happiness unless there is something sinister also. She doesn't merely tell us that this is so, she shows us by first boring us with a tale of jolly old Utopia, and then pulling the rug out by titillating us with a horrifying conundrum. It is a compelling argument that appeals directly to one's instincts rather than to one's intellect.

      At first read-through, what I took away from the shocking ending of this story was that the moral position belonged to those who walked away from Omelas. By refusing to participate in a society that allowed such travesty, they were posing a rebuke towards those who choose to stay, live with the horror, and reap the rewards. The place where they go is indescribable, apparently, by an author who just spent a mere five pages describing as complex a moral quandary as one could imagine. This confused me for a few moments, and then I realized that it didn't matter. The ones who walked away from Omelas are assholes, too. What good does merely walking away do? They're not much different from those who stayed. The child still lives in an oubliette of pain and loneliness, and both parties remain aware of this and both parties choose to do nothing to change it. You could argue that the leavers are cowards: At least the stayers are willing to live with their choices.

      Of course if instead of leaving, if just one of them chose to free the child, society comes crumbling down, right? Well this is where it ceases to be a useful allegory, in my opinion. The Penn State scandal involving Jerry Sandusky, Mike McQueary and Joe Paterno illustrates why. Science Fiction writer John Scalzi on his blog, referencing Le Guin's short story, says:

      "At Pennsylvania State University, a grown man found a blameless child being put through hell. Other grown men learned of it. Each of them had to make their choice, and decide, fundamentally, whether the continuation of their utopia - or at very least the illusion of their utopia - was worth the pain and suffering of that one child. Through their actions, and their inactions, we know the choice they made." (Scalzi, 2011)

      At Penn State, the very few people who knew about Sandusky's dark deeds did in fact choose to keep the status quo in order to keep their little football valley happy, like the stayers in Omelas. In real life, such a stark, specific situation is rarely tolerated by larger groups of people; the more people that find out about it the more untenable it becomes.

      However, had they chosen to save the child(ren), had McQueary, Paterno and the school president exposed the Sandusky Demon in their midst, Happy Valley would not have ceased to exist as a Utopia; rather they would have revealed an innate courage and moral strength that everyone mistakenly thought it already possessed. It would have self-corrected from what was in fact a Dystopia into something better approximating the Utopia everyone believed they were already a part of. It was in keeping silent, in knowing the children were being raped and in the doing of nothing that became the downfall of Joe Paterno and the Nittany Lions, quite the opposite of what is proposed in the parable of Omelas.

      In order to make a more reasonable interpretation for Omelas, perhaps it is better to go from the specific to the general, from the deductive to the inductive. For instance: The relationship between people in the United States who live in prosperity and the people who live in poverty. The people above the poverty line know there are people in their country, in their towns and cities even, who do not have enough money to have their basic needs met. Of these people, it is estimated by the National Center for Children in Poverty that there are 14 million children in the US below the poverty level. (Vanessa R. Wight, 2010) Poverty contributes to their poor health, increased risk of mental health problems, shorter life expectancy rates, and fewer educational opportunities. In essence, we are living in Omelas. We know, and we do nothing. If we're not actively engaged in freeing these children, we're enjoying our happy lives at their expense. However, as a perfect allegory the story fails again because there is no walking away from it; we either help the children or we don't.

      When Le Guin wrote this story, the War on Poverty in the US was petering out. After decades of US policy from FDR to Johnson focused on helping the underserved in this country, the pendulum swung. People started to deride the Welfare State, and they still do. In fact, the War on Poverty is a thing of the past now. But in 1975, Le Guin was in the throes of the backlash. Omelas still exists, only now we look at it philosophically and say it's a statement on happiness, which can't exist without despair. So it is possible that Le Guin was actually being a little more specific with her penned up child who is described a lot like the images of children living in poverty in Africa. "It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes... Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually." Yet even here I cannot understand what those who walk away are supposed to represent, not to mention that if starving African children were suddenly no longer starving, it is unlikely that it would destroy our civilization.

      Ultimately, I suspect that it is not meant to be an allegory for any particular human endeavor. I believe that it is meant as a parable of human psychology itself. Carl Jung once analyzed a seemingly normal man, who had a dream in which "he saw--precisely in the middle of the room--something white on the floor. As he approached he discovered that it was an idiot child of about two years old. It was sitting on a chamber pot and had smeared itself with feces." (Jung, 1983, pp. 157-158) This, to Jung, represented a severe psychosis buried deep within the man. Perhaps the child in Omelas, sitting in its own excrement, is the psychotic id of humanity, something of which we are all aware yet can do nothing about. Trying to free a part of your id, especially if it is psychotic, would certainly destroy any ego normalcy you'd managed to achieve. "When he told me of the dream, I realized that his normality was a compensation. I had caught him in the nick of time, for the latent psychosis was within a hair breadth of breaking out and becoming manifest." (Jung, 1983, p. 158) Jung quickly ended his psychoanalysis of the man and lied to him about the dream's true meaning, in order to keep the demon in the bottle. Such is the way of the Omelasians.

      If viewed in this light, the ones who walk away from Omelas are a question posed by Le Guin: What if humanity could leave behind the dark psychotic child covered in shit in the deepest dark of our collective unconscious? Is that place even comprehensible? Would it be a wonderful place, or even worse madness? We know that "rescuing ", or "releasing" our psychotic nature could doom civilization, and so we keep it bottled up. Perhaps walking away represents evolving past humanity's psychotic tendencies, which is why Le Guin "cannot describe it at all," and supposes that "it is possible that it does not exist." Evolving beyond the demons in our collective id would take us to a place where it is questionable whether we'd any longer be human.

 

Works Cited

Jung, C. (1983). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Great Britain: Flamingo.

LeGuin, U. K. (1975). The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. In X. K. Gioia, Backpack Literature Fourth Edition.

Scalzi, J. (2011, November 10). Omelas State University. Retrieved September 20, 2012, from Whatever: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/11/10/omelas-state-university/

Vanessa R. Wight, M. C. (2010, January). Who are America's Poor Children? Retrieved 09 21, 2012, from National Center for Children in Poverty: http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_912.html

"Every Single Commodity You Produce is a Piece of Your Own Death!" - Hitchhiker

Yes so as once previously threatened, I made it back to Austin Texas and I spent the night at the infamous Austin Motel penis-or-middle-finger-hotel depending upon your viewpoint. It was nice, but it didn't feel infamous. To be honest, I had more fun the last time I was in Austin with my wife, but this time at least I got some pictures.

The South Congress area of Austin is hip-hip-hip. For about 5 blocks. I mean, it's cool, and so are other parts of Austin, but I guess that you really have to be a city mouse to think that it's a cool place to live. I like the woods, and privacy, but I do admit that it is nice to browse some hip shop windows from time to time.

Ha! Take that, all ye fearers of irony, and scardey-cats of culture! It's so laughable to be homophobic, they're ironing books now. I do love me a good bookstore front window.

There is a bridge on South Congress street under which all the local bats hang out, and at dusk they pour out en masse to check out Austin's hotspots. I didn't make it to the bridge on time, but solitary literary bats are far more interesting than the groupthink bats that all mob the same places together anyway.

Or maybe that's just a bird. WHATEVER. Hey look over here, it's Captain Satan!

I know, I know, too many quirky book shop window shots. Nobody wants a book about DIY Porn.... or FUCKIN' DO they?! Anyway, I was excited to run across a famous Austin landmark, The Continental Club. 'Slacker', a favorite Richard Linklater film, shot a scene in here. The one with the anti-artist.

And yeah so one night in Austin, before heading up into the wasteland surrounding Fort Hood for work, isn't enough to do it all. All the cool cred that Austin has didn't seem worth it enough for me to ever even for a second consider that it might be yee-haw to live in Texas. Though, to be fair, I would have to attend SXSW fest to be completely certain.

I had a day off on this trip, during which I drove down to San Antonio to meet up with an old Chiemsee chum, one of my favorites. More on that in the next post.

Spoiler Alert! Surprise Surgeries Lead To A Detailed 'Rogue Moon' Book Report

I did wind up getting surgery on my hand; that's one of my before x-ray shots there. I don't think it's narcissistic to post it because it looks cool. See the break on the far right? That's my 5th metacarpal and I now have what looks like a drywall screw and a metal twist-tie holding the bone together. I can't wait to get my copy of those x-rays.

Top view. Thank the *FSM for keyboards, because I don't think writing by hand would be possible with that shattered thing. Did I mention that I'm totally high right now? I had my knee surgery yesterday, and today I am way drugged up on many many pain killers, which are not really stopping the pain so much as making me feel dopey, loquacious, and ready to write a post. According to my boss, who is awesome, I won't be working for a long long while. Which I think many people would be okay with, however I'm really going to miss the travel. But acl replacement surgery is a serious business, I'm told. Bending it will be out of the question for a few months. I'd really rather not spend this post complaining about how my life is going to suck and be different now with far less travel for a while at least, so I thought I'd do a book report post.

I recently acquired the seventy-ish books in the excellent Sci-Fi Masterworks series, which is a series of some of the awesomest sci-fi books ever. Some of my favorites are on the list, but there are many I've never read, and many many that I'd never even heard of. I've been wanting to read them for a while, but until my recent injuries I hadn't the time. Now, I'm all dove in.

'Rogue Moon' by Algis Budrys is bizarre. It was written in 1960, well before the moon landing, and part of what he did in the novel was to envision a future version of Man's eventual moon exploration. In Rogue Moon, we don't use rocket ships to get there, we use what is essentially a beam machine like in Star Trek, but with a few upsetting differences. What the transporter does is, it picks apart and reads every single atom in the object to be teleported and in this process, destroys it. It then sends an electronic signal with every single bit of information about the object's atomic structure to a receiver on the moon, which then breaks down local raw material (moon rocks, i.e.) and reconfigures the atoms from said material to match the signal's specifications exactly. What this means for a human transported this way is that he is actually killed by this machine, reduced to atomic slag. The copy of the human that is then assembled on the moon is so exact that his brain's electrical currents, neurons, etc. contain the exact personality and memories of the original.

The reason men are travelling to the moon in the novel is that there is an artifact of unknowable properties on some acreage on the backside of the moon which, when entered, becomes some sort of bizarre human killing game. If you move the wrong way in the wrong spot, you are killed in a horrible fashion. If you get through one area, the next has its own rules that will also kill you gruesomely. It is not known if it is a natural phenomenon, an alien artifact, a higher dimensional highway intersection, or what. Man's discovery of it is compared to a small beetle who inadvertently walks into a disposed tomato sauce can on the ground. The beetle can't understand why he gets trapped in there, nor can he know if someone has placed it there to torment him, or if it has merely been discarded and forgotten there having nothing to do with him, or even whether it is a natural or artificial construct. Beetles are ignorant of tomato cans and lack the intelligence to comprehend them, and humans are ignorant of this artifact and lack both the intelligence and the context to navigate it. It was impossible to study in any meaningful manner, until...

An accidental discovery. A second receiver is built on Earth, in the same laboratory as the transporter in order that the destroyed man might continue his life on Earth, even if only as a copy. If a man is destroyed, and the resulting signal goes out to both receivers, there are a few seconds of confusion: The copy on the moon and the copy on Earth share perceptions for just a few seconds. In other words, the Earth copy actually sees what the Moon copy is up to because their brains are identical, and action-at-a-distance between them seems to be a consequence. But only for a few seconds as, once the copies adjust to their different surroundings, they cease to be identical and go on their separate perception ways.

So an idea is tested and the Earth receiver is outfitted with a sensory deprivation tank, so that the Earth copy is created directly inside of it. Since he has no overt incoming sensations, he is able to stay in sync with the Moon copy for a much longer time, though not indefinitely as even in a sensory deprivation tank the small differences in perception begin to break the connection.

However when the moon copy is sent into the artifact to explore, and when he dies horribly, the Earth copy is pulled screaming mad from the deprivation tank, and is unable to communicate what happened. So a certain type of man is needed, one who not only has a death wish, but who will not go insane after dying, coming back, and immediately reliving a new death horror every day.

Such a man is found... And then the character stuff is almost as insane as the plot. As I said it was written in the Mad Men decade and every single male character in the book hates himself, and hates everyone around him too. There is a constant war of sizing up, testing weak spots, and ridiculous posturing over one woman in particular who is an emasculating mega-bitch in her own right. The only exception is the only other female character in the book, whose only purpose is to listen to the main character's extravagantly long monologues about what makes himself tick and then inexplicably to tell him she loves him. She has no personality and in fact seems to have no last name.

It's here that I'll have to admit that I have not finished the book, but despite the extreme bafflement and irritation that I experience in trying to understand the childish mentality of fictional 1960's so-called Homo-sapien, I'm really enjoying it. A lot of writers from those mid decades seem to use very similar character ideas of people; using pop psychology in fiction was all the rage, and it seems as though it was usually about pissing contests, ego-trips, and makin' love to brainless women, man. Even so, the lousy mores of those old battles of the sexes can't obfuscate the overall bonkers yet thought-provoking plot. 

*Flying Spaghetti Monster

Roswell Does NOT In Fact End Very Well, Futurama.

"The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble." - Ellen DeGeneres

Third trip to New Mexico is the charm! Roswell, baby. Actually it wasn't all that. I mean, it's cool to be able to say that I went, but other than the UFO Museum and Research center, there's not a lot going on there.

Not that, as a town, they don't embrace the hell out of their notoriety. Visitors are, after all, welcome.

The whole town has crap like that all over the place. Alien head lampposts and see the mailbox?

They need to take a little more pride in their place in history.

But what kills me is that the UFO crash didn't even happen at Roswell, rather 30 miles North closer to a town named Corona. But the military base where the investigation went out from was in Roswell, so there you go.

The museum was... well full of things like this. There is a LOT of reading material in the research room, but who has time for all of that when you're just using up some free time on a work assignment? Hell, who has time for that unless you're totally obsessed anyway?

Not that I'm not intensely curious. But I'm in the camp of people who don't really think that any information that is available to the public can point with any certainty to anything, well, for certain.

I've just finished reading that new book on Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen, and nothing in it made me feel any differently. It's an excellent book, well written and full of information about Area 51 that I didn't know before, including the U2 and OXCART spy plane dramas, but her conclusion about what the Roswell incident was about is a bit... well all she's doing is telling us what some guy who used to work there told her what he was told it was.

Which, if you've read anything about the book online, you'll know is that it was a technologically advanced hover saucer piloted by surgically altered retarded children (altered by none other than Joseph Mengele himself) sent by Joseph Stalin as both a psy-op to induce panic in America and to send a message to Eisenhower that he had wack Nazi technology at his disposal too, so what up?

She calls this a simpler, more Occam's Razor-like explanation than an extra-terrestrial crash landing, but I'm not so sure about that. This explanation leaves a lot of other questions; if Stalin had such advanced hover technology back in '47, and was able to penetrate American airspace with such ease, why wasn't this technology used again or since? I'm not sure that we could have won the cold war if they were that far ahead of us in stealth technology.

Anyway, I'm not saying I believe it was an alien crash. More likely it was something we were working on, and every bit of cover and disinformation ever released about it is just that, including very probably Annie's findings. One disturbing thing she says in the book is that the real reason Area 51 has been kept so secret all these years is because atrocities in the name of National Security have been going on there since the 50's, including human experimentation. I suppose the people involved would rather the public speculated endlessly about Aliens and/or Joseph Mengele than consider for a moment that a US Government-sanctioned continuation of Nazi experiments might be going on. In fact, I much prefer to believe that it is Extraterrestrial in nature.

Knowing what we know about how the corporate-controlled military-industrial complex of a government that we have operates in public, however, I shudder to think what the reality is about how they operate in private.

They're not the Aliens man, we're the Aliens.

In Another Universe, This Post Is About This Universe. (Where This Post Is About Another Universe, Where This Post Is About This Universe...∞

I want to do a book report on Brian Greene's new publication in the worst way, but I'm not sure that I am capable of it. I used to read popular science books quite regularly, and I'd realized that it's been years since those days at about the same time that 'The Hidden Reality' caught my eye. As I was going through it I realized that reading, and keeping pace with, popular science texts is a skill which must be practiced, especially if one is not particularly well trained in physics.

That's not to say that he doesn't do a great job of explaining the concept behind 9 different types of multiple/parallel Universes quite engagingly; he does. It's more that, once I put the book down for a few minutes after every couple of pages to think about the implications of whatever mind-blowing concept he's introduced, the particulars begin to drain away because my poor little head is not lately used to holding on to the strange and complicated concepts behind Infinity, Relativity, Quantum physics, and String Theory.

However I'm going to try because I feel that my motive in writing about this book is more an effort to hang on as best as I am able to the understanding of a beautiful dream that fades quickly after waking than an attempt to convince anyone else to read it. Of course after completing that last sentence, I've sat and stared at the book cover for about ten minutes trying to figure out how to start. Sigh.

So here then; let's begin with the apology. Mr. Greene himself goes to great lengths in the book to make the reader understand that, at the moment, no versions of the multiverse which he posits are actually provable with hard data, and therefore may fall slightly outside the boundary of science. I say slightly, because though their detection may currently lie beyond our best detectors, they are in fact unavoidable outcomes of certain aspects of science which ARE scientifically sound, mathematically speaking.

