Tohu Bohu

Funny/Not Funny

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:01:42 -0500

So in As You Like It there’s a bit where Rosalind is pestering Celia for information about Orlando and then not letter her get a word in edgewise when she attempts to actually talk. Celia complains about her interruption. Rosalind (dressed as Ganymede, remember) says Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.

Through the first weekend, this line does not get a laugh. The director has given her a note, which she has tried, and nothing. So she comes backstage and asks us: why am I not getting a laugh with this line? I told her the problem is that she is not saying the line in 1974, which was the last time it might have been funny. Our Fool, more helpfully, tells her to draw out the pause between the phrases. She does this, and she gets a laugh at each of the remaining performances, often a huge laugh.

And I am bothering telling you so because this sort of women never shut up amirite joke is something that I just find Not Funny. Not Funny at all. There are a lot of jokes in AYLI about gender roles, and how people respond to crossed-up gender expectations, and a lot of those jokes are really funny—but not that one. Not to me, at any rate. And one of the things I have found that sort of lurks around the edges of the various misogynist nastinesses that have been turning up in fandom recently is the women never shut up amirite joke (and to a lesser extent the men! amirite? joke), and it is still not funny.

I lucked in to some tickets for the local professional production of Twelfth Night, to which I took my daughter this weekend, and it occurred to me that the production took very few opportunities to make gender expectation jokes. Yes, there were bits about the very masculine Orsino among his buddies, particularly getting a rub-down from the supposedly-male Viola/Cesario, but those were jokes about Orsino, not Viola. One production I saw (in Golden Gate Park in 1993) had Viola/Cesario chucking herself under her chin whenever she wanted to assert her male-ness; an odd gesture, and one I didn’t previously associate with the performance of machismo, but after a few repetitions we all got it, and it got funnier through the rest of the show. In this one, Viola pasted on a moustache and wore trousers, but didn’t spit or scratch or grunt or otherwise indicate guy-ness and masculinity at all.

Another Swat Digression: Darko Tresnjak directed the production we saw last week, and in the program mentions having played Orsino in college. Did any of y’all GRs happen to see that? Or be in it? I know some of you overlapped with him more than I did, and I don’t remember whether any of you were in any of the shows he directed there. I only saw The Visit and House of Blue Leaves, and The Skin of Our Teeth on video, I think, and I have no recollection of who was in any of them. I’d be curious to know what his classmates thought of him and his shows at the time. End Digression.

So I felt in the one production that I was missing some gender play, jokes based on our expectations of gender performance. And in the other production (that I was in) I was grouchy about the gender stereotype joke that was there. So is it that I’m just a gripey sort of person? Probably that’s a good deal of it. Probably a lot. Some of though, is a difference between reinforcing our gender expectations and blowing them up. A garrulous person-in-male-clothing claiming that she is garrulous because she is actually female is reinforcing our gender expectation, not subverting it—and in truth nearly everything onstage, in that show and most others, reinforces our gender expectation. And that isn’t funny at all.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Book Report and Play Report

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:23:47 -0500

Your Humble Blogger doesn’t blog books anymore, but I did want to mention having read and thoroughly enjoyed Alif the Unseen. It’s an Urban Fantasy novel that doesn’t irritate me the way urban fantasy novels generally do. It’s a political novel that doesn’t irritate me the way political novels sometimes do. It’s an adventure novel that does entertain me the way adventure novels do. So that’s all right.

I would say, for any Gentle Reader who may happen to pick the thing up—don’t sweat the prologue thing. Give it another chapter beyond that. And after that, it builds in intensity and excitement—really, it picks up when the vampire shows up. Not a vampire. Don’t worry.

The main character, the titular character, is one of those fellows who exists primarily on-line, a person whose handle is more important to his sense of self than his name. Or, at least, a person who thinks that he exists primarily on-line—the action is real-world action, which tends to trump on-line identity, after all.

I hadn’t thought about it, but that does resonate with another thing I read this week, the play Water by the Spoonful. It’s a strange and beautiful playscript. We get to know several of the characters through their on-line identities, seeing the way their real life and on-line life overlap. Much of the play involves attempts to make or to avoid making real-life overlap with the on-line world. And, now that I’m focused on it, death and absence in both spaces. Hm.

Digression: One of the main characters is an adjunct at Swarthmore, teaching some sort of advanced Jazz History course. My immediate reaction was that Swarthmore doesn’t hire adjuncts to teach that sort of class. Then I thought to myself, well, they didn’t do that twenty-five years ago. Who knows what they do now? And then I thought, you know, self, you don’t really have any idea whether there were adjuncts teaching you. You didn’t know or care, self, whether the profs were full-time, tenure-track, whatever, unless you had some sort of crush on them. And this is largely accurate and fair. On the other hand—would Swat really hire a jazz composer as an one-course adjunct? End Digression.

