Pseudo-Danger Man

06:09 pm - Crappy Infrastructure

My Internet problem seemed to clear up on Sunday and was fine on Monday (two days in which I largely away from home, alas). Today it is, once again, slow as molasses. No WoW or videos again, goddam it. bigscary said this was a problem throughout Queens, but I don't know how to check progress in fixing it. (As always, the useless Verizon website just says "system status unavailable, try again later." Grrr.)

I wonder how many of my problems are due to me living in west Queens. It seems our infrastructure is always breaking down -- we lose power for days, subway lines are closed down every weekend, the buses used to always be on strike -- but no one seems to do much about it. These are immigrant communities where no one complains much due to low expectations and weak ties to the neighborhood.

08:37 am - Symbolism?

Via Wonkette:

Hillary Clinton's pick to win horse racing's Kentucky Derby, Eight Belles — the only female horse in the race — finished second, broke both front ankles, and subsequently was put to death on the track. The first place horse was "Big Brown." Go nuts.

01:14 am - Iron Man

A lot of fun. Very funny, too.

I thought the climactic fight scene was clichéd as hell, but that was about my only issue.

STAY AND WATCH THROUGH THE CREDITS. If you're a Marvel fanboy (or fangirl) you want to see the scene that follows them, believe me.

05:52 pm - Shut Down the USSC

Jim Henley watches Antonin Scalia defend the constitutionality of torture (it isn't punishment, you see, so it isn't prohibited by the Cruel and Unusual clause), and I blow my stack commenting on the follow up post. My point is serious: Guys like Scalia have no value. "Judicial Restraint" of this kind just leads to a Supreme Court with no reason to exist.

In the meantime, we read how Obama is fighting the perception that he's an "elitist." Maybe it's time to end the Presidency, too. This is just too painful to watch.

04:36 pm - Fourth Edition D&D: Entangle!

One PC in my D&D campaign is a druid, and while I'd like to convert to 4E when it comes out, I would hate for him to have to abandon his character. My solution will be to have a custom-designed druid class, which we can use until WotC comes out with the "real" druid specs later this year. Here's my take on the 1st-level druid spell "Entangle":

11:48 am - My Prediction

Hills will win Pennsylvania by a big margin (a shade over 10 points) and WE'LL BE STUCK WITH ANOTHER SIX WEEKS OF PRIMARY HELL, PLEASE PUT A SHOTGUN BLAST IN MY FACE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope our dear junior senator has a good reason for extending all this -- if she saw Obama making out with a Cylon that might qualify -- or the next time I see her, I'm gonna smack her in the face with a large sock full of horse manure.

Update: Meanwhile, Hills says she'll "obliterate" Iran if they launch a nuclear attack on Israel. Considering that (a) Iran doesn't have nukes, and (b) Israel has hundreds, this is pretty silly -- kind of like saying you'll "obliterate" Belgium if they nuke Paris -- but I guess that's the sort of thing you talk about in those 3 AM phone calls.

03:03 pm - Not Outragous, Just Doesn't Work

As I've said many times I support Obama for President. (Some people like my term "Obamanaut" so I'll repeat it here.) Still, I don't see what's so bad about this video. Yes, I know, McCain will use the same line of attack against Obama in the general, but so what? Honestly, it'd be a legitimate line of attack... from McCain. The problem as Matt Yglesias points out is "if this is an election about how in uncertain times we need to flee into the arms of a strong, comforting, figure of experience and authority then that figure is John McCain." It just doesn't work for Hillary Clinton, whose government experience consists of running the health care task force (badly), going on photo-ops, being an attack-dog for her husband and serving one term as an undistinguished NY senator. Plus, Obama could always respond with this:

05:45 am - The Shark Infested Custard

One of my favorite authors is Charles Willeford (1919-1988). When I first read him it was soon after Pulp Fiction and the similarities were striking, with the same combination of humor, shocking violence and long, digressive dialogue. Willeford was best known for the Hoke Moseley novels, starting with Miami Blues (1984), but the most Tarantino-esque of his novels was the Shark-Infested Custard, oddly enough, since it was published posthumously in the 90s and there's no way Tarantino could have read it.