As a comparison, when Einstein published his theory of General Relativity the technology available at the time was not capable of disproving his math. He came up with that theory using creative visualization, math and perspiration. And whatever other tools of genius he had at his disposal. But he himself did not go out and measure the Cosmic Background Radiation which ultimately helped to prove his theory correct. Now I'm not comparing Brian Greene or any other String Theorist to Einstein, (and neither was Greene in his book) merely the scientific process itself which is at work here. If you follow the math it leads to amazing places which, more often than you might think, describes the cosmos as it is in reality, even though it may also lead beyond all common sense. So this exploration of the side effects and the possibilities of infinity, string theory and math is extremely valid science, even if in the end it turns out that they've missed something and there are other things at work. You have to explore every avenue if you want to find out what's actually out there.

So why bother getting all excited over Parallel Universes if there's a chance it's inaccurate? Because it's exciting. And because, all things being equal, it's probably not inaccurate. It is currently science's best guess, much as Relativity and Evolution once were, and therefore worth a lengthy consideration.

So I'll start with the multiverse which I understand the most clearly, naturally. He calls it the Quilted Multiverse and here is how it works: There is some question in the cosmologist community whether the space that we inhabit is either very, very, very freaking large but ultimately finite, or whether it is in fact infinite. It all depends on the overall shape of the universe, which we don't yet know. (It's important to have a good grasp of the concept of infinity for this one, which I am lucky to have in some finite degree thanks to Rudy Rucker. His book 'White Light' is a rollicking exploration of infinity, and with extremely visual storytelling really helped me to glimpse what mathematicians actually mean when they use the term infinity. I highly recommend it.)

At any rate, If our Universe in fact turns out to be infinite (as the current trend of thought among cosmologists apparently believe is the likeliest scenario) then there is almost certainly another messiestobjects out there, writing up a book report about a publication by Brian Browne, (the last name of the author perhaps being the only difference between that Earth and this one) and positing some strange world where a version of himself is typing up a book report on a publication by a Brian Greene. In fact, there would be an infinite amount of Earths out there, that look just like ours. And there would be an infinite amount of other possible Earths as well. One, perhaps, that was solely inhabited by shrimp. Or one with no shrimp. Let your imagination go wild, like mine!

The reason why this would be so is simply statistical. Matter is evenly distributed throughout the visible Universe on very large scales. What that means is, you can take a really big box, say about 100 million light years cubed and chunk it down here, then weigh all of the matter in it. Then pick it up and chunk it down over there, again weighing all of the matter. Do this in several locations throughout the Universe and you will find that each box-full of matter will weigh in at about equal amounts, and it will be so all throughout the Universe. The idea here is that while matter may be evenly spread throughout an infinite Universe, there is a finite amount of forms that matter can take.

So the implication of this is that matter, as much of it as there is, can only arrange itself in so many ways. It's like a deck of cards; there are 52 cards in a deck, and 52 cards can be arranged in 10⁶⁷ unique ways. That number fully written out is 80,658,175,170,943, 878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000  which is obviously a really huge number. However, once you have arranged those 52 cards in that many unique ways, the cycle will repeat and you will start to get duplicate arrangements. Of course, some arrangements are more likely than others, so you will have odd random assortments of cards duplicate more often than you will see the deck fall out completely arranged from aces to Kings in all four suits, but as unlikely as that is, it will happen eventually.

The same is true for the arrangement of matter. In the entirety of our visible Universe, there are about 10¹⁰¹²² possible particle configurations. Which again, is a totally inconceivable number yet is definitely a finite number. Once you've reached every possible unique combination, the patterns will begin to repeat, and repeat infinitely. Thus, messyobjects is out there, messierobjects, and even an evenmoremessiestobjects, all trying to say hi to me right now. Since our brains and life experiences are nearly completely identical and in some cases absolutely identical, I can say hi to them and they've received the message! I know this because I've received their message, having sent one myself. We're totally braintext messaging across the infinite light years right now. They say hi back, and ask how's the wife and pets and I say oh, the same as yours, pretty much. ad infinitum. (Of course it's not a very interesting conversation, having identical thoughts and all, but there's always a downside.)

Whew. That was the first and easiest version of a multiverse in this book, and believe me they get far more difficult to grasp. The existence of the Quilted Multiverse depends only on discovering the shape of the Universe we currently reside in without calling any of the more unproven forms of science into the matter, but it is important here to note that Brian Greene and other String Theorists did not go out looking for multiverses. They did not read some ridiculous New Age drama and say "Oy, how can we finagle the math to come up with parallel dimensional portal-thingies in order to dazzle the public?" No, the attempt to understand actual observed phenomena through the framework of String Theory led them mathematically all on its own to many other different types of possible multiverses.

The Inflationary Multiverse, which better fits the definition of a multiverse in my extremely humble opinion, is one in which bits of our universe break off and inflate into bubble universes of their own, our Universe having broken off from another "larger" one at its own birth. There are also the Brane, Cyclic, Landscape, and Quantum types of multiverses. I like the Quantum Multiverse; it basically goes back to the Schrödinger's Cat thing, and Quantum uncertainty.

(jpeg of a print by Jie Qi) In case you are not familiar with Schrödinger's Cat, it is a Thought Experiment designed to help one visualize how Quantum Particles behave. The way it goes is, you put a cat in a box, close the lid, and have a radioactive atom timed to decay and open a flask of poison. In the quantum world, there is an equal possibility of the decay happening and causing the cat to be dead or alive when you open the lid. Until you open the lid, the cat is actually in an uncertain state, being both alive and dead at the same time which would be an unsettling thing to witness, I'm sure. The traditional outcome of this little game is that when you open the box, the probability wave collapses and the cat becomes one or the other. Thus the very act of observation determines the ultimate quantum state. (For a more accurate and less confused rundown of the thought experiment in mid-twentieth century science nerd jargon, visit the wikipedia page on the subject)

This is weird. But this type of behavior has been observed in quantum particle physics, hence the Quantum Uncertainty Principle and it does not apply to the world of things of our size, only to the realm of the very, very small. There is a gap between the quantum scale and ours where Quantum Theory breaks down and reality then becomes guided by Newtonian physics and Relativity. If you add String Theory math to this experiment, you can bridge the gap and in fact the cat is actually both alive and dead for realsies, in two different universes! Long, complex, nearly-incomprehensible-to-a-non-String-Theorist story short, the reason that Quantum particles behave so oddly is that we are seeing them play out every possible state of existence across a multiverse.

As an interesting aside, that particular multiverse explanation is where the idea comes from that every time one makes a choice, universes diverge and a separate reality for each choice carries on it's course. It may sound a bit hippie or New Age-ish, but if String Theory turns out to be correct, this in fact may actually be happening, right now, right next to you.

Another multiverse is the Holographic Multiverse, which is conceptually easy, but also very hard to explain the whys and wherefores of. This one is due to the nature of information and how it is stored in the universe, and when looked at closely begins to look a bit as though all matter as we see it is actually a projection of another type of matter on a distant quantum dimensional surface. In this multiverse all of our actions, in fact all interaction between all forms of matter everywhere is a shadow play. We're hand puppets. Don't ask me to explain the science though. It has something to do with Black Holes, very tall drinking straws, and math. Beyond that, I haven't retained a thing. Damn it.

The final multiverse of the book is the so-called Ultimate Multiverse, a distinction earned due to a new twist on the Anthropic Principle, which is the idea that asking the question "How is it possible that our planet, our very universe have the conditions necessary to bring forth life?" is meaningless because life evolves in the place to which it is suited. In other words, we are here both to ask the question and be the answer. I like this one for purely philosophical reasons, as it's an (yet another) answer of sorts in the debate between religion and science, at least for a certain set of debate points. The religious often like to point out that the Universe, Life, and Everything are far too complex to have "just happened" which is about as far as their understanding of the sciences of Cosmology and Evolution usually go. A very sad, limited viewpoint indeed.

At any rate, the Ultimate Multiverse answers the question of why the Physical Laws of our particular Universe are just right in order for galaxy, star, planet, and life formation to "just happen". Because in an infinite multiverse, where every possible Universe that can exist does exist, one with our physical laws and conditions for life merely becomes an inevitability, not a miracle. Therefore there is no "why" of existence, merely the statistical likelihood of it. You'll note that the Ultimate Multiverse differs from the Quilted Multiverse in the sense that, with the latter, there may be an infinite set of volumes with repeating particle configurations, allowing for infinite versions of themselves, however they are all still set in the same Universe as we are and subject to the same physical laws, merely separated by distances too large for any technology to ever cross. The Quilted version answers the question of why there is life on Earth, but does not answer the why of the overall conditions in our Goldilocks Universe and its particular laws of physics being just right in order to allow life to come about in the first place. The Ultimate Multiverse does, however. It states that while there are Universes like ours with just the right amount of density for galaxies, stars, and planets to form, there are also an infinite amount of stillborn ones. Our Universe is the Royal Flush that comes along once in a blue moon... or rather once in a Blue Iteration.

There are solid mathematical underpinnings to the Ultimate Multiverse, as well as for all of the others, but I'm not going there. If you want to try to understand them, or any of the other concepts, I suggest that you pick up a few popular science books and get cracking. 'The Hidden Reality' is wonderful, but unless you've already attempted to come to grips with the ideas behind Relativity, Infinity, or Quantum Physics, you might want to get a more basic picture of the Universe first. 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan is an excellent place to start for basic Cosmology, that Rucker book I already pimped for Infinity, and Brian Greene's earlier work 'The Elegant Universe' is a great introduction to String Theory. So get busy with the head scratching, braniac!

Another great way to contemplate infinity, by the way, is to obsessively-compulsively watch fractal zoom videos. I've posted about fractals before, here and here. I don't know how, but I'm sure that fractal math figures in to multiverses somehow. This one magnifies the Mandelbrot set 10²⁷⁵ times, and ends up at a copy of itself. Apropos.

 

A Pair Of Tools For The Peripatetic Trade Which Are In Fact NOT Pathetic.

Because of the nature of my job, I find myself spending quite a bit of time sitting around in airports, on airplanes, and in hotel rooms. This didn't used to bother me much as I've always rather loved those essential aspects of travel. I like being in airports and planes and hotels and trains and buses and whatever else. They aren't just a means to an end for me, they're part of the excitement. When I was a baby my parents used to get me to fall asleep by popping me in the car seat and going for a drive; I guess the sound of the motor was comforting as within a minute I would drop right off. Consequently I never was one of those horrible children to take on a long trip who was full of constant complaint and runny nose goo.

However, last year business picked up and it seemed for a while there that I was on a trip every week and even I found myself getting a bit restless with all of the free time on hand which this lifestyle provides. In the beginning my MP3 player was a huge source of comfort; it's one of the most genius inventions ever afforded to a traveler, and has been my main traveling tool for quite a number of years. All your music with you wherever you go, instead of a small envelope of cds you painstakingly had to choose out from your collection. But for constant 4 and 5 hour flights, I found myself turning it off and just reading until I passed out as much as possible. But for several day long trips, I really only could fit one or two books in my luggage and inevitably I'd finish them far too soon. And then, something wonderful happened.

For Julie’s birthday last year I gave her an Amazon Kindle. I thought that it would make a great present for a writer and avid reader. I hadn’t had much interest in one myself; I am an avid reader, however since ebooks first arrived on the scene I’ve always thought that reading a book without the benefit of paper pages and a well illustrated cover would cheapen the experience somewhat. Not to mention some of the other drawbacks: you can’t lend or borrow ebooks unless you’re willing to loan someone your $250 Kindle for the time it takes them to read it, and if you spill coffee on a real book you’re only out 5 to 20 bucks.

However, once I got to experiment with hers a little bit, when she wasn't using it of course, I found it to be pretty cool and valiantly hid my jealousy from her for about a month of pure torture, until of course she wasn't fooled for a second of it and bought me one for Christmas. Huzzah!

I like the fact that it's not backlit by computer screen light. It really does look just like a paper page and is as easy on the eyes as a normal book. I don't mind at all having to use a regular light to read by. Plus the electronic ink is extremely power saving. The Kindle is not using battery power to keep your page on the screen; it's actual ink (well, not actual ink, but tiny microcapsules about the diameter of a human hair), magnetically positioned on the underside of it to look like the book page you want it to. It only uses power to turn the page. The battery can last for weeks.

Also, page turning and bookmarking have really gone to the next level with Kindle; in fact I'd call it a major paradigm shift in how we read. I never lose my page. If I fall asleep while reading and it drops to my lap, or if something distracts me and I put it down without thinking, it of course just stays on the page you're reading and even when it turns off, it just powers back up right to your page. Even if you browse to other documents or books on your Kindle, when you open up your book again it will start right on the last page you were on. And you wouldn't think it, but page turning is a big deal. Now I can read from any position, and I never have to jink my elbow out from leaning on it to turn the page or sacrifice a comfortable station to flip to the next chapter. With whichever hand I'm holding the Kindle with, I just subtly click one of the two page turn buttons provided on each side of it. It may not sound as awesome as it is, but if you are a prolific reader you'll appreciate it when you get to try it out for a while.

But of course the best part of the Kindle is how damn many books you can bring with you wherever you go. There are thousands of free books available for it, mostly classics. So if you ever wanted to read Sherlock Holmes or Dracula or The Brothers Karamazov, but never got around to it, it's the perfect time. One of the first books I read on it was Uncle Tom's Cabin, because I never really understood why a book that was supposedly anti-slavery came to be considered a rather racist thing to call someone. Well now I get it, and it also made me see a side of the years of slavery in America I'd never really considered before and so look! The Kindle has helped to broaden my horizons and expand my mind already. Plus, I never run out of books to read now, no matter how long I'm on a trip for. It's awesome.

The downsides are there of course, though minimal. I'm not allowed to read it, for example, during takeoff and landing. Stupid. Plus the aforementioned being unable to lend or borrow books easily. But the advent of the ebook reader fills a need for readers that has been the hole in our hearts all this time that we could never identify. Anyway, it's not like you can't still pick up a real book if you want. I have plenty. Plus my Dad also got me a cool present for Christmas; justtherightbook.com sends me a book every once in a while based on specifications he gave them on my reading preferences. So the ebook is just another option, which is a good thing, I now believe.

The other essential travel tool-at-which-I-once-scoffed is the GPS. I hated the idea of those things. I always felt that part of the fun of traveling is figuring out your route yourself, and potentially getting lost, finding something you might not otherwise have found, and finding your way again. Venice, Italy is the premiere spot for this mode of travel, incidentally. Plus, you know, being suspicious of human nature in general I never liked the idea of "them" being able to pinpoint me wherever I am. But I carry a cellphone so... there's no hiding in this world any more from people who want to find you anyway.

However, my job often puts me in odd places around the US where I don't really have the time or the desire to wander about much, such as say Indiana. Ugh. And I'm always having to find my way out to odd spots in the middle of nowhere where the roadsigns make no sense and the locals have none either. (Have no sense, in case the wording of my little joke confused you) Such as say, some military base in Indiana. Or North Dakota. Ugh. And trying to read a map or directions printed out from mapquest can be quite difficult and dangerous while driving on busy highways or winding country roads. I'd of course mentioned this frustrating aspect of my job to Julie now and again, and last year for my birthday she bought me a GPS. I. Freaking. LOVE. It. And her. She's so smart and pretty and cool.

It has a little map, that shows me where I am, shows me where to go, and even talks to me and tells me when to turn. If I need to find a grocery store, or a gas station, or whatever, I can just touch the screen and it takes me to the nearest one. If I make a wrong turn, it recalculates and tells me where to go. No more driving-in-strange-scary-places-stress. Ah. The other great aspect of a GPS is for example, when you buy something on Craigslist. I've been getting quite a few deals lately from people on Craigslist. Bought a really nice desk for my new office and outfitted a home gym in the basement nice and cheap through people getting rid of old stuff. People who, incidentally, live all over the damn place. Typing their address into the GPS takes me right to their doorstep. No muss no fuss.

My traveling life at work is now stress free, thanks to these two awesome travel tools. Oh and also thanks to the Percoset my doctor prescribed for my back pain when flying in cramped little economy seats. That with a glass of wine and a good book and my flight is over before it began.

An Inevitable Post, Given That You Know I Had To Have My Say About Green Zone

  So Green Zone. I can't really speak to the larger events which this movie tries to condense into a cohesive plot-line, although I have read the book it was based on and even did a blog post on it a while back. But politics aside for the moment, I think that this movie nails it in the details.

My favorite scene is when Matt Damon, after some intense action out in the chaotic streets of Baghdad, walks out behind the Republican Palace which we were using as the US "Embassy" to meet his CIA contact by the swimming pool. The look on his face and on his men's faces is perfect. Utter confusion, as though they were wondering, "did we pass out and wake up back in the US somewhere?" That disconnect was spot on and is something I not only experienced in the Green Zone but witnessed on not a few members of the armed forces' faces in that very spot. Not that I was really ever "in the shit", but it was a pretty unreal place and having spent some time out in downtown Baghdad, the Green Zone (officially called The International Zone; Green Zone was "local" slang and I myself always preferred to call it the Interzone) was undeniably a real-life study in stark contrast. Employees of the DoD hanging out and sunbathing in speedos and bikinis, drinking beer and carrying on as though they were trying to really be in Key West, while a half mile away on the other side of mortar walls was a city in pain and disaster at every turn. That to me was what the film captures best all around, and specifically so in this scene.

The other thing the film did really well was the set detail. The embassy pool looked exactly right, as did the Saddam International Airport. The flyover shot of the Green Zone was perfect, from the Hands of Victory monument and the Iraqi Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Republican Palace itself.