YHB has written about mobile phones onstage before, and it’s something I still find interesting. Spoonful does take into account the mobile phone thing, but is much more interested in the internet. Alif (which of course is a very different story-telling form) is interested in the internet as a connecting web, and takes away the smartphones from its characters early—and the dumb phones are pretty nearly useless, which as an old guy I find entertaining.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

All Together Now

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:28:59 -0500

Back a while ago, I was reading a story in the local paper about Shocking Numbers Of Kindergarten, First Grade Suspensions and thought I should write about it. I didn’t. Later that day, I wound up in a FB conversation with an old friend—very, very smart fellow, mostly in the science-and-money smarts—who claimed that Americans were less free than they had been. I pointed out that this was only conceivably true for values of American that don’t include women, Jews, people of African descent, people with physical disabilities, people with mental illnesses, etc, etc, etc. He then clarified that he was troubled by a diminishing respect for freedom of speech, as evidenced by both restrictive speech codes in colleges and restrictive speech norms in businesses, as well as that first grade boys are getting suspended from school for pointing their fingers in a gun shape and saying “bang”.

And it struck me, you see, that I really think that these things are intimately connected. Well, the parts that aren’t nonsense are intimately connected—the idea that speech norms are more restrictive now than at some particular point in the past, rather than restricting different things, is just blind ignorant. And part of that blind ignorance is the assumption that American means a particular kind of American, with particular mainstream views, or perhaps views close to one particular edge of the stream. A hundred years ago, you might be kicked out of college for expressing views that were not racist or sexist. Fifty years ago, you might be fired from work for expressing views that were not homophobic. Twenty-five years ago, when I was in an unusually liberal college, you would be shunned and possibly expelled (or informally made to understand you ought not return) for expressing racist views. Now, I expect, you could be shunned or expelled from many places for expressing homophobic views. The change in these things is connected to the expansion for what it means to be American.

I don’t mean to say that it has been uniform progress—it’s much, much more complicated than that. But on the whole, in a general sense, the arc of American-ness has gone out and down, towards including more people and different people. (Not altogether off this topic is Jon Bernstein on the changing national self-image) And it’s not actually easy to remember that, always—in much the same way that when you tour historic houses, it’s not easy to remember that there were more servants than owners. So if you think about the history of schools in America, you can look past that arc of American-ness and miss how much of America was not present in the schools of previous generations. The black kids, of course. The rural kids, the immigrant kids. The troubled kids. The crippled kids. The dumb kids. As we thought of them then. Kids that would have been in a “home” are now in schools, mostly; a lot of kids that might have died are now in schools, mostly.

So just as a fellow might very well say Americans and be thinking of, well, straight white men, or even straight white affluent well-educated men—or might be comparing (straight white well-educated male affluent) Americans of fifty years ago to (gloriously diverse) Americans today, a fellow might be comparing a classroom full of kids from a Golden Age to a classroom full of kids now, not realizing that there were an awful lot of kids that weren’t in that Golden Age classroom at all. You have to compare today’s classroom to yesterday’s classroom-field-orphanage-street-factory-hospital-cemetery.

We are now coming close, finally in this generation, to fulfilling our theoretical commitment to universal education (within our borders). But as in so many areas we haven’t really thought about what it costs to actually do it. And education is really expensive. And a classroom of kids that speak different languages, have different disabilities and abilities, have different gender roles and expectations, different class roles and expectations, different cultural roles and expectations… see, that’s really, really expensive. And there will be failures. Not just because education doesn’t work, which is very true. Also, though, is that we’re attempting something really difficult, gloriously difficult, amazingly magnificently Americanly difficult. We’re attempting something worthy of us as a nation: educating everybody, together.

I’m just saying: it might help if we remember now and then that it’s a lot harder than putting a man on the moon.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

The Luxury Life of the Academic Library

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:54:47 -0500

OK, new fund-raising idea: we’ll put your name on one of the buckets that we shove under the leaky places in the roof, and we’ll print your name in our Annual Bucket List. How about it? The William Robinson Jones Memorial Receptacle. The Mahmoud Bin Hariri Bin. The Gabriel Martinez Unsealed Window Tarp. The Millie and Marvin Rabinowicz Perpetual Damp Patch.

Just sayin’.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Potty-mouthed Philosophy

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:51:28 -0500

So. I don’t know if any of y’all are following or even care in the slightest about the Colin McGinn Incident. Essentially, Professor McGinn has resigned from his position at the University of Miami after being more or less given an ultimatum: resignation or public investigation of allegations of sexual harassment. The harassment publicly alleged consists of wink-wink smut in email; there are always hints that there are Much Worse Things just waiting to come out, but nobody is at present saying what they are, or if they even exist.

Your Humble Blogger is attempting, by the way, to frame this conversation in a way that doesn’t depend on how incredibly creepy Professor McGinn appears to be. That appearance is subjective and based on very limited information—things look very bad from my angle, but there exist other angles. So I’m hoping by explicitly stating how terrible it looks, and by being as careful as possible in my framing, I can avoid claiming to know things I actually do not.

So. One of the emails in question contains, or is reported to contain, Professor McGinn telling his research assistant he was thinking about her during his recent “hand-job”. Professor McGinn posted a recent note claiming to refute the appearance that this email constituted sexual harassment, or at least claiming to “take care of certain false allegations”. In it, he… well, he… I’ll just quote a bit:

What kind of hand job leaves you cleaner than before? A manicure, of course. Why does this joke work? Because of the tension between the conventional idiomatic sense of “hand job” (a certain type of sex act) and its semantic or compositional meaning (in which it is synonymous with “job done by or to the hand”). When you think about it virtually all jobs are “hand jobs” in the second semantic sense: for all human work is manual work—not just carpentry and brick laying but also cookery and calligraphy. Indeed, without the hand human culture and human economies would not exist. So really “hand jobs” are very respectable and vital to human flourishing. We are a “hand jobs” species. (Are you now becoming desensitized to the specifically sexual meaning of “hand jobs”? Remember that heart surgeons are giving you a “hand job” when they operate on you; similarly for masseurs and even tax accountants.)