Anyway, The Shark-Infested Custard (the title's a metaphor for Miami) was about four swingers in the 1970s. I thought about it after my last entry, since at point, one of the guys sings up for a computerized dating service, and he has to fill out a questionnaire. Told by his friends, naturally, to lie his ass off, he gets to religion:

"What's your religion, Larry?"
"None, really, but I used to go to the Unitarian Church once in awhile in Gainesville."
"You can't put that down. That's the last thing you want, a date with a Unitarian. They're weird, man."
"I know. They were weird in Gainesville, but they weren't inhibited, either."
"Put down Church of England."
"Episcopalian?"
"No, Church of England. That way they can match you with Episcopalians and lapsed Roman Catholics. If you happen, by chance, to get a real Church of Englander, they aren't concerned with morality, anyway. Episcopalians are all time-servers, and lapsed Catholics have a sense of guilt they're always trying to deny. A girl who thinks sex is dirty, and feels guilty about it, can be a damned good piece of ass."

03:05 pm - Fourth Edition D&D Tea Reading, Plus Geek v Nerd

D&D lovers will definitely want to check out the latest Wizards offering, which has a complete schedule for power acquisition! It looks like the number of "At Will" powers remains constant at all levels, while Encounter, Daily and "Utility" powers increase with experience: You get one in each category every 4th or 6th level, plus "paragon" powers at 11th, 12th and 20th and an "epic destiny" power at 26th. The lack of a clear progression is kind of annoying, but it means you get some goodies with almost every level, which is nice.

Meanwhile, I checked out the etymologies of geek and nerd over at dictionary.com, and at Mirriam-Webster as well. They seem to have evolved into more or less the same term, but their origins are far different: "geek" seems to come from the German word for "fool" by way of carnival slang, while "nerd" was apparently invented out of whole cloth by Dr. Seuss. Hats off to Mr. Geisel!

03:06 pm - Hippies, Geeks and Rednecks

I've thought a bit about our image of The Geek since I saw Weird Al Yankovic's "White and Nerdy". Yankovic plays the depiction of the stereotypical geek: The skinny guy with horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a shirt and tie and a pocket protector. It's an old stereotype, which you can see in the posters for Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and dozens of other places.

The weird thing, though, is I've spent plenty of time over the years with hard-core geeks -- D&D players, fanfic writers, Monty Python fanatics, Trekkies, you name them -- and very few of them ever resembled the stereotype. If I had to describe the Typical Male Geek (and when I was a kid the typical geek was male), he might wear glasses but he'd look almost nothing like the Revenge of the Nerd type. He'd be chubby rather than skinny; he'd have long hair and a beard; he'd wear T-shirts and sneakers, and wouldn't get caught wearing a tie if his life depended on it. (If any of you resemble this stereotype -- and I know some of you do! -- please accept my apologies in advance.)

If you want to see people who look like Revenge of the Nerd Geeks, they're easy to find: Go to photographs from the 1950s and (to a lesser extent) the 1960s, and you'll see them all over the place. (See this photo of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, for example.) They were the squares in the 1960s. Who were their enemies? The hippies! And it's the hippies, not the squares, that the geeks most closely resemble.

Now honest-to-God hippies are pretty rare these days, but I've come to think that Hippie-dom didn't disappear so much as splinter and morph into a number of subcultures that are still around. I suspect -- but obviously can't prove -- that Hippie-dom gradually took over large segments of the white working class, especially in rural areas. When you think of the stereotypical crystal meth addict you probably picture a long-haired, bearded guy in a T-shirt -- someone, in other words, who'd look right at home in Gen Con in 1982. (I'm reminded, years ago, of an article which listed the reading habits of Death Row inmates. As I recall, H.P. Lovecraft was by far their favorite author.)

I'm not sure what conclusion I'd like to draw from all of this, but I'd be curious to see what connections we might find among these different strands of American culture.

10:14 am - Damn, the Guy is Good (and Bad, Sometimes)

Honestly, I'm not an Obamanaut, and when I heard about Bitter-gate I groaned to myself. I agree with Isaac Chotiner that Obama's original statement was badly phrased, and one can interpret it in a way that sounds silly (people become evangelical Christians and gun nuts because the economy is lousy). Then I hear his response, though, and I'm more rather than less impressed with the man:


I guess it's hard to explain anyone's behavior without patronizing them one way or another, particularly if you like what they're doing (and obviously, politicians don't like it when for the other side!). Still, I think Obama's on to something here; we'll see how much damage he takes when the Pennsylvania primary comes around.

03:49 pm - Gettin' Funky with Big Bird

Via Crooked Timber, Stevie Wonder plays "Superstition" ... on Sesame Street.

05:37 pm - I Smell an Oscar!

The Human Tornado, baby! Here's some honest-to-Ghad grindhouse action:



"Dolemite is mah name, and fuckin' up mutha fuckers is mah game!"



True, uh ... classics. (No I haven't seen them. They may be works of genius for all I know, but I doubt it.)