I even thought I saw my old camps in that shot, though I could have mentally added them in myself. I wonder if they used real footage there or if it was a digital recreation... either way, it looked excellent.

Another detail which I felt was right on was the sort of haphazard occupation of the Palaces in the Interzone. People would just sort of make their sleeping areas wherever there was a corner, their belongings strewn on the sides of hallways, working and living areas side by side, neo-cons in suits and soldiers in uniform, contractors and DoD employees in pocketed cargo pants and shirts all rubbing shoulders. Incidentally, on certain later occasions there were also three very out-of-place Stroudsburg rejects walking those halls wearing their rock-n-roll T-shirts (I think Jeff had a Lou Reed and Scott had a White Stripes. I may have had a ripped Pixies T-shirt at the time) and feeling like we were surrounded by pod people. Especially at lunch time when we'd sit together reading the Stars and Stripes and made fun of the daily propagandist idiocy in a dining hall otherwise full of neo-cons. We really didn't fit in there.

As for the politics of the film; a lot of critics are saying that the film has a heavy liberal bias, is anti-conservative and anti-war. Well, I don't really know when being anti-war became a bad thing, but the film anyway isn't really anti-war. The Matt Damon character is a soldier, and understands why the war was necessary... until it becomes clear that the reasons for the war were lies. He's assigned to a unit that is to search for Saddam's WMDs, which of course we all know by now never existed. It is an anti-conservative film, if by anti-conservative you mean that it's against being lied to by the Neo-cons so that we'd get behind their war like so many patriotic parrot heads. So then also it has a liberal bias, if by liberal you mean a person who dislikes having been tricked into committing murderous devastation upon a city for the sake of the Bush-Cheney agenda. It makes no claims per se on what their real agenda may have been, other than a closing shot of an Iraqi oil refinery. I myself don't really believe that this war was about Iraq's oil, or at least not only about their oil. I think what they wanted was probably a bit more far reaching than that, but until we can put those crooks on a stand, we may never really know.

One of the dumbest criticisms I've seen about the film is that it's not a new message. That we all know by now, even the Republicans, that we were lied to and that there never were any weapons of mass destruction to be found, and that this film doesn't add anything to the story and is really unnecessary. That's stupid. It's a movie, and as such all it needed to accomplish was to put the viewer inside the story it's trying to tell. If you can still make a movie about WWII, you can certainly make a movie about the invasion of Iraq without having to justify yourself beyond that criteria. As for whether or not it accomplishes that agenda, it's hard for me to say. I certainly feel like it's a complete success of a film, but that's because it only had to remind me of what it was like to be there, whereas I can't say that it succeeded for people who have never been to Baghdad or the Green Zone. Maybe it was too confusing and fast. But speaking as someone who lived there for a few years, it's the best movie I've seen yet depicting that time, that place.

The book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, does the job much better, factually and politically speaking. The film is supposedly based on this book, but I'd have to say only very loosely. The book spends a lot more time on the day to day life of the Green Zone's ruling class and their disastrously ignorant decision-making, whereas the movie is trying to condense everything that happened into a nice streamlined plot with a good guy and a bad guy. I feel like this really worked on a visceral level, but unfortunately left it open to the very valid criticism of "making it all up". We all know there was a great WMD lie, but it was probably not one single dickish neo-con general who hatched it up on his own, and I feel like the CIA was largely complicit in allowing the great lie to happen in the first place, even though the first major break in the ranks came from the CIA Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay when he announced that he'd seen no evidence of WMDs after being in theater for less than a year. If there were any good guys in the Green Zone attempting to expose the lie, (and the book does talk about a few of them) they were largely ignored, marginalized, and were not involved in many, if any, heroic action sequences. At least not that we're aware of. In fact, my favorite early whistle blower, Scott Ritter, was a UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq before the war who went on any news show that would have him in the run-up to the war and plead with America to listen to him because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! Unfortunately he dropped off the radar pretty quickly due to inappropriate sexual conduct on the internet, and that's what happens to people who dare to speak out. (Although apparently now there is some damning video of him out there, so perhaps it wasn't merely a politically motivated discrediting move after all. We'll see.)

In any case, If you're looking for a detailed description of the insanity of the Iraq Invasion and subsequent occupation, read the book. If you're looking for a good action flick with shaky-cam and more reality than a Bourne movie via a brief exposure to what it may have been like in the Green Zone in 2003, see the movie. It's very good.

It's Twenty-Ten, Do You Know Where Your HAL Is?

Happy new year, and best wishy washies to all and to all a good night and all of that standard, socially acceptable holiday greeting card junk. Now that's out of the way, I can move on to what's important. I self-published a book of my photographs. Mainly because it made an easy Christmas gift to fob off on friends and family. I was kind of embarrassed to willfully join the ranks of the self-published, but my wonderful Miss Luongo, who is a %100 bona fide properly published sexy author, assured me that self-publishing is a perfectly acceptable route to go for photography. You can use it as a portfolio and so it serves a legitimate function in addition to massaging one's vanity.

If you click on the book cover up there, or on the handy little badge which I've inserted permanently on the left sidebar, it'll take you to the website where you can preview and buy it. But do not by any means feel obligated to do so out of charity, as part of the benefit of an online self-publisher is that the books cost me nothing so it's not like I need to sell them. When you buy one, only then does the company print one out and send it to you! Very nice.

Also, I am supposed to be hanging some of my pictures in Sweet Creams in Stroudsburg this February. So if you're in town during the shortest month, and therefore the shortest show of the year, stop in for a hot almond milk and some of the best sandwiches this side of nowhere. Too bad for you that it's a bit cold for ice cream; theirs is awesome. My pictures may or may not be there though... during last year's show at The Main Street Jukebox they all got a bit of moisture damage (my fault, I failed to tape them correctly) and I never got around to flattening them out. So now I have like two weeks to fix 'em up because I currently can't afford to re-do them all. Urgh. But I'll facebook an invite when I know what's going on.

I Scold Humanity With Science Fiction

If you haven't read 'Childhood's End' by Arthur C. Clarke, I'm about to spoil it for you so continue reading at your own discretion. Childhood's End blew my mind when I first read it many many years ago; it opened my eyes to exactly what Science Fiction was capable of. Before that I was more of a Fantasy geek; I really enjoyed the epic battles of Good Vs. Evil and knew very well how a good fantasy novel could speak to the moral center of your mind. I tended to feel that Science Fiction was a bit stupid; I loved Star Wars but knew that that was essentially a western in space. I hadn't really read much Science Fiction because why waste time with that when I could re-read the Robert Jordan series?

At any rate, I found myself reading Childhood's End and as I said, it changed a few things for me. It's about a race of aliens who appear in a ship one day, and decree an end to all strife and warfare on Earth. Anyone who ignores the warning and starts some international bullying gets a super blast of the alien laser canon of doom from above. It turns out that the aliens play the role of a sort of galactic nursemaid; they are here to supervise humanity's transition to the next step of our evolution to join the galaxy's more civil population. There are a few other things going on in the book but that's enough to be going on with for our purposes.

With all of the 2012 insanity going on these days, and that deeply stupid looking disaster movie exploiting people's irrational fears of the Mayan prophecy, I really think that someone should make a movie of Childhood's End and update it to tie in with 2012. For the record, I don't buy for a second that 2012 is going to be any more dramatic than Y2K was, or the 7th Day Adventist's original belief that the Return of Christ was to occur in 1844. Even the Mayans, contrary to popular belief, don't predict disaster so much as the end of the world as we know it. They saw something more like a sort of renaissance of humanity, or perhaps a disaster or event which leads to a new state of mind. This is a much nicer thought and Childhood's End is an apt vision for this belief. The novel was originally published in 1953, based on a short story that Clarke wrote in 1950, and to the best of my knowledge and research he did not intend for it to have anything to do with the Mayan prophecies of 2012; however it seems to be a perfect fit.

I don't believe that a pleasant state of mind is going to occur in 2012, either, especially if that nitwit Sarah Palin actually succeeds in being nominated for the Republican presidential bid. However I do believe that should humanity survive such a disaster, someday we will reach the next stage in our evolution and it's far more exciting to entertain such notions than it is to watch apocalypse porn. It's time to put aside childish things, humanity.

It's Not Quite An Official Holiday, But To Me, Robert Jordan Day Is The Best Holiday

It's Robert Jordan day! Well and now Brandon Sanderson day also, I suppose. Don't know what I'm talking about? I don't blame you. First off, let me start by admitting that that is one terrible book cover. However it's the twelfth book in The Wheel of Time series which I've been reading avidly since I was in high school, and whenever the new WoT novel comes out, my tradition is to wake up way too early in excitement and hit the bookstore the moment it opens, buy my copy, rush home and read the whole thing in as close to one sitting as possible. It doesn't always work out; when the last book came out, I was in Iraq and had to wait like three weeks after release for my copy to show in the mail. That was torture. (Not the Dick Cheney kind of torture of course, but the kind which we spoiled American media junkies consider to be torture.) And for books eight nine & ten, I was in Germany, so I'd had to wait like a week. But before that, that was always my tradition and so I'm so stoked about being home and near a book store for this particular release day that I'm up way too early, coffee already made, waiting for 8:30 to roll around so I can be at Borders at 8:59.

I know I know, this probably makes me as geeky as the book cover. Well I used to read a lot of fantasy when I was younger, and when the first book was released in 1990, that cover just called out to me. So I took it home and I've been impatiently awaiting the next release in the series ever since. Robert Jordan's fans used to joke that the series was so long and complicated that he'd never live to finish the series. Well, turns out that's not a joke. Or at least, it's some good black comedy! He died in September 2007, after struggling for over a year with a rare blood disease, cardiac amyloidosis. He had attempted to finish the series with one final book during that period, however he didn't have the health or the time. His wife contracted a young author by the name of Brandon Sanderson, who was also a huge WoT fan, to finish the novel using Robert Jordan's notes and voice recordings. Before Mr. Jordan died, he told the story to his friends and family. He'd said from the beginning that he always knew how the series ended, that he actually pretty much had the final scene of the final book written and in fact it was the image of that scene, which he said just struck him one day, that had inspired the entire series in the first place.

So fans were relieved that they were at last going to get to read that legendary scene after all, until Brandon got into writing the series and discovered that there was just too much material, too many unresolved plot points and too many things that had to happen to reach that scene to properly fit it all into one book. This I found to be extremely unsurprising; it was typical of Mr. Jordan to underestimate the size of his own series. It was originally supposed to be a trilogy. Then at one point I think he said he could finish it up in 6 books. Then 8. Then 9 or 10. Then at last, twelve. But still, nope. The last final volume of The Wheel of Time saga has been split into three books, making this a gigantic 14 book series, and Mr. Sanderson says he will be able to put them out one per year. Depending on how good of a job he does, this makes me very happy actually because I love Robert Jordan day, and don't really mind the length of the series one bit. I have no problem with the series being bigger and longer if it means I get to immerse myself in that world a few extra times on Robert Jordan Day.

Oop! It's 8:25! Later losers!

Post Read Script: I finished the book yesterday evening, 770 pages in a day & 1/2, boo-yah!

Grand Grandy Grandness And The Canyon Of Death

As we were checking into our hotel on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon (The Bright Angel Lodge) the other day, the desk lady said to me; "Oh, I see that you are staying in one of our historic cabins!" Suitably interested, I replied "Oh yeah? What happened there?" A blank look ensued. "I mean," I attempted to clarify the seemingly unclarifiable for her, "why are they historical?" "Oh," she said. "They're really old."

I'm not sure that historical means what the Bright Angel Lodge front desk lady thinks it means, but still, her statement was true enough as far as it went. The Grand Canyon itself is of course the best example of this definition of historical. It's really, really old, although nothing of import has happened there, per se. It certainly is historical in the sense of the importance that we choose to give it just for existing.

I'm here to tell you folks, the Grand Canyon isn't just a 60's family-in-a-station wagon stop over on a road trip vacation any more. The place is incredible. I can't pass on the feeling of standing at the rim and looking into forever to you, any more than anyone who went there before me was ever able to impart how awesome it is to me. "Yeah yeah, the Grand Canyon." I'd say. "It's Grand, isn't it? Sure sure, I'd like to see it some day, why not?"

Pictures are no good, either. No matter how many pictures I took of it (and believe me, I took a lot) there is no way to fit it all in there. Even panoramic shots are a joke. It just goes on and on forever and there's no way to do it justice. It's the biggest living fractal on Earth. Here's a Geological survey map showing it in all it's fractal glory.

I did get this shot of a near Darwin Award winner. His girlfriend dropped her camera over the edge of the railing at one of the lookout points, and it stopped just before going over the very very very steep cliff of death. So this guy valiantly goes to get it. Two ladies happened to be there who lent him their walking poles in order to try and snag the camera by the strap. He kept inching closer and closer to the camera... I was sure he would fall so of course I started taking pictures. To be fair, I did tell him he really really shouldn't do this, that surely the Park Rangers would have some sort of grabby device he could borrow. Sage advice offered from the passenger seat is rarely heeded however. The ladies who lent him the poles had to go to the other side of the lookout so they couldn't see him; they couldn't watch, he was making them queasy. Julie was feeling a bit uncomfortable, but didn't want to miss the excitement. I was, um, documenting this event, and his girlfriend watched excitedly and never once tried to talk him out of this madness. "My pictures from the last 4 days are on that memory card", she explained. Creepy.

They sell a book in all the Canyon gift shops called Death in Grand Canyon which is full of tales of stupid people falling into it. Unfortunately, my near-Darwin experience guy was successful and lived to see his girlfriend's photos or this would be a very different post. I never get to see Darwin in action, dammit!

Uh, I mean, all's well that ends well, whew, praise Jesus amen. Hey guys, look over here, pretty big hole in the ground, huh?

Well that's pretty much all I got from my adventures at the very big canyon. I mean, there are many many more pictures, and a few more good tales, including one about a hand caught in a car trunk, a philosophic carpenter and a coy elk, but perhaps I'll bore you another time. Meanwhile, we spent a night in Flagstaff and are now getting ready to leave Las Vegas, so I'll have more stuff later. Grand Canyon!!

A Preachy One About Your Health, Because I Know What's Best For You.

 This book is my new Bible. I got it for my birthday from a certain special someone who is quite familiar with my rants about the inadequacies of modern living, and who knows intimately of my recent obsession with health. Not that I'm one of those dippy health freaks, but since I started going to the gym last year so that I wouldn't have to take Lipitor for high cholesterol and get carpal tunnel syndrome, I've become more aware of how much of a difference that a certain amount of health consciousness can make.

I started taking a few vitamins (a multi-vitamin, some extra C and B and some fish oil) not too long after I began losing weight, because we all know that it is really difficult to get all of your nutrients from food anymore. Especially in today's junk food culture, but what I'm learning is that even if you are a very healthy eater, there are very few vitamins and nutrients left in your fruits and veggies by the time they get to your table. I mean, I think we've all heard that. I'd heard it before, but it kind of goes under your alarm-o-meter what with all of the other things to be terrified about these days. But after reading this book I've decided to pay more attention.

In a nutshell, Dr. Shari Lieberman's case is as follows: Vegetables begin to lose their nutritional potency the minute they are born; The soil ain't what it used to be. Food gets its vitamins and minerals from the ground as it grows. And due in part to modern farming practices, our soil is depleted of selenium in most parts of the county and often has only marginal levels of zinc, magnesium, calcium, and other minerals. Without mineral-rich soils, it is impossible for fruits and vegetables to contain a rich supply of nutrients. Then, once they're picked, they really begin to lose steam. Most of them have been picked, then stored, then shipped, then stored again, possibly for weeks or months. After we buy them, we may store them again for a bit. Then you might cook them, or at least cut or slice them. Each of these steps causes further nutrient loss. And don't even get me started on processed food. You might as well be eating bacon flavored paper for all the vitamins you'll get out of them.

Waitaminnit... am I a dippy health freak? How'd that happen? Well, just because you're paranoid.... yeah you get it.

She has a lot more detail in the book. She's quite a respected nutritionist, and her statements are based on studies and measurements of soil and veggie samples. Plus, you know, the real evidence for her case is all around us every day. America is overweight and unhealthy. Cancer is rampant and so are a host of other mysterious illnesses. Vitamin therapy has been shown to fight many forms of illness. I won't get into it, but if you want to find out more read the damn book for yourself.

So the upshot is this: The Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) or Daily Values (DV) amounts of vitamins that you see on food nutrition labels is a bunch of bunkum. Those numbers, in reality, indicate the amount of vitamins to take only to prevent the most obvious deficiency diseases, such as gangrene. RDI is the minimum wage of the health pay scale, in other words. By taking significantly higher doses of all of the basic vitamins and minerals, as well as certain others depending on your personal health profile, you can in fact prevent a whole host of illnesses and larger health problems. The important thing is to take high doses of all of them, not just one or two, as another important point she makes is that vitamins all work together and support each other. Deficiency in one can cause inadequacy in another. Dr. Lieberman calls it the Optimum Daily Intake (ODI). It's very hard to overdose on vitamins, impossible on some of them, but best do a little research yourself before determining what your own personal ODI is.

I've started taking three batches of vitamins a day, one with each meal. That's 3 full multi-vitamins a day plus extra supplements each of A, C, E, a balanced mix of B-complex vitamins, chromium, calcium, magnesium, fish oil, (for the omega fatty acids) and echinacea just for fun.

There. Now if that doesn't make me a total health freakazoid, I don't know what will. Ohh, maybe regular enemas! ... Nah, I drink Metamucil every day too so, I don't need to go that far. What am I, a Californian?