Now, does this not show a fundamental failure of understanding how language works? There’s a word (or two-word phrase, depending on how you count things like words in the English language) that has one and only one common meaning. Claiming that there is a semantic meaning that nobody ever uses or has used, and that the so-called semantic meaning trumps the actual meaning is, well, it’s a lot like what a joke philosophy professor would say, possibly in Alan Bennett’s voice (are you using the word ‘yes’ in the affirmative sense?) rather than an actual sensible statement.

It should, by the way, astonish y’all as it astonished me that Prof. McGinn’s refutation really is that he was indulging in crude […] humor with an employee. That’s it. He claims that he didn’t tell her he had a hand-job, but that he made a joke about having a hand-job. I guess that’s not quite true—he also claims that the two are totally different things, as if making crude jokes to an employee was not actionable. And… that’s it. That’s his refutation. In fact, he doesn’t even say that much, positing it as a hypothetical; he really only says that someone might have been reported as telling his employee that he had a hand-job, when in fact that person might have used a sort of double-entendre (A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre, so the bartender gave her one) which, by the way, would have been incredibly witty, according to the distinguished professor of philosophy. Such wit, as far as I can tell, would have been called out as inappropriate on the internet message board I read for fans of my favorite sports team.

To get back to my question, though: do any of you care to defend the understanding of language and communication displayed here? Or is it possible that a supervisor using the word “hand job” to his employee could not be understood as a reference to a sex act, either directly or through obvious and direct implication?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Big Fucking Data

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:43:46 -0500

Here’s my reaction to the whole NSA thing: like a lot of people on the left, I kinda figured this was happening anyway. I kinda figured that the PATRIOT Act was written specifically to allow this sort of thing (whether the particular actions violated the statute or not, it allowed them to do this sort of thing) and reauthorized and modified to allow this sort of thing, all with widespread public support. So when it got leaked that this sort of thing is actually happening and people expressed outrage, well, my instinct is to say why weren’t you outraged ten years ago? Or five years ago?

Of course, many of the people who are outraged now were, in fact, outraged over the initial PATRIOT Act and its revisions and extensions, so there’s that. And there’s the other thing, which is that being right late is one hell of a lot better than being wrong; my irritation about people only being outraged now is, pretty much, dickishness. Far better to be irritated at people who were so utterly ineffective at explaining what was outrageous about the PATRIOT Act in the first place—people, that is, including YHB—that it’s only now that people get it.

Anyway. this is interesting, as is this, as is a bunch of other stuff out there, including My Gracious Host’s father’s FBI file for some insight into our law-enforcement snoopishness. And it was Atrios who pointed out that this is largely a scam, that the incentives are all for NSA to pour ever-increasing quantities of pelf into the pockets of Booz Allen Hamilton and their colleagues for ever-increasing snoopage into our lives.

And, if you follow the Madisonian system, the counter-incentive is provided only in… well, outrage. Yours, mine.

By the way, the absolute best and most productive path for that outrage is to contact the campaign of a legislative hopeful and demand a policy statement that agrees with your priorities. So if any of y’all happen to live in a place with, f’r’ex, a special election for the US Senate coming up within a few weeks, now would be an excellent time to indicate to your preferred candidate or candidates that you are outraged.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Calm! Calm! The English say cawm.

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:17:30 -0500

An email this morning from the Director of the library that employs me mentioned that there were several people away (including the Directorial self), and that the business manager, who I’ll call Linda, “has the calm”, and if we need her we should contact her.

So what I’m wondering—is this a dictation error? I don’t know for sure whether the Library Director dictates emails, but I know a lot of people do, and those emails do often have some odd and interesting wordings. The email does have the sent from my iPad tag (do people seriously not remove that immediately?) so I am inclined to think that it’s beach-wrecking.

That still leaves the question of whether the L.D. said (correctly) that Linda has the conn or (incorrectly) that Linda has the com. TSOR shows that take the com is an existing eggcorn (tho’ it does not yet appear in the eggcorn database), but I’m not seeing anything for take the calm or has the calm—it’s hard to be sure, because of course non-mistakes are going to drown out mistakes in a short search. If it is a dictation thing, then I’m inclined to think that the L.D. said conn and the far more frequently-heard calm was close enough.

But I am bothering telling you so because I love the idea that, while we are on skeleton crew for a day, calm is in short supply and we may need to restock. We may be overstretched trying to do the work of the various people who are away, but on those occasions of stressedosity and overwhelmage, Linda has the calm. I’m imagining the lines of students at circ, at reference, in tech services and ILL and the printers and the copiers and the café, students fighting over the newspapers in the periodicals stacks, and I pick up the phone and jab at Linda’s extension: Dammit, Linda, where’s that calm? I need that calm NOW!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Jeremiah 31:18

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:08:42 -0500

One of the reference librarians at the establishment that employs YHB was recently asked about a possible English translation of Jeremiah 31:18. I looked it up, and it’s a very interesting and tricky verse. Let’s start with the KJV:

I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself [thus]; Thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed [to the yoke]: turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou [art] the LORD my God.