09:57 am - My Solution to the Primary Mess

Now that the Democratic nomination process is fucked up to hell, I thought it may be a good time to post the Matt Plan for Holding Primaries and Caucuses. The original goal behind the Plan was to keep some elements of "retail politics" in the nomination process, so that ordinary voters get a chance to meet and question candidates, while eventually easing Iowa and New Hampshire out of their privileged positions. One other feature is that it wraps the whole process up in a month, so we wouldn't be waiting six goddam months to discover who the nominee is.

Anyway, here's the plan: Every 12 years, select 1 state at random from each of the 9 census regions. Of those 9, the state with the lowest population gets to hold the first primary/caucus. The second lowest-population state holds the next contest, one week later. After another week, the three next-smallest states hold their primaries or caucuses simultaneously. The following week the remaining 4 states hold simultaneous elections. Then, after an appropriate interval, the remaining states (and non-states that send delegates) hold elections in a nationwide primary.

For political reasons, we can forgo random selection of the first nine early-election states, so states like Iowa and New Hampshire don't automatically oppose the plan. After 12 years, however, their privileged positions would go to other states within their census regions. (I picked 12 years to ensure that at least one census would fall between each cycle, and to give states the time to schedule votes according to the plan.)

Does this plan have any chance of being implemented? I doubt it. No harm in making it public, though.

01:46 am - Old Friends and Their Hobbies

Via Jonathan Kulick:


PCP may be making a comeback. Kulick points out that Hunter S. Thompson wouldn't take the stuff; he thought it was too dangerous. Yes, HUNTER S. THOMPSON wouldn't take PCP. That's hardcore.

11:36 am - Music Editor? For Free, Please

I got my father a cassette deck for his PC for Christmas. Unfortunately it was an internal device, there weren't any empty slots on his desktop, and my dad (who, while a smart guy, is now a senior citizen) is completely flummoxed by computers. (He's still getting the hang of the whole Internet thing.) On my last trip to Massachusetts he asked me to take the cassette deck and install it on my PC. So viola! I bought a very expensive gift ... for myself.

Not that I mind, though, since I have a buttload of cassettes from the 80s and early 90s, which I've been trying to transfer over the past day-and-a-half. Now the device software gives you two options: Convert the entire tape to a single file, or have them automatically split them up between silences. Naturally, I chose the latter, but since my tapes include a lot of "art rock" crap from the 70s (some of which I admittedly still like, as long I don't listen to the goofy lyrics), this doesn't work out too well. With long stretches of guys quietly blink-blinking on their guitars, interspersed with hard-rock carpet-bombing, the songs end up split into a half-dozen files, with awkward transitions between them.

What I need is an MP3 editor, something which lets me splice these bits together, or break a big file into smaller chunks. Anyone have suggestions? I'm not looking to become Phil Spector, I just want something simple, and preferably without having to pay anyone to use. Any recommendations?

12:57 pm - Meanwhile, Back in Cretinopolis

US "accidentally" sends nuclear missile fuses to Taiwan. I'm sure the Chinese will take this all in stride. If not... sorry for the nuclear war, folks. Shit happens.

12:24 pm - Could Someone Explain This to Me, Please?

In a way that doesn't make us look like complete assholes and idiots, that is:

A cargo ship chartered by the U.S. Navy opened fire when approached by an Egyptian motorboat late on Monday near the Suez Canal, and Egyptian and US officials gave conflicting reports on Tuesday on casualties.

Egyptian security sources and witnesses said the gunfire killed an Egyptian trader on the motorboat and wounded two other people. The U.S. Navy said it had recorded no casualties.

The small Egyptian craft had been trying to sell goods to ships passing through the Suez Canal, the Egyptian sources said.

The U.S. Navy said the Global Patriot, on short-term charter to the military, had fired warning shots near the Egyptian boat after it ignored verbal orders and a signal flare telling it to stay away.

08:26 am - What to Expect with an Obama Presidency

Well ... not really:


Just posting something I found funny, don't get sanctimonious and shit.

Update: In all seriousness, if you want to know what to expect from Obama, check out this article by Spencer Ackerman. I'm not sure that "dignity promotion" is much of a foreign policy doctrine, but I know it's better than Clinton-era triangulation, which is no real doctrine at all.

11:33 am - Fourth Edition D&D Tea Reading, Part V

By now enough material has come out that one can just ... almost ... put together a full rule set. There's a "Lite" Player's Handbook floating around, as well as a mini-Monster Manual of sorts. The PHB "Lite," unfortunately, can't include much about the Dragonborn or the Warlord class (although we get a few daily Warlord powers at the WotC site). Other than that, though, one could almost play a 4E adventure with player-designed characters. (Just don't expect much guidance when you reach level 2.)