Ba-Doink-a BOINC

I don't often do this, but there is a gnarly piece of software that I want to recommend that everybody use. It's called BOINC, and it's awesome. I actually used to use it years ago, but between all my traveling and moving I kind of forgot about it, and I've just rediscovered it. It's basically a screen saver program, but not just a pretty one. It's useful. What you do is you download the BOINC software, and then choose a project. The instructions are all there on the homepage. But what BOINC does is this: When your computer is idle, it comes on just like your normal screen saver would, and it uses your computer processor to perform calculations needed by various scientific projects which you can choose from, showing you a neat little visual of the calculations being performed as the screen saver. What's so powerful about this tool is that thousands of people doing calculations on a project offers more computing power than is possible to the individual scientific programs on their own, so you can help them to do some really incredible things.

I myself run a project called SETI@home, which I've I had a link to on my sidebar forever and still managed to forget about all this time, dur. But as an example of how BOINC works, SETI@home is the radio signal project for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) people. You may have heard of them from that movie Contact, in which Jodi Foster represented them, based on the book by Carl Sagan. So anyway, what they do is point their radio telescopes at different points in the sky for periods of time, and record space noise of all sorts. They record this space noise in huge batches and parcel it up, then send it out to everybody running their project via BOINC. BOINC, with the help of your computer processor while you're not using it, then sifts through this raw data, searching for patterns and signals, and sends the results back to SETI. If your computer is the one that finds indication of Extra-Terrestrial radio signals, you'll be famous. Here's what my screen saver looks like:

Of course I understand that a lot of people might think that this is a loopy project, with about a zero chance of ever finding anything meaningful. To you people, I say up yours. Aliens is cool. But, you know, there are plenty of other projects to choose from should the search for the answer to the most profound question we have (are we alone?) not be your particular cup of awesome.

There is a nice one called Rosetta@home, which needs your help to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. There is also one called climateprediction.net, which is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century because climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.

But there is a whole list of such non-profit projects you can choose from over on the BOINC project page, so you can choose one that you feel is important, regardless of the ultimate importance of the Alien question.

A Perfect New York Day, Gabba Gabba Hey.

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years”
- Thomas Wolfe

I live about one hour to the west of NYC, and I haven't been there in like fifteen years. I've still never even been up to see the Statue of Liberty except one time when I was too young to remember; apparently my Pop Pop, who used to work in the City, took me there once. It's one of those traveling oddities. Germans that I knew from Bavaria had never been to Italy, which is only a few hours away by train, yet had been to the Statue of Liberty. I've been to Venice, Baghdad, and Moscow even, but it's been fifteen years since I spent any time in the greatest city in the world. I'd seen online that one of my favorite bands was playing the final show on their tour there on Saturday night, so Miss Luongo and I drove over there yesterday to have a perfect New York day.

Miss Luongo doesn't particularly enjoy concerts, so in order to bribe her into attending one with me, I had to promise that we'd see a Broadway show which is one of her favorite things to do in the City. We hit TKTS which sells discounted day-of-show tickets, and scored a sweet deal on Equus. I'd never seen it before, but it's one of Miss Luongo's favorite plays and she credits it with being an important force in her decision to become a writer. And, to top it all off, the cast consisted of Daniel Radcliff (Harry Potter), Richard Griffiths (Uncle Vernon Dursley), and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager)! I really enjoyed it. It's a very 70's sort of sexual psychodrama, but it holds up and I think having British leads really helped make it work. If you've ever seen it or heard about it, you know that the role of the boy calls for some nudity, so yes, we got to see Harry Potter's penis. But other than that tense moment it was quite enjoyable and it's nice to see a child actor grow up into a good actor and not yet another screwed up tabloid case. I was able to sneak a blurry picture of the set before the show got started, which I was reprimanded for. Sometimes getting in trouble for pictures is worth it, but on this one I'll have to say, eh. Those silver things are the horse heads which were donned by actors portraying some scary-ass horses during the show.

After the play we hit Little Italy for the street festival of San Genaro and got some awsome Italian food and Pinkberry, which is some sort of Asian frozen yogurt and awesome. Then we hit the Angelika, an independent movie theater and saw some wacky Woody Allen movie about love and it's myriad disappointments. And threesomes. Vicki Christina Barcelona. Go see it. Or not. Afterwards it was time to hit the concert at the Zipper Factory on 37th and 9th.

It was Dean & Britta again, and Spectrum opened for them. Spectrum is a band formed by Sonic Boom, singer from another legendary band that I love, Spacemen 3. My friend Scott turned me on to them a ways back and he used to say that they don't play their instruments better than anyone. This was definitely the case last night... Sonic Boom does this sort of trance-rock thing and he opened with a Spacemen 3 bit called 'Transparent Radiation' which made me very happy. Then he did a bunch of loud sonic-y things which weren't really songs and got progressively weirder until the final number which prompted Miss Luongo to uncork her ears long enough to tell me angrily that she thought he was basically saying "screw you" to the audience because nobody was even playing instruments by this point, he was just utilizing foot pedals and amps to produce massive amounts of feedback. Again, Spacemen 3 used to do this better than anybody, and Sonic Boom was in top form. I guess you have to know what you're getting into here otherwise it pretty much is just noise, but I really enjoyed it.

Dean & Britta were of course awesome. I don't need to go into how awesome they are all over again... I saw them in DC not too long ago and you can go read that one again if you want to know how awesome they still are. I did grab a copy of Dean Wareham's book after the show and had him autograph it. My friend Steph had originally wanted to join us to go see the show, but she had already read Dean's book and said that it sort of disappointed her to see what one of her favorite musicians was really like. She still might have gone, but she'd have had to take off work and her heart wasn't in it. I can't wait to read it. It sounds like it's going to be honest.

I got a nice shot of Britta grinning at me. We had the best seats! It was a terraced u-shaped theater going up, and the seats were all old discarded minivan seats. A very nice and comfortable way to enjoy New York shoegazer Rock.

And here they are, singing 'You Turn My Head Around' again. I love taking pictures of them during that song.

Here's four shots of their shoes that I cobbled together.

So yes, it was a perfect New York day. A broadway show, an Italian streetfest, a Woody Allen film, and quintessential New York shoegazer icons. Some things are just worth saving up for. We didn't make it to the Statue of Liberty, but that's really ok. I'll make it there one day and then I'll be like, "Huh. I wonder what the people who declared that this gift of friendship to us from the French should symbolize Liberty and Freedom would think of how far we've come from those heady days of hope."

And Along Came A Transrealist

I picked up this book relatively randomly a few weeks ago. Stuff of this nature always piques my curiosity because I like both science fiction and popular science. (Also, I saw it sitting next to a new book of transcripts from some lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Scotland in 1985 which has recently been published by his wife, which is what originally caught my eye.) It's a book of essays by various pundits about what humanity could possibly look like if we were still around in, well, Year Million.

It's not overall a great book; I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's a bit stale in many ways. Naturally, it's difficult for anyone to guess what even the very near future is going to look like. For instance, go into a Starbucks on lunch hour in any major city, listen to a conversation that the nerdy computer types are having about the drudgery of their IT jobs, and try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like to you back in say, 1985. I'm sure even Carl Sagan would have been like, "What the crap are you maniacs talking about?" Words that mean one thing back then have taken on whole new meanings in light of technological advances, so to a 1985er, the words might even sound familiar, but the ways in which they were being put together might remind him of a conversation in a particularly dire lunatic asylum. For instance: "I was trying to download some music files onto my cellphone, but Apple's damn proprietary iTunes system keeps messing me up. I've got to figure out a way to hack that shit." Think about what that sentence could possibly mean in a pre-home computing world. It's English, but it's nonsense.

Stanislaw Lem actually wrote a really excellent book on that subject called "Return From The Stars", which in a nutshell is about a Spaceman who returns to Earth after a 100 year mission only to find that he doesn't understand anything that is going on. Looking at the problem in reverse, I just re-watched that fabulous David Mamet movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is about the cutthroat business of real estate sales in, I assume, the late 80's early 90's. These salesmen kept having to make telephone calls to potential sales leads via pay phone, and in one Scene Jack Lemmon is calling his family and telling them he won't be able to be reached later and I kept thinking, what? Why are they bothering with pay phones? Can't he be reached by his cell? Major plot hole. It's amazing to me how anachronistic those pay phones seemed, and that it took me a beat or two to catch on to the time frame. I think it was the combination of familiarity and a decade of perspective... I've seen that movie before and all the actors in it are pertinent to my adolescent movie experience, yet give it ten years and whammo, weirdness.

So you can see, the idea of trying to look a million years into the future seems at first glance a bit useless. One major technological advance and wham, everything changes. But in a weird sort of way, looking a million years into the future might actually be easier than looking a decade into the future. You have to ask larger, less precise questions such as, Will we have colonized other planets, or entire galaxies by then? Will our energy source be entire suns, entire star clusters, or dark energy itself? Will we be human, something more evolved, or will our personalities be downloaded into huge programs in which our thought processes will be in effect immortal, and capable of computations greater than our current meat-brains can presently conceive? Well, all of these possibilities are addressed, of course. Some of the essays are more successful at getting the points across than others. But here's the reason I really loved this book:

There are about 14 essays in this book, and the first 10 are all asking questions along these lines. Futures are spun out for us that to a Borg seem like heaven. We have deconstructed entire planetary systems and turned them into so-called Dyson Spheres: technological monstrosities made of "computronium" which would make the Death Star run away with its tiny little tail between its legs. We turn ourselves into gigantic computer minds, more capable of exploring the infinite Universe than in our present, limited meat bodies of mortality. All of which are not necessarily impossible ideas, they just seem to us now as that airplane seemed to those people from the last of the uncontacted tribes in South America. Or perhaps they are impossible; it's a book of speculation, after all. But then, along comes chapter 11. And who is it written by? Why, none other than the greatest speculative mind of our time, Rudy Rucker. I haven't said it enough lately; I love that guy. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Not that that matters; his own body of work is genius. He's a well respected mathematician and philosopher in his own right. But I've written enough about him in the past, so I'll spare you.

Except that, his essay in this book is why I love the book and why I think he's the greatest, in a nutshell. All these impressive, impossible to fully comprehend, yet fundamentally bleak views of the future of humanity, and along comes a transrealist. His essay is about how all of that mechanical technology is a real downer and totally beak. It's a great book because it shows the real value of genius, standing him up next to the more mainstream and dull views of the status quo. I'm going to quote him now:

 "Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth [or any other structure] is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that's a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It's worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature, because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires using a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts."
Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that's smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/ Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels."

So basically what he's saying is, the physical matter of the Universe is already the most complicated calculation there is, and that any desire on our part to harness it for our own small needs is rather ugly and in the long run diminishing. Not that he doesn't predict amazing possibilities for our future. Due to the high calculation potential of every bit of matter, he predicts something he calls Hylozoism, from the Greek, hyle, matter, and zoe, life. He believes that, given a million years, we'll find a way to wake matter up. As in, making it conscious. So that we can communicate with it. You'll actually be able to talk to walls, and it will be more productive than talking to politicians. He even has a plan for it, involving bending certain spatial topologies utilizing the extra dimensions of space. The benefits of waking matter up are enormous, and too much to go into, but they involve the possibility of teleportation, matter duplication, etc. This is a book report, not the Cliff's Notes. Suffice it to say, Rudy paints a much more incredible, surreal, no, transreal, view of the future, and on top of it, shows how it's just as conceivably possible as the deader versions of the typical futurist. If I could buy stock in Rudy Rucker, I'd grab every share I could, because I have a feeling that his ideas are going to be around for a long long time.

"Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation."

"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end."

"It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable."

"If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!"

"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way."

"Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."

  -Rudy Rucker

Place Keeper Place Keeper, Make Me A Post, Find Me A Place I Can Call All My Own

So in the tradition of Bridget Jones' Diary, I've been wanting to start a sort of stat list on certain numbers that are important to me these days. I'm not a girl, I swear. That book is really funny. You do NOT have to be a 30-something desperately single British girl to laugh at that book. The book I say, not the movie. The movie was kind of dumb. You're not allowed to make fun of me until you've read it. I also like The Gilmore Girls, what of it? Wanna fight?! I'll kick your Vin Diesel wannabe butt. Do tough guy posers still wanna be like Vin Diesel? Or is there a new poseur out there for them to cloak their inner inadequacies behind their idolatry of?

Of course we all have a tough guy we admire, though, so perhaps I'm not being fair. If I had to pick a tough guy I admire, it'd be Clive Owen in Children of Men in fiction, or that guy whose nephew had his arm bitten off by a shark a few years back in reality. He jumped in the water and chased down the shark, beat it up and dragged it onto shore, killed it and got the arm out, and they were able to successfully re-attach his nephew's arm. He beat up a shark. That guy is cool, and will never ever have problems with the ladies. True story, I swear. It happened at least a decade ago if not longer though, and I've been unable to find any reference to it online, but my friend Scott remembers it too, so I'm not making it up... unless it was one of his lies that he told for entertainment purposes back in the day and over the years we both forgot it was totally made up, like his famous story of the last great legal Stroudsburg gunfight showdown (yes, Western style) on lower main street in front of the McDonald's in the 70's.... hmm. I'll have to get back to you on this.

Anyway, my stat list:
Motorcycle odometer reading - 1504 miles (it had 3 miles on it when I bought it)
Weight - 194 lbs! (I weighed 212 lbs last September)
Stamina - 40 minutes at 5.8 mph on the treadmill (Last September? 5 minutes at 5.5)
Books published by someone I know - 1 (before May 27th 2008 - 0!) (Big fat congratulations, Julie!) (Everybody go buy a copy at Amazon and leave a review!) (NOW!!) (Or, you can also find it on the New Fiction table at Borders and other fine book chains) (By the way, really good publication party the other night J. Well done, great toast. Good food. Very entertaining conversation.) (I need a tattoo where I can see it in the mirror, now.)

Well anyway, I was supposed to have been in Alaska all last week... I had a job in Anchorage that I was supposed to fly directly to from Chicago, but it got canceled at the last minute. SO, bummer. That would have been a really good post. Which is why, of course, you're stuck with this self-conscious place keeping post instead. I consoled myself this week by catching up on other things. I've added 7 new galleries to my smugmug page... I'd been really slacking on uploading my recent U.S. travel pictures, mostly because I had a hard time finding them interesting enough to bother about. But when I went back and looked at all of them, I decided that there were in fact some good ones that I could be proud of, even if they're not quite foreign travel quality. So here they are: Neosho & Branson, Missouri, USA, St. Louis & Hannibal, Missouri, USA, The Clinton Museum in Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA, 3 Border Towns In Mexico, The Coral Castle, Homestead, Florida, USA, Seattle, Washington, USA, & Chicago, Illinois, USA. Or you can just go to the main page. Or not. I think that the best ones I already posted here, so, whatever.

Seattle; City Of Science Fiction And Improper Diction

"When I die, I'm donating my body to science fiction."
-Steven Wright

"The future isn't what it used to be."
-Arthur C. Clarke

It's my 200th post! So in honor of this rather meaningless milestone, I traveled all the way out to Washington state just to get this photo of the Space Needle. Well ok, I was forced to be in Seattle for work, but I made the best of a bad situation and toured around the city a bit, and spent some time with Jordan and Alison, friends of mine who live in the area whom I'd known from Germany. Jordan is famous for his dance moves at the Bavarian Biker Fest (and has the neck-scars to prove it!) and Alison is famous for her drunken instigation of little Danish hot dog fights. Also I got to see Emily, another friend from Germany, who was in the area on rather suspicious business one afternoon and who is famous for breaking T-bars over fellow snowboarder's heads in fits of amazing pique. Ah good times, good times.

Anyway, Seattle is a very cool city, although I must say that I'm very disappointed to not have seen one single flannel the entire time I was there! Very sad. It's almost as if, collectively, it is a city ashamed of it's grungy flash in the pan. The absolute COOLEST part of the city, without a doubt, and I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say because it's the coolest thing in the universe (that we know of) and it's in Seattle so of course you know where I'm going; is the Science Fiction Museum.

I was soooooo happy when I realized this place existed, and that I was in Seattle to experience it. This museum kicked so much butt. You weren't allowed to take photos inside, which really really frustrated me. Here I was, in the coolest museum I'd ever been in... and I was impotent. The no photo rule didn't stop me from trying to be all surreptitious of course, but the few shots I managed to sneak wound up coming out rather blurry and not worth keeping, because I was too busy looking around for the mean kling-on security guard. I did keep one or two photos, blurry and badly composed as they are. But I'll get to those in a minute. They had a ton of first edition science fiction classics in there that I would steal in a second. (Uh, if I did that sort of thing, which I don't.) By authors I had been sure that only I knew about. James Blish. Fritz Leiber. Theodore Sturgeon. Stanislaw Lem. Pierre Boulle, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick. And... they were in places of honor. It was like heaven. They even had Iain M. Banks and Vernor Vinge, two of my more modern favorites, along with of course all the big easy ones. Asimov. Clarke. Niven. Anderson. A first edition of Childhood's End, (by Clarke) the first sci-fi novel to blow my mind and which made me ravenous for more. No Rudy Rucker though that I saw... a major oversight.