From the Hermeneia series, I believe this lovely poetic translation is by William L. Holliday:

(A sound) I have heard,
  Ephraim rocking with grief:
“You punished me, and I took the punishment”
  like a calf untrained.
Bring me back, and let me come back,
  for you are Yahweh my God.

The JPS:

I can hear Ephraim lamenting:
You have chastised me, and I am chastised
Like a calf that has not been broken.
Receive me back, let me return,
For You, O Lord, are my God

That’s enough to go on with, right?

And perhaps some context: Jeremiah (or Yirmiyahu) is talking about the destruction of the Temple, the end of the Kingdom of Israel, and the beginning of the Babylonian Exile. The entire book is a book of desolation and loss. The Divine speaks to Jeremiah to pass along to the bereft People of Israel an explanation, at least, for their loss: they had sinned. Whether you believe that the prophecies written in the book were declaimed before the events (and predicted them) or after (and explained them), they were clearly for those of us who live after the events, and must live with a world in which they make sense.

Within the fifty-odd chapters of Jeremiah, just over halfway through, there is what has been called Jeremiah’s Book of Consolation, 30:1-31:40, which says that Israel will be restored, the humbled will be honored, etcetera etcetera etcetera. Not only will the southern kingdom (Judah) be restored, but the northern kingdom, which had been conquered a hundred and fifty years before, will be brought together with them, restoring the Ten Tribes. There’s an image of Rachel weeping for her children (the Sages say that she was buried along the roadside so that the Israelites would pass by under her protection on the way to the rivers of Babylon), and the Divine says to her Your children shall return to their country. And then we move from a weeping Rachel to the lamenting Ephraim, and our verse.

Shamo’a shamati
Ephraim mitnodayd
yisartani va’ivasair
k’aygel lo lumad
hashivaynu v’ashuvah
ci atah adonai elohai

The first thing here are the pairs, keeping in mind that in Hebrew duplication indicates emphasis: Shamo’a shamati from sh’ma, to hear; hashivaynu v’ashuvah, from shuv, to turn; the more hidden one yisartani va’ivasair both from the root ysr, meaning… well, meaning to chastise or castigate, either by the whip or by the word. To correct, to reprove, to teach. In 1Ki 12:11, my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions. On the other hand, Pro 29:19, A servant will not be corrected by words: for though he understand he will not answer. At any rate, those three pairs are there for emphasis, for double emphasis as it were, and in any translation we need to keep it in mind. KJV uses surely heard to keep the emphasis without the un-English double; Mr. Holliday adds the noun sound to flesh it out, while the JPS simply elides it. The Vulgate, bye-the-bye, begins audiens audivi, presumably from the Septuagint ἀκοὴν ἤκουσα; I gots no Latin or Greek, so I’m no good, there. Probably worth keeping in mind, though, that the Greek was possibly redacted earlier than the version of the Hebrew we’re looking at now; our Jeremiah-text has passed through many hands.

Anyway. There are these three pairs, lovely pairs, in the first, third and fifth lines of the poem. I’m treating it like a poem, by the way, because it so clearly is one. Then we have the other lines, backing them up. The Divine heard (or heard heard) Ephraim mitnodayd, Ephraim is the personification of the northern kingdom, not unlike Uncle Sam or the Russian Bear. And he is doing something with the root nud, to be moved or agitated, either physically or mentally. I don’t know anything more than that—Mr. Holliday is poetic and drawing back to the image of Rachel weeping by the side of the road, and I think it’s lovely—but is he translating too much into the text? I think part of the beauty of the passage is its strange mutability, the way that it remains open to a variety of moods and emphases, and I am reluctant to cut any of them off by making others too concrete. On the other hand, some choice must eventually be made.

The fourth line: k’aygel lo lumad, like an calf without teaching. The root lmd means both to teach and to learn (the same root as Talmud), but is connected with beating just as ysr is; Rashi makes the connection to malmad, the ox goad in Judges 3:31: Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad. So, an untrained calf or an unbeaten calf, a calf that had not previously known the rod.

The last bit is a formula, here using my rather than our to keep the idea of the personification (singular) representing the scattered northerners (plural). Nothing really interesting there, as once a translator has decided on how to translate the formula for the rest of the text, it gets plugged in here with the singular version.

So. Where are we?

The divine hears (or rather hears hears) Ephraim, rocking and/or lamenting. And Ephraim says that he has been chastised chastised, or rather than he has been both actively and passively chastised, lashed like a calf that had never felt the rod, and was turned turned, or both actively and passively turned. Now, shuv has, to my ears, the connotation of repentance, of restoration, of return. And of course the entire thing is a metaphor of return—the southern kingdom from the Babylonian Exile and the Lost Tribes from their earlier dispersal—so emphasizing restoration makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, I think that runs the risk of losing—I think all three of the above translations do lose—the power of the image of breaking an ox to the plow. Ephraim is a calf still young, and the Divine is subjecting him to the whip and the rod, and Ephraim is at the end of the field at the edge of the weeds and is turning, turning—turning away from blundering into the untamed wilderness and turning back (under duress) to plow another furrow so that the farm can grow. I like that image, the lumbering dumb animal, and how difficult it is to turn.

So what do you think, Gentle Readers? How would you translate all that?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Who? Who? Who?