They had displays of movie items too, of course. Props from famous sci-fi movies and franchises; the dress that Sean Young wore in Blade Runner, a Storm Trooper armor suit, the original model of the Death Star used in Star Wars, (Where the no photo rule would have literally had me pulling out my hair, if I had any. As it was, I was in agony. The security ape would not leave! I think he was on to me.) the little talking bear from A.I., the Terminator robot, Robby the Robot. (Robby the freaking Robot!) Captain Kirk's command chair. Anybody recognize this?

Yes, that's right! It's the Pit Bull. Griff Tannen's anti-gravity skateboard from Back To The Future II. Totally. Sweet.

My favorite thing about the Sci-Fi Museum though is that, you know how in normal like, arty-farty museums, you'll see collections of snooty arty-farty junk, with little plaques next to them that say snooty stuff like "Kindly donated from the prestigious collection of Snooty McVandersnot"? Well, it's only at the Sci-Fi Museum that you'll find Star Wars action figures donated from the collection of Gus Lopez!

Yeah, it says "From the collection of Gus Lopez"... kind of hard to read, I know. But I had Had HAD to get this picture, and I was very nervous that that security clown was going to come around the corner before I got the chance. Plus the light was all dark and science fictiony. Oh well.

After the titillating thrill of the Science Fiction museum, the rest of Seattle rather paled. I re-visited Pike Place (I'd been there about 12 years ago on my way back from Alaska) and had a coffee at the original Starbuck's. I don't like Starbuck's coffee... too acidy. I like my coffee stronger and with the coffee machines having been cleaned out every once in a while. BUT, it's the very first Starbuck's coffee shop ever, it's a great success story, it was right there, and I am a traveling glory-hound, after all.

Oh sure, I did other stuff. I went up the Space Needle, rode a ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle, saw the world famous Giant Shoe Museum. Hell I even worked a little. But none of it is really as exciting as, well you know. That awesome genius science fiction museum, of course.

Jordan was kind enough to let me crash at his parent's house (they were on vacation) with him and Alison for a few nights, which saved me a few bucks on a hotel room. Very cool. Good to see them. When old Chiemseers get together, many tales of German hilarity along with German beer will inevitably flow. I flew out of Seattle on the 12th straight down to Fort Lauderdale Florida, where I am at the moment. Again for work. It's rather a hum-drum area... I've been here before, back in January. I just think it's neat I went from one corner of the continental US to the other. What a great job.

Oh, just in case not everybody has noticed, something else happened this past week which made me extreeeeemely happy: The military officer who arrested me in Iraq for being snotty to him found and commented on my blog! Specifically on the original post where I told that story. Nothing has made me that kind of happy for a really long time. You can read the post, his comment, and my response in the original spot, here. I really hope he comes back... unless he's going to arrest me for being snotty to him again of course. I won't be needing any more of that.

Shoes of Mystery? Sheesh.

I Bring You The TEN [CRASH!] Um, FIFTEEN Commandments!

"There is in every village a torch and an extinguisher: the schoolteacher and the priest."
-Victor Hugo

The Athiest’s Commandments from ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. The first ten are from a website he found while researching his book, then XI through XIV are his own additions, and XV is mine, as well as the comments in brackets.

 I. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.

 II. In all things, strive to cause no harm.

III. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.

 IV. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.

 V. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

 VI. Always seek to be learning something new.

 VII. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

 VIII. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you. [But don’t let them get away with faulty reasoning without a fight. Besides, maybe they’ll prove you wrong and that’s good too.]

 IX. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.

 X. Question everything.

 XI. Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.

 XII. Do not discriminate or oppress on the on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.

 XIII. Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

 XIV. Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

 XV.  Patriotism is a lie. Religion is a lie. God is an unknown. [Patriotism and Religion are not even compatible, and yet most Patriotic Americans are Religious too. Here, I’ll prove it:

 a) Patriotism = My country is #1, above and beyond all others, right or wrong.

  b) My Country is run by old rich cowards who want our young idealistic men to kill for their comforts

c) Religion says thou shall not kill. [even if that commandment is the only part of the Old Testament which actually says that, because otherwise God sanctioned quite a lot of killin’ and rapin’ in those days.]

  d) Therefore, Patriotism & Religion can not go hand in hand. Yet somehow, when combined in the mind of deeply uncritical people, they do.

I’m not saying I'm an atheist. But I am saying that I share a lot more in common with an atheist than with religious thinkers these days. And here's the reason. One time in Church, I remember my pastor doing that whole thing where he says that a lot of people out there in the world will try to tell good Christians that the Bible is full of lies and contradictions. His response to the congregation? "Well I'm here to tell you that the Bible is NOT full of lies!" Brilliant, carry on, Pastor. What? That's all you got? Huh. Anyway I think I related this story in somewhat more detail once before, here.

But the realization that I eventually came to is that belief in God is fundamentally, in the mind of religion at any rate, an insidious and lazy way of avoiding the issue of Life, The Universe, and Everything. What I mean is, one thing that many religious types use to try to convince people that evolution is bunk is the idea that the world is too complicated, too amazing, too wonderful to have all just happened by random chance, it must have been created. (Here's a YouTube I will NEVER get tired of, which is a prime example of that sort of reasoning. If, of all horrors, you find the banana argument compelling, please watch this one also. Thanks again, GoDrex! )

First off, anyone who has taken the time to attempt to understand evolution would never say that. Evolution is anything but random, which is part of its beauty and power. Secondly, all they've done by this argument is show a lack of logical thought. SO, you're saying that the Universe is too complicated and "well designed" to have just happened? So, there must be a Creator. Well then, logically, any possible Creator has to be larger and more well designed than the object of his creation. A hammer and anvil do not forge a blacksmith, for instance. Therefore essentially all that this argument has done is to push the question back a step and in reality, magnify it. Rather than believe in the apparent existence of a complicated and evolved Universe (based on verifiable fact), you'd rather believe in the apparent existence of an even larger and more complicated, magical Creator.

I'm not saying that definitively there's no God, which is why I'm not an atheist. (Although according to Dawkins' scale of atheism, I am a 5th or 6th degree atheist, with a 7th degree atheist believing absolutely %100 in the non-existence of God. I will always leave room for the possibility, if not the probability.) I'm just pointing out the weakness of logic in the Religious mind. And I AM saying that IF there's a God, he's not the God of that great work of fiction, the Bible. I think that IF there is a Creator, the only thing that he really gave us are our hearts and our minds, which are very effective tools when reason and logic are applied, and I think he'd be very disappointed in Religion.

For anybody who has read 'The God Delusion', it's apparent that I've used much of Dawkins' material here. In my own idiosyncratic way, of course. But I feel that it's a book which has provided me with a clear way of thinking about ideas which I've held for a while.

Basically what it all boils down to for me is this: Religious apologists have NEVER been able to prove the existence of God or the veracity of the Bible through either Science, logic, or reason. Which makes sense according to the Fundamental Religious version of "logic" anyway; it's all about faith, regardless of the facts. (Dinosaur bones were purposefully planted there to test our faith.) So why do they keep trying? Why do they want Creationism, sorry, Intelligent Design, taught in science classes? Science is about verifiable fact, religion is about faith. You don't see scientists banging on the doors of churches, trying to force Sunday school teachers to teach evolution. Although, the inevitable backlash has already begun with the likes of Dawkins. He's tired of Religion's interference in the world of reality, hence the book. It's time for the Religious to accept that faith is based on nothing verifiable, and that they are welcome to it. 

And his main points are good ones; You don't need Religion to be moral, brainwashing children with religion is immoral (Christians don't call it brainwashing when they do it, but what else would you call it when, in a different religion such as Islam for example, brainwashed children grow up to steer planes into buildings in the name of their faith?), and he (and I) would be the first one to believe in the existence of God should there ever be proof of his existence. In the meantime, people should stop fighting, brainwashing, and killing each other over minor differences in opinion as to his nature. Something tells me that should your particular version of God turn out to be the real one, he'd still be very pissed at you for adhering to such nonsense and calamity. Unless of course you're Jewish. The Old Testament God was an asshole.

On a final note, I want to reiterate what I believe to be Dawkins' most imperative point in his book: There is no such thing as a Christian child, a Muslim child, an atheist child, or a Buddhist child etc. There are only Children of Christian parents, Children of Muslim parents, Children of atheist parents, and Children of Buddhist parents etc. Until children are mature enough to have weighed all the facts and decide for themselves, they are only children. After all, no one says that their child is a Marxist, or a Democrat, or a Communist. It's ok to wait until the child is of age to decide for itself what its political leanings are, and the same needs to be true of religion.

Back To School: My Book Report & How I Spent Four Summers

Hey guess what? I'm having my Groundhog day. I'm in Virginia again, for the third week-long assignment in a row. Ick. If anybody ever wants to travel to Vienna, VA, I know all the good restaurants. I forgot my camera, so even if I wind up doing something interesting, I won't be able to share any images. I'm probably not going to do much though. I might go see another concert on Saturday; there's a band I really like named Louis XIV playing.

But I finally got around to reading a book which I'd touted here waaaay back in October aught 6. I'd been wanting to read it for a very long time, but I think I felt like I was still too close to my own experiences in Iraq, so I kept putting it off. I don't know exactly why I finally decided to pick it up, other than that I just needed something to bring to Virginia with me. At any rate, after I finished reading it, I went to the author's website and dropped him the following note:

I just finished your book... I lived in Baghdad (successively in a hotel in the Karradah district, the VVIP airport terminal, and in the Green Zone) for three years, from August 2003 through October 2006. Since I left, the level of both stupidity and insanity which I witnessed there slowly seeped away from my daily consciousness, until I was almost fit for normal human company again. Reading your book was an extremely engaging experience for me as it not only brought all of those old emotions back, but additionally shed some new light on the chaotic events that went on around me which I did not fully understand at the time.

Uh... thanks?

Which about sums it up. It's an excellent book in that I believe he really went out of his way to be as impartial and as nice as possible to the people he was writing about, which in the end only made their grand stupidities even more painful to read. Having lived there during the period about which he wrote, (The CPA's tenure in control of the reconstruction of Iraq led by Paul Bremer from 2003 to 2004) it added another layer of emotion which I find to be inexplicable. For instance, there was an incident near my company's compound in the Green Zone one time while I was covering for Rodney there while he was on his vacation. Rodney was the Irish scalawag friend of mine who'd had a friend working in Iraq who got us all jobs there in the first place back in August aught 3.

Anyway, one night the Green Zone incoming alarm went off, followed by a warning to all CPA employees to stay out of the streets of the Zone. Word came down to us that an American had been stabbed right out in the open inside the Green Zone and that the army was searching for the terrorist that had somehow snuck in and done it. We never heard anything else about it and, with so many other crazy things going on all the time, it was quickly forgotten about. Well, Rajiv wrote about that incident in his book. Apparently it had been quickly discovered that the stabbing was done by a fellow American; the two men had been having a drunken brawl or something. This news was hushed up, and that was that. It seems that the powers that be would rather have had us believe that an insurgent was loose in the Green Zone than admit the truth, and I'm not even really sure why. But I'll tell you one thing, when I read that, I laughed my ass off. I'd always kind of wondered about that stabbing, and it was an unexpected release of, something, when I read what had really happened, over four years later now.

That was one of just a few incidents that I was around for which he writes about from an insider's perspective. He wrote about the bombing of the United Nations building, which had happened just a week after my arrival in Baghdad. One funny incident that he wrote about was when the Iraqi Soccer team won an important match against Saudi Arabia. That night, the Americans inside the Green Zone freaked out when they heard an insane amount of gunfire coming from the city just outside their 12 foot high protective barriers; they all ran for bunkers and basements thinking that this was it, the Iraqis were storming the Green Zone. It was my second night in Baghdad and we were staying in a hotel downtown, NOT protected by the concrete blast walls of the Emerald City. We were inside, probably playing cards or eating strange and greasy local food or who knows what, when a CRAPLOAD of gunfire began right outside on our street. Dave, Scott and I were kind of like, aw hell, we're going to die on our second night here? Rip off. Ironically, my future boss-who-is-now-in-prison was there too; it's where I first met him. Dave tried to lock himself in the bathroom, Scott was standing in the hallway trying to figure out what good hiding was going to do, and I was under me bed. Phil (my future boss) was in his room, gesticulating at all of us urgently (and creepily) to come into his room while holding out a bottle of Jim Beam; I think that he was thinking that hell, if we're going to die we might as well party first. (That, incidentally, should have tipped me off about him right away.) We heard someone walking through the courtyard of our hotel, bullet shells dropping onto the tiles. Oh God oh God oh God, this is it. Phil's security guard walked in with a big grin, because he'd just been outside joining in with the celebratory gunfire over Iraq's victory in the soccer match. I wrote about that in less detail at the time here.

One that really got me was the bombing of the Green Zone Cafe and then the Market on October 14th 2004. I knew that date off the top of my head, and could have told anyone who asked when that happened without having to look it up. I'd quit my first job in Iraq and began working for Phil on October 12th, 2004. Rajiv called the market and cafe bombings the beginning of the end of the CPA staff's illusions in the Green Zone (I'm paraphrasing). I'd been to the cafe with Scott a few times, and we'd frequented the market during that summer. I think I also wrote about that in a mass email at the time, here. (This other page that I keep linking to by the way is a companion blogpage where I posted a bunch of mass emails I'd sent to friends and family from my early days in Iraq, before I had a blog) I was two blocks away from the market when a suicide bomber blew himself up, along with one of my favorite shops there; A tent where a nice old Iraqi man and a young Iraqi John Lennon lookalike sold songbirds and various other bric-a-brac.

It was a sobering omen of what was to come, and it certainly saddened me in ways that few other bombings which I was around for did. For the remaining two years that I was there, every time I drove by the area where the market used to be, I shook my head like an old man, and even indulged in a tut-tut occasionally.

But these are some of the moments I felt while reading his book because of how I experienced them, not what the book is really about. It's really about how the Bush Administration not only did NOT have a real plan for Iraq after his wrong-headed war, but how even more egregiously they sent people over to fix the country they'd just demolished who were chosen for their jobs because of their affiliation and loyalty to the Republican party. People who actually understood Iraq and what needed to be done were short-shrifted, shunted aside, even fired and removed in favor of Bush loyalists, most notably Jay Garner for Paul Bremer but also hundreds of others. Quoting from the book jacket:

...the case of the 24 year old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad's stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe [other] Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons specialists from defecting to Iran! (that's my favorite one, by the way); Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House officials for their views on Roe vs. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists. Finally, he describes Bremer's ignominious departure in 2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of schedule.

Of course I wasn't even close to being directly involved in any of that stuff, but I was around for it and witnessed a lot of the side effects. I heard all the talk... the Green Zone was a small community in those days. I highly recommend 'Imperial Life In The Emerald City'  by Rajiv Chandrasekaran as a clear minded journal of one of the most embarrassing moments in American history. And yes, I was a part of it in my own small way. Yay.

On a final note, I want to say that one of my proudest moments in Iraq was when I got to be rude to Paul Bremer. Dave, George, Scott and I were eating dinner in the CPA building when who should walk right by our table, but Paul Bremer and Dan Rather, followed by a gaggle of reporters and suck-ups on their way to a quiet corner of the Republican Palace for an interview. As I saw him coming, I loudly whistled Darth Vader's theme. For my trouble I was rewarded with a sharp look from Bremer and some very frightening glares from his body guards. In retrospect, especially after reading this book, I realize that he was not so much a Dark Lord as an opportunistic incompetent, and it would have been more apropos to whistle the Animaniacs' theme.

My Scientist Could Kick Your Scientist's Ass

"Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame."
-Lydia M. Child

So I've been reading this biography on Nikola Tesla. Wowzers. This guy was insane, and there is quite a bit of misinformation out there about him and his inventions. For instance, Thomas Edison was a royal tool. Edison is credited with inventing electricity, but actually, Tesla invented alternating current, which is the form of electricity we use today. Edison was a proponent of DC, and had a whole bunch of money invested in patents for it. Tesla came along and dreamed up AC, and a battle ensued as to which form of current would be adopted. Much like the Betamax / VHS war, or the other, more recent Blew-Ray / HD DVD battle. Grrr. Argh.

Anyway, Edison resorted to some extremely dirty tactics. He kidnapped dogs and cats off of the streets, even people's pets, and electrocuted them to death with AC current in a barrage of propaganda stunts intended to scare people off of using it, saying that Alternating Current was far too dangerous to be used safely. He even apparently filmed the electrocution of an elephant with AC. Tesla won out though, because AC is superior and people realized it eventually. Unlike with HD DVD. Grrr. Argh.

"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."
-Thomas A. Edison

"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."
-Nikola Tesla

Mark Twain was a close friend of Tesla's. Mark used to hang out in Tesla's lab, and one time Tesla was experimenting with electrical therapy, and Mark insisted on trying it out. So he got up on a special rubber platform and thoroughly enjoyed a sensation of electrical vibrations. When Tesla told him that it was time to stop, Mark refused, whooping, waving his arms, and saying that this was awesome, and he could take it! Tesla smiled and said that for Mark's own well-being, he really ought to let it go and get down; a person is only meant to take so much vibrating. Mark laughed and still refused, despite Tesla's repeated warnings. Suddenly, Mark got a look of consternation on his face and clenched a bit. He abruptly hobbled to the edge of the platform and begged Tesla for the direction to the bathroom, as Tesla and his assistant laughed uproariously, knowing full well the laxative effect of the electrical therapy.

"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough."
-Mark Twain

"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."
-Nikola Tesla

Tesla demonstrated publicly many amazing feats of electricity, some of which engineers are still baffled by today as to how he did them.

There are some extremely sobering, and frankly rather quite scary things which he claimed to have invented and tested, but which we know nothing of today. He claimed to have invented a device which could fit in his pocket, and could knock down a building simply by attaching it to a metal girder. It worked by resonating vibrations, and there is proof that his theory was sound. He'd been experimenting with it in his lab in New York City, and it caused great rumblings and broken glass 15 blocks away. He claims that later, he put such a device in his pocket, sauntered down to a building that was under construction, attached it, and waited until the entire structure began to vibrate alarmingly. It made an unbelievable sound, construction workers began running, and he surreptitiously stopped the device, put it back in his pocket, and strolled off unnoticed.

By the way, after he died, the US government confiscated all of his papers and personal notes, and they have still yet to see the light of public scrutiny. Nobody knows what was in them. For those of you who are conspiracy-minded, chew on that.

Tesla claimed that with that same device he could collapse the Brooklyn Bridge in minutes, and with appropriate timing and a large enough such device, he could split the Earth like an apple.

For further conspiracy theorizing, here's a paragraph from his Wikipedia entry:

Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer.

Hmmm... Sound like any UFOs you've heard of?

He also demonstrated claims that he could transmit electricity wirelessly, and believed in the possibility of "Free Energy"; Do you have any idea what wireless power and free energy would mean to the world? Of course you do. But it has never been developed. He tried building a tower at Wardenclyffe designed to transmit power in just such a manner, but he ran out of funds, everybody thought he was a nutter, and the tower was destroyed for scrap.

He is actually the unsung inventor of Radio. Marconi was originally credited with inventing it, but all he did was steal an idea of Tesla's from a lecture, and patented it before Tesla had a chance to. In a nutshell. Tesla was eventually awarded the patent and credit for inventing Radio, but the Marconi misconception persists to this day. Tesla was cheated out of credit for many many things in this manner... he did patent quite a few inventions, but he is one of those historical geniuses that had more ideas in a day than I've had in ten lifetimes. He was so far ahead of his time that many of the things he accomplished have yet to be rediscovered, and he is uncredited for many of the ones that have been because at the time people thought his ideas were loony, and other people followed in the footsteps of Marconi with Tesla's "crazy" notions.

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
-Nikola Tesla

After reading this biography, I've had to rethink my opinion of The Prestige. I mean, I still think that it's a sloppy movie, and the denouement is still visible ten miles away, but part of what I thought was ridiculous about that movie was the portrayal of Tesla by David Bowie. I thought that the particular invention that he came up with in that film was utterly laughable, but now, I'm less sure. I mean, duplication of matter through the simple application of electricity is still extremely far fetched, but less so to me now that I've read about some of the things that he actually did experiment with.

 “Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.”
-Nikola Tesla

... But Resistance Is Character-Forming Might Be My Favorite Mind Name

"In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and in every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots."
-Iain M. Banks

It's time for an ode to another of my favorite Sci-fi authors, Iain M. Banks. The above quote is from one of his novels, Use Of Weapons. What's great about Iain is his use of politics and social structures in front of an unusually intriguing hard sci-fi backdrop. He believes that in space, a form of Anarchistic society is not only desirable, but inevitable and necessary for survival, and to that end he's created a series of novels about a Galactic humanoid race known as The Culture. Rather than boring you with any further descriptions of The Culture, I suggest you follow the link to read a fascinating biography on them, if you care about such things. It's long, but entertaining.

I first discovered him while living in Germany; He's a Scottish author and until recently, his books were relatively unavailable or at least unknown in the US, so I had been surprised to find such a well-regarded sci-fi author with such a large body of work that I hadn't yet heard of. I picked up a book called Excession in the Englischer Book Shop in Munich by the University, and proceeded to be blown away. The main characters are not so much the humans as the spaceships that carried them, which are equipped with Artificial Intelligences known as Minds and are vastly superior to the human minds in both intelligence and humor, with distinct personalities of their own and have names such as Fate Amenable To Change, It's Character Forming, Unacceptable Behaviour, Shoot Them Later, Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality, A Series Of Unlikely Explanations, Well I Was In The Neighbourhood, We Haven't Met But You're A Great Fan Of Mine, Inappropriate Response, Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, Lapsed Pacifist, You May Not Be The Coolest Person Here, Demented But Determined, Charming But Irrational, Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again, Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory, Ravished By The Sheer Implausibility Of That Last Statement, All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff, God Told Me To Do It, and many others of similar ilk. (Actually, some of those names are characters in other Culture books, but I love them.) The humans are essentially benignly looked upon by the ships that carry them in the same way as we look upon our blood cells; part of us and necessary, and we encourage them to be healthy and lead meaningful lives, but we don't let them tell us where to go or what to do, at least not without a vote... Ok there are subtle differences in the two relationships, but you get my meaning. The book was about the discovery of a Trillion-year-old Sun, in a 15 Billion-year-old Universe.

If you're intrigued enough to give him a try, you should start with Consider Phlebas however, which is the first in The Culture sequence and is equally astonishing. See that funnel-looking thing appearing to come off of the planet on the book cover? That's actually part of the planet. Strictly speaking, it's not a planet but a 'ringworld', which concept Iain freely admits to having lifted and adapted from Larry Niven, but it's the adaptation that makes all the difference.

For anyone who is into those 'Halo' video games, apparently it's fairly obvious that they in turn stole quite a few ideas from Iain's books and simply renamed them, without any real original adaptation, but whatever. I've never seen those games, myself, but I understand that they are essentially shoot-em-up games for people who enjoy blowing up aliens. And with that in mind, I'll close with another fabulous quote from Mr. Banks:

"To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by it's place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy."
-from Excession by Iain M. Banks

First I Steal From GoDrex, And Then I Steal From Mr. Altemeyer. Huh. Knowledge IS Like A Virus!

"In my experience, the worst enemy and corrupter of man is the tendency - resulting from mental laziness and the desire for peace of mind - to join groups and organizations with set dogmas, be they religious or political."
- Hermann Hesse

GoDrex, in a recent post, linked to a very interesting online book about a human phenomenon as old as time: The Authoritarian Follower. In other words, a book about the sheep, the army ants, that infest humanity and allow incredibly evil things to happen through their passive/aggressive stupidity.

There is a section at the end of the third chapter in which he uses his theory to explain the inexplicable events surrounding our invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. I've copied and pasted it here, because it's the best rundown of the key events I've come across yet. 

A Little Application
That said, let’s take what we have learned in this chapter about how
authoritarian followers think and see if it explains what otherwise might seem quite baffling. Beginning in late 2001, the Bush administration stated that Saddam Hussein was a source of terrorist activities around the world, and frequently implied he was involved in the attacks of September 11th, even though nearly all the attackers had come from Saudi Arabia, and none had come from Iraq. The administration also said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, even though United Nations inspectors had never found any, so an invasion of Iraq was necessary. A choir of “theocons” seconded this “neocon” outlook with the argument, however implausible, that it was highly moral to start a war with Iraq. In fact, it was God’s will.

The polls showed most Americas supported the president, although a significant minority did not. Besides observing that no terrorist connections had been demonstrated, and no “WMDs” or facilities for making them had been discovered, critics said an invasion would make it easier for Muslim fanatics to launch suicide attacks on Americans, and would probably tie down America’s mobile armed forces for years to come because civil war was likely to develop after Saddam’s removal.

They also observed that the war would seem not only unjustified to most Muslims, but totally unfair given America’s greatly superior military forces. An American/British slam-dunk victory would probably create so much hatred for those countries in Islam that the number of zealots plotting terrorist attacks against them would probably increase rather than decrease as a result of the war. It would prove a monumental step in the war against terror--but backwards.

The critics were castigated by administration officials and their backers with a vehemence not seen since the anti-Vietnam war protests. Those who urged caution were denounced, even as late as the fall of 2006, as traitors, fools, and idiots by officials and supporters who will likely never admit that the critics were proved right. For after the successful military invasion of Iraq, no pre-existing ties to al-Qaida were discovered and no weapons of mass destruction were found. Some Americans then realized their country had invaded another country on false premises--which would seem to be very wrong morally, and which would have outraged many supporters of the war had certain other countries done such a thing. But several months after the administration itself conceded that no weapons of mass destruction had been discovered, pollsters found a lot of Americans believed such weapons had been found. And for these believers and others the new justification for the invasion, viz., to remove Saddam and bring freedom to Iraq, to make it a shining example in the Middle East of what democracy will bring, was good enough anyway.

But as American casualties steadily mounted after the war was declared over, and as chaos descended upon Iraq, and as the Bush administration had no response other than, “We know this is the right thing to do, no matter what,” and as the war helped drive the national debt to such unprecedented heights that the United States became the world’s largest debtor, most Americans finally saw the war had become a national disaster.

Still, nationwide polls for Newsweek, CNN, and USA Today revealed that in
October 2006, as the mid-term election drew near, 40 percent of the American people did not think the United States made a mistake in invading Iraq, 30 to 34 percent approved of President Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq, 30 percent said the administration did not misinterpret or misanalyze the intelligence reports they said indicated Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and 36 percent said the administration had not purposely misled the public about this evidence to build support for the war.

Thirty-seven percent even thought the U.S. military effort was going “well” (either “fairly” or “very”) And 35 to 37 percent approved of how Bush was doing his job in general, while 35 percent also were satisfied with the way things were going in the country. In all cases, the solid majority of Americans saw it otherwise. But you have to wonder, who were all those people who thought everything was fine?

Well, what’s not to understand, if that hard-core of supporters mainly consists of authoritarian followers, given what the experiments described in this chapter show us about them? The justification for the war in the first place was largely irrelevant to high RWAs. [Right Wing Authoritarians] They liked the conclusion; the reasoning didn’t matter. If the United Nations refused to sanction the war, so what? There’s no contradiction, in a highly compartmentalized mind, between believing that America stands for international cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict on the one hand, while on the other hand insisting it has the “right” to attack whomever it wants, no matter how weak they are, whenever it wants for whatever reasons it decides are good enough. Those who protested were trouble-makers; everyone should support the government.

If no connections to al-Qaida and no weapons of mass destruction turned up after the invasion, just believe they had turned up. An aluminum tube that could have been designed to help enrich uranium was used to enrich uranium, proving Saddam was making atomic bombs! Trailers that could have been used to make biological weapons were used to make them. Besides, people whom the followers look to, such as the evangelist Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) said they still believed Saddam had such weapons, even if there was no evidence he had. And anyway, if the first reason for the war comes up lame, just invent a new one. Everybody knows Saddam is our biggest problem! And when later the president insisted he never said America would “stay the course” in Iraq, when actually he had said it over and over again, most people knew that was an outright, almost pathological lie. But it would not make much of a dent on an authoritarian follower’s mind, which is quite capable of believing white is black when his authority says so.

Authoritarian followers aren’t going to question, they’re going to parrot. After all, in the ethnocentric mind “We are the Good Guys and our opponents are abominations”--which is precisely the thinking of the Islamic authoritarian followers who become suicide bombers in Iraq. And if we turn out not to be such good guys, as news of massacres and the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, by the CIA, and by the arms-length “companies” set up to torture prisoners becomes known, authoritarian followers simply don’t want to know. It was just a few, lower level “bad apples.” Didn’t the president say he was sickened by the revelations of torture, and all American wrong-doers would be punished?

However the policy came from the top, and the administration scrambled to make sure it could not be punished. When the White House said it would veto a bill because it prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, you had to be nearly blind not to realize what was going on. When the White House also insisted, successfully, that Congress pass a bill allowing it to use torture, you had to be completely blind. But high RWAs are quite capable of such blindness.

And while most Americans came to realize what a mistake the war in Iraq has turned out to be, high RWAs lagged far behind. They listen to the news they want to hear. They surround themselves with people who think like they do. They believe the leaders who tell them what they want to be told. They make about as much effort to get both sides of an issue as the Bush administration does to foster different points of view within the White House. And if six high RWAs are sitting in a room talking about the war, and all six now have misgivings, it will still be hard for any of them to say so because the ethic of group solidarity is so strong in the authoritarian mind.

Is there any conceivable evidence or revelation that will lead them to admit the war was a mistake? I suspect some of them will eventually, begrudgingly reach that point, and others will rewrite their personal histories and say they had their doubts from the start. But others, petrified by their dogmatism, will never admit the undeniable. Did they ever about Viet-Nam? No. “We just didn’t use enough force!”-- which is exactly the argument those who proposed the invasion of Iraq are using now as they tried to shift the blame for the failure of their incredibly unsound policy.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the phenomenon, although I suspect that the people who need to read it the most, the authoritarian followers, will never even touch it and even if they do, they'll misinterpret it. It's a book that is preaching to the converted, for sure, but it's still eye-opening. It's called The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer. It's completely online, and completely free, and not even very long. So you have no excuse. Unless you're one of them, in which case I suggest you turn a blind eye, because we wouldn't want you to hurt yourself with self-recrimination, after all.

Whirling Dervishes Eat Haunted Donuts

I'm in Atlanta Georgia and I'm bored. I haven't really had a chance to leave the hotel yet, and even when I get a chance I'm not particularly excited about it. I mean, it's Atlanta. Although, one cool thing, I'm about 3 blocks away from this sweet looking Haunted House, which was rated the #1 Haunted House in America by Hauntworld Magazine! So, I will definitely check that out soon.

Also, I finished reading both of those Rudy Rucker books.  Spacetime Donuts was the first book he ever wrote, but 2nd published after White Light. SD was fantastic. It's about the idea that the Universe is shaped like a donut, so that if you were to shrink infinitely, you'd eventually wind up coming back around to our size. In other words, our Universe is contained within itself, in every atom. The donut analogy as Rudy describes it is this:

Say you have this donut laying flat, and you place a piece of paper on top of it. The points where the paper actually touch the donut form a circle and is our size level. Staying on the surface of the donut but moving towards the center, the hole of the donut, the size of the circle you are on shrinks. That's you shrinking down to the size of molecules, atoms, quarks. Continue around and without going backwards, you wind up growing back up in size until you are back to where you started. It's very fractal. Good timing that I just read that book actually... everything is speaking to me through fractals these days. Rudy is often trying to describe the complex mathematical ideas of infinity through his gonzo transreal stories. My brain actually feels massaged every time I finish one of his books. He's very good at it.

I know I know. You're exhausted with my Rudy Rucker blogs by now. Sorry. Maybe you should get off your butt and read some already, so you'll know how awesome he is, too.

Moving on, I was holding off on this until it actually came to fruition, but it looks like it never will, so... I was contacted last February by someone who works in the Religion and Ethics department of the BBC website. He had stumbled across my video and pictures of the Whirling Dervish ceremony I'd attended in Turkey, and he wanted to use them in a piece he was putting together. I of course was flattered with a much enlarged ego. He'd written to me once or twice to say that he was still working on it, and that it could be a while before it came together, but it's been a really long time now and nothing. They did however put my name and website prematurely on their photo credits page, so I've got that going for me! See here! Scroll down to the M's. Very exciting, very nothing.

On Buying Used Books, or, Revisiting Tired Old Refrains

I haven't actually read this book yet, but I've started it and I'm very excited about it. It's an old Rudy Rucker novel that I picked up used from Amazon. I love this guy.

But my point isn't about Rudy this time. My point is that you should always buy used books when you can. Because they're cheaper. And because they need a home. And because they've already got that nice older book smell, no waiting!

And also because, old books are like a box of chocolates... never mind. I got Spacetime Donuts in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I never got around to reading it until last night. I'd brought it with me on the last couple of trips I've been on for work, including a two-day trip to Virginia I just got back from, (Traffic was hell on the way back; other than that I have little to report on that one.) but I never got the chance to get to it until now, and when I opened it, a snapshot fell out which I assume was being used as a bookmark. I love when that happens. I mean, it probably sucks to be the guy that sold his old books and then can't figure out what happened to his picture, but bonus for me! So here's the snapshot: (Of course I've scanned it already. All pictures must be scanned. I'm like the photo police.)

Crazy right?! It was someone's personal snapshot of the Dalai Lama! Looks like he took a couple of shots to the arm there. Fight Club Dalai Lama?

I wonder where this was taken? Everybody is Asian, except for the cops... so it could be some American Chinatown somewhere, or it could actually be in Asia, because of the pagoda and the Asians, and maybe the Dalai Lama likes to cart Western-lookin' cops around with him? There's no date stamp on it unfortunately, but it looks at least relatively recent, because he's all old. Still, that dude travels a lot, so there's no knowing.

So what, you really think I'm going to let this post pass without gushing about how awesome Rudy Rucker is? Fat chance! I mean really, he's so cool that even the Dalai Lama hangs around his books all the time, trying to be half as cool. His newest book was recently released, and I'll be bringing it with me to gorge on on my next job, which is likely to be in Atlanta Georgia. A good place for reading, I think. God I love this guy. Seriously, if you still haven't visited Mr. Rucker's work, get 'White Light' now. Right now.

Aw hell, while I'm at it, Gun Club rules the most too. Still.

Great Authors Dying Really Sucks. I Was Just Getting Used To Vonnegut Being Dead.

Today is a very sad day... one of my favorite authors died last night of a rare blood disease which he's been fighting for the past year or two. Robert Jordan (His real name is James Oliver Rigney Jr.) is the author of The Wheel of Time series, a 12 novel fantasy series which I began reading when the first book came out in 1990. I can't say he's as king as J.R.R. Tolkien, but he's got the number 2 spot as far as millions of fantasy readers are concerned. I'd have to agree... he created a unique and richly detailed world and I admit I've been fairly obsessed with it ever since I first discovered it, salivating like a dog in a science lab whenever word of the next book in the series was going to be released.