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:49:08 -0500

Your Humble Blogger is a bit of a Whovian; I wrote a bit about it a couple of years ago. Since then, I have started watching the New Who; I enjoyed the entire David Tennant stretch—more or less, and I should write about that at some point—and have watched the first season of Matt Smith in the role, and am taking a break. I was disappointed in his portrayal, and the choices that the show made around replacing David Tennant. And, since I had watched the whole David Tennant era in six months or so, I wasn’t sure if the problem is in the show, or just that I needed a break. So my Best Reader and I decided to take a break for a while, and then the news came that the Doctor will be regenerating again.

So. Here’s the thing I was saying, last week, before this news came out: it was a problem for me to have three young, manic Doctors in a row. I think that they made a very sensible commercial choice, but another young, manic doctor made the show …the same as it was before the regeneration. I am bored with it.

Now, the show isn’t for me. I am an old Whovian, at heart, and what’s more I am old, or at least middle-aged, and besides that I don’t purchase DVDs or T-Shirts or talking Dalek toys or any of that. When I step into the sort of places that have talking Dalek toys, I am simultaneously pleased and appalled that such things not only exist but are readily available—but I am long past the time when I might have spent my hard-earned money on them. And I really don’t want the show to lose all its ratings, for everyone to go broke and have the show die again; they should make a choice that is a moneymaker, because they are in the money business. And, as far as artistic integrity goes, well, artists are different one to another, so let’s not get our hearts set on everyone’s vision of artistic integrity matching up with YHB’s. And it’s probably worth noting that most people seem to think that the David Tennant years had more of that artistic integrity stuff than my beloved rubber monster heads did, so there’s that, too.

Having said that, I am willing to say that what I would really like is for the new Doctor to be substantially different, physically, from the last three. I don’t mean hairstyle. I mean I would like a Doctor who needs to rely on companions for physical support.

The most obvious way to do this would be to go back to having a middle-aged Doctor, or even an old one (old being relative໤Bill Hartnell was in his mid-fifties, but played older), who cannot run long distances, leap to safety over depthless chasms, or spring back from lead-pipe beatings like a cartoon character. A Doctor who has to sit and rest, now and then, and use his brain or other non-physical attributes. A Doctor with a pronounced limp or a club hand or severe myopia or something similar would be difficult (but not, for clever writers, impossible) to square with what we know of Gallifreyan biology, but would be interesting nonetheless. Or, perhaps, a Doctor who is about a meter tall—Warwick Davis isn’t terribly busy these days, is he?

I’m not, actually, thinking of this from a political point of view, although certainly having a Doctor with some physical limitations would be helpful in fighting the stigma there. I’m just interested in it from a story-telling point of view, putting some extra obstacles in the way of the Doctor and his life.

The Doctor of my youth, the Fourth, was (in my memory, anyway) primarily a puzzle-solver. He could fight, and he could run, and he could persuade—but the fun part was watching him figure things out. The stories were puzzles that yielded to solutions, or appeared to yield to solutions only to reveal new puzzles that yielded to new solutions. Why did somebody steal the Mona Lisa? Who is murdering the human crew of the sandminer? Why doesn’t the lighthouse on Fang Rock have its light working? Why are all the coins in the dead man’s pocket minted in the same year? They weren’t all puzzles, and sometimes the puzzle was of the how do we use these parts we found lying around the shed to stop the Bad Guys variety that the Tenth of course used a lot as well. Still, like a lot of the science fiction of the generation before, the setting was designed to present problems solvable by a Scientist! rather than an action hero.

I like that sort of thing. I am not the target audience for New Who, but I like that sort of thing, more than I like the sort of thing with close-ups of actors indicating loneliness and loss with their eyes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

29-25

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:35:45 -0500

I happened to notice, the other day, an old note of mine from January 2010, when I was feeling Despondent about my Giants. Specifically I was despondent about the signing of Bengie Molina, but included in that was a general despondency about the team being in a good-but-not-good-enough period again: they aren’t a team that should be looking to Win It All this year, said I. And, of course, they did win it all in 2010 and again in 2012. Which is a lesson about taking anything YHB says seriously.

My guys are 29-25 right now, exactly a third of the way through the season (if my arithmetic is correct) and four games over .500. They’re a game and a half behind the D-Backs and a game ahead of the Rockies, and a wonderful six games ahead of the bad guys. I’d rather be in first, of course, but they are doing fine: a good April, a mediocre May. If they play like they did in April, they will win the division; if they play like they did in May… they might just win the division anyway. If they go back and forth—well, call it 87-75, and while it’s short of a Good Team, it’s solidly a Pretty Good Team. And as implied above, I have started to expect the team to do better than I expect them to do. So that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Everything is Stories, you know

Thu, 30 May 2013 09:50:48 -0500

Your Humble Blogger feels somehow that it would be a good idea to write about Michelle Bachmann’s announcement that she will not seek re-election to Congress. I don’t know what to say, though, really. She’s an interesting figure, having been among the most prominent faces of the dog-wagging tail for a few years. But, really, what do more information do you need to know? She’s retiring; there will be a new Representative from her district. That’s pretty much it. I have read half-a-dozen columns.