The second worse thing after him dying is that he was currently working on the 12th and final book in the series, which was to contain many answers and a climatic battle for which fans have been waiting patiently nearly 20 years. Last week before he died I know that he sat his family down and told them how the story was to end, and turned over a bunch of notes he'd been keeping for years, and the news I've heard is that someone will indeed still complete the final book, which is really nice and at least we'll know how it all turns out, but still.

I was really hoping that he would turn out to be one of those guys that lived just long enough to complete his work because you know, it's nice when that happens.

Boy, This Work Sure Is Hard.

So I was in Greenblatt's Deli the other day on Sunset Boulevard and this group of ladies sitting behind me were discussing a script that someone wanted them to make a movie out of. It was apparently about some boxer from South Africa during Apartheid, and during this conversation, I heard the phrase that made my trip to Hollywood complete: "I think there is definitely a market for a South African 'Rocky'." Ahhh... so Robert Altman. But it got even better as the discussion continued; they apparently forgot how marketable the idea was because she started to say that the guy would have to be flexible with his script as the "whole Apartheid thing has been done to death" and perhaps they could change it to a Muslim boxer, or a Muslim love interest because "that whole Muslim... thing... hasn't really been explored as much yet."

You can't make this stuff up, folks! Well... ok, they can, but I can't. I was so happy. That's really the best thing that happened to me on this trip. Although, if I was a sports fan, that wouldn't be true because I sat next to Kurt Warner on the plane ride from Newark to Pheonix. Although, since I had never heard of him until the guy sitting on the other side of me told me with barely concealed glee as we were getting off the plane who he was, I didn't get much out of it. I had had my headphones on and my face in a book for the whole trip, so I was confused as we began getting our luggage out of the overhead when some lady kept thanking him and how sorry she was to bother him but her son wouldn't forgive her if she didn't get his autograph (He was quite gracious about it), and in full earshot of Kurt, I turned to the guy next to me and said, "So who's this dude then?" After he told me, and ran down a list of Kurt Warner's football exploits, I was all like "Huh, that's wack, yo. But I don't watch football, so you're like, speaking gibberish right now."

I noticed while traveling from Newark to Phoenix to Santa Ana that every 4th person on the planes, in the airports, at my hotel here even, had a copy of the new Harry Potter book in their hands. Seriously. The front desk girl here is having a terrible time getting through it because although she speaks great English, it's not her native tongue but she's dying to find out what happens. Every time I walk by the desk she admonishes me not to tell her anything. It's all pretty funny. This is definitely going to be something that defines the 2000's when people reminisce 20 years from now. "So, where were you when the last Harry Potter book came out?" I just finished reading it myself, and I have to say that it's not what I expected, and it was pretty awesome. Definitely the most exciting one yet.

So otherwise, I've been to see the La Brea Tar pits, the big Hollywood sign, and I took a nice drive on Mulholland drive and a quick run through of Beverly Hills. Here's a picture of Hollywood High School. What's Lawrence Fishburne doing there with Elvis and Bruce Lee? Why is Dorothy so chubby? Who are all those other people? Is this the message we want to send to LA's young people?

I gave the Avenue of Stars and Rodeo Drive a big pass on the way to the Santa Monica Pier, which I could have passed over, also. Honestly, I can't figure out why rich and famous people like to live here. It's desert hot most days, the smog makes my eyes puffy, and the traffic is unbelievably insane. All that crazy talk about LA freeways is true. It takes about 2 hours to go 30 or 40 miles. Although, the Pacific Coastal Highway was nice. If I get time I need to go hit one of the beaches I passed. But, for my money, if I'm ever rich and famous, I'd live on Martha's Vineyard.

So here's a Sunset Boulevard billboard. I'd really like to know what the hell is going on in this Perrier ad. Um... no I wouldn't. Never mind. But I call this work of art 'Privilege', for obvious reasons. It all kind of ties together, I think.

Oh, did I mention that I'm here for work? I forget that part sometimes. Hee hee.

Either "Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road" Jokes Have Deep Philosophical Significance On The Importance Of The Wandering Life... Or I Just Made That Up.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. - Mark Twain

Incidentally, if I ever open a book store, I'm going to name it Two Fathoms Deep, in honor of 'ol Sam Clemens. Because that's what mark twain means, in Mississippi river-boat parlance. What that has to do with a bookshop or the possibility of me ever opening one, I'm not sure, but it sounds good and would make a great conversation piece for me to chat up the customers with.

I bet after one visit, people would stop coming into my bookshop.

Although... that guy at Carroll & Carroll still captivates his customers with tales of arcane Library of Congress numbers and 3rd edition imported copies of old British sci-fi for hours and hours, and hours, so who knows.

Well, apropos of the above quote, it's been a slow week, I know. I've been waiting to post because I've been waiting on some news about whether I got a certain job or not. And I've been vegetating in front of my TV and not really exercising my head, so, no good rants were coming to mind, either. That's just the way it goes, sometimes. Although I did just finish reading a book named 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. Very interesting stuff, and one I recommend to people with poor decision-making skills. The stuff about mind-reading through facial expressions was particularly interesting. But I digress...

I got the job! They are currently doing a background check on me, which has me a little nervous. Not that I've got anything to worry about... that I can think of. That's the problem with people digging around in your past. You start convincing yourself that somehow you've forgotten about a murder you committed or that time you did for embezzlement, and the sweat, oh my the sweat.

So it doesn't pay a lot, but I'm really excited about it. I'll be working for a company that does one or two week intensive training camps, where corporations will send their employees to get certified/re-certified on computer programs such as any of the Microsoft docket, Java, databases, blah blah blah etc. etc. Their home office is not far from my house, and it's in a nice location out in the woods, free of distractions.

I won't, however, be working there. My job title is something ridiculous like Remote Site Administrator Guy. What they do is, they have these camps all over the country, in cities where their clients want to send their people for two weeks of intensive training. My job will be to fly to that city with all of the computer equipment, book the hotel rooms and conference rooms for the client, set up the equipment before the party starts, then hang back while someone else does the training! If I want, I can even sit in on the classes, so that's a total bonus. Maybe I can figure out how the hell Windows Vista works... it's stupid. I miss XP. Traveling and learning on the company's dime is SO what all that intense hard work in Baghdad has qualified me for. Actually, it's the logistics experience that attracted them to me, and the independence, because I'll be flying around on my own. I didn't mention to them that that's not exactly what 'Independent Contractor' means, but shhhh.

So yes I'm extremely impatient to start... I haven't actually been to too many places within the continental U.S., and they tell me that I will have ample opportunity to look around... So I get to travel again, and possibly have new subject material to blog about, something which is painfully obvious that I need here. It's a win-win. Hopefully, I'll also be learning stuff about the business/office world, such as what the hell phrases like "We quickly customize ethical paradigms and professionally fashion inexpensive content for 100% customer satisfaction", or "Our challenge is to interactively restore resource-leveling content to set us apart from the competition" mean. I'm sure it must mean something.

Buy One, Get One Free; One For The Missus And One For You And Me. Or, Books I Read This Summer.

That's right, two fer a dollar. I just thought I'd go on to prove even further how dreary life on vacation on a tropical isle can be by not only posting twice in two days, but by quickly sharing with you the three books I've read this week because there was nothing better to do than sit on the beach and read. Ho hum. If you're as bored as I am, read on, because obviously neither one of us has anything better to do.
The first one was a pleasant surprise; who knew that Nick Cave could write? 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' is a pretty gritty southern gothic (of course it is) novel, and for those of us who love bashing on fundies, it's a tasty treat. I swear I didn't know that when I picked it up. I just thought, Nick Cave wrote a book now? Huh. I want one. And it's really good, too. I'm a little confused about the ending, so perhaps I will have to re-read it one day, or better yet have a conversation with someone who has read it and does understand it. I also read Thomas Pynchon's 'The Crying of Lot 49', because ever since I read 'Infinite Jest' by David Foster Wallace, I've been dying to read 'Gravity's Rainbow' by Pynchon to which it gets alot of comparisons. But 'Gravity's Rainbow' is hugeongous, although not as big as 'Infinite Jest', granted. But I wanted to read something slightly smaller by Pynchon first, just to test the water. And so after reading 'Lot 49', I am definitely queueing up 'Gravity's Rainbow'. Pynchon is hilarious, labrynthine, and ingenious.
I saved my most eagerly anticipated read for last: 'Mathematicians In Love' by Rudy Rucker. Have I said how much I love Rucker? I'm sure I have. Actually it's funny; if I had read Pynchon before I posted about Rucker a few back, I'd have said something inane like: Rucker is a mix of Thomas Pynchon, Douglas Adams, a hyper-perpindiculate writer to Philip K. Dick, and something else all his own because no one else has ever done that. All that being said, 'Mathematicians' isn't his best, I think. So carry on and start with 'White Light', but eventually 'Mathematicians' is still totally worth it. It's about what happens when two friendly competeing mathematicians love the same girl, and then discover a proof having something to do with wave functions and predictive systems or something that allows them to put their talents where their other brains are. Fantastic.
So you see, I've got lots of time on my hands. Today I did a little bit of spelunking; there's a really big cave in the middle of the jungle and I got a guided tour. I saw a HUGE cave spider. I got this picture, of course:

Bigger than my hand but not Shelob-size. Also bats, and those stalagmite and stalacite thingies. It took about two hours to crawl through the whole thing. Nifty, but no eye surgery. Then I went on a longtail boat tour of the mangrove mudflats they have on the island here... saw a bunch of fiddler crabs and monkeys. Fiddler crabs are pretty.

I even saw a mudskipper, which I think I got a little too excited about, because I got a lot of funny looks. But you know, Muddy Mudskipper! From Ren & Stimpy!... Right?
Anyway, out of sheer ennui, tomorrow I'm going scuba diving again. Ho hum hum drum.

"Rucker On Acid And Infinite Numbers, Bright Copper Kettles And Warm Woolen Mittens..."

... these are a few of my favorite things. Rudy Rucker is all nines, baby. If you are the type that often stays awake in bed far too late at night trying to wrap your head around infinity, but then get sidetracked and start thinking about who your favorite muppet is (DR. Teeth), (or wait, Zoot.) (No no, Beaker, definitely Beaker.) then Rudy Rucker is your future favorite author, I guarantee it. (Damn it! I forgot about Animal. This is hard.) Start with White Light. While waiting for it to arrive, go to Rudy's site and try to wrap your head around whatever the hell he's talking about. Other awesome mind-exploding books by him are Frek & The Elixir, and he also wrote a sort of sequel to Edwin A. Abbott's classic Flatland, called Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension, which was my first experience with Rudy. He is a mathematics professor and he writes this weird sort of mathematical/mescalin induced sci-fi, which, because it's not like any other sci-fi anywhere, has been given the label of Transreal. I just received his latest book in the mail and I can't wait to devour it. I swear, he may be my favorite author ever... actually my favorites kind of go on swing shift. Next time I start thinking about John Steinbeck, he'll be my favorite. And then Herman Hesse. And then Vernor Vinge.
As for music, for those of you who don't know about The Gun Club, go find a copy of Fire of Love. Honestly, I love it more than anything (today), but the first time I heard it, I got really, really, really angry. They sound aLOT like the Pixies, or a certain very distinctive aspect of them, anyway. Then I found out that The Gun Club was around way before the Pixies, realized that Francis apparently didn't totally come up with that sound all on his own, and I got even angrier... I'm over it now. But damn. Getting older is all about having your deepest illusions shattered. But it's probably becoming one of my favorite albums ever, so at least I've got that going for me.
My Dad plays the dulcimer, and is all into the Pocono Dulcimer Club. They put on a concert earlier tonight and I got to see Don Pedi, a master of the Mountain Dulcimer from North Carolina, play. He apparently was in that movie 'Songcatcher' with Aidan Quinn, which I've never seen, as the white-bearded Appalacian dude playing the dulcimer, which is appropriate because that seems to be exactly who he is. But the dulcimer is a really pretty instrument, and it was actually really fun. Tomorrow, I'm going to Philly with Creepy and her boyfriend's band, who are opening for Murphy's Law. So I'm getting the whole spectrum this week. Hoo-ray for spectrum.
It looks as though I won't be going to D.C. to give my deposition, after all of that nonsense... I'm not really sure why. I got paid, and emailed GBG to tell them I got it and that I was ready to go... but then they never got back to me! So, I don't know what's going on there, but I'm leaving for Thailand this friday, so it sucks for them!

(Wait, of course! Statler & Waldorf!!!)

Cookies, Robert Redford, The Antichrist, And The Real Reasons Why These Things Ought To Scare You

While my brother is away at school, I've been temporarily occupying his room in my Dad's house until I figure out where to go next. After I get back from Thailand I'll have to seriously start thinking about that.
Anyway my point is that on my brother's bookshelf is 'The Purpose Driven Life' by Rick Warren and the entire 12 book series of 'Left Behind' by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. This constitutes some of the scariest pop right-wing christian fundamentalist lieterature (misspelling intended) out there. I worry about my brother. I'd recently read a very good article about the series, and Revelation end-of-times thinking in general, by Joe Bageant, who I was turned on to by Heather and Miss Luongo... those ladies are always finding good stuff out there. But I was thinking about it, and I realized that I've never actually read any of those books, and we Godless perverts are always making fun of doltish fundie preachers who declaim against Evolution without ever really having actually read Charles Darwin's book, or tried to understand the theory in any useful way. One should always know what one is up against. While I have read the Bible, I've been out of the loop on the latest developments in advanced Christian thought, SO, I decided to start with what I consider the easier of the two, the 12 book fictitious series about Tim LaHaye's vision of a post-rapture world. Tim LaHaye is by the way, let me just say, a total freak, dude. Click on this super-scary picture of him shooting laser beams of evil out of his eyes to be led to his website where you will find a most entertaining intro before going to his main page, where you will find his very own voodoo version of that Myers-Briggs personality theory that Miss Luongo is so fond of, as well as vague descriptions of himself and all the books, ministries, and projects he's involved in, with links taking you to where you can buy his stuff, but nothing too personal, I'm afraid. He's got some nice jewelry, though, huh?
Anyway, I'm almost halfway through the third book, but let me tell you that before the end of the first chapter of the first book I decided that I could easily devote a whole new blog to the reading of the series on which I post something every time I came across a statement that was either grossly mis-informed, ignorant, fallacious, or just plain made me laugh at it's own tunnel-vision certitude that it knew the truth based on no facts whatsoever. I realized by the third chapter that I would need a month for each book if I actually tried doing that, and I really want to get through them and be done with it. But, having made the claim, I will attempt to at least illustrate my point just a bit, here. Here's a quote right off of book 1 page 1, which may seem rather minor, but it illustrates something about the fundie mind which I feel is important to understand:

"God was OK with Rayford Steele. Rayford even enjoyed church occasionally. But since Irene [Rayford Steele's wife] had hooked up with a smaller congregation and was into weekly Bible studies and church every Sunday, Rayford had become uncomfortable. Hers was not a church where people gave you the benefit of the doubt, assumed the best about you, and let you be. People there had actually asked him, to his face, what God was doing in his life."

This is minor, but it is the first of many rather disingenuous statements made by non-Christians about Christians throughout the series so far. Rayford is surprised that fundamentalist Christians, after a sermon on sunday at a fundamentalist church, actually want to talk to him about God? Heaven forfend! That is so crazy that fundies, like, take their beliefs so seriously! In the Left Behind books, Non-Christians are constantly surprised by the honesty, forthrightness and vigor of a Christian's beliefs, excepting only those who are merrily skipping down the path to the Antichrist's side. Reading these books has made me remember my own thought processes when I was a younger church-going Christian myself. Christians, despite being the largest most powerful religious group in America, tend to feel persecuted and not listened to. For no apparent reason. It's as though they think that the only non-Christian, if you're not a direct servant of Satan, is one who has simply not thought it all through, or doesn't understand the horrors that will befall unbelievers when a vengeful bloody Jesus (long gone is the messiah of love) returns after the rapture. They can't conceive of someone who has read about and understood their religion, and despite being a good person, has decided it was all a load of crap. They think we don't understand what they have found to be the truth in their lives, that we are simply misguided. I would like to bet a LOT of money on the fact that at least %90 of fundamental religious types call themselves believers only because the idea of an MC 900 foot Jesus coming to rip their guts out if they don't become Born Again has scared the living shit out of them. (Or eternity in Hell, yadda yadda. It's all the same idea.) That and/or for the other self-evident reason that these books have reminded me of: Rapture and Tribulation are the ultimate infantile vengeance fantasy. Anybody ever get this taunt on the playground? "My daddy/big brother/whomever can beat up your daddy/big brother/whomever/you!" We all so desperately want to be right, on the winning side, the side that gets cookies for good behaviour. (Not that it means anything, but the authors of the Left Behind books have this weird fascination with cookies. Cookies seem to be around at some of the more touching moments a little too often. Cookies, and Robert Redford. The Antichrist is described in some seriously homoerotic terms more than once by different characters as a more dashing, sexier Robert Redford.) No one wants to be on the losing side of an argument. And these guys have found the biggest daddy and the most horrible retribution ever with which to side with, and are looking forward to the day when everyone who disagrees with them will get what's coming to 'em.
This, make no mistake 'O ye who seek only spiritual comfort, is a religion of fear. It is not based on truth, or righteousness, or most importantly, love. They want to scare the hell out of you, literally, so that you will join their cause, give them money, and spread the fright to others. I'm not saying they don't believe their own crap; I'm sure they do. But they do not believe in Good. Another quote:

"Would it fade, her preoccupation with the end of the world, with the love of Jesus, with the salvation of souls? Lately she had been reading everything she could get her hands on about the rapture of the church. "Can you imagine, Rafe," she exulted, "Jesus coming back to get us before we die?"
"Yeah boy," he said peeking over the top of his newspaper, "that would kill me."
She was not amused. "If I didn't know what would happen to me," she said, "I wouldn't be glib about it."
"I do know what would happen to me," he insisted, "I'd be dead, gone, finis. But you of course would fly right up to heaven."
He hadn't meant to offend her, he was just having fun. When she turned away he rose and pursued her. He spun her around and tried to kiss her, but she was cold. "Come on, Irene," he said. "Tell me thousands would just keel over if they saw Jesus coming back for all the good people."
She had pulled away in tears. "I've told you and told you. Saved people aren't good people, they're--"
"Just forgiven, yeah I know," he said, feeling rejected and vulnerable in his own living room. He returned to his chair and his paper. "If it makes you feel any better, I'm happy for you that you can feel so cocksure."
"I only believe what the Bible says," Irene said.

Notice that LaHaye's idea of a perfect Christian (Irene and others like her throughout the world are raptured right off the bat) is one who became a heartfelt born again believer over her obsession with rapture lieterature? (Again, misspelling intentional.) And of course the other important point, saved people aren't good people, they're just forgiven. i.e., they picked the winning side. Of course there's more to that dogma than just that, they believe in living good lives as well; Jesus demands more than just lip service. But their idea of good lives and, well, good-people-not-saved-people's ideas of what is right and wrong are very different. The unfortunate side-effect of believing in a world gone to hell and a Saviour who is going to come and trash the place anyway, is that the world is no longer worth saving; the only worthy cause is trying to convert people they like and condemning to a very scary end those they disagree with, even trying to keep an eye out for the Antichrist. (Henry Kissinger? Ted Kennedy? Barack Obama? Any liberal gay Jew that happens by?) Forget trying to save the environment, ending the war in Iraq, or approving of stem-cell research (which hurts no one, least of all the dead-end biological goo it comes from!) to help people, or a hundred other issues which, if the fundamental right had any concern for them, they could help to do a world of good. They look forward to the end of the world, and indeed, applaud anything that looks like it might bring the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse closer. Sign up for 'ol Tim "laser-eye" LaHaye's newsletter for timely messages on current events related to Biblical prophecy. He might as well gleefully rub his hands and echo one of our President's most foolish comments; "Bring them on!"
I will end this by saying that there are certain things in the Bible that I believe to be true; even certain things in Revelations. Not simply because they are in the Bible, but because they are truths which are self evident to anybody who looks for such truths. Jesus' message of love and compassion, for example. But we are talking about end-time stuff here, and so something out of Revelations which I believe is that there will be many false prophets... can you guess who's at the top of my false prophet list?

How Getting Sidetracked By Pet Peeves Can Sometimes Lead You To Find A Good Book

I was recently asked by a newcomer to Interzone what my scariest moment in Iraq was. Speaking of newcomers, before I launch into that tale I'd like to take a moment to talk about a really annoying aspect of Interzone culture. I really hate talking to other Americans that live here; there is this thing that everybody does when you meet them as sort of a status gauge. One of the first questions these neanderthals always ask you is: "So, how long you been here?" As if the length of time you've lived pampered inside Interzone has anything to do with anything. You can always tell the ones that have been here for more than a year because they ask with a sort of smug pre-emptive gleam in their eye and an "I'm such a bad-ass old-timer" inflection in their voice: "So, how long you been here?", as if there is no chance anyone could have been here as long as they have. It's true that very few people stay longer than a year, but so what? Don't get me wrong, I love that I can say I lived in Baghdad for 3 years, but I'm acutely aware that, in and of itself, that is not really something to be proud of, and certainly is a retarded thing to use as a status gauge; It's not like, as an American, living in the Interzone is fraught with trials and tribulations and surviving them for three years is a measure of manliness. Really, the hardest thing about coming here was the initial decision to actually get on a plane and fly to freaking Iraq! Once you make the decision to come, and weather the doubt-filled flight to the middle east with a pit of "oh my god oh my god oh my god what am I doing?!" in your stomach, the rest is easy. Just being here isn't so bad, not for Interzone denizens, anyway. As the book reviewed in this article says, the Interzone is an Emerald City, with several thousand pampered contractors strutting around with power and water and pork and beer 24/7 acting as though they are total bad boys. The funniest thing I see on a daily basis are the Embassy rats; 300 pounder, late middle-aged men sauntering over to the dining facility with pistols strapped to their beefy thighs, with a look on their face much like an 8 year old whose father just got them their very first Red Rider BB gun for Christmas and is showing it off to his friends. I'm ranting about this because yesterday I was driving down the road in front of the new Embassy complex that they're building, and I noticed a gas point run by KBR on the side of the road. I've seen it before, but, what with our camp closing down and all that, my supplier has stopped sending us gasoline. The sign on the side of the station says 'KBR retail fuel'. Now, gasoline, called benzine locally, is a hot commodity in the IZ. I know very well that KBR is only allowed to provide fuel to the military or certain authorized others. But, seeing as how I don't have a supply of my own any more, and the sign actually says 'retail', I figured it was worth a shot. So I pull in and ask if I'm allowed to purchase fuel with cash, even though I don't have a fuel card, and the redneck KBR station manager laughed and said, "Naw, man. You gotta have a guv'mint card... you oughtta know that. How long you been here?" Argh! I resisted the urge to tell him three years, because I actually try not to play that game with people, as satisfying as it is to shut them up. Instead I just verbally abused him saying that the sign should not say retail then, and drove off. But I hate that! Seniority is stupid, and besides the point. The fellow that wrote this book (Rajiv Chandrasekaran) was only here for a year or so, but I'll wager he is far more knowledgable and worthy of respect than I am.
Anyway, sorry for the pet peeve post. Sometimes it's just good to complain. (Sometimes? Does being aware of your self-delusions negate them, or make you a worse person for continuing to tolerate them within yourself?) And I actually had no intention of going on for so long about it... I wanted to write about my scariest moment in Iraq! Well, I will save that one for tomorrow, maybe.

A Dream Of Injustice, My Moral Dilemma, And What It All Means

I read 'Almost Home' last night, which is the autobiography of Damien Echols, the most prominent of the West Memphis 3. He's not necessarily a great writer, although the closer he gets to the main event that has shaped his life, the more eloquent he gets. But man, his story and his attitude on death row are incredible. Obviously, the saga of the WM3 has left a lasting impression on me. I had a dream last night where I was accused of something, I can't really remember what, but something to do with my fat ex-boss (not Phil; he's too shark-like to ever be fat) which I hadn't actually been involved in. Anyway, there was a "trial" (In the woods?) which was more like a kegger and nobody would listen to me... the drunk judge at one point told me that all this didn't matter, it didn't matter what I or anyone said, I was going to prison for this crime, it was decided before the alleged crime was even committed and this was all for show, allbeit a rather poor show.... well it's obvious where that dream came from, having just finished that book. But what was really neat about that dream was how it really suffocated me. I mean, really. I woke up taking deep breaths, and with the realization that the right to a fair trial was more than just words... it's something you hear all your life as an American, but until you actually suffer the injustice of being falsely accused and railroaded... yes it was only a dream, but that is sometimes what is so great about them. If you are deep enough in it, you really feel what's happening, and it doesn't matter that it's not something you've ever experienced in actuality. You are watching a movie in which you are the principle protagonist, and you forget that you're in a cinema until the lights come on.
The range of your emotions in dreams can be quite surprising, also. Usually dreams are fluff; odd and interesting but ultimately very easy to slough off. But occasionally... I woke up from this one with an incredible amount of rage, which was I think the true cause of my breathlessness. It's hard to feel that kind of rage about anything in normal day to day life, even for someone like me who enjoys a good rant from time to time. It was the rage of personally feeling my right to exist taken from me... My first rational thoughts, after all the dream events and emotion began slowly sliding away, were of this: This dream wasn't so much about the WM3, although obviously inspired by them, but about the feeling of terror and helplessness that is going through the internal systems of mine and everyone else who understands what is going on as our rights and dignity are being slowly (or not-so-slowly, as it were) stripped away by the Red Administration. Granted, most of us may never be affected by the atrocity of a Senate-approved interrogation tactic, or a House-approved listening device in your overhead light. But they are still your rights that are being taken away, and as 3 extremely normal boys (even though they were not considered normal by their own hometown, they could have been dropped anywhere on either coast without making so much as a dribble) in West Memphis, Arakansas could tell you, you never know when it might be convenient for someone with more power than you and something to hide to use those stolen rights against you, or someone you know.
Anyway, as some would say, who am I to complain? Well, they'd be right. I've been thinking about my moral quandry quite a bit recently. An old friend of mine basically called me a baby-eater for being here, and while I could never see it that way, the very fact that someone could think that about me has given me pause... There are three main reasons why I have continued to stay in Baghdad. 1) The money, hence, baby-eater. I no longer view the money as a reason to stay... honestly. If that was the only thing I had, I would leave this week. I don't need more. 2) My Iraqi friends. I am paying them very decent salaries, and they were unlikely to find other work if I'd have left prematurely, given the overall situation in Baghdad, and I've come to care for them quite a bit. Scott picks on me and rather derisively says I have a false Great White Hope attitude, but I fail to see how caring about your friends merits that. Anyway, I was able to, through a contact, find employment for most of them with a US contract in Kurdistan! So, my friends are about to begin a very decent-paying job in a very safe place... many of them will be moving their families up there. So, very shortly, reason #2 will be out of date! That's 2 down, one to go.
The third reason is more personal and less easy to write about, but suffice it to say, with reasons #1 & #2 down, #3 will be much easier to handle, and I am going to start making preparations to leave this month, actual date of leaving to be determined, depending on some mundane logistical issues. Definitely by December. Will keep you posted, of course.

In Which I Skirt The Issue Of What Today Is The Anniversary Of

So some of you may have noticed that my posts seem to be deteriorating into ranty madness, lately. Well, I didn't really notice it myself until just this morning, and I'd like to continue ignoring that fact, because I'm not sure I'm really ready to confront the state of my mental balance just now. I mean, I knew, but I didn't see it as a downward spiralling pattern until today. I blame my inactive, caravan-dwelling lifestyle. It's been well over six months since I left the 600 man camp to come here and... subsist. Remember way back not long after I first came to the GBG camp when I said that there was a guy who was locked in his room as an experiment with no windows or clocks, and was given irregular meal times so that he wouldn't have any idea what was going on outside of his room? And how when the experiment was finished he came out all twitchy and wore two watches on each wrist for the rest of his life? Yeah... gettin' there. I also blame Dave Eggers and Mara Leveritt. I blame Mara because of that book I just finished reading... you know the one. Don't get me started on that crazy injustice again. I'm not really being toungue-in-cheek about that... Likely I'll be very angry about the ignorant West Memphis legal hicks for the rest of my life. They make an excellent focal point for impotent, outraged righteous wrath. Moving on; I blame Dave because right before 'Devil's Knot', I'd read 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' by him, and he's got a loopy, self-conscious writing style which of course, combined with West Mephis Wrath, put me in the right frame of mind for loopy, self-conscious rants. So, I'm stepping out of it for just this minute in order to ask you not to tell the crazy person that he's trying to lick his elbow. Don't let on that you know he's out of control, it may only encourage him. And, whatever you do, don't stare him directly in the eyes... that can really backfire on you.
So, I was in the PX yesterday, and they were playing 'United 93' on the display TVs. The scene where the highjackers went from quiet passengers to taking over the plane came on, and everybody in the store, soldiers, contractors, cashiers, Iraqis; they all just kind of stopped what they were doing and watched with the fascinated revulsion that we all are familiar with when re-experiencing those events. It was weird.

Um. I Get A Little Unbalanced In This One. Sorry. I Think I've Revealed Too Much, Maybe.

That's it, we're dead. Bush won't be happy until he breaks every law and rule against ethics, morality, and reason. Run for your lives, the sky is falling! I don't know anymore what is propaganda, what is real, what is paranoid, or what is purposefully intended to scare us. All I know is, whatever they're trying to do to me, it's probably working. Iwlwpmbhjsd... excuse me, that was me wiping the blood off of my keyboard. The blood that's been dripping from my mouth ever since I started looking for little Men In Black installing satellite receivers in my teeth last night. Which is weird because teeth don't bleed, they're like bone or something. Maybe I got a few of the little buggers without noticing, and they're bleeding.
Ok, enough crazy talk, Mike. You're upsetting the children. Sure boss no problem.
Anyway, I've been reading 'The Devil's Knot' by Mara Leveritt. Which is another reason I'm in this weird mood, probably. If righteous rage were a valid legal defence for killing people, this guy Gitchell would also go down, man. I'd seen the documentaries 'Paradise Lost' 1 & 2 before, which are horrific enough, but one of the things you always hear the police say is that the movies show a one-sided opinion of the case, and that if you look at the facts, there's more to it. Well, that's what Mara did, and it actually makes the law enforcement look worse than even the film makers could have. She's a journalist, and went into the case cold, with no emotional attachments either way. She then reports more exhaustively on the actual police reports and court transcripts than the movies had time for. It doesn't look good, man. It actually looks exactly like a book on the Salem Witch Trials I read a long time ago.
On a side note, yet not entirely unrelated, something about the Superman franchise really bothers me. I mean, this guy is about the closest thing to a God that pop culture has. Why is he always flying around saving cats from trees and people from the same arch villian over and over again? I mean, he's a reasonably intelligent guy. And he has an exquisite moral belief system. I think that, if he were a real thing (which I know that he is not) he would be in Iraq, defending the helpless. Or in Darfur. Or Lebanon. Fat white rich America would probably get about a nanosecond of his time... I say this because if I was him, that's about what I'd be thinking. Not that there aren't people in America that need saving, but people in poorer, more dangerous parts of the world need it vastly more. Actually, in the deepest recesses of my wrathful little black heart, I rather believe he'd be spending alot of his time conquering armies involved in immoral actions. Al Qaeda, Those African Junta thingies you always hear about, the Bush administration. Had I his power, the rich, soulless powerful would be trembling in their boots. I'd be Castle Stomping their secret germ-warfare laboratories. I'd tear up secret CIA prisons. I'd show 'em what wire tapping really meant. And I'd have a sweet ass jacuzzi with Lois Lane waiting in it for me every day after work. I mean, I wouldn't really be made of steel, just righteous wrath and skin tights that I would take off every once in a while. Isn't that enough?
Well, it certainly is enough of my infantile fantasy. I just think that that would make a better Superman story than the usual fare. I mean, are our Gods not there to dispense justice to the evil? It's not hard to find where the real evil is, these days.

P.S. I don't actually advocate the killing of anyone, even Gitchell. It's a purile vengeance fantasy, is all. Just wanted to clear that up, in case I had my family worried.

Mayday! Mayday! This entry lacks cohesive control!

So I was, once again, going back through my past entries, and I noticed that I seem to frequently state that I will be leaving Baghdad shortly. Only it never seems to pan out that way. Way back when my boss was first arrested (over 5 months ago!) I was all like, dude. Bummer. Guess I gotta pack up. Then when we lost the contract in March I was all like, dude. Bummer. Guess I gotta pack up. And here it is, May 1st, and I'm jammin' out to my newest mostest favouritest band, 'The Eagles of Death Metal', in my cozy caravan, and I haven't packed a dang thing yet. In fact, we may continue in this sort of limbo indefinitely, as there seems to be no shortage of people for us to rent this camp out to.  Or, as the property our camp is built on is Iraqi Government property, and they've been making noise about wanting it back, perhaps we'll be evicted and I'll be all like, dude. Bummer. Guess I gotta pack up.
It all just made me think about how ever since my second month here, when I got into an argument with a spook, I've felt like I was going to be booted out of Iraq the next day. And almost 3 years later, that feeling hasn't left. Maybe that's how they get you. The more insecure you feel, the more you'll worry about being forced to leave, and never actually consider that, having been around for far too long, it might be time to leave of your own accord! Lordy how I been duped.
But that still doesn't mean I'm capable of actually choosing to leave. What can I say? I gave up an addiction to tobacco for an addiction to Iraq! I wonder which one could kill me faster? I wonder if, given the opportunity, I might someday look back and say, "Holy crap. I've been here for 10 years!" I mean, that's what normal people do, right? They get a job at some office somewhere, and never look up except on payday, until ten years have passed, and they've saved up for that killer family vacation to Disneyland and isn't it time to refinance the mortgage? I mean, what difference does it make if I do it in Iraq as opposed to Stroudsburg? Except on my family vacation we do an Earth Orbit, 'cause Earth Orbiting is way cooler than a roller coaster.
Anyway, I've been reading a book called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail". It's all about how a secret society has been hiding the decendants of Christ for  over a thousand years, incited the First Crusade, and got up to a bunch of all-around sneakiness. I was really enjoying it, because secret societies are neat-o, but then I went online and read in a million different places that it was all a big fat hoax. It's the same secret society that Dan Brown based "The Da Vinci Code" on; The Priory of Sion. So that's my great disappointment for this week, and I heave a great sigh. It's a far cry from threatening to junkie suicide it, ain't it though?