What it brings to mind, for me, is how attuned I am to political news, and how much I tune out every other kind of news. I mean, that’s the news of the day, for me: Michelle Bachmann won’t seek re-election. I saw the headlines about the Disneyland dry ice incident; I didn’t bother to read the articles. I don’t know what’s going on with Amanda Bynes or Justin Bieber—I know who Justin Bieber is, at any rate, but my eyes tend to pixilate even the headlines of such articles. I would not have known about the baby rescued from the sewer had my co-workers not been discussing it for two days.

And see, that’s the thing—I would not make the argument there’s anything inherently more interesting and useful about the news that Rep. Bachmann won’t seek re-election than the baby-in-the-sewer story. They are both, largely, fueled by a grisly rubbernecking (and the press mania about both smells misogynistic to me, without, you know, actually knowing about the press mania on the other one) and horrific schadenfreude. Neither have much chance of affecting my life personally. The particularly special thing about Rep. Bachmann was of course her post-policy credentials, the way she turned failing to pass or even influence legislation into a badge of honor. So it’s not like her presence in or absence from the legislature is going to change the law, just the stories. Any claim I could make to be interested in those stories because they are Important and Affect People’s Lives is… well, arguable.

On the other hand, the Toronto Mayor story? That’s something everybody can agree is fun to watch, right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

It's perception all the way down

Wed, 29 May 2013 14:05:06 -0500

An interesting philosophical matter lies behind a note from Jonathan Bernstein called No Available Fix for Politician Paranoia, mostly coming from a note by Ezra Klein called Did I get the money-and-politics debate all wrong? Mssrs Bernstein and Klein (and Schmidt) note that while money doesn’t win elections, the belief that money wins elections causes people to act as if money wins elections, and these actions are themselves much of the problem that we would have if, indeed, money did win elections.

To clarify: Campaign fund-raising is important but has rapidly diminishing returns. Many—probably most—candidates raise more money than is actually useful in the campaign, and would do almost exactly as well in the election if they raised only four-fifths of what they did raise. Or less. Hard to be sure, but that’s what the scientists say.

On the other hand, the fear of being outspent is a powerful motivator—and I’m not just saying that it seems like it might be a powerful motivator, but that people are seen to act as they would if they were motivated by the fear of being outspent. They spend all their time raising money and hanging around with potential donors. For freshman in Congress, focus is on raising money is how the Boston Globe headlines Tracy Jan’s story, which points out that the DCCC suggests that your United States Representative spend four hours a day fund-raising. Four hours a day. Four hours spent making the case to those constituents (and non-constituents) who have money; four hours a day listening to the concerns of people with money. Even leaving aside the quid-pro-quo possibility, that’s a problem for democratic representation.

So. The problem isn’t that the incumbents need money—the problem is that the incumbents believe that they need money, and act on that belief, and so most of the money wins elections harm actually does happen, even though money does not, on the whole, win elections. There is no problem, but the perception that there is a problem is a problem, so there is a problem. And since the belief that is causing the harmful action is not based on direct observation but on a sort of cultural assimilation, it’s not as if the problem can be solved by simply pointing out the facts of the case.

It’s similar to a thing I used to say about the deficit: the deficit isn’t a problem, but there is a perception that the deficit is a problem, and that perception is a problem even if there isn’t a problem to be perceived. It’s like Oakland: there may be no there there, but they still beat the Giants four to one. Fortunately, the perception of the deficit problem has so far only resulted in poor policy choices such as any Congress might make. It could be worse. The bond vigilantes, too, could be real—or, again, the perception that they are real could lead people to act as if they are real, which would mean acting like bond vigilantes, which would, kinda, make them real, even if they are only doing it out of fear of imaginary real ones. Right?

With the campaign finance issue, it also has a second-level sort of effect, where a non-serious sort of person who declares that much of the money is wasted will not get the backing of the serious-minded folk at the DCCC or the other well-connected networks. Emily’s List, f’r’ex, will not bother giving money (and it’s worth pointing out that early money is like yeast in part because of those diminishing returns and in part because everybody acts as if money wins elections) to somebody who hasn’t shown herself to be a viable candidate by raising money, which, as you know, wins elections. Or doesn’t. Whichever—but the Emily’s List endorsement means more than just money, it means press and persuasion and elite suasion, all of which probably have better returns than the money does. But you need the money to get that stuff, right? Or you’re a fringe candidate.

In fact, money-raising correlates as well as it does to candidate viability because the causality is the other way around. People want to donate to a candidate they think can win, because (a) they don’t want to waste their donation, and (2) they want to feel like a winner. A candidate people think is viable can raise a lot of money, and people think a candidate is viable because she can raise a lot of money, and you can see why these incumbents believe that money wins elections by the time they get to DC.

So. Practically, under all of this, is a different sort of real problem that has very little to do with the raising or spending of money on electoral campaigns. And it’s not the fact that the relatively few people who control most of the wealth in this country have disproportionate influence over politicians through campaign donations. If you somehow made the campaign donation thing null and void, they would still have disproportionate influence because they control most of the wealth in this country. the idea that the famous 1% who own a huge share of the wealth outright and control much of the rest through corporate and financial holdings are somehow not going to have disproportionate influence is… touching.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Memorial

Mon, 27 May 2013 06:44:51 -0500

“His Mate”
by Rev. G.A. Studdert Kennedy

There’s a broken battered village
  Somewhere up behind the line,
There’s a dug-out and a bunk there,
  That I used to say were mine.
I remember how I reached them,
  Dripping wet and all forlorn,
In the dim and dreary twilight
  Of a weeping summer dawn.
All that week I’d buried brothers,
  In one bitter battle slain,
In one grave I laid two hundred.
  God! What sorrow and what rain!
And that night I’d been in trenches,
  Seeking out the sodden dead,
And just dropping them in shell holes,
  With a service swiftly said.
For the bullets rattled round me,
  But I couldn’t leave them there,
Water-soaked in flooded shell holes.
  Reft of common Christian prayer.
So I crawled round on my belly.
  And I listened to the roar
Of the guns that hammered Thiepval,
  Like big breakers on the shore.
Then there spoke a dripping sergeant,
  When the time was growing late,
‘Would you please to bury this one,
  ’Cause ’e used to be my mate?’
So we groped our way in darkness
  To a body lying there.
Just a blacker lump of blackness.
  With a red blotch on his hair.
Though we turned him gently over,
  Yet I still can hear the thud.
As the body fell face forward.
  And then settled in the mud.
We went down upon our faces,
  And I said the service through,
From ‘I am the Resurrection’
  To the last, the great ‘adieu.’
We stood up to give the Blessing,
  And commend him to the Lord,
When a sudden light shot soaring
  Silver swift and like a sword.
At a stroke it slew the darkness,
  Flashed its glory on the mud,
And I saw the sergeant staring
  At a crimson clot of blood.
There are many kinds of sorrow
  In this world of Love and Hate,
But there is no sterner sorrow
  Than a soldier’s for his mate.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

llama, llama, apple, hussyfscap

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:07:07 -0500

I happened to read a couple of interesting and well-written essays about Women in Fiction recently. I suspect many Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu have read them already: ‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative by Kameron Hurley and Toward a More Expansive Definition of ‘Princess’ by Noah Berlatsky. Ms. Hurley is (I believe) specifically writing about how the actual history of women warriors has been erased by the more prevalent cultural trope of femininity. Mr. Berlatsky is writing about the narrow rejection of femininity that seems to be replacing that dominant frame. They are both worth reading, and they are worth reading together. And yet.

Ms. Hurley begins her article with a wonderful and arresting image:

I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves—lemming-like—over cliffs to drown in the surging sea. They are, at heart, sea creatures, birthed from the sea, married to it like the fishing people who make their livelihood there.

She then goes on to talk about how difficult it would be, if all the books and movies and television shows had scaly, cannibalistic lemming-like llamas, to accurately observe llamas and to tell (or listen to) stories about real llamas, even you had accurately observed them. The point being that when we hear that women are timid domestic souls more naturally inclined to be the angel in the house than the fearsome foe, it’s like hearing that llamas have scales: you hear it enough, and you start to think that the fuzzy llamas you have seen are anomalies.

It’s a powerful image and a terrific way of telling the story. Of course, it’s not exactly accurate—analogies are not about accuracy. And the thing is that some women are, I think, inclined to the domestic virtues rather than the martial ones. Some men are as well. It’s not that we are told that llamas are scaly, it’s that we’re told that all apples are red.

And we are, aren’t we? We practically define apples as red fruit, and red as the color of apples. A is for apple, and there’s the apple, and it’s red. There’s one green leaf hanging off the stem, and the apple is red. It’s in the ABC books, it’s in the coloring books, it’s a plush toy, it’s on the bib or the onesie. Apples are red. And, here’s the thing: lots of apples are red! And lots are green! And some are yellow! And some are red in places and green in places! We can have all the experience we like with actual apples—galas and fujis and macs and granny smiths and honeycrunches and macouns and braeburns and baldwins and bountifuls and, yes, Pink Ladies—and we will still think of apples as red. A kindergartener may have a big old green apple for snack and then grab the red crayon to color the apple, because apples are red. Red apples are red.

And I think that’s important to add to (not, I want to be clear, take away from or deprecate) the experience of reading Ms. Hurley’s article. The knowledge that while we culturally have been erasing women’s experience systematically for centuries should be tempered as well with the knowledge that some women are great cooks, too.

This is where Mr. Berlatsky is attempting to go in his article, I think:

Merida is a different kind of princess in part because she doesn’t want much to do with traditional femininity—and her story is exhilarating for that. But still, it seems like it maybe leaves out a fair number of girls who like princesses because of the femininity, not despite it.

and later:

The point isn’t to create a single perfect role model, be it Merida or Wonder Woman or Cimorene or Cinderella. The point is to give girls, and for that matter boys, the chance to see femininity not solely as a prison to inhabit or escape, but as a story that can be told in lots of ways. As Cimorene’s friend Princess Arabella tells her at the end of the novel [Dealing With Dragons], “I wouldn’t like being princess for the King of the Dragons, but it will suit you down to the ground.”

I’m going to edge out a bit ahead of what Mr. Belatsky actually writes, here, because I think it’s the logical extension he doesn’t quite get to. He talks about Cimorene liking adventure and swordplay and cooking; her rejection of the Princess Lifestyle (if you will) is not a rejection of all domestic virtues. In fact, Cimorene becomes more or less a traditional domestic wife and homemaker for the dragon. And that’s a fine choice. For her. For a while. It changes in the later books, although I don’t think that the domestic virtues are ever actually denigrated. Similarly, in Dragon Slippers, our heroine is brave and clever and really good at sewing and weaving.

And what he doesn’t get to, and maybe I’m getting too far ahead of him here, is that—look, it’s great to be heroic, it’s great to be strong and brave, resourceful and resolute, combative and fierce. And then do the laundry. Because after the villain is vanquished, there will still be laundry to be washed.

What we don’t want is a bunch of kids who believe that if they get any satisfaction from cleaning the house, washing the dishes or dressing the baby they are falling into the Disney Princess stereotype that is Keeping Women Down by enforcing femininity. Girls or Boys—it’s a greater risk for boys, of course, because for generations we were told that cleaning and cooking and nurturing is essentially feminine, and thus beneath us. That’s a despicable lie, and we were all hurt by it. It will be a despicable lie if we tell it to girls, too.

Because of course women have always fought—and there was always laundry to be done after the fighting was over. Women went to sea, and there were babies to be changed. Women were doctors and lawyers and governors, and there were still dirty dishes, too. Just like when men were sailors and generals and Great Men, and there was still mending and cleaning and cooking to do. When we break out of the conceptual trap of the scaly llama—and that’s really important, breaking out of the trap, because it really is hurting people—there will still be mending and cleaning and cooking and nurturing and weaving and all. The domestic virtues will still be virtues. Whether they are feminine or masculine or human or just, just, well, just necessary, they will still be virtues.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Run, run, run, run, run run run away

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:57:43 -0500

Your Humble Blogger has been playing a lot of Temple Run 2 lately. I don’t actually enjoy it as much as I did Temple Run, but I play it a lot more. Because, I think, it’s harder and the rewards come slower. And I still want those rewards.

A fellow named Tevis Thompson wrote about The Endless Shopper on Grantland about a month ago (I’m a little behindhand on my blogging), and it’s a pretty good article. About Temple Run, anyway—I don’t play the other ones. I particularly took the point that the game is designed to make your scores improve (and your games last longer) whether you get better at the game play or not. You can’t help achieving the early objectives, and even most of the later objectives are simply a matter of continuing to play, rather than doing anything you would not otherwise do. So your multiplier increases, and your scores increase. If you buy anything with the coins you almost can’t help collecting, your gameplay improves—as Mr. Thompson says, even if you never actually got much better and your scores go up some more. You feel like you are improving, but are you?

This became more obvious to me recently, as I have achieved (almost) all the objectives and have purchased (almost) everything there is to purchase. I’ll talk about the exceptions in a bit, but my point at the moment is that there I have stopped improving my game play through upgrades and objectives, and the game has become dull. Of course, I have played the game five hundred times, so perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect it to stay interesting. Still, I have pretty much run myself out of the endless runner.

I find the whole current economy of video games perplexing and disorienting, as it happens. I understand it, but it doesn’t feel right: you can play the game for free, but it takes money to win. That’s not entirely accurate, of course, but the general idea is there.

When it works, for me, in gameplay, it works as part of a multiple-layer MFQ strategy, perhaps with a variety of kinds of victories available. Or in a game with system that compels the player has to balance goals within a run—in a launch game, for instance, you may need to level up by achieving height benchmarks, but gain money by long-distance launches, and also have power-ups valuable for later launches that are more frequently found higher, or lower, or close or further away. In system like that, even if it is well-designed (and some of them are), you could find yourself in need of half-a-dozen launches’ worth of pure money-grubbing, and the ability to save yourself the effort by spending an actual buck or two doesn’t detract from the game. I don’t spend the dollar, but I don’t mind that it’s an option. It doesn’t unbalance the game.

For that to work, though, there has to be a really delicate balance of goals. In Buster Bash, for instance, it doesn’t work at all—it seems like it ought to work, but it doesn’t. In that game, you are essentially trying to hit as many home runs as you can, and hit them as far as you can, while along the way collecting sunflower seeds for hitting targets. The sunflower seeds can be exchanged for equipment that will help you hit the ball farther and more accurately, which of course helps you with both goals as well as helping you replenish your seeds. But I simply can’t collect enough sunflower seeds to trade in for whatever it is will help me bash the ball further. I could buy them, and not for very much money, either, but I am not going to. I’m just going to stop playing.

Fruit Ninja, on the other hand, seems to be two different games: a free one and a paid one. I haven’t played the paid one, so I don’t know how it is, but the free one is pretty much a solid free game. You can in theory pay for stuff, but there isn’t any point to it; there’s nothing to achieve that the starfruit currency will get for you. So when I play (not often) I don’t generally even think about the possibility of paying.

Which is the issue, really. From my perspective, I don’t want to think about the possibility of in-game purchases at all. I’m not going to make any, and the more I have to think about them, the less I am going to enjoy the game. From the game company’s perspective, of course, they want players to think about in-game purchases a lot. And if that makes the game less enjoyable for me, well, I’m not giving them any money, now, am I? That’s a bit harsh—all else being equal, they would rather I enjoy the free game, as my word of mouth (or blog or whatever) is potentially helpful. But the game is for people who make the purchases, and that’s got to be their priority. And I’m never going to be that person.

Where does that leave me? On level 8, with only two objectives left: one million coins, and ten million meters. Another five hundred games to achieve those, I’m thinking, and having said that, it makes me want to find some other game to play.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.